Introduction to the theory and application of data envelopment analysis:a foundation text with integrated software

The book aims to introduce the reader to DEA in the most accessible manner possible. It is specifically aimed at those who have had no prior exposure to DEA and wish to learn its essentials, how it works, its key uses, and the mechanics of using it. The latter will include using DEA software. Students on degree or training courses will find the book especially helpful. The same is true of practitioners engaging in comparative efficiency assessments and performance management within their organisation. Examples are used throughout the book to help the reader consolidate the concepts covered. Table of content: List of Tables. List of Figures. Preface. Abbreviations. 1. Introduction to Performance Measurement. 2. Definitions of Efficiency and Related Measures. 3. Data Envelopment Analysis Under Constant Returns to Scale: Basic Principles. 4. Data Envelopment Analysis under Constant Returns to Scale: General Models. 5. Using Data Envelopment Analysis in Practice. 6. Data Envelopment Analysis under Variable Returns to Scale. 7. Assessing Policy Effectiveness and Productivity Change Using DEA. 8. Incorporating Value Judgements in DEA Assessments. 9. Extensions to Basic DEA Models. 10. A Limited User Guide for Warwick DEA Software. Author Index. Topic Index. References.

Text messaging forensics : Txt 4n6: idiolect free authorship analysis?

Current debate within forensic authorship analysis has tended to polarise those who argue that analysis methods should reflect a strong cognitive theory of idiolect and others who see less of a need to look behind the stylistic variation of the texts they are examining. This chapter examines theories of idiolect and asks how useful or necessary they are to the practice of forensic authorship analysis. Taking a specific text messaging case the chapter demonstrates that methodologically rigorous, theoretically informed authorship analysis need not appeal to cognitive theories of idiolect in order to be valid. By considering text messaging forensics, lessons will be drawn which can contribute to wider debates on the role of theories of idiolect in forensic casework.

A computational model of intonation for yorùbá text-to-speech synthesis:design and analysis

In this paper we present the design and analysis of an intonation model for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis applications using a combination of Relational Tree (RT) and Fuzzy Logic (FL) technologies. The model is demonstrated using the Standard Yorùbá (SY) language. In the proposed intonation model, phonological information extracted from text is converted into an RT. RT is a sophisticated data structure that represents the peaks and valleys as well as the spatial structure of a waveform symbolically in the form of trees. An initial approximation to the RT, called Skeletal Tree (ST), is first generated algorithmically. The exact numerical values of the peaks and valleys on the ST is then computed using FL. Quantitative analysis of the result gives RMSE of 0.56 and 0.71 for peak and valley respectively. Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) of 9.5 and 6.8, on a scale of 1 - -10, was obtained for intelligibility and naturalness respectively.

Discovery driven analysis on semi-structured text data

Discovery Driven Analysis (DDA) is a common feature of OLAP technology to analyze structured data. In essence, DDA helps analysts to discover anomalous data by highlighting 'unexpected' values in the OLAP cube. By giving indications to the analyst on what dimensions to explore, DDA speeds up the process of discovering anomalies and their causes. However, Discovery Driven Analysis (and OLAP in general) is only applicable on structured data, such as records in databases. We propose a system to extend DDA technology to semi-structured text documents, that is, text documents with a few structured data. Our system pipeline consists of two stages: first, the text part of each document is structured around user specified dimensions, using semi-PLSA algorithm; then, we adapt DDA to these fully structured documents, thus enabling DDA on text documents. We present some applications of this system in OLAP analysis and show how scalability issues are solved. Results show that our system can handle reasonable datasets of documents, in real time, without any need for pre-computation.

Petr Eben's oratorio Apologia Sokratus (1967) and ballet Curses and Blessings (1983): An interpretative analysis of the symbolism behind the text settings and musical style

