11,451 research outputs found
The impact of procurement method on costs of procurement
Collaborative working methods offer the hope of reduced waste, lower tendering costs and improved outputs. The costs of tendering may be influenced by the introduction of different working methods. Transaction cost economics appears to offer an analytical framework for studying the costs of tendering, but it is more to do with providing explanations at the institutional/industry level, not at the level of individual projects. Surveys and interviews were carried out with small samples in UK. The data show that that while tendering costs are not necessarily higher in collaborative working arrangements, there is no correlation between costs of tendering and the way the work is organized. Practitioners perceive that the benefits of working in collaborative procurement routes far outweigh the costs. Tendering practices can be improved to avoid waste, and the suggested improvements include restricting selective tendering lists to 23 bidders, letting bidders know who they are competing with, reimbursing tendering costs for aborted projects and ensuring that timely and comprehensive information is provided to bidders
Generation of internal stress and its effects
Internal stresses may be generated continually in many polycrystalline materials. Their existence is manifested by changes in crystal defect concentration and arrangement, by surface observations, by macroscopic shape changes and particularly by alteration of mechanical properties when external stresses are simultaneously imposed
Using a Grid-Enabled Wireless Sensor Network for Flood Management
Flooding is becoming an increasing problem. As a result there is a need to deploy more sophisticated sensor networks to detect and react to flooding. This paper outlines a demonstration that illustrates our proposed solution to this problem involving embedded wireless hardware, component based middleware and overlay networks
Optical and dc transport properties of a strongly correlated charge density wave system: exact solution in the ordered phase of the spinless Falicov-Kimball model with dynamical mean-field theory
We derive the dynamical mean-field theory equations for transport in an
ordered charge-density-wave phase on a bipartite lattice. The formalism is
applied to the spinless Falicov-Kimball model on a hypercubic lattice at half
filling. We determine the many-body density of states, the dc charge and heat
conductivities, and the optical conductivity. Vertex corrections continue to
vanish within the ordered phase, but the density of states and the transport
coefficients show anomalous behavior due to the rapid development of thermally
activated subgap states. We also examine the optical sum rule and sum rules for
the first three moments of the Green's functions within the ordered phase and
see that the total optical spectral weight in the ordered phase either
decreases or increases depending on the strength of the interactions.Comment: 14 pages, 14 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.
Pre-Hawking Radiation from a Collapsing Shell
We investigate the effect of induced massive radiation given off during the
time of collapse of a massive spherically symmetric domain wall in the context
of the functional Schr\"odinger formalism. Here we find that the introduction
of mass suppresses the occupation number in the infrared regime of the induced
radiation during the collapse. The suppression factor is found to be given by
, which is in agreement with the expected Planckian distribution
of induced radiation. Thus a massive collapsing domain wall will radiate mostly
(if not exclusively) massless scalar fields, making it difficult for the domain
wall to shed any global quantum numbers and evaporate before the horizon is
formed.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures. We updated the acknowledgments as well as added
a statement clarifying that we are following the methods first laid out in
Phys. Rev. D 76, 024005 (2007
Irreversibility in response to forces acting on graphene sheets
The amount of rippling in graphene sheets is related to the interactions with
the substrate or with the suspending structure. Here, we report on an
irreversibility in the response to forces that act on suspended graphene
sheets. This may explain why one always observes a ripple structure on
suspended graphene. We show that a compression-relaxation mechanism produces
static ripples on graphene sheets and determine a peculiar temperature ,
such that for the free-energy of the rippled graphene is smaller than
that of roughened graphene. We also show that depends on the structural
parameters and increases with increasing sample size.Comment: 4 pages, 4 Figure
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Searching for the missing mantles of disrupted asteroids: Evidence from an olivine-rich clast in the Vaca Muerta Mesosiderite
The measurement of the winds near the ocean surface with a radiometer-scatterometer on Skylab
The author has identified the following significant results. There were a total of twenty-six passes in the ZLV mode that yielded useful data. Six were in the in-track noncontiguous mode; all others were in the cross-track noncontiguous mode. The wind speed and direction, as effectively determined in a neutral atmosphere at 19.5 m above the sea surface, were found for each cell scanned by S193. It is shown how the passive microwave measurements were used both to compute the attenuation of the radar beam and to determine those cells where the backscatter measurement was suspect. Given the direction of the wind from some independent source, with the typical accuracy of measurement by available meteorological methods, a backscatter measurement at a nadir angle of 50, 43, or 32 deg can be used to compute the speed of the wind averaged over the illuminated area
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