Diethanolamine (DEA) is a common ingredient of personal care products. Dermal administration of DEA diminishes hepatic stores of the essential nutrient choline and alters brain development. We previously reported that 80 mg/kg/day of DEA during pregnancy in mice reduced neurogenesis and increased apoptosis in the fetal hippocampus. This study was designed to establish the dose-response relation...

The high tech industry has played a critical role in the economic growth of Taiwan over the past two decades. The main success factor in the high tech industry is posited to be improving R&D efficiency and performance. This study utilizes an empirical study to provide valuable managerial insights when measuring the impact of R&D activities and performance representation in the Taiwanese high te...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a technique used to compare efficiency in various sectors such as hospitals, chain stores, and dealerships. It represents a set of linear programming techniques and uses deter-ministic data (inputs and outputs), in stable conditions. The DEA technique cannot be used when there is data with indeterministic nature, or when there is an environment with dynamic co...

Private finance initiative (PFI), as a form of public/private partnership (PPP), helps to contract the private sector to governmental projects. In contrast to traditional public financed projects, PFI projects are procured by allowing a private sector entity to take the responsibility to design, build, finance, and operate (DBFO) an asset for a contract period of up to several decades. Moreover...

D-eritadenine (DEA) is a potent inhibitor (IC(50) = 7 nm) of S-adenosyl-l-homocysteine hydrolase (AdoHcyase). Unlike cyclic sugar Ado analogue inhibitors, including mechanism-based inhibitors, DEA is an acyclic sugar Ado analogue, and the C2' and C3' have opposite chirality to those of the cyclic sugar Ado inhibitors. Crystal structures of DEA alone and in complex with AdoHcyase have been deter...

DEA models treat the DMU as a “black box.” Inputs enter and outputs exit, with no consideration of the intervening steps. Consequently, it is di(cult, if not impossible, to provide individual DMU managers with speci;c information regarding the sources of ine(ciency within their DMUs. We show how to use DEA to look inside the DMU, allowing greater insight as to the sources of organizational ine(...

The evaluation of research & development (R&D) performance has been an important problem of both academic interest and practical need. This paper presents an empirical study in which we use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to evaluate the R&D performance of 52 integrated semiconductor firms located at Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park in Taiwan. We found that the R&D performance is very diff...

Nowadays, technological progress is one of the most important components of economic growth and the efficiency of R&D activities is particularly essential for countries. This study is an attempt to analyze the R&D efficiencies of EU countries. The indicators related to R&D efficiencies should be determined in advance in order to use DEA. For this reason a list of input and output indicators are...

In this study, the data envelopment analysis (DEA), three-stage DEA (3SDEA) and artificial neural network (ANN) are employed to measure the technical efficiency of 29 semi-conductor firms in Taiwan. Estimated results show that there are significant differences in efficiency scores among DEA, 3SDEA and ANN analysis. The advanced setting of the three stages mechanism of DEA does show some changes...