Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Systems are widely used to process scanned text into text usable by computers. We observe that current OCR systems have bad performance on domain-specific papers, even generating lots of incorrect words; besides, different OCR systems make relatively independent mistakes. Based on these observations, we train an ensemble system from multiple open-source OCR s...

This study introduces a revised data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to explore a new use of DEA for the environmental assessment in which outputs are classified into desirable (good) and undesirable (bad). Such an output separation is important in the DEA-based environmental assessment. We used a Range-Adjusted Measure (RAM) DEA model that is a kind of non-radial DEA model for combining the t...

A profession that claims to understand economies, and that has gained power over the greater part of our societies, has big responsibilities. The fundamental responsibility is to ensure its perception of economies gives some useful guidance to the behaviour of real economies. Here mainstream economics fails utterly, and has been failing for a long time. Worse, it actively resists alternative vi...

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Malmquist–Luenberger index Urban water utilities Greenhouse gas emissions Nonparametric productivity measurement The energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in the provision of urban water and sewerage services have become an increasingly important issue in recent times. However, the impact of negative externalities such as greenhouse gas emissions on the product...

We explore the use of the Spiral Array spatial visualization of tonal evolution through time for the visual analysis of P.D.Q. Bach’s The ShortTempered Clavier. In particular, we analyze situations in which we can see some of the humour devices abstracted in an earlier study by David Huron. We conclude that although we can see a good number of Schickele’s humour devices − such as incongruent st...

We demonstrate that deregulation in the form of vertical separation of network components into natural monopoly and potentially competitive markets does not truly represent a lessening of regulatory burdens. That is, vertical separation is not synonymous with deregulation; “more competitors” is not equivalent to “more competition”. We assume a public interest regulator that is constrained to se...

This paper extends the political agency approach to an environment in which voting may be divided between informed and instrumental, informed and ‘expressive’ and uninformed due to ‘rational irrationality’. It constructs a model where politicians may be good, bad or populist. Initially the existence of only good and populist politicians is assumed and the incentives for good politicians to pool...

Phosphorylation of the BH3 (Bcl-2 homology domain 3)-only protein BAD (Bcl-2/Bcl-X(L)-antagonist, causing cell death) can either directly disrupt its association with the pro-survival proteins Bcl-X(L) and/or Bcl-2, or cause association of BAD with 14-3-3 proteins. In the present study, we further characterize phosphorylation of BAD at Ser170, a unique site with unclear function. We provide fur...