European banking mergers : stock market and operating performance evaluation

There has been a new wave of merger and acquisitions (M&A) activity since the early 1990's across the world, much of this occurring in the financial services industry. This trend has affected Europe as well where the landscape of the financial services industry has been changing. This M&A activity in general has stimulated more in depth research to assess the consequences of the merger events, although comparatively little work has been done on M&A activity in the European financial services industry. This thesis uses a market return approach and an operating performance approach to evaluate the M&As outcome in European banking. We document a minimal total return, and a smaller target return in comparison to US studies. The post-merger operating cash flow return on assets deteriorated but we also found a very minimal improvement in efficiency which was not supportive enough to boost the cash flow return on assets and the profitability of the merging partners, although these mergers were mainly motivated by synergy. Deeper research may provide more interesting findings using clinical studies that seek as much detailed information about the merging partners as possible. It is also worth examining the pattern of managerial ownership and how it affects the merger outcome as this factor is an important one for regulators in the financial services Industry

Investigation thermal comfort in urban environmental centres by combining traditional and modern principles

Traditional cities have been able to provide thermal comfort to their residents through the use of simple physical principles related to the movement of air from cold areas high-pressure represented by a cold air gathering focal like the basements and the middle courtyard and shaded alleys to hot areas low-pressure such as large urban open courtyards that exposed to sunlight. However, due to the industrial revolution, The Urban development has deteriorated the traditional urban fabric, and it’s environmental components, which provided urban fabric with thermal comfort reasons, have disappeared, and a modern urban fabric has emerged that does not take environmental considerations and thermal comfort into account. Here, the research tries to suggest a planning urban style that combines the Principles of architecture and traditional planning with a modern ideas that are appropriate for the times, achieving new urban centers within the city capable of providing thermal comfort to its occupants and creating an urban environmental vision to revitalize traditional urban areas by using vertical green walls

Extent of risk management implementation in some of rock laboratory tests for tunnel projects by means of AHP method

In any project, especially infrastructure ones such as tunnels, tests play a major role in predicting and showing the properties of the ground built on. For such construction through a rock mountain terrain, it is quite not easy to predict the engineering property of such materials. Since working with rock is a quite challenge because of the nature of rock materials, it needs a lot of care and persuasion when dealing with such. For such rock materials, it needs both of field and laboratory tests to ensure the process of obtaining the final engineering property of the materials. This paper concentrate on some of the laboratory tests required for tunnel project held in rock profile sites. Emphasizing on safety, accuracy that enquired during such tests and try to run those under risk management process by means of AHP to get the responded weights for those factors such as test procedure with average of weight (49.43%) indicates the caution to be taken during test beside major parameters such as sample size and mass in accurate manner to avoid risk in test and results obtained

Evaluation of Construction Delay of Public Projects in Erbil Governorate

Delay is one of the greatest challenges facing the implementation of construction projects. The completion project time is considered one of the measure indicators for assessing the success of any project. Delays usually have negative impacts of financial and social to all parties involved in the projects. The aim of the study is to find the most important causes of delay by evaluating the common causes of delays in terms of frequency, severity, and important indices in implementation of public construction projects in Erbil Governorate related to owners, contractors, consultants, and external factors. The data gathered through conducting a questionnaire for perception various parties involved in implementation of public construction projects. For these purpose, 104 forms of questionnaire were distributed to various parts to identify the delay causes in accordance with their opinions. It was concluded that the most significant factors causing the delay in construction of public project in Erbil Governorate related to the owner were “variation orders by owner during the construction” which came in the first rank, while the cause of delay related to the consultant that came in the first rank was “unclear and inadequate details in drawings,” whereas the factor related to the contractor which came in the first rank was “selecting incompetent contractor.

Cooperation as a Service in VANET: Implementation and Simulation Results

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET), specializing from the well-known Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) to Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) wireless communications. While the original motivation for Vehicular Networks was to promote traffic safety, recently it has become increasingly obvious that Vehicular Networks open new vistas for Internet access, providing weather or road condition, parking availability, distributed gaming, and advertisement. In previous papers [27,28], we introduced Cooperation as a Service (CaaS); a new service-oriented solution which enables improved and new services for the road users and an optimized use of the road network through vehicle\u27s cooperation and vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The current paper is an extension of the first ones; it describes an improved version of CaaS and provides its full implementation details and simulation results. CaaS structures the network into clusters, and uses Content Based Routing (CBR) for intra-cluster communications and DTN (Delay and disruption-Tolerant Network) routing for inter-cluster communications. To show the feasibility of our approach, we implemented and tested CaaS using Opnet modeler software package. Simulation results prove the correctness of our protocol and indicate that CaaS achieves higher performance as compared to an Epidemic approach

