We investigate the consistency of efficiency scores derived with two competing frontier methods in the financial economics literature: Stochastic Frontier and Data Envelopment Analysis. We sample 34,192 observations for all German universal banks and analyze whether efficiency measures yield consistent results according to five criteria between 1993 and 2004: levels, rankings, identification of...

The development of value added services is currently still very time and cost consuming. The TeamCom project offers a solution to cope with this problem. It offers a simple, fast, and cost efficient way to design the service graphically in a BPEL developer tool. A code generator analyses the BPEL code and generates the value added service. This service can be deployed on a JSLEE application ser...

Distributed and collaborative wireless sensor networks (WSN) plays key role in developing Smart Environment. A Smart Environment needs information about its surroundings as well as about its internal working; this information’s are monitored and collected by the network of wireless sensors. The futuristic application of distributed WSN includes : Animal monitoring, Vehicle monitoring, Enemy mon...

This paper attempts to examine, using data envelopment analysis, the productivity performance trends of the Indian commercial banks for the period: 1997-98 – 2004-05. Our broad empirical findings are indicative in many ways. First, the increasing average annual trends in technical efficiency for all ownership groups indicate an affirmative gesture about the effect of the reform process on the ...

This research analyses the efficiency of China’s banks using the data envelopment analysis (DEA). The Chinese government began its reforms of the banking industry reform since 1978. Our data set contains twelve banks in China during the period of 1996 to 2003. All nominal variables are transformed into real variables in the 2003 prices. There are twelve banks including four state-owned speciali...

INTRODUCTION there is evidence to suggest that delirium incidence can be reduced in older people admitted to medical services using multi-component interventions that target delirium risk factors. The cost-effectiveness of this approach is uncertain. We therefore developed a novel cost-effectiveness model for delirium prevention. METHOD we compared multi-component delirium prevention interven...

AIM To evaluate the impact of a Diabetes Specialist Nurse prescriber on insulin and oral hypoglycaemic agent medication errors and length of stay. BACKGROUND The National Health Service has committed to a 40% reduction in the number of drug errors in the use of prescribed medicines. Drug errors in diabetes care are a common cause of significant morbidity and complications. Nurse prescribing c...

Exponential improvements in software development environments and increased vulnerability to security couple with an ever widening circle of applicable uses for software in large scale systems. Add to this the growing trend toward non-traditional methods of delivering software solutions such as outsourcing software development, integrating commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions, and incorpor...

INTRODUCTION Observation and assessment wards allow patients to be observed on a short-term basis and permit patient monitoring and/or treatment for an initial 24-48 hour period. They should permit concentration of emergency activity and resources in one area, and so improve efficiency and minimise disruption to other hospital services. These types of ward go under a variety of names, including...

Distributed Systems are a popular paradigm in Computer Science today. The installation of Local Area Networks (LANS) has become affordable in recent years due the reduced cost of computer equipment and advances in networking technologies. We are concerned with harnessing the processing power that is available when computers on the LAN run idle or are under-utilised at certain times. In order to...