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This paper proposes a universal constructor implemented on a self-timed cellular automaton, which is a particular type of asynchronous cellular automaton. Our construction utilizes the asynchronous nature of the underlying cellular automaton in a direct way, as a result of which it is simpler than the conventional construction based on the simulation of a synchronous cellular automaton by an asynchronous cellular automaton. Our model employs 39 rotation-invariant rules and the state of each cell is encoded by 8 bits.

We study parallel solutions to the problem of implementing priority queues and priority deques. It is known that data structures for the implementation (e.g. the heap, the min-max heap, and the deap) can be constructed in linear sequential time. In this paper, we design optimal Θ((log log n)²) time parallel algorithms with processors for the constructions in the parallel comparison tree model.

In this paper, a new spreading network was constructed and the corresponding immunizations were proposed. The social ability of individuals in the real human social networks was reflected by the node strength. The negativity and positivity degrees were also introduced. And the edge weights were calculated by the negativity and positivity degrees, respectively. Based on these concepts, a new asymmetric edge weights scale-free network which was more close to the real world was established. The comparing experiments indicate that the proposed immunization is priority to the acquaintance immunization, and close to the target immunization.

In this paper, we present a construction of a family of surface-knot diagrams with cross-exchangeable curves, along which we can change the crossing information to obtain trivial diagrams. These diagrams also satisfy a kind of minimality, called $d$-minimal surface-knot diagrams.

ScinoPharm and Lee's Pharmaceutical jointly develop drug products for the Chinese market.

WuXi PharmaTech begins construction of new R&D and cGMP manufacturing campus in Changzhou.

NeoStem signs Licensing Agreement with Cellular Biomedicine Group and plans to begin Phase 2 hepatocellular carcinoma trial in China.

Abiogen Pharma signed agreement with Lee's Pharma to market Neridronic Acid in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.

InSightec launches its first centers in China.

Shuwen Biotech and DiagnoCure sign exclusive agreement for commercializing colorectal cancer staging test in China.

The Jackson Laboratory and Frasergen to begin creation of cancer genomics facility in Hubei Province, China.

RuiYi and iHuman Institute form collaboration to identify novel antibodies targeting GPCRs.

Enigma Diagnostics and China's ICDC collaborate to develop MDX infectious disease assays for use at point-of-care.

Drug to inhibit liver cancer discovered.

Objectives: The study was to establish a precise three-dimensional (3D) finite element model (FEM) of the distal radioulnar joint (DRUJ) and then to validate its accuracy for the application to the research on clinical biomechanics. Materials and methods: The right forearm DRUJ of a volunteer (male, 28 years old, 62 kilograms) was scanned by computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The resulting sectional images were input into MIMICS10.1 and ANSYS10.0 to generate 3D FEM of the DRUJ. With this FEM, the bending load, axial compression load and the torsion load conditions were simulated, and the vonmises stress distribution of the DRUJ was detected. The simulation results were compared with the biomechanics experiment results which were reported by the literatures. Results: The constructed FEM consisted of 333,805 elements and 508,384 nodes. Together, the simulation results with this FEM were in consistent with those of the reported experiments in bending load, axial compression load and torsion load conditions. Discussion: The 3D FEM of the DRUJ can reflect the real geometric structure of the DRUJ objectively and the simulation with this FEM can predict the results of the biomechanics experiments successfully.

Construction processes planning and effective management are extremely important for success in construction business. Head of a design must be well experienced in initiating, planning, and executing of construction projects. Therefore, proper assessment of design projects' managers is a vital part of construction process. The paper deals with an effective methodology that might serve as a decision support aid in assessing project managers. Project managers' different characteristics are considered to be more or less important for the effective management of the project. Qualifying of managers is based on laws in force and sustainability of project management involving determination of attributes value and weights by applying analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and expert judgement methods. For managers' assessment and decision supporting is used additive ratio assessment method (ARAS). The model, presented in this study, shows that the three different methods combined (ARAS method aggregated together with the AHP method and the expert judgement method) is an effective tool for multiple criteria decision aiding. As a tool for the assessment of the developed model, was developed multiple criteria decision support system (MCDSS) weighting and assessment of ratios (WEAR) software. The solution results show that the created model, selected methods and MCDSS WEAR can be applied in practice as an effective decision aid.

In this paper, we propose a construction of a new cubic spline-wavelet basis on the hypercube satisfying homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Wavelets have two vanishing moments. Stiffness matrices arising from discretization of elliptic problems using a constructed wavelet basis have uniformly bounded condition numbers and we show that these condition numbers are small. We present quantitative properties of the constructed basis and we provide a numerical example to show the efficiency of the Galerkin method using the constructed basis.

