Are Tier-one contractors making their money out of wasteful procurement arrangements?

The UK Government challenged construction to achieve 50% faster delivery and a 33% reduction of clients' capital costs by 2025 – prevailing business models won't meet these targets. Eliminating waste from construction design and delivery as advocated by lean ideals is therefore a necessary step towards these goals. However, waste understood simply as the improvement of current processes rather than fundamental system redesign will not be enough. Obtaining a better understanding and conceptualisation of waste in construction is therefore becoming more crucial. One aspect of this is to challenge the apparent coherence of prevailing procurement practices generated by the institutional, organisational, and commercial environments that surround the design and delivery of construction projects. This paper contributes to this by examining Tier 1 contractors and presents examples of practices that open debate on how to challenge prevailing procurement models for construction. Through literature review and interviews, the study discusses the factors influencing the ‘Principal-Agent’ relationship demonstrating how procurement arrangements often mirror institutional forces. These forces do not necessarily guarantee better value services, they are more likely to serve the interests of large industry players with the bargaining power to create new rules (North, 1994). A radically different delivery model, where the client intends to eliminate the management fees and confrontational behaviours of their Tier 1 contractors is described

Anterior Urethral Advancement in Repair of Hypospadias: A Modification of the Technique

Background/Purpose: Anterior Urethral advancement as one stage technique for hypospadias repair was first described by Ti – Shang Cheng in 1984. It was used for repair of distal and midpenile hypospadias. It was also used for treating secondary cases and urethral fistulae. Stricture, fistulae and ventral curvature were among the complications that faced surgeons on applying the original technique. Materials & Methods: In the period between March1997 and December 2008,140 patients with distal penile hypospadias or anterior urethral fistula were treated with anterior urethral advancement technique with certain modifications. Results: The usual complications of the technique (ventral curvature of the penis, urethral fistula and meatal stenosis) were avoided. Conclusion: This study represents certain modifications that helped to a great extent in improving the results and prevented stricture and fistula formation. Index Word: Hypospadias, fistula, urethral advancemen

SYNTHESIS AND UTILITY OF NEW POLYCYCLIC COMPOUNDS AS POTENTIAL ANTIMICROBIALS BASED ON CHROMENE MOIETY

Objective: The present research aims to synthesize some new polycyclic compounds including chromene moiety and study their antimicrobial activity. Methods: Several new polycyclic systems including chromene scaffold incorporated with pyridine, pyrimidine, imidazopyrimidine, and imidazodiazocine were achieved via condensation reaction of chromene derivative under the proper condition with various reagents namely; cyanothioacetamide, phenyl isothiocyanate, malononitrile, carbon disulfide, benzaldehyde, triethyl orthoformate, and 1,4-dichlorobutane. Moreover, a chlorodiazenyl chromene derivative was reacted with some substances possessing active–CH2-bridge such as ethyl cyanoacetate and malononitrile to end up with hydrazono compounds. Such compounds were eventually cyclized with hydrazine hydrate to form pyrazole and oxopyrazole derivatives. Moreover, compound 1 was treated with benzoyl acetone, and then followed by cyclization with malononitrile to provide the corresponding 2-amino14-(4-methoxyphenyl)-4-methy-5-phenyl-14H-benzo[5,6] chromeno [2,3H][1,6]naphthyridine-3-carbonitrile (20). Results: The results of the antimicrobial screening in vitro revealed that the inhibition zone (mm) of the synthesized compounds 1-3, 5 and 8 implied their optimum antibacterial activity, while the compounds 4, 6 and 9-13, 15 showed a moderate to weak antibacterial activity against multiple species of B. subtilis, S. aureus, E. coli and P. aeruginosa. In contrast, the compounds 1, 6, 11, 15 showed high antifungal activities against different species of A. flavinand C. albicans, while the other compounds exhibit a moderate to poor antifungal activity. Conclusion: It is remarkable that a series of chromene derivatives synthesized by a simple and available method leads to a molecule of promising antimicrobial activity. Further research is recommended to approve the importance of polycyclic systems for various applications

DATA MINING: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION

Data mining may be regarded as the process of discovering insightful and predictive models from massive data. It is the art of extracting useful information from large amounts of data. It combines traditional data analysis with sophisticated algorithms for processing large amount of data. It is an interdisciplinary field merging concepts from database systems, statistics, machine learning, computing, information theory, and pattern recognition. It has the real potential of becoming part of electrical engineering education. The main objective of this paper is to provide a brief introduction to data mining

DATA MINING: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION

Data mining may be regarded as the process of discovering insightful and predictive models from massive data. It is the art of extracting useful information from large amounts of data. It combines traditional data analysis with sophisticated algorithms for processing large amount of data. It is an interdisciplinary field merging concepts from database systems, statistics, machine learning, computing, information theory, and pattern recognition. It has the real potential of becoming part of electrical engineering education. The main objective of this paper is to provide a brief introduction to data mining

The Impact of Political Variables on the Ottoman-European Hegemonic Conflict in the Mediterranean before the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 CE

The political variables that contributed to the development of hostilities between European states and the Ottoman Empire in the region will be examined in the paper The Impact of Political Variables on the Ottoman- European Hegemonic Conflict in the Mediterranean before the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 CE . The paper examines how these elements affected the state-state struggle and concentrates on the time leading up to the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 CE. The study will go into the alliances and diplomatic ties between states that contributed to the conflicts escalation as well as other political and military factors. The study will also look at how the conflict has affected the societies involved and the political ties between governments. The study will employ archival materials and a range of references to present a thorough overview of the conflict and its effects on the political variables. Additionally, both analytical and inductive methodologies will be used in our work

Digital Education

Digital education is the process of using digital technology in teaching and learning. Teachers are under pressure to use digital technologies in teaching students and prepare them for work in a globalized digital economy. Digital education prepares students for becoming digital citizens by making them acquire skills for navigating and existing in the digital world. This paper provides a brief introduction to digital education

WEB-BASED DUPLICATE RECORDS DETECTION WITH ARABIC LANGUAGE ENHANCEMENT

Sharing data between organizations has growing importance in many data mining projects. Data from various heterogeneous sources often has to be linked and aggregated in order to improve data quality. The importance of data accuracy and quality has increased with the explosion of data size. The first step to ensure the data accuracy is to make sure that each real world object is represented once and only once in a certain dataset which called Duplicate Record Detection (DRD). These data inaccuracy problems exist due to due to several factors including spelling, typographical and pronunciation variation, dialects and special vowel and consonant distinction and other linguistic characteristics especially with non-Latin languages like Arabic. In this paper, an English/Arabic enabled web-based framework is designed and implemented which considers the user interaction to add new rules, enrich the dictionary and evaluate results is an important step to improve system’s behavior. The proposed framework allows the processing on both single language dataset and bi-lingual dataset. The proposed framework is implemented and verified empirically in several case studies. The comparison results showed that the proposed system has substantial improvements compared to known tools