Competition Between National Economies and Competition Between Businesses--A Response to Judge Pescatore

This Article challenges the validity of Judge Pescatore’s theory [that Member States of the ECC are prevented by Community law from intervening in the marketplace by legislation]

Advances and perspectives in engineered cementitious composites: a comprehensive review

Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC) have garnered significant attention within the construction industry due to their exceptional mechanical properties and durability. This thorough review presents a meticulous analysis of the progress and prospects in ECC research. It commences by introducing the background and rationale for investigating ECC, while outlining the objectives of the review. The review provides an encompassing overview of ECC, encompassing its definition, characteristics, historical development, composition, and constituent materials. Emphasis is placed on the examination of ECC's mechanical properties, specifically its flexural behaviour, tensile behaviour, compressive strength, and resistance to environmental factors. Furthermore, the rheological properties of ECC, including workability, flowability, self-healing, crack mitigation, viscosity, and thixotropy, are discussed in detail. The review delves into the influence of fibre reinforcement on ECC, encompassing the types of fibres utilised, their impact on mechanical and structural properties, as well as fibre dispersion and orientation. Additionally, it explores the diverse applications of ECC across various fields, such as structural applications and sustainable building practices. The challenges and limitations associated with ECC, such as cost and availability, are addressed, alongside an exploration of future trends and research directions

Perception of ECE-TEP Students in Deepening Tenses through UPI Serang’s MBKM English Credential Camp Program

This research aims to explore the perspectives of ECE-TEP students regarding the deepening of tenses through the MBKM English Credential Camp program at UPI Serang. The challenges of education in the modern 21st century push ECE-TEP students to possess English communication skills. This is important because English is an international language. The use of English tenses by ECE-TEP students often requires appropriate understanding and training. The ECC program is an integrated and holistic solution to enhance the use of tenses by ECE-TEP students. This research employs a qualitative descriptive approach with a case study. The primary data sources are direct questionnaires, audio recorders, and secondary data in the form of MBKM ECC program documents. Data analysis was conducted through four stages: data collection, data transcription, data categorization, and drawing conclusions. The research subjects consist of three individuals who are students of the ECC program. Participants are selected based on their academic performance in the program. The research findings indicate that the ECC program significantly contributes to improving the understanding of tenses among ECE-TEP students. This program is effective in preparing students to face the challenges of the 21st century through deepening  improving their English language skills

Ethical Governance in the Indian Construction Industry: A Case Study of Larsen & Toubro Ltd.

Governance has moved beyond mere fulfilment of legal requirements. The corporate debacles of the last decade and more have indicated how very respectable corporate organisations across the globe succumbed to greed and compromised on ethics and organisational value systems. Corporate Governance is mainly concerned with the intrinsic nature, purpose, integrity, and identity of an organisation. It encompasses the entire gamut of organisational stakeholders. While a lot of literature is available in the field of Corporate Governance, an analysis of corporate organisations in terms of their stakeholder-related initiatives has hitherto not been attempted. In this paper, the author has used the case study of an Indian multinational corporation — Larsen & Toubro’s Engineering, Construction and Contracts Division (ECC) — and has attempted to study its practices with respect to two major stakeholders: the Shareholder and the Government. ECC is a market leader in the Indian construction industry and has been associated with some of the most prestigious governmental, commercial, and religious construction projects in the country over the last six decades. Triangulation of data has been gathered for this case study primarily through personal interviews with top executives of the Company and responses to an Executive Perception Survey on the Shareholders and the Government. This has been supplemented through other information available in the public domain

Benefits and challenges of applying Semantic Web Services in the e-Government domain

Joining up services in e-Government usually implies governmental agencies acting in concert without a central control regime. This requires the sharing of scattered and heterogeneous data. Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology can help to integrate, mediate and reason between these datasets. However, since few real-world applications have been developed, it is still unclear which are the actual benefits and issues of adopting such a technology in the e-Government domain. In this paper, we contribute to raising awareness of the potential benefits in the e-Government community by analyzing motivations, requirements, and expected results, before proposing a reusable SWS-based framework. We demonstrate the application of this framework by a compelling use case: a GIS-based emergency planning system. We illustrate the obtained benefits and the key challenges which remain to be addressed

Impact of EU duty cycle and transmission power limitations for sub-GHz LPWAN SRDs : an overview and future challenges

Long-range sub-GHz technologies such as LoRaWAN, SigFox, IEEE 802.15.4, and DASH7 are increasingly popular for academic research and daily life applications. However, especially in the European Union (EU), the use of their corresponding frequency bands are tightly regulated, since they must confirm to the short-range device (SRD) regulations. Regulations and standards for SRDs exist on various levels, from global to national, but are often a source of confusion. Not only are multiple institutes responsible for drafting legislation and regulations, depending on the type of document can these rules be informational or mandatory. Regulations also vary from region to region; for example, regulations in the United States of America (USA) rely on electrical field strength and harmonic strength, while EU regulations are based on duty cycle and maximum transmission power. A common misconception is the presence of a common 1% duty cycle, while in fact the duty cycle is frequency band-specific and can be loosened under certain circumstances. This paper clarifies the various regulations for the European region, the parties involved in drafting and enforcing regulation, and the impact on recent technologies such as SigFox, LoRaWAN, and DASH7. Furthermore, an overview is given of potential mitigation approaches to cope with the duty cycle constraints, as well as future research directions

Experiences with the Streptococcus mutans in Lakota Sioux (SMILeS) Study: Risk Factors for Caries in American Indian Children 0-3 Years

Severe Early Childhood Caries (S-ECC) is a terribly aggressive and devastating disease that is all too common in lower socio-economic children, but none more so that what is encountered in American Indian Tribes. Nationwide, approximately 27% of 2-5 year olds have decay while 62% percent of American Indian/Alaska Native children in the same age group have a history of decay (IHS 2010, NHANES 1999-2002). We have conducted a study of children from birth to 36 months of age on Pine Reservation to gain a better understanding of the variables that come into play in the development of this disease, from transmission and acquisition of Streptococcus mutans genotypes from mother to child to multiple dietary and behavioral components. This article describes how we established a direct partnership with the Tribe and the many opportunities and challenges we faced in performing this 5-year field study