Chapter 15 DEA/AR analysis of the 1988–1989 performance of the Nanjing textiles corporation

This article employs new data envelopment analysis/assurance region (DEA/AR) methods to evaluate the efficiency of the 35 textile factories of the Nanjing Textiles Corporation (NTC), Nanjing, China. The returns to scale (RTS) of these factories were studied without assuming that the optimal DEA solutions were unique. All DMUs are identified with pointsE (Extreme Efficient),E (Efficient but not an extreme point) andF (Frontier but not efficient). We then further identify the nonfrontier DMUs with pointsNE, NE andNF according to whether they are projected onto a point inE, E, orF en route to evaluating their performances. All of the inefficient factories were in classNF and had unique optimal primal-dual solution pairs. Consequently, the solution pairs satisfy the strong complementary slackness condition (SCSC). Application of cone-ratio (CR) ARs reduced significantly the number of factories in classE, and showed that some AR-efficient factories were more flexible in adopting the mixture of central planning and market economies that China currently is trying to use. Also, linked-cone (LC) ARs were applied to measure maximum and minimum profit ratios. The SCSC multiplier space approach was utilized to analyze the sensitivity of the efficiency results to potential errors in the data with and without ARs. The results in this article suggest that collective units had a better performance than state-owned units in the two consecutive years analyzed.This paper was written while the author was at the School of Economics and Management, Southeast University, Nanjing 210018, P.R. China.     

Temperature dissipation measurements in a fully developed turbulent channel flow

All three derivatives of the temperature fluctuation in a fully developed turbulent channel flow have been measured using a pair of parallel cold wires with fixed separations in either the x (streamwise), y (normal to the wall) or z (spanwise) direction. At several locations, measurements were also made, each for a range of y separations between the wires. These latter measurements were important for establishing a suitable method of correcting the data for the effect of wire separation, thus allowing the fixed separation data to be corrected. In the near-wall region, the corrected temperature dissipation is in good agreement with results from direct numerical simulations. The time scale ratio deduced from measurements and simulations agrees well with the theoretical wall value.     

Homomorphisms to oriented cycles

We discuss the existence of homomorphisms to oriented cycles and give, for a special class of cyclesC, a characterization of those digraphs that admit, a homomorphism toC. Our result can be used to prove the multiplicativity of a certain class of oriented cycles, (and thus complete the characterization of multiplicative oriented cycles), as well as to prove the membership of the corresponding decision problem in the classNPcoNP. We also mention a conjecture on the existence of homomorphisms to arbitrary oriented cycles.