Causes of Construction Delays for High Rise Buildings: a Quantitative Comparison between the USA and India

High rise buildings are complex, high risk, and multi-contractor projects which make them prone to construction delays. Delays can lead to time overrun, affect the total project duration and the total cost, and could result in litigation. Most construction schedules are deterministic and do not include the uncertainty and risk inherent in the diverse activities which constitute the construction project. Generally, high rise buildings are expensive undertakings and a schedule overrun could lead to significant time and money losses. Therefore, a high rise project manager must be able to estimate the potential delays and eliminate them if possible in order to reduce their impact on the success of the overall project. The research study identified 42 possible construction delays through the literature study and grouped them into six categories according to their source and relevance. These groups include: general delays related to project, owner, contractor, consultant, resource, and miscellaneous delays. A questionnaire was developed to investigate severities of the identified six delay categories; in addition, some questions about project details, critical effects of delays, and most responsible people for the delays were added to ascertain more information from the survey. The questionnaire was sent to pre-identified construction professionals of the high rise construction industry all over the United States and India. The individual analysis of each country shows that change orders, given by the owner during construction, is the most severe cause of delay for the USA, followed by severe weather conditions, as well as mistakes or errors in design and drawing documents. For India, the most severe cause of delay is the lack of communication and coordination among all parties involved in the construction, followed by improper construction methods and payment delays by the owner. The comparative analysis of two countries shows that there is a difference between the results and demonstrates that the presence of construction delays and their effects are more often and severe for India than the USA. It also shows that consultant related delays and miscellaneous delays are more severe for the USA than India and vice versa for the rest of the delay categories (general, owner, contractor, and resource related). All the participants of the two nations agreed that time overrun and cost overruns are the critical effects of construction delays, followed by disputes and arbitration. The present research study also includes the recommendations made by the survey participants

Συλλογές δημοτικών τραγουδιών των Ελλήνων της Κάτω Ιταλίας: Προσπάθειες διάσωσης ενός φθίνοντος πολιτισμού κατά τον 19ο αιώνα

Please note: this article is in Greek. Greek folk song collections of South Italy: During the ninetieth century, the Hellenism of liberated Greece was struggling to embody unliberated regions inside the national borderline and modulate the elements of the national identity in the context of the new era of freedom. The Greeks of South Italy, however, were separated from the mainland of Greece and disjoined from the elements which constituted their sociocultural individuality. This paper presents the efforts for research and preservation of the Greek folk songs of South Italy as linguistic and cultural monuments of the ninetieth- century native Italian Greeks. These efforts were manifested mainly through the aggregation and publishing of collections of folk songs. The basic guidelines of our study constitute of the prologues and the content of these collections, the inertextual and interdisciplinary dialogue, and the meta effect of the drivers and motives of the independent researchers

The Survival Strategies of Poor Youth in the Metropolitan City of Douala, Cameroon

The question we asked in this work was how young people who are predominantly poor survive in the metropolitan city of Douala, considering their reduced purchasing power. Our main objective was to identify the various coping mechanisms that the poor in the metropolitan city of Douala use to survive. We use the explanatory sequential mixed method to carry out this research: in the first phase, we randomly administered 610 questionnaires constructed using the desired values for living a comfortable life in Douala, and in the second phase, we purposefully selected and interviewed 50 poor youth to understand their survival strategies. We discovered that about 91% of youths are poor and 68.7% of them are the working poor. We discovered that they succeed by being calculative, flexible, and creative, accepting precarious jobs, practicing “long-linked borrowing” and modelling. In the course of struggling for survival, they form various identities of themselves: those of strugglers, helplessness, uncertainty, underachievers, alienated people, etc. We noticed that poverty is situational and not cultural, because they also wish to integrate the main stream values of their society but they are constrained

Family, poverty and conflict in the metropolitan city of Douala- Cameroon

The objective of this work was to describe how poverty influences family’s consumption pattern in the Household wealth theory which explains that wealth is a source of well-being and how the increasing rate of unemployment among household due to the deterioration of the job markets has affected family members’ consumption of home products for 202 participants. A systematic sampling method was used in which in every neighbourhood, much effort was made to start with an nth subject and then select every twentieth unit after the first was selected. The questionnaires were administered by directly contacting and handing them to the respondents (self-administered) and the non-literate ones were helped to fill them. It was discovered that, people tend to prefer nuclear family as their income rises and extended family as their income decreases. The nuclear family members have a better consumption habit than extended family members, single parents and single people because they earn more money and have a much smaller family-size. However, single parent tend to significantly use formal health seeking methods than others because they also have smaller families. The extended family consume more home-based goods and therefore have more domestic comfort: they do not only significantly own and rent expensive and quality homes but also have more durable goods

Gender Difference and Poverty in the City of Douala

This article examines how gender disparity in terms of education, occupation and a person’s income influences poverty. The main question we asked was: how has Cameroon’s depressing economy for the past twenty-five years affected the present gender gap? We use the relative method to measure poverty. We discovered the psychological and social essentials for ordinary living patterns in Douala which we used to construct our questionnaire. It was self-administered using the systematic sampling method. The following results were obtained: 25.74 percent and 7.5 percent of men and women respectively earn above the poverty-line: 177,000frs CFA. Men earn an average salary of 100,000frs as against 60,000frs for women. About 48 percent of women are married and 10.61 percent of them are housewives thereby slightly demarcating the public/private sphere. Although men dominate women in owning durable goods, there is statistically no feminisation of poverty in Douala because women participate as much as men in the desired predominant values of Douala: domestic comfort, health seeking behaviour, good feeding habit and leisure activities. This is because more women stay under someone and live in a family house than men