Contribution of AHP method in prioritizing risk factors regarding tunnel project phases

Tunnel projects are consistently regarded to be mostly a complex and risky engineering projects, owing to the features of the projects, since they increasingly achieve high risk and complexity during the execution of the project. this led to the fact that the necessity of risk management understanding and implementing is a crucial quest with the intention to obtain tunnel project objectives considering (time, cost, quality & safety) to avoid time and cost overruns and any other obstacles. it was observed the most affecting objective was Safety (47.3%) by AHP method in which it is actually reasonable as such project of tunnel need a great concern regarding that matter for many reasons for instance the closed construction area, ventilation considerations, blasting, and so on. the second major objective is quality (31.1%) in which as experts always say it has to be maintained as a high quality as possible

On a Versatile Stochastic Growth Model

Growth phenomena are ubiquitous and pervasive not only in biology and the medical sciences, but also in economics, marketing and the computer and social sciences. We introduce a three-parameter version of the classic pure-birth process growth model when suitably instantiated, can be used to model growth phenomena in many seemingly unrelated application domains. We point out that the model is computationally attractive since it admits of conceptually simple, closed form solutions for the time-dependent probabilities

Digital gamers' attitude towards intention to continue playing digital games

User-centered design of digital games calls for a clear understanding of the mind and the thinking of digital gamers. This understanding is important because it allows digital games designers to create games with the right game dynamics to capture a specific market segment. In the past, digital games were produced without prior consideration of the human factors which were difficult to define and measure. Fang & Zhao (2010)paved the way towards the use of technology acceptance model to ascertain the degree of emotion flow which induces the desire to continue playing digital games. This paper used snowball sampling (Wright&Stein , 2005; Blernackl , 1981 ) to collect data which was used in the analysis to estimate how compatibility,trialability, observalability and attitude influenced the intention to continue playing digital games and how they affected actual behavior playing digital games. It was found that digital gamers’ attitude towards intention to continue playing digital games wassignificantly influenced by attitude beliefs compatibility and trialability. Observalability of digital games by digital gamers significantly increased intention to continue playing digital games

Triggers And Tweets: Implicit Aspect-Based Sentiment And Emotion Analysis Of Community Chatter Relevant To Education Post-Covid-19

This research proposes a well-being analytical framework using social media chatter data. The proposed framework infers analytics and provides insights into the public\u27s well-being relevant to education throughout and post the COVID-19 pandemic through a comprehensive Emotion and Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA). Moreover, this research aims to examine the variability in emotions of students, parents, and faculty toward the e-learning process over time and across different locations. The proposed framework curates Twitter chatter data relevant to the education sector, identifies tweets with the sentiment, and then identifies the exact emotion and emotional triggers associated with those feelings through implicit ABSA. The produced analytics are then factored by location and time to provide more comprehensive insights that aim to assist the decision-makers and personnel in the educational sector enhance and adapt the educational process during and following the pandemic and looking toward the future. The experimental results for emotion classification show that the Linear Support Vector Classifier (SVC) outperformed other classifiers in terms of overall accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure of 91%. Moreover, the Logistic Regression classifier outperformed all other classifiers in terms of overall accuracy, recall, an F-measure of 81%, and precision of 83% for aspect classification. In online experiments using UAE COVID-19 education-related data, the analytics show high relevance with the public concerns around the education process that were reported during the experiment\u27s timeframe

Survey of Personalized Learning Software Systems: A Taxonomy of Environments, Learning Content, and User Models

This paper presents a comprehensive systematic review of personalized learning software systems. All the systems under review are designed to aid educational stakeholders by personalizing one or more facets of the learning process. This is achieved by exploring and analyzing the common architectural attributes among personalized learning software systems. A literature-driven taxonomy is recognized and built to categorize and analyze the reviewed literature. Relevant papers are filtered to produce a final set of full systems to be reviewed and analyzed. In this meta-review, a set of 72 selected personalized learning software systems have been reviewed and categorized based on the proposed personalized learning taxonomy. The proposed taxonomy outlines the three main architectural components of any personalized learning software system: learning environment, learner model, and content. It further defines the different realizations and attributions of each component. Surveyed systems have been analyzed under the proposed taxonomy according to their architectural components, usage, strengths, and weaknesses. Then, the role of these systems in the development of the field of personalized learning systems is discussed. This review sheds light on the field’s current challenges that need to be resolved in the upcoming years