A three-staged least squares translog cost function is estimated for 13 heavy-rail and nine light-rail United States urban mass transit systems for the period 1985-1991. Firm output is taken to be endogenous. Large economies of density are found in operating costs. These economies become even more substantial when the cost of way and structure maintenance and capital costs are incorporated. How...

In the literature results can be found which claim consistency for the subspace method under certain quite weak assumptions. Unfortunately, a new result gives a counter example showing inconsistency under these assumptions and then gives new more strict su$cient assumptions which however does not include important model structures such as, e.g. Box}Jenkins. Based on a simple least-squares appro...

The paper aims at analyzing the least squares ranking method for generalized tournaments with possible missing and multiple paired comparisons. The bilateral relationships may reflect the outcomes of a sport competition, product comparisons, or evaluation of political candidates and policies. It is shown that the rating vector can be obtained as a limit point of an iterative process based on th...

With the continuous development of society, media literacy education has an increasingly important position and role in university ideological and political education. Therefore, making media literacy education suit university ideological and political education is of great significance to ensure the comprehensive efficiency of ideological and political education. The concept of media literacy ...

Social scientists, particularly political scientists, frequently use ordinal survey items as dependent variables in models of political attitudes. Commonly, normal-theory modeling strategies like ordinary least squares regression are applied to these items. Additionally, workers also make frequent use of the proportional odds (ordinal logit) model or cumulative probit model when working with su...

Differentiation matrices obtained with infinitely smooth radial basis function (RBF) collocation methods have, under many conditions, eigenvalues with positive real part, preventing the use of such methods for time-dependent problems. We explore this difficulty at theoretical and practical levels. Theoretically, we prove that differentiation matrices for conditionally positive definite RBFs are...