Client project governance capabilities: unpacking the concept and governance mechanisms in practice

Globally public sector clients are increasingly being asked to do more for less i.e. produce more public value with fewer resources; at the same time as cost and time overruns on major projects are increasingly highlighted and subjected to public scrutiny. These developments are not lost on the research community and there is now an emerging body of literature that seeks to explore the relationship between how these organisations are structured and resourced and project outcomes. This paper seeks to build on this literature set. It does so through the theoretical lens of organizational capabilities. The particular focus is on project governance and associated governance capabilities. Drawing on an extensive review of the academic literature on project governance from both a supply-side and client perspective, as well as public policy sources, we propose that client project governance capabilities are underpinned by three sets of sub-capabilities: project assurance, project coordination and asset-integration capabilities. We unpack these capability sets with particular attention given to the multiple ways in which they can be deployed. Conclusions are drawn highlighting the importance of a strong owner for the successful realisation of the project and how project governance capabilities are key to achieving this.postprin

Developing an Ontology of Concepts in the Qur'an

In recent years, there is growing interest in IT for Islamic Knowledge. Researchers in religious studies have started to use ontologies to improve knowledge construction and extraction from religious texts such as the Qur’an and Hadith. An ontology can be used to describe a logical domain theory with very expressive, complex, and meaningful information. Recent research has been done in Arabic language ontology and on holy Qur'an ontology but they are still incomplete. Also there are some other issues including the process used to extract and construct an ontology that needs extra work. This paper describes our actual and ongoing work in developing an ontology. Our approach is to investigate the applicability of ontology methods of formal Knowledge Representation from Artificial Intelligence and Text Analytics research to capture and represent abstract concepts in the Qur'an. We will implement three ontology methods. The first one is to elicit or extract the abstract concepts from experts in the domain. Another approach is to semi-automatically extract concepts from text sources from the domain. The last approach is to find existing partial ontologies for the domain, and try to unify and re-use them. Finally to evaluate our general Qur'an ontology, we will investigate practical use of the ontology in a semantic search application. We have implemented the third approach, merging of existing ontologies, The experimental verification result reveals that our proposed merging methods work well, as checked by human expert. A similarity measure was applied for ontology merging, and we report a high accuracy and recall through experiments

Phylogeny, biogeography and diversification patterns of side-necked turtles (Testudines: Pleurodira)

Pleurodires or side-necked turtles are today restricted to freshwater environments of South America, Africa– Madagascar and Australia, but in the past they were distributed much more broadly, being found also on Eurasia, India and North America, and marine environments. Two hypotheses were proposed to explain this distribution; in the first, vicariance would have shaped the current geographical distribution and, in the second, extinctions constrained a previously widespread distribution. Here, we aim to reconstruct pleurodiran biogeographic history and diversification patterns based on a new phylogenetic hypothesis recovered from the analysis of the largest morphological dataset yet compiled for the lineage, testing which biogeographical process prevailed during its evolutionary history. The resulting topology generally agrees with previous hypotheses of the group and shows that most diversification shifts were related to the exploration of new niches, e.g. littoral or marine radiations. In addition, as other turtles, pleurodires do not seem to have been much affected by either the Cretaceous– Palaeogene or the Eocene–Oligocene mass extinctions. The biogeographic analyses highlight the predominance of both anagenetic and cladogenetic dispersal events and support the importance of transoceanic dispersals as a more common driver of area changes than previously thought, agreeing with previous studies with other non-turtle lineages.Fil: Ferreira, Gabriel S.. Universidade de Sao Paulo; Brasil. Senckenberg Centre For Human Evolution And Palaeoenvironment; Alemania. Universität Tübingen; AlemaniaFil: Bronzati Filho, Mario. Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie; AlemaniaFil: Langer, Max C.. Universidade de Sao Paulo; BrasilFil: Sterli, Juliana. Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Regional Differences in Presence of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli Virulence-Associated Genes in the Environment in the North West and East Anglian regions of England

Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli is carried in the intestine of ruminant animals, and outbreaks have occurred after contact with ruminant animals or their environment. The presence of STEC virulence genes in the environment was investigated along recreational walking paths in the North West and East Anglia regions of England. In all, 720 boot sock samples from walkers’ shoes were collected between April 2013 and July 2014. Multiplex PCR was used to detect E. coli based on the amplification of the uidA gene and investigate STEC-associated virulence genes eaeA, stx1 and stx2. The eaeA virulence gene was detected in 45·5% of the samples, where stx1 and/or stx2 was detected in 12·4% of samples. There was a difference between the two regions sampled, with the North West exhibiting a higher proportion of positive boot socks for stx compared to East Anglia. In univariate analysis, ground conditions, river flow and temperature were associated with positive boot socks. The detection of stx genes in the soil samples suggests that STEC is present in the English countryside and individuals may be at risk for infection after outdoor activities even if there is no direct contact with animals. Significance and Impact of the Study: Several outbreaks within the UK have highlighted the danger of contracting Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli from contact with areas recently vacated by livestock. This is more likely to occur for STEC infections compared to other zoonotic bacteria given the low infectious dose required. While studies have determined the prevalence of STEC within farms and petting zoos, determining the risk to individuals enjoying recreational outdoor activities that occur near where livestock may be present is less researched. This study describes the prevalence with which stx genes, indicative of STEC bacteria, were found in the environment in the English countryside

Effective action in a higher-spin background

We consider a free massless scalar field coupled to an infinite tower of background higher-spin gauge fields via minimal coupling to the traceless conserved currents. The set of Abelian gauge transformations is deformed to the non-Abelian group of unitary operators acting on the scalar field. The gauge invariant effective action is computed perturbatively in the external fields. The structure of the various (divergent or finite) terms is determined. In particular, the quadratic part of the logarithmically divergent (or of the finite) term is expressed in terms of curvatures and related to conformal higher-spin gravity. The generalized higher-spin Weyl anomalies are also determined. The relation with the theory of interacting higher-spin gauge fields on anti de Sitter spacetime via the holographic correspondence is discussed.Comment: 40 pages, Some errors and typos corrected, Version published in JHE