Special investigation of the Washington Community School District for the period June 1, 2003 through October 31, 2006

Special investigation of the Washington Community School District for the period June 1, 2003 through October 31, 2006

Audit report on a special investigation of the Bear Creek Narcotics Task Force for the period July 1, 2003 through November 30, 2006

Audit report on a special investigation of the Bear Creek Narcotics Task Force for the period July 1, 2003 through November 30, 2006

Report on a special investigation of the Dallas County Jail for the period July 31, 2000 through February 5, 2007

Report on a special investigation of the Dallas County Jail for the period July 31, 2000 through February 5, 2007

Special investigation of the Crawford County Conservation Department for the period January 25, 2002 through December 7, 2006

Special investigation of the Crawford County Conservation Department for the period January 25, 2002 through December 7, 2006

Special investigation of the City of McCausland for the period January 1, 1999 through January 31, 2007

Special investigation of the City of McCausland for the period January 1, 1999 through January 31, 2007

ABD e-News Special Edition - May 18, 2007

Weekly newsletter

Report on a special investigation of Three Rivers Independent Living Corporation for the period July 1, 2005 through May 26, 2006

Report on a special investigation of Three Rivers Independent Living Corporation for the period July 1, 2005 through May 26, 2006

A polynomial algorithm for special case of the one-machine scheduling problem with time-lags

The standard one-machine scheduling problem consists in schedulinga set of jobs in one machine which can handle only one job at atime, minimizing the maximum lateness. Each job is available forprocessing at its release date, requires a known processing timeand after finishing the processing, it is delivery after a certaintime. There also can exists precedence constraints between pairsof jobs, requiring that the first jobs must be completed beforethe second job can start. An extension of this problem consistsin assigning a time interval between the processing of the jobsassociated with the precedence constrains, known by finish-starttime-lags. In presence of this constraints, the problem is NP-hardeven if preemption is allowed. In this work, we consider a specialcase of the one-machine preemption scheduling problem with time-lags, where the time-lags have a chain form, and propose apolynomial algorithm to solve it. The algorithm consist in apolynomial number of calls of the preemption version of the LongestTail Heuristic. One of the applicability of the method is to obtainlower bounds for NP-hard one-machine and job-shop schedulingproblems. We present some computational results of thisapplication, followed by some conclusions.

Special investigation of the Dallas County Mental Health Advocate for the period September 1, 2005 through March 31, 2006

Special investigation of the Dallas County Mental Health Advocate for the period September 1, 2005 through March 31, 2006

Are rules-based government programs shielded from special-interest politics? Evidence from revenue-sharing transfers in Brazil

Manipulation of government finances for the benefit of narrowly defined groups is usuallythought to be limited to the part of the budget over which politicians exercise discretion inthe short run, such as earmarks. Analyzing a revenue-sharing program between the centraland local governments in Brazil that uses an allocation formula based on local population estimates,I document two main results: first, that the population estimates entering the formulawere manipulated and second, that this manipulation was political in nature. Consistent withswing-voter targeting by the right-wing central government, I find that municipalities withroughly equal right-wing and non-right-wing vote shares benefited relative to opposition orconservative core support municipalities. These findings suggest that the exclusive focus ondiscretionary transfers in the extant empirical literature on special-interest politics may understatethe true scope of tactical redistribution that is going on under programmatic disguise.

An Automatic Approach for Learning and Tuning Gaussian Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Membership Functions Applied to Lung CAD Classification System

The potential of type-2 fuzzy sets for managing high levels of uncertainty in the subjective knowledge of experts or of numerical information has focused on control and pattern classification systems in recent years. One of the main challenges in designing a type-2 fuzzy logic system is how to estimate the parameters of type-2 fuzzy membership function (T2MF) and the Footprint of Uncertainty (FOU) from imperfect and noisy datasets. This paper presents an automatic approach for learning and tuning Gaussian interval type-2 membership functions (IT2MFs) with application to multi-dimensional pattern classification problems. T2MFs and their FOUs are tuned according to the uncertainties in the training dataset by a combination of genetic algorithm (GA) and crossvalidation techniques. In our GA-based approach, the structure of the chromosome has fewer genes than other GA methods and chromosome initialization is more precise. The proposed approach addresses the application of the interval type-2 fuzzy logic system (IT2FLS) for the problem of nodule classification in a lung Computer Aided Detection (CAD) system. The designed IT2FLS is compared with its type-1 fuzzy logic system (T1FLS) counterpart. The results demonstrate that the IT2FLS outperforms the T1FLS by more than 30% in terms of classification accuracy.

Special investigation of the City of Riverdale for the period July 1, 2002 through June 30, 2005

Special investigation of the City of Riverdale for the period July 1, 2002 through June 30, 2005

ABD e-News - Special Edition, July 11, 2007

weekly newsletter

Special investigation of the City of Mystic for the period January 1, 2006 through January 31, 2007

Special investigation of the City of Mystic for the period January 1, 2006 through January 31, 2007