Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has proved to be an excellent approach for measuring performance of decision making units (DMUs) that use multiple inputs to generate multiple outputs. In many real world scenarios, DMUs have a two-stage network process with shared input resources used in both...

It is interesting to observe how long it takes to move a powerful new technology from the academic to the practitioners' world and to understand what constitutes acceptance and adoption by professionals.~Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was introduced in 1978 but has been only sporadically used...

China's accession to the WTO poses great challenges to the Chinese agricultural sector, especially to the grain producers. Compared with major grain exporters in the world, most grain crops in China are high in production cost and weak in market competitiveness. This can be partly attributed to...

Ba0.6Sr0.4TiO3 (BST) and Ba0.6Sr0.4TiO3/Ba(Zr0.2Ti0.8)O3/Ba0.6Sr0.4TiO3 (BST/BZT/BST) multilayer (ML) films were prepared by pulsed laser deposition on the LaNiO3-coated LaAlO3 substrate. X-ray diffraction analysis revealed that the two kinds of films could be epitaxially grown in pure...

In the literature of social networks, understanding topological structure is an important scientific issue. In this paper, we construct a network from mobile phone call records and use the cumulative number of calls as a measure of the weight of a social tie. We extract skeletons from the...