Uprising and Human Rights Abuses in Southern Cameroon-Ambazonia

In 2016, lawyers, teachers and students in the two Anglophone regions initially led demonstrations and strikes, which eventually involved a wider section of the population. This mobilization was against their marginalization by the Francophone-dominated government in which they were chronically under-represented in all aspects of national life: political appointments and professional training and had been treated as second-class citizens since their reunification. They argued that their vibrant economic and political institutions had been completely erased, and their education and judicial systems had been undermined and degraded. Activists spread videos that show security forces abusing human rights (by suppressing peaceful gatherings, beating, harassing, arresting and killing protesters, burning their houses, schools and hospitals) in order to produce a counter-narrative to the ‘official story’ that main-stream media had been producing. We collected and analyzed 30 videos to better appreciate the human rights abuses. The videos provide information that cannot be provided by other types of data. They are used as ‘proofs of facts’ and they contain much more visual information on bodily movement and acoustic data. The videos show appalling images not just of how French-speaking soldiers tortured Anglophones but also their inability to communicate with them adequately although they share the same country

Peran Pusat Pelayanan Terpadu (PPT) “SERUNI” dalam Penanganan Kasus Kekerasan Terhadap Perempuan di Kota Semarang

Masih adanya kultur budaya patriarki di masyarakat yang memposisikan laki – laki sebagai superior dan perempuan sebagai subordinat menjadikan perilaku diskrimasi, ekploitas serta kekerasan terhadap perempuan masih terjadi. Data Catatan Tahunan Komnas Perempuan Tahun 2020 menyatakan bahwa dalam kurun waktu 12 tahun, kekerasan terhadap perempuan meningkat sebanyak 792% (hampir 800%) artinya kekerasan terhadap perempuan di Indonesia dalam kurun waktu 12 tahun terakhir meningkat 8 kali lipat. Data Kementerian Pemberdayaan Perempuan dan Perlindungan Anak Republik Indonesia mencatat Kota Semarang menjadi daerah dengan jumlah kasus kekerasan tertinggi di Jawa Tengah angka kasus kekerasan di Kota Semarang menempati posisi tertinggi yaitu sebanyak 175 kasus dengan korban laki – laki sebanyak 15 dan korban perempuan sebanyak 160 kasus. Metode yang dilakukan penelitian ini menggunakan metode kualitatif dengan melakukan wawancara, pengamatam serta pemanfaatan dokumen. Hasil dari penelitian ini yaitu peran yang dilakukan oleh Pusat Pelayanan Terpadu (PPT) “SERUNI” dalam penanganan kasus kekerasan terhadap perempuan yaitu dengan melakukan berbagai pelayanan diantaranya pelayanan pengaduan, layanan penegakan hukum, layanan kesehatan, layanan pendampingan melalui rehabilitasi sosial dan reintegrasi sosial serta rumah aman (shelter

Biogeochemical Evaluation of Major Streams along the Eastern Flank of Mount Cameroon: Implications for Water Quality

The Eastern flank of Mt Cameroon constitutes one of the richest drainage systems in the world. However, the surface waters on which the surrounding population depends, continues to witness pollution from anthropogenic and in some cases, natural phenomena. The major objective of this study was to conduct a biogeochemical evaluation on the quality of major surface waters (streams, rivers) to ascertain their suitability for human consumption, recreation and for the suste-nance of their aquatic ecosystems. 9 water samples were collected and analyzed from 6 major streams and rivers running through heavily populated areas at the upstream and downstream. With the use of Rockwork software, multivariate statistical techniques were employed to group samples into hydrochemical facies in order to identify potential pollution sources. The results reveal a decreasing order of magnitude for cations: Na+ > Ca2+ > Mg2+ > K+. Meanwhile the anions the trend reveals a decreasing order as follows: HCO3- >> Cl- > NO3- > SO42-. The main water types of the area are NaK- HCO3 and CaMg- HCO3-. While most of the samples have trace metal concentrations well below the WHO guidelines for drinking water, the Stone Quarters Stream (STQ) shows high concentrations of trace elements Fe, Mn and Al from geogenic sources. Most of the samples revealed generally low concentrations for trace metals as the total coliform counts exceeded the WHO guideline of zero (CFU)/100 mL. Rock-water reactions which leads to chem-ical weathering of silicates and human (anthropogenic) pollution which engenders microbial con-tamination are respectively the main culprits of surface water contamination. Most of the waters in their current state, are unfit for human consumption, recreation and ecological sustenance while still safe for irrigation with the exception of the STQ which appears unsuitably hazardous. The study further proposes institutional and technological remedies through which the problem can be addressed and mitigated such as effective stakeholder coordination, improved community awareness and waste collection processes, monitoring and enforcement, allocation of funds to-wards innovative solutions, expansion of sewage and water treatment facilities, water boiling and chlorination, and the provision of water filters. Key words: Water quality, anthropogenic, contamination, pollution, trace elements, nutrients