C1 IBM IBM Business Consulting Services BE C2 LSE London School of Economics UK C3 T6 T6 scarl IT C4 SUN Sun Microsystems Iberica ES C5 FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik DE C6 ICL Imperial College London UK C7 IESE IESE Business School Universidad de Navarra ES C8 INTEL INTEL Ireland IE C9 ISUFI Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies University of Lecce IT C10 TUC MUSIC Technical Unive...

In this paper we examine the robustness properties of a specific type of orientation in the context of efficiency measurement using partial frontiers. This so called unconditional hyperbolic α-quantile estimator of efficiency has been recently studied by Wheelock and Wilson (2008) and can be seen as an extension of the in-put/output methodology of partial frontiers that was introduced by Aragon...

Emoticons in informal text communication are common worldwide. They have the potential to reveal emotion and social functions, analogous to facial expression and body gestures in face-to-face verbal communication. Our findings from a corpus study of online text communication by a group of scientists, some of whom were bilingual and others monolingual, suggested that patterns of emoticon use dep...

Probiotics are defined as live microorganisms which, when administrated in adequate amounts confer health benefit on humans (FAO, 2001). Bacteria belonging to genera Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus are often used as probiotic supplements (Homayouni, 2008). With potential health advantages such as alleviation of symptoms of lactose malabsorption, cancer suppression, resistance to infectious ga...