The New Zealand Construction Contracts Amendment Act 2015 - For Better or Worse?

Adjudication has been statutorily introduced as an alternative dispute resolution method in 14 jurisdictions including New Zealand. Whilst adjudication under the New Zealand Construction Contracts Act 2002 has been hailed a success, further refinements were proposed in the Construction Contracts Amendment Bill first published in 2013. As part of the legislative process, 48 submissions were made to the Commerce Committee. There was general support for most of the amendments, but some parties expressed concerns on some of the changes. A documentary analysis of the Amendment Bills and submissions to the Commerce Committee was made to critically evaluate the changes proposed and establish if they were improvements. The findings show the major changes proposed include (i) removing most of the distinctions between the treatment of residential and commercial contracts under the Act, (ii) extending the scope of the Act to apply to contracts for certain professional services, (iii) removing the distinction between enforcement of payment determinations and of those relating to rights and obligations, and (iv) making the enforcement process more efficient. The findings also show that during a period of over two years from when the Bill was first introduced in January 2013, one other significant improvement for retentions to be held in trust was made. A few proposals to further refine the Bill such as the suggestion to mandate retentions to be kepts in a separate trust account were however not accepted. The Construction Contract Amendment Bill (Bill 97-3) was uninanimously passed during the third and final reading in Parliament on 20 October 2015 with most of the amendments coming into force on 1 December 2015, those incorporating professional services on 1 September 2016, and the retention provisions on 31 March 2017. Royal assent was given on 11 October 2015 leading to the enactment of the Construction Contracts Amendment Act 2015

Telespectrograph Patent

Telespectrograph for analyzing upper atmosphere by tracking bodies reentering atmosphere at high velocitie

What moves the primary stock and bond markets? Influence of macroeconomic factors on bond and equity issues in Malaysia and Korea

This paper examines the impact of macroeconomic factors on the stock and bond market activities in two Asian countries. We examine the influence of interest rate changes, expected inflation rate, and stock market returns on aggregate stock and bond issuance in Malaysia and Korea. Using vector autoregressive models (VARs) and variance decomposition techniques, our result show that dynamics of equity and bond issuance in both countries vary significantly. Our findings show that there has been a two-way relationship between interest rate changes and bond issuance in the case of South Korea, whereas, stock returns have significantly influenced the bond issuance (instead of equity issuance) in Malaysia. The findings seem to support emerging popularity of corporate bond markets in Asian region.stock and bond markets, macroeconomic factors, VAR, Malaysia, South Korea

Securing address registration in location/ID split protocol using ID-based cryptography

The Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) is a routing architecture that provides new semantics for IP addressing. In order to simplify routing operations and improve scalability in future Internet, the LISP separates the device identity from its location using two different numbering spaces. The LISP also, introduces a mapping system to match the two spaces. In the initial stage, each LISP-capable router needs to register with a Map Server, this is known as the Registration stage. However, this stage is vulnerable to masquerading and content poisoning attacks. Therefore, a new security method for protecting the LISP Registration stage is presented in this paper. The proposed method uses the ID-Based Cryptography (IBC) which allows the mapping system to authenticate the source of the data. The proposal has been verified using formal methods approach based on the well-developed Casper/FDR tool

Product Market Competition, Regulation and Dividend Payout Policy of Malaysian Banks

This paper investigates the impact of the product market competition, regulations on the dividend policies of We find significant differences in the payout of the banks categorized as selling a non-interest based banking products and mix of both interest and non-interest based banking products. We find that the decision to increase dividends is significantly related to earnings, and the decision to cut dividend is significantly related to the changes in the non-performing loans, corporate and real estate sectors loans ratio and earnings loses. Research findings have implication for the regulators of the banks. The research provides a clear link between banks' portfolio choice and earnings that have implications for the dividends in the emerging markets.Dividends, Banks, Non-performing loans, Ordered Probit Model, Malaysia

Sustainable slow maintained pile load test

Slow maintained load test is widely used by contractors in Malaysia to ensure the driven pile could accommodate the design load of the structure. Slow maintained load test is a test to determine load-settlement curve and pile capacity for a period of time using conventional load test. Conventional static pile load test equipment is large in size thus making it heavier and takes a long time to install. In addition, it consumes a lot of space which causes congestion at construction sites. Therefore, the objective of this thesis is to conduct a conventional load test by replacing the pile kentledge load with anchorage and reaction pile. Preparations of ten designs comprising six commercial designs were reviewed. In addition, four proposed designs were suggested for the setup. Final design was produced based on its safety factors and criteria referred via literature review. The test frame consists of reaction frame with four reaction helical pile with two helixes per reaction pile. The deformation shapes, safety factor, stress, and strain of the design and finite element of the model has been analysed with the use of SolidWorks and Plaxis 3D software. SolidWorks software emphasizes on the model load-deflection relationship while Plaxis 3D ensures a correlation of reaction between pile uplift force and soil. Then, the model was tested on site to determine the relationship between physical load-deflection and pile-soil uplift force. The results of uplift force and displacement for numerical and physical test were nearly identical which increment of load-displacement graph pattern. The higher the uplift force, the higher the displacement obtained. In conclusion, the result obtained and the design may be considered as a guideline for future application of sustainable slow maintained pile load test

Image segmentation using fuzzy clustering incorporating spatial information

Effective image segmentation cannot be achieved for a fuzzy clustering algorithm based on using only pixel intensity, pixel locations or a combination of the two. Often if both pixel intensity and pixel location are combined, one feature tends to minimize the effect of other, thus degrading the resulting segmentation. This paper directly addresses this problem by introducing a new algorithm called image segmentation using fuzzy clustering incorporating spatial information (FCSI), which merges the segmented results independently generated by fuzzy clustering-based on pixel intensity and the location of pixels. Qualitative results show the superiority of the FCSI algorithm compared with the fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm for all three alternatives, clustering using only pixel intensity, pixel locations and a combination of the two

Fuzzy Image Segmentation using Suppressed Fuzzy C-Means Clustering (SFCM)

Clustering algorithms are highly dependent on the features used and the type of the objects in a particular image. By considering object similar surface variations (SSV) as well as the arbitrariness of the fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm for pixel location, a fuzzy image segmentation considering object surface similarity (FSOS) algorithm was developed, but it was unable to segment objects having SSV satisfactorily. To improve the effectiveness of FSOS in segmenting objects with SSV, this paper introduces a new fuzzy image segmentation using suppressed fuzzy c-means clustering (FSSC) algorithm, which directly considers object SSV and incorporates the use of suppressed-FCM (SFCM) using pixel location. The algorithm also perceptually selects the threshold within the range of human visual perception. Both qualitative and quantitative results confirm the improved segmentation performance of FSSC compared with other algorithms including FSOS, FCM, possibilistic c-means (PCM) and SFCM for many different images