Abstract Promoting management efficiency is always a big concern either to profit-making or non-profit-making organizations. An efficient firm indicates that the leader manages well. To a profit-making unit, the term ¡§efficiency¡¨ means ¡§rapid production¡¨, ¡§the offer of distribution¡¨ and ¡§related services¡¨ which could save time and the good use of manpower and resources are also included. Therefore, the promotion of management efficiency becomes an important issue for the organization to survive successfully and to fight with other competitors. This study was to present the evaluation of management efficiency of some commercial banks in Taiwan. Some factors were selected as the ¡§input items¡¨ and ¡§output items¡¨from the financial reports of these commercial banks in Taiwan from 1999 to 2001. It evaluated the efficiency performance of these commercial banks according to the evaluation theory of Farrell and Data Envelopment Analysis. The relative efficiency in the process of the transferring from ¡§input items¡¨ to ¡§output items¡¨ was also concerned. From the changes in ¡§input items¡¨, it could show how efficiency value changes. By these two analyses (Slack Variables Analysis and Scale Efficiency Analysis), the results could show a direction in order to improve the efficiency of all these commercial banks. 38 commercial banks were selected and evaluated in this research. The information collected from financial reports was to construct a model in order to evaluate management efficiency of all subjects. This investigation involved ¡§overall efficiency ¡¨, ¡§overall technical efficiency¡¨, ¡§pure technical efficiency¡¨, ¡§scale efficiency¡¨, and ¡§allocative efficiency ¡¨. Apart from these calculation, all subjects were grouped into three parties: namely ¡§old commercial banks¡¨, ¡§new commercial banks¡¨ and ¡§commercial banks upgraded from credit cooperative¡¨; by cross and vertical analysis the result provided the comparison of management efficiency among these three groups. Using the CCR and BCC models, the overall efficiency value and technical efficiency became available. The Return to Scale was derived by the use of CCR model. The first finding from financial reports in 2001 showed that the top five as the most efficient banks among 38 subjects were Cathy United Bank, Taishin International Bank, Taipei Bank, Fubon Commercial Bank and Bank of Kaohsiung respectively. The bottom five subjects were Chung Shing Bank, Kao Shin Commercial Bank, Cota Commercial Bank, Pan Asia Bank and Union Bank of Taiwan. The Second finding showed that the ¡§old commercial banks¡¨ represented the highest efficiency value in the analysis, which was based on 2001 financial reports. Both the ¡§new commercial banks¡¨ and ¡§commercial banks upgraded from credit cooperative¡¨ had efficiency value, which was below the average efficiency value of all subjects. This was different from the result based on financial report in 2000, which showed that the ¡§new commercial banks¡¨ had the highest efficiency value. This represented the overall efficiency of the ¡§old commercial banks¡¨ was improving and that of the ¡§new commercial banks¡¨ was getting worse. Thirdly, through ¡§Slack Variables Analysis (SVA)¡¨, the result would indicate a direction for these ¡§less-efficient¡¨ subjects for improvement. The decision-maker could follow this direction to restructure or reallocate resources, and refer to the allocation of resources and strategies application of those subjects, which with overall efficiency, in order to improve its management efficiency and reach the optima production. The fourth, using "Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)" to test whether the efficiency values were different between these three groups. The result showed that the efficiency values between these three groups were significantly different in 2001. According to Scheffe's S method, the difference was derived from the scale efficiency between the groups of "new commercial banks" and "commercial banks upgraded from credit cooperative". Finally, according to the regression analysis, the result showed that the overall efficiency measure is negatively related to overdue loans but positively related to BIS ratio. The other items, such as the numbers of branch, the numbers of employee, capital and the numbers of ATM, which were non-related to the overall efficiency.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 22-25, 2001 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Shaped Offset QPSK (SOQPSK), as proposed and analyzed by Terrance Hill, is a family of constant envelope waveforms that is non-proprietary and exhibits excellent spectral containment and detection efficiency. Results using a conventional coherent OQPSK demodulator without any special pulse shaping to recover the SOQPSK signal have been previously presented. This paper describes a trellis detector for SOQPSK-A and SOQPSK-B that provides superior detection performance, as compared to a traditional OQPSK detector, by accounting for the pulse shaping. Analytical error performance bounds, implementation of the trellis demodulator, and computer simulation results are presented.

Generators are widely used across the world as portable power units in case of power outages, used for emergency services and are also used in rural areas without access to electricity. The majority of commercially available generators use internal combustion engines designed as automobile engines with little or no optimization for use in generators. With operating conditions vastly different than that of automobile engines, they can be re-designed to operate much more efficiently as generator engines. The development objective here was to design a low cost, 1.6L, lean burn, internal combustion engine which minimizes heat losses, time losses and frictional losses to improve thermal efficiency. Various high swirl, high squish, easily CNC’d combustion chambers were created in the re-design process. A computer model was used to provide insight into the trade-off between time losses and heat losses. A maximum brake thermal efficiency of 37.2% was achieved.

