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 Redundancy Allocation Problem (RAP) is a reliability optimization problem in designing series-parallel systems. The reliability optimization process is intended to select multiple components with appropriate levels of redundancy by maximizing the system reliability under some predefined constraints. Several methods have been proposed to solve the RAPs. However, most of these methods often t...

ABC analysis is a popular and effective method used to classify inventory items into specific categories that can be managed and controlled separately. In traditional ABC analysis the inventory items are categorized in to A ,B and C classes based on the annual dollar usage. The annual dollar usage is determined as the product of unit cost of each item and its annual demand. The items are arrang...

An extension of TOPSIS (technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution), a multi-attribute decision making (MADM) technique, to a group decision environment is investigated. TOPSIS is a practical and useful technique for ranking and selection of a number of externally determined alternatives through distance measures. To get a broad view of the techniques used, we provide a few...

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 recent development of the Internet has made an increasing number of information sources available to users. This makes it necessary to submit queries only to the most appropriate sources. When gathering and combining information from these sources the quality ooered can and must be a criterion for source selection. However, information quality has many dimensions and it is thus diicult to d...

Supply chain management (SCM) is one of the most important competitive strategies used by modern enterprises. The main aim of supply chain management is to integrate various suppliers to satisfy market demand. Meanwhile, supplier selection and evaluation plays an important role in establishing an effective supply chain. Traditional supplier selection and evaluation methods focus on the requirem...

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...