The Czech composer Petr Eben (1927-2007) has written music in all genres except symphony, but he is highly recognized for his organ and choral compositions, which are his preferred genres. His vocal works include choral songs and vocal-instrumental works at a wide range of difficulty levels, from simple pedagogical songs to very advanced and technically challenging compositions. This study examines two of Eben‘s vocal-instrumental compositions. The oratorio Apologia Sokratus (1967) is a three-movement work; its libretto is based on Plato‘s Apology of Socrates. The ballet Curses and Blessings (1983) has a libretto compiled from numerous texts from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries. The formal design of the ballet is unusual—a three-movement composition where the first is choral, the second is orchestral, and the third combines the previous two played simultaneously. Eben assembled the libretti for both compositions and they both address the contrasting sides of the human soul, evil and good, and the everlasting fight between them. This unity and contrast is the philosophical foundation for both compositions. The dissertation discusses the multileveled meanings behind the text settings and musical style of the oratorio and ballet in analyses focusing on the text, melodic and harmonic construction, and symbolism. Additional brief analyses of other vocal and vocal-instrumental compositions by Eben establish the ground for the examination of the oratorio and ballet and for understanding features of the composer‘s musical style. While the oratorio Apologia Sokratus was discussed in short articles in the 1970s, the ballet Curses and Blessings has never previously been addressed within Eben scholarship. The dissertation examines the significant features of Eben‘s music. His melodic style incorporates influences as diverse as Gregorian chant and folk tunes on the one hand, and modern vocal techniques such as Sprechgesang and vocal aleatoricism on the other. His harmonic language includes bitonality and polytonality, used to augment the tonal legacy of earlier times, together with elements of pitch collections and limited serial procedures as well as various secundal and quartal harmonic sonorities derived from them. His music features the vibrant rhythms of folk music, and incorporates other folk devices like ostinato, repetitive patterns, and improvisation.

Using text-mining-assisted analysis to examine the applicability of unstructured data in the context of customer complaint management

Double Degree

What is that place? Observations of the impact of environment colour through photographic analysis

Isolating the impact of a colour, or a combination of colours, is extremely difficult to achieve because it is difficult to remove other environmental elements such as sound, odours, light, and occasion from the experience of being in a place. In order to ascertain the impact of colour on how we interpret the world in day to day situations, the current study records participant responses to achromatic scenes of the built environment prior to viewing the same scene in colour. A number of environments were photographed in colour or copied from design books; and copies of the images saved as both colour and black/grey/white. An overview of the study will be introduced by firstly providing examples of studies which have linked colour to meaning and emotions. For example, yellow is said to be connected to happiness1 ; or red evokes feelings of anger2 or passion. A link between colour and the way we understand and/or feel is established however, there is a further need for knowledge of colour in context. In response to this need, the current achromatic/chromatic environmental study will be described and discussed in light of the findings. Finally, suggestions for future research are posed. Based on previous research the authors hypothesised that a shift in environmental perception by participants would occur. It was found that the impact of colour includes a shift in perception of aspects such as its atmosphere and youthfulness. Through studio-class discussions it was also noted that the predicted age of the place, the function, and in association, the potential users when colour was added (or deleted) were often challenged. It is posited that the ability of a designer (for example, interior designer, architect, or landscape architect) to design for a particular target group—user and/or clients will be enhanced through more targeted studies relating colour in situ. The importance of noting the perceptual shift for the participants in our study, who were young designers, is the realisation that colour potentially holds the power to impact on the identity of an architectural form, an interior space, and/or particular elements such as doorways, furniture settings, and the like.

Historical timelines : analyzing multimodal text design

The recent focus on literacy in Social Studies has been on linguistic design, particularly that related to the grammar of written and spoken text. When students are expected to produce complex hybridized genres such as timelines, a focus on the teaching and learning of linguistic design is necessary but not sufficient to complete the task. Theorizations of new literacies identify five interrelated meaning making designs for text deconstruction and reproduction: linguistic, spatial, visual, gestural, and audio design. Honing in on the complexity of timelines, this paper casts a lens on the linguistic, visual, spatial, and gestural designs of three pairs of primary school aged Social Studies learners. Drawing on a functional metalanguage, we analyze the linguistic, visual, spatial, and gestural designs of their work. We also offer suggestions of their effect, and from there consider the importance of explicit instruction in text design choices for this Social Studies task. We conclude the analysis by suggesting the foci of explicit instruction for future lessons.