A meta-synthesis approach was used to identify, synthesize, and categorize appropriately factors in the literature that contribute to design documentation quality. The categories include factors on quality attributes, quality indicators, and quality-influencing factors. Findings indicate that the quality of design documentation in practice is unsatisfactory, therefore, there is a need for collaboration between the owner, designers, and end-users to improve design documentation quality. The results offer pragmatic data on design documentation quality in the construction industry between the years 1992 and 2019. However, further research on the significant impacts of poor-quality design documentation on construction projects is recommended.

The domestic building sector across Europe accounts for around 40% of total energy consumption. Mitigation strategies for greenhouse gas emissions have focused on improving the energy efficiency of buildings, both in terms of electricity use and space heating. In addition to improving the thermal properties of the building envelope and developing mechanisms to encourage energy conservation, the use of new energy technologies in new build and retro-fit residential buildings has the capacity to reduce significantly energy consumption. Active solar heating (ASH) systems are one such technology, suitable for widespread use across new and existing buildings in the housing stock, which have the potential to make a significant contribution to sustainable building and regeneration. Their generally slow adoption can be attributed to high capital cost and unknown cost effectiveness, but these factors do not adequately explain considerable differences between European countries in the take-up of new sustainable technologies in construction. This suggests that there are sets of more important factors and institutions inhibiting or facilitating their adoption. This paper examines the structural and institutional factors behind these differentials and draws implications for the management of innovation by construction firms and government policy for those countries under-exploiting the potential of ASH systems. Regulation, legislation and fiscal and financial incentives can encourage innovation and can help to promote solar technology. For countries such as the UK and France, lessons can be learned from the fixed price schemes, direct capital grant support, tax incentives and other such initiatives employed in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. However, manufacturers and suppliers of ASH systems cannot be considered independently of other firms along the building chain. By raising the visibility of the adoption of this sustainable technology, construction firms can benefit their organisations from the reputation for installing this innovation, while confining the risk to this particular technology. Government can also play a role in increasing the capacity of construction firms to identify appropriate sustainable technologies and evaluate their potential costs and benefits.

It has been increasingly recognised that construction activity imposes external costs to the environment. This paper aims to review the benefits and major problems in the implementation of ISO 14000 EMS in the Hong Kong construction industry. This study surveyed major construction firms in Hong Kong to uncover the hindrance factors contributing to the low adoption of ISO 14000. Based on the findings, this paper identifies and ranks the perceived order which hinders the construction firms' adoption of ISO 14000. The case study in Hong Kong serves as a reference point for understanding the problems in the implementation of ISO 14000 in other countries.

Specifically, this study found that the four major obstacles to ISO 14000 implementation are: lack of government pressure; lack of client requirement/supports; expensive implementation cost; and sub-contracting systems, which create difficulties in managing the EMS. Since the government is a very dominant client, the extent to which the Government wishes to restrict its choice of tenderer to those firms that have an environmental management system in place, will demonstrate its commitment to environmentally responsible operations. The public sector clients play a critical role in driving the construction industry to improve its operations through contractual requirements. Education of the end-users is also important to create market demand for environmentally friendly construction. To an extent, professional institutions and other industry bodies can help to instill a greater sense of accountability among industry participants by stipulating acceptable standards of behaviour and establishing a supportive regulatory framework.

There is a tremendous housing shortage in the world that can only be overcome by innovative designs and enlightened production management, such as lean construction. This paper presents a method for fast and low-cost erection of apartment housing units that have architectural flexibility, manufacturing flexibility, and erection flexibility. Flexibility is one of the fundamental aspects of lean manufacturing. The paper describes an innovative design using cam and nut jointing methods for large panel erection, and presents characteristics of an appropriate structural system to correspond to the mechanical jointing and quick erection needs. Current precast plants can quickly acquire capabilities to manufacture large panels as per the stated design using cam and nut. The cam screw and cam nut scheme is conducive to quick erection, besides being capable of withstanding all structural and natural loads. Erection speeds using this method are estimated to be about ten times as fast as conventional methods, thereby facilitating lean production. This paper presents an overall lean approach to the design, manufacture, and construction of this innovative housing system. It is believed that only through innovative systems can future technology needs of the world be met.

As construction projects emerge from the traditional delivery processes to modern fast-track forms, stress has developed in the interface between the design professional's delivery process and effective construction production. This is no greater evidenced than at the specialty contractor level. The current attempts at fast-track team type projects remain largely a time-compressed form of the traditional processes with respect to the design-construct production flow. While many of these projects are comprised of a pre-selected "team" of design and construction firms, in most cases the role of the specialty contractor is limited to pricing exercises and perhaps some traditional "value engineering" suggestions during the design phases. Substantial improvements in production workflow, if any, have been generally limited to the area of cooperative construction activity sequencing and scheduling. Problems arising from this situation are illustrated and research is proposed for testing possible solutions.

