Article history: Received 25 July 2011 Received in revised form 5 March 2012 Accepted 10 April 2012 Available online 27 April 2012

This paper (1) appraises The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s widely disseminated and reported indices ranking states on their relative level of charitable giving, and (2) presents a different set of rankings based on a more valid research methodology, what we call the CWP (Center on Wealth and Philanthropy) Index. Our more precise methods raise important questions for the community of nonprofit sch...

Computing with Words (CW) methodology has been used in several different environments to narrow the differences between human reasoning and computing. As Decision Making is a typical human mental process, it seems natural to apply the CW methodology in order to create and enrich decision models in which the information that is provided and manipulated has a qualitative nature. In this paper we ...

Computing with words (CWW) techniques have been shown to be useful in the management of imperfect information. From the programmer’s standpoint, new tools are necessary to ease the use of these techniques within current programming platforms. This paper presents a step in this direction by describing a general framework that supports the implementation of applications dealing with fuzzy objects...

Computer representation of human knowledge must be approached using the human ability to assign different meanings to information according to our perceptions, which at the same time are constructed and constitute the interpretative context in which possible meanings acquire varying degrees of validity. This work proposes that humans construct our perceptions based on the context of our past ex...

Applying the generalised extension principle within the area of Computing with Words typically leads to complex maximisation problems. If distributed quantities—such as, e.g., size distributions within human populations—are considered, density functions representing these distributions become involved. Very often the optimising density functions do not resemble those found in nature; for instan...

Internet users are assisted by means of distributed intelligent agents in the information gathering process to find the fittest information to their needs. In this paper we present a distributed intelligent agent model where the communication of the evaluation of the retrieved information among the agents is carried out by using linguistic operators based on the 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic represe...

The TURF Framework enables usability analysts evaluate EHRs by analyzing work tasks, users, representations, and functionality. Currently the TURF framework does not have a focus on evaluating clinical workflows across multiple tasks or across individuals . Because clinical workflows are vital to the successful implementation of an EHR, this study will augment the capabilities of the TURF usabi...

Fuzzy equality relations or indistinguishability operators generalize the concepts of crisp equality and equivalence relations in fuzzy systems where inaccuracy and uncertainty is dealt with. They generate fuzzy granularity and are an essential tool in Computing with Words (CWW). Traditionally, the degree of similarity between two objects is a number between 0 and 1, but in many occasions this ...