The perception and production of the mid-front Finnish vowels /i/, /e/, /y/, and /ø/ were investigated in fourteen Finnish-speaking subjects. In the perception experiment, synthesized long vowels were used as stimuli in order to identify category prototypes. For production, the subjects were asked to pronounce words including these vowels as short and long variants. This study introduces a new ...

Balanced scorecard has proven to be a functional tool for large companies, however, smalland medium-sized enterprises (SME) have experienced it too complicated for their purposes. The aim of this research is to analyse the potential of simplifying balanced scorecard in order to acknowledge the practical realities of SMEs. The results of this study indicate that the viewpoints covered by balance...

In [Tal94], Talagrand showed a generalization of the celebrated KKL theorem. In this work, we prove that the converse of this generalization also holds. Namely, for any sequence of numbers 0 < a1, a2, . . . , an ≤ 1 such that ∑n j=1 aj/(1 − log aj) ≥ C for some constant C > 0, it is possible to find a roughly balanced Boolean function f such that Infj [f ] < aj for every 1 ≤ j ≤ n.

Introduction: Continuous performance assessment and improvement are critical to the survival of all organizations. An assessment tool the health care industry has started to use is the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). The authors present their BSC, a multidimensional framework linking their department’s values and goals with day-to-day activities. The BSC measures performance along multiple dimensions...

This article studies the performance of unpaced serial production lines that are subject to breakdown and are imbalanced in terms of both of their processing time means (MTs) and buffer storage capacities (BCs). Simulation results show that the best pattern in terms of throughput is a balanced line With respect to average buffer level; the best configuration is a monotone decreasing MT order, t...

We consider pairs of maps from a discrete group Γ to the unitary group. The deficiencies of these maps from being homomorphisms may be great, but if they are close to each other then we call such pairs balanced. We show that balanced pairs determine elements in the K group of the classifying space of the group. We also show that a Fredholm representation of Γ determines balanced pairs.

There exists a balanced ternary design with block size 3 and index 2 on 2v P2 + 4 and 2v P2 + 1 elements with a hole of size v, for all positive integers v and P2, such that v ~ 2P2 + 1. As an application of this result, we determine the numbers of common triples in two simple balanced ternary designs with block size 3 and index 2, for P2 = 3 and 4.

State-of-the-art classification algorithms suffer when the data is skewed towards one class. This led to the development of a number of techniques to cope with unbalanced data. However, as confirmed by our experimental comparison, no technique appears to work consistently better in all conditions. We propose to use a racing method to select adaptively the most appropriate strategy for a given u...