The purpose of this study is to avoid delays and cost changes that occur in emergency reconstruction projects especially in post disaster circumstances. This study is aimed to identify the factors that affect the real construction period and the real cost of a project against the estimated period of construction and the estimated cost of the project. The case study is related to the construction projects in Iraq. Thirty projects in different areas of construction in Iraq were selected as a sample for this study. Project participants from the projects authorities provided data about the projects through a data collection distributed survey made by the authors. Mathematical data analysis was used to construct a model to predict change in time and cost of the projects before the start of the construction. The artificial neural networks analysis was selected as a mathematical approach. The most important factors identified leading to schedule delays and cost increase were contractor failure, redesigning of designs/plans and change orders, security issues, selection of low-price bids, weather factors, and owner failures. The use of the ANN model for such a problem is expected to be an effective method for modeling this complicated phenomenon.
Abstract
The current research aims to identify the level of organizational relaxation among the employees of educational directorates in the Sultanate of Oman. The descriptive approach was used, as well as a questionnaire of two parts to collect data. The questionnaire consists of (15) items divided into three themes about the relaxing level. It was applied on a sample of (406) male & female employees of the educational directorates who were randomly selected. The results of the study showed that the level of organizational relaxation was low. The study results also found that there were no statistically significant differences at the level of significance (α ≤ 0.05) of the study sample in the level of org
... Show MoreThe mean age of AS patients was (35.0 ± 9.8) years.When the patients and control subjects were divided into different age groups (>40, 30-40, <30 years), the differences were not significantin terms of disease prevalence. The results also showed that the percentage of male patients is higher than that of females. There was no significant difference (P?0.05) between patients and controls in the distribution of males and females.Most of the patients had the disease for a period of 5 years or higher, with a disease severity of ? 2.1 and functional disability degree of I, II. The resultsshoweddifferent patterns of distribution for the three tested cytokines. A significant increase in the level of TNF-?, anon-significantincrease i
... Show MoreThe media of all kinds have the task of introducing, expressing and objectively representing the cultures of different societies in various types and forms of press and media. The precept of media pluralism is the basis for freedom of expression & the cornerstone of its realization. Therefore, it is linked to the establishment of several conditions and elements in order to establish it as a principle and practice. Issues of cultural diversity in media and cultural pluralism are one of the most important elements and indicators. So, this paper aims to shed light on the concept of media pluralism and related concepts within the framework of cultural diversity and multicultural indicators. Thus, highlighting the feature
... Show MoreVolleyball is one of the sports that require physical and skill abilities thus many teaching models appeared to teach these abilities like group investigation model. The research aimed at identifying the effect of group investigation model on learning underarm and overhead passing in volleyball. The researchers hypothesized statistical differences between pre and posttests in learning underarm and overhead passing in volleyball as well as differences in posttests of controlling and experimental groups in learning underarm and overhead passing in volleyball. The researcher used the experimental method on (30) second year female students of physical education and sport sciences college/ university of Baghdad. Group investigation model was app
... Show MoreFind the impediments Activity vital and important, but focuses a bancassurance activity, diagnosis and its impact on the financial ratios indicators for insurance companies. The researcher has adopted in his research on several financial ratios used to analyze the financial performance of a (relative profitability, liquidity ratio and the ratio of solvency) of the company Iraqi insurance for a period of one year (2009) to a year (2015), based on the annual reports and financial statements (balance sheet revealed income), financial statements for insurance premiums for banks research sample of this research has addressed several topics of theoretical and practical body through which the researcher obstacles to banking and insurance experi
... Show MoreCurrent design codes and specifications allow for part of the bonded flexure tension reinforcement to be distributed over an effective flange width when the T-beams' flanges are in tension. This study presents an experimental and numerical investigation on the reinforced concrete flanged section's flexural behavior when reinforcement in the tension flange is laterally distributed. To achieve the goals of the study, numerical analysis using the finite element method was conducted on discretized flanged beam models validated via experimentally tested T-beam specimen. Parametric study was performed to investigate the effect of different parameters on the T-beams flexural behavior. The study revealed that a significant reduction in the
... Show MoreThis paper considers and proposes new estimators that depend on the sample and on prior information in the case that they either are equally or are not equally important in the model. The prior information is described as linear stochastic restrictions. We study the properties and the performances of these estimators compared to other common estimators using the mean squared error as a criterion for the goodness of fit. A numerical example and a simulation study are proposed to explain the performance of the estimators.
To ensure fault tolerance and distributed management, distributed protocols are employed as one of the major architectural concepts underlying the Internet. However, inefficiency, instability and fragility could be potentially overcome with the help of the novel networking architecture called software-defined networking (SDN). The main property of this architecture is the separation of the control and data planes. To reduce congestion and thus improve latency and throughput, there must be homogeneous distribution of the traffic load over the different network paths. This paper presents a smart flow steering agent (SFSA) for data flow routing based on current network conditions. To enhance throughput and minimize latency, the SFSA distrib
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