Success factors in an alliance contract: a case study in Australia

Many studies have been carried out in relation to construction procurement methods. Evidence shows that there needs to be a change of culture and attitude in the construction industry, moving away from traditional adversarial relationship into cooperative and collaborative relationship. At the same time there is also an increasing concern and discussion on alternative procurement methods, drifting away from traditional procurement systems. Relational contracting approaches have become more popular in recent years, and have appeared in common forms such as partnering, alliancing and relationship management contracts. This paper reports the findings of a survey undertaken with a private organisation based on an alliance project during its design stage, identifying the critical factors that influence the success of the alliance project. Legal aspects focusing on dispute resolution in alliancing are also highlighted.published_or_final_versio

Row-oriented multiscale error diffusion technique for digital halftoning

Centre for Multimedia Signal Processing, Department of Electronic and Information Engineering2000-2001 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalAccepted ManuscriptPublishe

A row-oriented error diffusion technique for digital halftoning

Centre for Multimedia Signal Processing, Department of Electronic and Information EngineeringRefereed conference paper2000-2001 > Academic research: refereed > Refereed conference paperVersion of RecordPublishe

Feature-preserving multiscale error diffusion for digital halftoning

Centre for Multimedia Signal Processing, Department of Electronic and Information Engineering2004-2005 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe

A technique for lossy compression of error-diffused halftones

Centre for Multimedia Signal Processing, Department of Electronic and Information EngineeringRefereed conference paper2003-2004 > Academic research: refereed > Refereed conference paperVersion of RecordPublishe

Microstructural study in heteroepitaxial YBa/sub 2/Cu/sub 3/O/sub 7//Nd/sub 2/CuO/sub 4/ multi-layers by using electron microscopy

Neodymium copper oxide Nd/sub 2/CuO/sub 4/ (NCO) has been applied as a buffer material to improve the epitaxy of YBa/sub 2/Cu/sub 3/O/sub 7/ (YBCO) thin films on reactive substrates and as a potential barrier to construct multi-layer junctions. The microstructures and interfaces in heteroepitaxial Nd/sub 2/CuO/sub 4//YBCO multi-layer have been characterized by using an electron microscopy. Cross-sectional images obtained on a transmission electron microscopy (TEM) revealed an atomically sharp boundary between layers, underlining the excellent compatibility of NCO with YBCO. No chemical reaction occurred between film and substrate. It was found that all layers grow highly epitaxially with their c-axis perpendicular to the substrate surface. On the other hand, various defects such as mis-oriented grains and stacking faults were found near the interfaces.published_or_final_versio

PDB140 Quality of Care For Patients With Diabetes Mellitus (Dm) In Canada: Findings From A National Population-Based Survey

Núm. de Catàleg de Patrimoni: 2076Primer pla d'una operària netejant una troballa d'estris de metall, a les excavacions realitzades sota el pis de la Sala Capitular del Monestir de Santa Maria de Pedralbes des de finals de 2007 i fins a principis de 200

Improving Query Performance by Clustering XML Documents

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Filtering of false positive microRNA candidates by a clustering-based approach

B M C BioinformaticsBackground: MicroRNAs are small non-coding RNA gene products that play diversified roles from species to species. The explosive growth of microRNA researches in recent years proves the importance of microRNAs in the biological system and it is believed that microRNAs have valuable therapeutic potentials in human diseases. Continual efforts are therefore required to locate and verify the unknown microRNAs in various genomes. As many miRNAs are found to be arranged in clusters, meaning that they are in close proximity with their neighboring miRNAs, we are interested in utilizing the concept of microRNA clustering and applying it in microRNA computational prediction. Results: We first validate the microRNA clustering phenomenon in the human, mouse and rat genomes. There are 45.45%, 51.86% and 48.67% of the total miRNAs that are clustered in the three genomes, respectively. We then conduct sequence and secondary structure similarity analyses among clustered miRNAs, non-clustered miRNAs, neighboring sequences of clustered miRNAs and random sequences, and find that clustered miRNAs are structurally more similar to one another, and the RNAdistance score can be used to assess the structural similarity between two sequences. We therefore design a clustering-based approach which utilizes this observation to filter false positives from a list of candidates generated by a selected microRNA prediction program, and successfully raise the positive predictive value by a considerable amount ranging from 15.23% to 23.19% in the human, mouse and rat genomes, while keeping a reasonably high sensitivity. Conclusion: Our clustering-based approach is able to increase the effectiveness of currently available microRNA prediction program by raising the positive predictive value while maintaining a high sensitivity, and hence can serve as a filtering step. We believe that it is worthwhile to carry out further experiments and tests with our approach using data from other genomes and other prediction software tools. Better results may be achieved with fine-tuning of parameters. © 2008 Leung et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.published_or_final_versio

Laser spectroscopy of NiI: Ground and low-lying electronic states

Rotationally resolved near-infrared and visible spectroscopic studies of the ground and low-lying electronic states of NiI were performed using the technique of laser vaporization/reaction with free jet expansion and laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) spectroscopy. Two electronic transitions as well as isotopic molecules were analyzed. The electronic configurations that give rise to the X 2∏ 3/2 ground state for NiF, NiCl, and NiBr were determined.published_or_final_versio