Seven different but integrated experiments were conducted to study the factors affecting the utilisation of dietary energy. The first two experiments involved feeding broiler chickens diets containing either corn oil or corn starch as the supplementary source of energy at two protein levels. Herring meal was used in all diets because of the high biological value of its protein. All diets were calculated to be isocaloric and to contain the same balance of amino acids; minerals and vitamins were added to meet the requirements for these nutrients. Live weight gain and the efficiency of food utilisation within calorie:protein regime were not improved when fat was substituted for starch in isocaloric diets. The superiority of the low-fat high-protein diet in promoting the highest metabolisability of energy, questions the validity of the claim that added dietary fat has an "extra-caloric" effect. Birds fed the high-fat low-protein diet which had a lower calorie:protein ratio, deposited more abdominal adipose tissue, indicating that in evaluating growth performance, the balance between energy and protein is of greater significance than the source of supplementary energy. Formulation of isocaloric diets has necessitated the inclusion of the so-called nutritionally-inert ingredients such as cellulose. Since the diets used to test the main hypothesis of "extra-caloric effects" attributable to dietary fat incorporated cellulose, the effect of the latter on the physiological parameters under study, was tested. At high levels of inclusion cellulose depressed body weight gain. Adverse effects of added dietary cellulose on food conversion efficiency and energy metabolisability were also evident. Another effect of .added dietary cellulose which is particularly interesting is that it decreased abdominal adipose tissue. Results of the above studies have shown significant differences among the different treatment groups in body weight gain, efficiency of food utilisation and metabolisability of energy within the first three weeks posthatching. The possibility that the residual yolk may influence the metabolic parameters in question was considered and tested. Absence of the yolk sac, excised surgically, did not influence the performance of birds on the basis of growth and energy utilisation as measured by body weight gain and metabolisable energy values, respectively. The residual yolk did not influence food conversion efficiency in the first and third weeks of the experimental period. However, depression of food conversion efficiency resulting from the removal of residual yolk was found to occur in the second week. It was noted that birds without residual yolk retained a greater amount of nitrogen compared to birds with residual yolk in the first week posthatching. The residual yolk does not contribute significantly towards the nourishment of the chick in the first week posthatching as evidenced by the fact that abstinence from food resulted in the death of both the groups retaining yolk sacs and those without yolk sacs at approximately the same time. The presence of a large bacterial population in the avian caeca and extrapolation of the features associated with bacteria-host symbiosis in ruminants and other animals to the domestic chicken have led to speculation that the avian caeca perform some cellulolytic and proteolytic functions. The relevance of the concept of caeca-mediated nutrient utilisation to the topic under study prompted an experiment using intact and caecectomized chickens to investigate the effect of the excision of the caeca on the utilisation of dietary energy and protein. Caecectomized and intact control New Hampshire cockerels were fed diets used in the previous studies. Metabolisable energy values and uric acid excretion were used as the criteria for measuring dietary energy and protein utilisation. Caecectomy did not affect the metabolisability of the diets. Metabolisability of the diet incorporating corn starch was more variable and slightly lower with the caecectomized birds. Uric acid excretion was similar for the caecectomized and the intact birds. Macroscopic and histological examination of sections of the caeca revealed that regeneration of the caeca had occurred in four caecectomized birds that survived until autopsy 85 weeks later. Although the onset of the regeneration of the caeca was not observed, it would appear that the degree (or the absence) of regeneration of the caeca in caecectomized birds may be responsible for the discrepancies in the findings reported with such birds. / Land and Food Systems, Faculty of / Graduate

Industrial flaring can result in atmospheric emissions that have significant impact on regional air quality. This study investigates the impact on one-hour average ozone concentrations due to industrial flaring, using the region around Houston, Texas as a case study. Specifically, this study examined the impact on ozone formation of different flare destruction efficiencies. There are some concerns about whether flare destruction efficiency is reduced from design conditions (98 to 99% destruction) at low flare flow rates. Some studies have reported very low flares destruction efficiencies under low flow, so it is possible that ozone precursor emissions may be underestimated by an order of magnitude or more at low flow conditions. In this thesis, 100 different destruction efficiency scenarios have been constructed where destruction efficiency depends on the ratio of flare flow rate to the maximum flow rate (turndown ratio). The scenarios differ in the assumed destruction efficiency at near zero flow and the turndown ratio at which destruction efficiency returns to the design value. These destruction scenarios are applied to hourly mass flow data for twenty-five flares in Houston, Texas. The scenarios have very different impacts on air quality. The air quality implications of these results for possible modifications to flare operation are explored. / text

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