The use of narrative text for injury surveillance research : a systematic review

Objective: To summarise the extent to which narrative text fields in administrative health data are used to gather information about the event resulting in presentation to a health care provider for treatment of an injury, and to highlight best practise approaches to conducting narrative text interrogation for injury surveillance purposes.----- Design: Systematic review----- Data sources: Electronic databases searched included CINAHL, Google Scholar, Medline, Proquest, PubMed and PubMed Central.. Snowballing strategies were employed by searching the bibliographies of retrieved references to identify relevant associated articles.----- Selection criteria: Papers were selected if the study used a health-related database and if the study objectives were to a) use text field to identify injury cases or use text fields to extract additional information on injury circumstances not available from coded data or b) use text fields to assess accuracy of coded data fields for injury-related cases or c) describe methods/approaches for extracting injury information from text fields.----- Methods: The papers identified through the search were independently screened by two authors for inclusion, resulting in 41 papers selected for review. Due to heterogeneity between studies metaanalysis was not performed.----- Results: The majority of papers reviewed focused on describing injury epidemiology trends using coded data and text fields to supplement coded data (28 papers), with these studies demonstrating the value of text data for providing more specific information beyond what had been coded to enable case selection or provide circumstantial information. Caveats were expressed in terms of the consistency and completeness of recording of text information resulting in underestimates when using these data. Four coding validation papers were reviewed with these studies showing the utility of text data for validating and checking the accuracy of coded data. Seven studies (9 papers) described methods for interrogating injury text fields for systematic extraction of information, with a combination of manual and semi-automated methods used to refine and develop algorithms for extraction and classification of coded data from text. Quality assurance approaches to assessing the robustness of the methods for extracting text data was only discussed in 8 of the epidemiology papers, and 1 of the coding validation papers. All of the text interrogation methodology papers described systematic approaches to ensuring the quality of the approach.----- Conclusions: Manual review and coding approaches, text search methods, and statistical tools have been utilised to extract data from narrative text and translate it into useable, detailed injury event information. These techniques can and have been applied to administrative datasets to identify specific injury types and add value to previously coded injury datasets. Only a few studies thoroughly described the methods which were used for text mining and less than half of the studies which were reviewed used/described quality assurance methods for ensuring the robustness of the approach. New techniques utilising semi-automated computerised approaches and Bayesian/clustering statistical methods offer the potential to further develop and standardise the analysis of narrative text for injury surveillance.

Inducing shades of meaning by matrix methods : a first step towards thematic analysis of opinion

This article explores two matrix methods to induce the ``shades of meaning" (SoM) of a word. A matrix representation of a word is computed from a corpus of traces based on the given word. Non-negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) compute a set of vectors corresponding to a potential shade of meaning. The two methods were evaluated based on loss of conditional entropy with respect to two sets of manually tagged data. One set reflects concepts generally appearing in text, and the second set comprises words used for investigations into word sense disambiguation. Results show that for NMF consistently outperforms SVD for inducing both SoM of general concepts as well as word senses. The problem of inducing the shades of meaning of a word is more subtle than that of word sense induction and hence relevant to thematic analysis of opinion where nuances of opinion can arise.

An analysis of the RC4 family of stream ciphers against algebraic attacks

To date, most applications of algebraic analysis and attacks on stream ciphers are on those based on lin- ear feedback shift registers (LFSRs). In this paper, we extend algebraic analysis to non-LFSR based stream ciphers. Specifically, we perform an algebraic analysis on the RC4 family of stream ciphers, an example of stream ciphers based on dynamic tables, and inves- tigate its implications to potential algebraic attacks on the cipher. This is, to our knowledge, the first pa- per that evaluates the security of RC4 against alge- braic attacks through providing a full set of equations that describe the complex word manipulations in the system. For an arbitrary word size, we derive alge- braic representations for the three main operations used in RC4, namely state extraction, word addition and state permutation. Equations relating the inter- nal states and keystream of RC4 are then obtained from each component of the cipher based on these al- gebraic representations, and analysed in terms of their contributions to the security of RC4 against algebraic attacks. Interestingly, it is shown that each of the three main operations contained in the components has its own unique algebraic properties, and when their respective equations are combined, the resulting system becomes infeasible to solve. This results in a high level of security being achieved by RC4 against algebraic attacks. On the other hand, the removal of an operation from the cipher could compromise this security. Experiments on reduced versions of RC4 have been performed, which confirms the validity of our algebraic analysis and the conclusion that the full RC4 stream cipher seems to be immune to algebraic attacks at present.

Statistical and Econometric Methods for Transportation Data Analysis, 2nd edition

Now in its second edition, this book describes tools that are commonly used in transportation data analysis. The first part of the text provides statistical fundamentals while the second part presents continuous dependent variable models. With a focus on count and discrete dependent variable models, the third part features new chapters on mixed logit models, logistic regression, and ordered probability models. The last section provides additional coverage of Bayesian statistical modeling, including Bayesian inference and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Data sets are available online to use with the modeling techniques discussed.