This study’s overarching aim is to establish the areal extent and characteristics of the rapid sugarcane expansion and land use change in São Paulo state (Brazil) as a result of an increase in the demand for ethanol, using Landsat type remotely sensed data. In 2003 flex fuel automobiles started to enter the Brazilian consumer market causing a dramatic expansion of sugarcane areas from 2.57 mill...

We propose a selective method of measurement for computing image similarities based on characteristic structure extraction and demonstrate its application to flexible endoscope navigation, in particular to a bronchoscope navigation system. Camera motion tracking is a fundamental function required for image-guided treatment or therapy systems. In recent years, an ultra-tiny electromagnetic senso...

Standard data envelopment analysis (DEA) supposes that measure status from point of view input or output is known. Nevertheless, in some situations, determining the status of a performance measure is not easy. Measures with unknown status of input /output are called flexible measures. Moreover, traditional DEA models do not deal with imprecise data and assume that all input and output are exact...

The permanent decline of equipment prices relative to nondurable consumption prices rendered fixed-base quantity indexes obsolete, because of the well-known substitution bias. National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) responded by switching to a flexible-base quantity index to measure GDP growth. We argue this is a welfare measure of output growth. In a two-sector endogenous growth model, we ...

A flexible representation of uncertainty that remains within the standard framework of probabilistic measure theory is presented along with a study of its properties. This representation relies on a specific type of outer measure that is based on the measure of a supremum, hence combining additive and highly sub-additive components. It is shown that this type of outer measure enables the introd...

A technique using micromachined mechanical force sensors to measure the force response of living cells is introduced. The force sensors consist of a probe and flexible beams. The probe is used to indent and stretch the cells, and the flexible beams are used to measure the cell force response. The stiffness of the sensors is designed at several nanonewtons per micrometer, but can be varied over ...

the efficiency measurement is a subject of great interest. the majority of studies on dea models have been carried out using radial or non-radial approaches regarding the application of dea for the efficiency measurement. this paper, based on the directional distance function, proposes a new generalized hybrid measure of efficiency under generalized returns to scale with the existence of both r...

The efficiency measurement is a subject of great interest. The majority of studies on DEA models have been carried out using radial or non-radial approaches regarding the application of DEA for the efficiency measurement. This paper, based on the directional distance function, proposes a new generalized hybrid measure of efficiency under generalized returns to scale with the existence of both r...

Dirac measure is an important measure in many related branches to mathematics. The current paper characterizes measure-preserving transformations between two Dirac measure spaces or a Dirac measure space and a probability measure space. Also, it studies isomorphic Dirac measure spaces, equivalence Dirac measure algebras, and conjugate of Dirac measure spaces. The equivalence classes of a Dirac ...