This study aims at ranking the construction information being needed by the general contractors. It is based on the study of Ndekugri and McCaffer (1988) who identified the seven sources of information for the general contractors. These sources are the six management functions being planning, estimating, cashflow forecasting, valuation, cost control and accounting, and the external parties. While they suggested that mapping out of the characteristics of the flow of the construction information produces the necessary step for information integration, this paper takes a further step to rank various forms of information to disclose their relationships in terms of importance level. This extends their contribution to provide more evidence of how to integrate the information at work. Not only allowing the general contractors to systematize and manage their flow of information, but also creating the foundation for further empirical research undertaken in this area.

The maintenance of health in industrial communities presents special problems and priorities, which are exacerbated in developing countries by socio-economic realities. Lifestyle, communicable diseases, alcohol and drug abuse are issues, which extend far beyond the boundaries of society, impacting on individuals' performance in the workplace.

The aim of health promotion is to persuade people to adopt and maintain healthy life practices, thus preventing ill-health and promoting health and overall performance.

Given the aforementioned, a descriptive survey was conducted among general contractors (GCs) to determine: the extent of health promotion; the extent to which employees would benefit there from, and the perceived holistic benefits. The findings indicate that little or no health promotion is undertaken in South African construction. However, GCs perceive that health promotion would benefit employees, the benefits including improved health and project performance manifested in, inter alia, lower absenteeism, and improved productivity and quality.

Civil engineering academics are caught between a science-based university culture on one side, and on the other, the expectations of students and practicing engineers in industry who want practical knowledge for immediate application. The science-based culture primarily measures faculty by research projects and funding, Ph.D. students produced, and by papers refereed primarily by academic peers for publication and citation in scholarly journals. There are strong pressures to produce these outputs, which are duly quantified for tenure and promotion decisions but the system does not directly reward time spent gaining practical experience in full-time or part time jobs prior to academic employment, or later in summers or sabbaticals, or in solving problems through consultations.

This paper will address the balance between academia and practice, and focus on the residential building sector of the design and construction industry as one that is largely neglected by engineering programs. In particular, it will show where the design and construction of residential structures can provide opportunities to enhance engineering education and open new avenues for broad, interdisciplinary research that are different from those where engineering academics normally venture. In conclusion, it will focus on academics who successfully bridge the realm of academia and the world around them.

In groundwater construction projects, many variables affect construction schedule and cost overruns. This paper aims to examine and evaluate the relative importance of the main factors that cause delay and cost overruns in groundwater construction projects. In order to identify these factors, a questionnaire survey was conducted. Questionnaires were sent to professionals involved in groundwater construction projects in Ghana. The data was analyzed and ranked, based on the profession of the respondents and their roles in the industry (i.e. owners, contractors and consultants). The questionnaire survey consisted of 49 factors which were grouped into nine major categories, and the level of importance of the categories was measured and ranked by the relative importance weights. The percentage agreements in ranking among the three groups were measured. The results shows that: (1) the surveyed groups generally agreed that the project financing category is the main reason for groundwater construction delay and cost overruns, whereas the labor category is the least; (2) owners, consultants and contractors substantially agree on the ranking of the major categories of delay and cost overruns factors. The paper concludes that all the three groups felt that project financing, micro-economics, natural conditions and materials factor categories play a predominant role in causing delay and cost overruns to groundwater construction projects.

Though there is a general belief that the investment in information technology (IT) will improve the productivity of the construction industry, the extent to which the construction industry has used IT for strategic advantage has been limited. This study investigates the differences in the use of IT in three major participants of the construction industry in Hong Kong: engineering firms, architectural firms, and quantity surveying firms. In addition, an in-depth interview was carried out with a leading firm in each of the professions for studying the scope of use of IT in Hong Kong's construction industry. The findings reveal some interesting facts that are useful to managers of the construction industry in making decisions on investment in IT.

Despite the popularity of motivation research in the latter half of the twentieth century, little empirical evidence exists of the factors influencing the motivation of different occupational groups within the construction industry. Furthermore, no significant attempt has been made to compare the job motivation level difference of the employees working in large companies or small-medium sized enterprises (SMEs). This research attempts to fill these knowledge gaps by exploring the motivation of members of three occupational groups (professional engineers, skilled trade-craft workers and unskilled or semi-skilled general operatives), working for a variety of SMEs and large sized businesses. The findings reveal that professional employees are predominantly motivated by intrinsic reward, which contrasts markedly with unskilled workers who demonstrate a desire for extrinsic rewards. However, company size does not appear to affect the motivation of any of the groups studied significantly.

The factors that affect the quality of building construction projects in Gaza Strip are identified. Nominal Group Technique (NGT) was used at the preliminary stage to identify these factors and to assist in developing a questionnaire to identify and rank these factors and the associated sub-factors. 65 contracting companies and 24 consulting offices participated in responding to the questionnaire. Using factor analysis and stepwise multiple regression analysis, the most important factors affecting the quality of the building construction projects were identified and modeled. Among the most significant factors identified are: characteristics of site layout, experience of site staff, consistency of design documents, the financial power of the contractor, availability of construction materials, subcontractors, political environment, and the control systems used.