A study of current design & build procurement approach practice based on the client‟s specific expectations in the Malaysian Construction Industry

Design and build procurement approach is being considered as one of the innovative procurement approaches that is widely gaining popularity globally. The Malaysian construction industry is not left out in the growing adoption of this procurement approach, this could be attributed to the several advantages that the system offers to construction clients which includes single point responsibility, fixed cost, shortened project duration and risk allocation. However, with all these inherent advantages of the procurement approach, it is yet to be effectively adopted and practiced in the Malaysian construction industry. This study is aimed at appraising the Design &Build (D&B) procurement approach in the Malaysian Construction Industry based on current practice through identifying the impeding and enabling factors to the achievement of the client‟s specific expectations in order to enable the better practice of D&B procurement approach in the industry. Data was collected from a two round Delphi questionnaire survey which was conducted in Malaysia in order to identify the features that characterize the D&B procurement approach, and also the impeding and enabling factors in the achievement of the client‟s specific expectations. The key findings in the study showed that the practice of the system in Malaysia is most importantly characterized by the fact that the system is most suitable for projects that are complex in nature. Whilst the impeding and enabling factors in the achievement of the client‟s specific expectations which are attributed to be client related, contractor related and also external environment related was determined. It is expected that with the consideration of these impeding and enabling factors to the achievement of the client specific expectations, it will consequently result in the enhanced D&B project delivery, the better practice of the procurement approach; and ultimately the overall improvement of the performance of the Malaysian construction industry in relation to D&B projects

External debt, debt overhang, crowding out effects and capital formation in Nigeria and South Africa

The deficiency of saving in Sub-Saharan Africa, as represented by Nigeria and South Africa has led to shortages in funding capital formation, thereby necessitating external borrowing. This has slowed down and restrained economic growth and development. The questions of external debts determinants, effects and causal relationships with capital formation are yet to be adequately responded to; mainly due to weak and nonrigorous methods employed in the previous studies. The focus has not been effective and specific. The objective of this study is fourfold; determine factors affecting external debt accumulation, examine effects of external debt on capital formation, assess impact of debt overhang and crowding out effects on capital formation and investigate causal relationships between external debt and capital formation in Nigeria and South Africa. Autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) and Vector Autoregressive (VAR) modeling on time series data covering three decades were employed in the study. The results have established that, interest rate and external debt service are the most statistically significant variables explaining external debt accumulation scourge in the selected countries. Additionally, the study has discovered that, external debt has significant negative effects on capital formation in the same manner with debt overhang and crowding out effects. However, these impacts are proven to be more pronounced on capital formation in Nigeria than in South Africa. It is also established that external debt and capital formation Granger causes each other. The overall implication of the research findings is that speed of capital formation has been retarded by the negative effects of external debts. Measures by the government should be tailored towards improving capital formation by designing policies that will reduce the burden of debt accumulation and reducing the cost of external debt services. This can be done through enhancing the debt management process and improving efficiency in funds utilization, so as to ensure timely repayment and servicing of debts

Improving parallel self-organizing map using heterogeneous uniform memory access / Muhammad Firdaus Mustapha

Self-organizing Map (SOM) is a very popular algorithm that has been used as clustering algorithm and data exploration. SOM consists of complex calculations where the calculation of complexity depending on the circumstances. Many researchers have managed to improve online SOM processing speed using Heterogeneous Computing (HC). HC is a combination of Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) that work closely together. Standard HC can be represented by CPU and GPU accessing separate memory blocks. In spite of excellent performance using standard HC, there is a situation that causes computer hardware underutilized when executing online SOM variant. In details, the situation occurs when number of cores is larger than the number of neurons on map. Moreover, the complexities of SOM steps also increase the usage of high memory capacity which leads to high rate memory transfer. This situation is caused by the standard HC implements "deep copies" in storing processing objects which lead to communication latency. Recently, combination CPU and GPU that integrated together on a single chip are rapidly attractive the design paradigm for recent platform because of their remarkable parallel processing abilities. This kind of microprocessor is based on Heterogeneous Unified Memory Access (HUMA) model. This model allows both CPU and GPU to access and store into the same memory location which avoids redundant copies of objects by "deep copies" method. Therefore, the main goal of this research is to reduce computation time of SOM training through implementing on HUMA platform and improve GPU cores utilization. This research has three main objectives to be achieved. Firstly, this research attempts to study the processing natures of original SOM algorithm on standard HC platform. Secondly is to model an enhanced parallel SOM on HUMA-GPU platform and adapting multiple stimuli approach in order to improve the processing speed. Lastly is to evaluate the enhanced parallel SOM in terms of performance accuracy, efficiency, and scalability. This research attempts to improve the processing of SOM algorithm through three stages. The research works start with conducting a preliminary study on sequential SOM algorithm. The research continues to design a parallel SOM architecture based on literature study and implements on two types of architecture; standard HC and HUMA model. Finally, this research designs and implements an enhanced parallel SOM architecture through combining two parallel methods which are network and data partitioning. The combination of the two methods are realized via adapting multiple stimuli approach. This research employs datasets that are acquired from UCI repository. As a result, the enhanced parallel SOM that executed on HUMA platform is able to score up to 1.27 of speed up overall for large map size compared to standard parallel SOM. The proposed work also scores better for smaller map size with scored up to 1.03 of speed up overall compared to standard SOM on the identical platform. Accordingly, the proposed work is able to offer a better solution for small to medium sized of data analysis software. Overall, the solution is enhanced through utilizing recent hardware technology and improved method

