In this paper, an exact geometric algorithm is presented for solving two-job sequencing and scheduling problems in flexible flow shop and job shop environments while the resources are (un)available in some time periods and processors (un)availability is the same in all work centers. This study seems utterly new and it is applicable to any performance measure based on the completion time. The in...

AIM To investigate the role of music in reducing anxiety and discomfort during flexible sigmoidoscopy. METHODS A systematic review of all comparative studies up to November 2016, without language restriction that were identified from MEDLINE and the Cochrane Controlled Trials Register (1960-2016), and EMBASE (1991-2016). Further searches were performed using the bibliographies of articles and...

BACKGROUND Measurements of CFTR function in rectal biopsies ex vivo have been used for diagnosis and prognosis of Cystic Fibrosis (CF) disease. Here, we aimed to evaluate this procedure regarding: i) viability of the rectal specimens obtained by biopsy forceps for ex vivo bioelectrical and biochemical laboratory analyses; and ii) overall assessment (comfort, invasiveness, pain, sedation require...

A new family of distortion risk measures -GlueVaRis proposed in BellesSampera et al. (2013) to procure a risk assessment lying between those provided by common quantile-based risk measures. GlueVaR risk measures may be expressed as a combination of these standard risk measures. We show here that this relationship may be used to obtain approximations of GlueVaR measures for general skewed distri...

From 1985 to 2002, most Federal conservation dollars going to farm operators have been to retire land from crop production. Yet most U.S. farmland (850 million acres) remains in active production. The Farm Security and Rural Investment (FSRI) Act of 2002 sharply increased conservation funding and earmarked most of the increase for working-land payment programs (WLPPs). The design and implementa...

Gait signals detectable by sensors on ubiquitous personal devices such as smartphones can reveal characteristics unique to each individual, and thereby offer a new approach to recognizing users. Conventional pattern matching approaches use inner-product based distance measures which are not robust to common variations in time-series analysis (e.g., shifts and stretching). This is unfortunate gi...

Technical progress in U.S. agriculture is evaluated using a new measure of productivity growth, flexible technical change. This measure allows for nonconstant returns to scale, market structures other than perfect competition, and time-varying coefficients. An integral part of the procedure is the estimation of the production function by Flexible Least Squares. Flexible technical change results...

in this paper, we aim to overcome three major shortcomings of the fdh (free disposal hull) directional distance function through developing two new, named linear and fractional cdfdh, complete fdh measures of efficiency. to accomplish this, we integrate the concepts of similarity and fdh directional distance function. we prove that the proposed measures are translation invariant and unit invari...

Process capability indices are considered as an important concept in statistical quality control. They have been widely used in the manufacturing industry to provide numerical measures on process performance. Moreover, some incapability indices have been introduced to account the process performance. In this paper, we focus on the one proposed by Chen ~cite{Che:Stat}. In today's modern world, a...