This paper contributes to the discussion about the performance and e¢ ciency of Portuguese secondary schools, using the stochastic production frontier analysis. We discuss the impact of school variables and the environment on output (measured by the average national examination scores), as determinants of the shape of technology and degree of e¢ ciency. We …nd, in particular, that teacher senio...

A signal-separation front-end based on adaptive decorrelation ltering (ADF) was integrated with an HMM based speaker independent continuous speech recognition system for co-channel speech recognition. The ADF is improved by addressing the adaptation gain for system stability and e ciency: an upper bound of adaptation rate is derived for system stability, and an accelerated sequence of adaptatio...

Relative performance evaluation has been suggested as a means to overcome information asymmetry between regulators and organizations when assessing e ciency. By comparing similar organizations the relationship between costs and e€ ort can be better isolated. The English Department of Health (DoH) has undertaken relative performance evaluation in comparing the unit costs of acute hospitals usin...

A regular (cv. Thothapuri) and an irregular (cv. Langra) bearing cultivar of mango were selected to study the gas exchange parameters such as photosynthesis, stomatal conductance and internal carbon dioxide concentrations in ̄owering and non̄owering branches. Photosynthetic rates at different carbon dioxide concentrations were also recorded in both the branches to calculate the carboxylation ef®...

In mobile distributed environment, data broadcasting has many applications because it has two desirable characteristics: energy eciency and bandwidth eciency. There have been some researches on the indexing mechanisms for wireless data broadcasting in the past. We ®rst describe the problematic issue in the conventional index replication scheme, and then propose various index replication metho...

The application of arti® cial intelligence planning techniques to real world problems is a very di cult task which usually implies overcoming expressiveness and e ciency handicaps. Expressiveness in order to cope with the great amount of knowledge involved in these problems and also to obtain results directly, or almost directly, applicable in the ® eld of study. E ciency to achieve a good c...

in the real world there are groups which composed of independent units. the conventional data envelopment analysis(dea) model treats groups as units, ignoring the operation of individual units within each group.the current paper, investigates parallel system network approach proposed by kao and modifies it. as modi ed kao' model is more eligible to recognize ecient groups, a new ranking m...

The performance of a linear multigrid method using four smoothing methods, called SCGS, CLGS, SILU and CILU is investigated for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in general coordinates, in association with Galerkin coarse grid approximation. Robustness and e ciency are measured and compared by application to test problems. The numerical results show that CILU is the most robust, SILU t...

This paper discuss practical issues and implementation details on improving e ciency of ray intersection calculations of implicit surfaces using interval analysis. We examine two methods of improving the basic method described in [8]: a new technique for calculating intervals along a ray; and a method for spatial pruning based on the work in [7]. Comparisons are drawn between the di erent techn...

Most research in learning for planning has concentrated on e ciency gains. Another important goal is improving the quality of nal plans. Learning to improve plan quality has been examined by a few researchers, however, little research has been done learning to improve both e ciency and quality. This paper explores this problem by using the Scope learning system to acquire control knowledge that...