Energy Consumption and Economic Growth in Nigeria: A Causality Analysis

The paper is set out to re-examine the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth using Nigeria’s data from 1980 to 2011 in a multivariate frameworkby including labour and capital in the causality analysis. Applying Granger causality test, impulse response and variance decomposition analysis; the results of the causality test reported absence of causality and that of variance decomposition found that capital and labourare more important in affecting output growth compared to energy consumption. Keywords: Capital, Causality, Economic growth, Energy consumption, Labou

Dynamics Fracture Propagation due to Cold Water Injection

Hydraulic fracturing is a well stimulation tcchnique to improve hydrocarbon rcoovGry. Despite the rcsearch done in tire past scveral decdes, numerical simulatio of dynamio fracturc propagetion remains a challenging topic in the oil and gas indusay. This project investigatcd the fracture propagation in a cold water injction scc,oario boscd m sevcral models in hydraulic fracturing. Moreover, Oris project intends to quantifr thc stability of fracture and the leakoffrate at the fracture surfaces. Otrer ftan ttat, cmputational tml is developed to simulate the fracture propagation and projeot in a Graphical Uscr Intsrfroe

Collapsing towards Extinction? Trade in Birds Carcasses for Traditional Medicine and the Decline of Vulture Population in Katsina State, Nigeria

Decline in vulture populations have seriously reported in Nigeria as in other habits around the world. Human pressure from poisoning, hunting and trading for traditional medicine are key factors leading to decline of vulture population in northern Nigeria. This study examines vulture trading for traditional medicine as risk factor for the raptors population decline in Katsina with a view to providing baseline information for reviewing conservation policies in the State and Nigeria at large. The study is a survey research involving questionnaire administration and interview of seventy two stakeholders who were sampled using snowball sampling technique as follows: vulture stall owners (n=58) and abattoir employees (n=10) and traditional healers (n= 4). A total of five locations were surveyed based on the understanding that they possess the most specialized fetish markets and important centres of vulture trading in Katsina State. Percentage and mean were used for data analysis. The study found that trading of vulture is proliferating in the area as more than 50% of the stalls were opened between 2016 and 2019. It also revealed that 80% of the fetish stalls are located outside Katsina town for fear of authorities fighting illicit trade of vulture. Also revealed was that prices of vulture vary in space and depend on relationships with customers: a whole vulture costs N21000 (ca. $55.55) which soars as high as N27000 (ca.$75) outside Katsina town and N30000 (ca. $83) in times of scarcity. This study recommended that there is the need to carry out nationwide comprehensive  assessment of trade in avifauna for improving conservation policies and practices in Nigeria. Keywords: carcasses, fetish stalls, traditional medicine, conservatio

Web Based Product Directory System for Video and Music Store

Self service system has been widely used to improve business process. In the environment of music and video stores the usage of self service system are still minimal as customer's need of access to the product's information been neglected. Therefore this project is about building a usable self service system with improved functionality in purpose to improve customer service. The scope of study for this project is focus on the implementation of self service system in Malaysian video and music store environment which covers its usability and functionality. The methodology for this project is focused on delivering the most efficient system's design and content to the user. The result proves that users are critical about the system's content while prefer the design that easy to navigate, quick in information access, simple, and consistent

Bayesian approach to classification of football match outcome

The football match outcome prediction particularly has gained popularity in recent years. It attract lots type of fan from the analyst expert, managerial of football team and others to predict the football match result before the match start.There are three types of approaches had been proposed to predict win, lose or draw; and evaluate the attributes of the football team. The approaches are statistical approach, machine learningapproach and Bayesian approach. This paper propose the Bayesian approaches within machine learning approaches such as Naive Bayes (NB), Tree Augmented Naive Bayes (TAN) and General Bayesian Network (K2) to predict the football match outcome. The required of football data is the English Premier League match results for three seasons; 2016 – 2017, 2015 – 2016 and 2014 – 2015 downloaded from http://www.football-data.co.uk. The experimental results showed that TAN achieved the highest predictive accuracy of 90.0 % in average across three seasons among others Bayesian approach (K2 and NB). The result from this research is hope that it can be used in future research for predicting the football match outcome

First discovery augmented reality for learning solar systems

The development of Augmented Reality (AR) systems in educational settings should be given more attention and recognition on its contribution to the evolution of education. Although this shift of pedagogical method may disrupt the traditional curriculum model, it also offers great opportunity to complement and improve the modern age education model. This paper presents an AR-based mobile application for exploring Space and Science for primary school students called the First Discovery (FD). This application supplements a traditional book that contains 10 target images for solar system and its planets, which can be scanned by the AR camera in FD application. Evaluation was carried out among primary school children, elementary educators as well as parents, which showed a highly favorable response. It is hoped that the proposed FD application is able to improve the ability of children in retaining knowledge after the AR science learning experience, to enhance information accessibility of the science learning content for children as well as to develop creative learning and the ability of children in exploring and problem solvin

The Impacts of Oil Price and Exchange Rate on Food Prices in Nigeria

This empirical research examined the interconnecting relationship between oil price, exchange rate and food prices in Nigeria. The study applied annual time series data from 1972 to 2016. Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) techniques were used in the process of estimating the model. The main results disclosed that there is a long run association among the considered variables. The error correction term indicates significant negative sign. Among the two independent variables in the model, exchange rate is affecting food price more than the oil price counterpart since some of the food items are imported. The result has robust implication on policy recommendations in Nigeria. Food production has a vital role in influencing food prices in Nigeria. The Central Bank of Nigeria must consider exchange rate as a factor influencing food price in its quest for achieving inflation target. Keywords Oil price; exchange rate; food price; ARDL; Nigeria DOI: 10.7176/JESD/10-8-08 Publication date: April 30th 201