Designing an Analytical Model for Determining Price Reasonableness in Contract Management: A Case Study of an ICT Company

Discovering the fair and reasonable price, is one of the critical subjects in purchasing process, especially in imperfect markets, in which, market mechanism cannot be applied to judge about proposed price. To cover this gap, in this paper, an analytical model for analyzing the price in non-competitive markets, has been developed and step by step procedure in order to decide about proposed price, is presented. For this reason, all factors affecting the price, have been collected and divided in “Market condition”, “Internal characteristics” and “Nature of product” categories. In next stage, effect of each factor on cost items has been clarified and accordingly, it becomes explicit that how these factors can be used to analyze the cost items and discover the reasonable price. Finally, the proposed model has been applied in a governmental agency in ICT industry. Keywords: Fair and reasonable price, Contract pricing, Cost and price analysis, Purchasing.

Developing culturally specific tools for the evaluation of good governance in diverse national contexts: a case study of the National Olympic Committee of the Islamic Republic of Iran

One of the key features of the Olympic movement is its universalistic appeal, particularly in the sense that it has sought to establish itself as a platform for universal interaction and promotion of universal values. In this paper, we consider the nature, feasibility, and implications of the IOC's promotion of its universalist position in terms of the ethical standards it promotes in relation to universal principles of good governance. A major problem in this respect is the culturally diverse set of constituencies that are incorporated within the Olympic movement, such that the imposition of ‘one size fits all’ policies may be impractical and in many instances undesirable. The authors of this paper therefore argue that although universal agreement is often impractical, general agreement may often be established. The paper therefore presents an approach to balancing centrally promoted principles of good governance with local preferences in terms of the weighting to be given to particular values within the operationalization of good governance. This approach, based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process technique, developed by Thomas Saaty and widely employed in decision-making with regard to evaluating and weighting alternatives, is introduced here in the context of the evaluation of National Sport Federations in Iran. The paper highlights ways in which this technique allows for the expression of local priorities within the general framework of good governance principles in ways which satisfied both global and local priorities. In effect, it is a practical example of what Robertson has termed glocalization. The paper concludes by applying this framework to an evaluation of the National Federation (NF) of Football in Iran as an example of how this technique will be used for the purposes of ranking NFs in terms of performance with respect to elements of good governance which will inform both self-assessment by the NF and the decision-making process for allocation of funds by government to NFs in Iran in the future

Energy analysis of multiple-cracked Euler-Bernoulli beam

This paper presents energy analysis of multiple-cracked beams. The study deals with crack energy reduction functions for consuming strain energy due to crack growth and the degree of conformity between these functions and experimental results. Three different reduction functions are employed in this research work. A comprehensive analysis is performed providing a comparison of the functions for a beam with one and two cracks. In order to elucidate advantages and disadvantages of each function, we employ them in different crack detection problems. For different cases of crack localization and quantification in a crack detection problem, the best function that fits the experimental results more accurately is highlighted

cGAN-Based High Dimensional IMU Sensor Data Generation for Therapeutic Activities

Human activity recognition is a core technology for applications such as rehabilitation, ambient health monitoring, and human-computer interactions. Wearable devices, particularly IMU sensors, can help us collect rich features of human movements that can be leveraged in activity recognition. Developing a robust classifier for activity recognition has always been of interest to researchers. One major problem is that there is usually a deficit of training data for some activities, making it difficult and sometimes impossible to develop a classifier. In this work, a novel GAN network called TheraGAN was developed to generate realistic IMU signals associated with a particular activity. The generated signal is of a 6-channel IMU. i.e., angular velocities and linear accelerations. Also, by introducing simple activities, which are meaningful subparts of a complex full-length activity, the generation process was facilitated for any activity with arbitrary length. To evaluate the generated signals, besides perceptual similarity metrics, they were applied along with real data to improve the accuracy of classifiers. The results show that the maximum increase in the f1-score belongs to the LSTM classifier by a 13.27% rise when generated data were added. This shows the validity of the generated data as well as TheraGAN as a tool to build more robust classifiers in case of imbalanced data problem

Developing a droplet microfluidic platform for making double emulsions towards manufacturing polymersomes

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the use of double emulsions in various industries such as pharmaceutical, foods, and cosmetics. Polymersomes are one of the promising applications of double emulsions that are being increasingly used in drug delivery to carry and release a specific dose of the drug. The efficacy of using polymersomes for controlled release of drugs is significantly dependent on the monodispersity and size generated double emulsions. Over the past few years, microfluidics technology has been used to produce double emulsions with high throughput and precision. Single-step, two-step and tandem methods are among the most common techniques that are being used for generation of water/oil/water (w/o/w) or oil/water/oil (o/w/o) emulsions. However, the existing methods have not yet addressed the challenges in the field. In this work, we present a microfluidic design to produce double emulsions with high monodispersity in addition to high control over the thickness of the middle phase. The presented design also solves the challenge of surface modification of microchannels which usually adds complexity to the existing methods. Moreover, in this project, a thorough guideline is provided to design an optimized platform for producing double emulsions with different sizes. Finally, we successfully show how such double emulsions can be used for generation of polymersomes by extraction of the organic component