The objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive efficiency measures to estimate the performances of OECD and non-OECD countries. A Russell directional distance function that appropriately credits the decision making unit not only for increase in desirable outputs but also for the decrease of undesirable outputs is derived from the proposed weighted Russell directional distance model. ...

BACKGROUND Hereditary ataxias with similar phenotypes were reported in the Smooth-Haired Fox Terrier, the Jack Russell Terrier and the Parson Russell Terrier. However, segregation analyses showed differing inheritance modes in these breeds. Recently, molecular genetic studies on the Russell group of terriers found independent mutations in KCNJ10 and CAPN1, each associated with a specific clinic...

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Macroautophagy (hereafter termed autophagy) is a cellular membrane-trafficking process that functions to deliver cytoplasmic constituents to lysosomes for degradation. Autophagy operates at basal levels to turn over damaged and misfolded proteins and it is the only process for the turnover of organelles. The process is therefore critically important for the preservation of cellular integrity an...

We have developed a system that breaks input speech into segments using an acoustic similarity measure. The aim is to detect the time points where the acoustic characteristics change, usually due to speaker changes but also resulting from changes in the acoustic environment. We have also developed a system to cluster the segments generated by the first system into clusters composed of homogeneo...

Extracting and fusing discriminative features in fingerprint matching, especially in distorted fingerprint matching, is a challenging task. In this paper, we introduce two novel features to deal with nonlinear distortion in fingerprints. One is finger placement direction which is extracted from fingerprint foreground and the other is ridge compatibility which is determined by the singular value...