High-profile Projects Research Articles

Article: Anti-Avoidance Jurisprudence in Direct Taxation: The CJEU Between Politics and Certainty

Over a span of several years, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) developed a framework for anti-abuse in the context of European law and particularly established criteria for justifying restrictions on the fundamental freedoms in the tax context. In tax cases on anti-avoidance that are more recent, however, the court has demonstrated a notable change in its stance towards this issue that represents a disruption in the consistent development of its jurisprudence on abuse. While the court covers the contradictions in its case law by passing an impression of continuity between disparate decisions, it is remarkable how recent rulings draw from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) language. This reliance on concepts from a non-EU institution, however, leads to legitimacy concerns. The increasing importance of international organizations and public opinion – for example, in reaction to the Panama Papers – in shaping the international tax landscape is undeniable. While high-profile projects like Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) and Global Anti-Base Erosion (GloBE) highlight international tax issues, they also exert political pressure on judicial bodies such as the CJEU which leads to less methodological decisions that will align the court with political interests. In this context, the CJEU’s acting as a political player at the borderline of its competences is to be viewed critically, especially regarding the recent shift in its case law on abuse and tax avoidance that leads to concerns over legal certainty. Anti-abuse principle, anti-avoidance jurisprudence, CJEU, international organizations, international taxation, legal certainty, legitimacy, political influence

A Multimodal Appraisal of Zaha Hadid’s Glasgow Riverside Museum—Criticism, Performance Evaluation, and Habitability

High-profile projects promoted by governments, local municipalities, and the media do not always meet program requirements or user expectations. The Riverside Museum in Glasgow by Zaha Hadid Architects, which has generated significant discussion in the media, is used to test this claim. A multimodal inquiry adopts three factors: criticism, performance evaluation, and habitability. Results from this method are then correlated with visual attention scans using software from 3M Corporation to map unconscious user engagement. A wide spectrum of tools is employed, including a walking tour assessment procedure, contemplation of selected settings, navigational mapping, and assessing user emotional experiences. Key aspects of the design and spatial qualities of this museum are compared with an analysis of critical writings on how the project was portrayed in the media. Further, we examine socio-spatial practices, selected behavioral phenomena, and the emotional experiences that ensue from users’ interaction with the building and its immediate context. The findings suggest design shortcomings and, more worrisome, that spatial qualities relevant to users’ experiences do not seem to have been met. In going beyond the usual method of analysis, we apply new techniques of eye-tracking simulations, which verify results obtained by more traditional means. An in-depth analysis suggests the need for better compatibility between the imagined design ideas and the actual spatial environments in use.

Scale and Impact of Sports Stadium Grow Lighting Systems In England

Recently, many sports stadiums have begun using high power lighting systems to help the grass grow on the playing surfaces. These lights supplement winter sunlight, which is sometimes insufficient due to the low elevation of the sun and shading from the surrounding walls. In many stadiums, grow lights are operated at night, and the waste light emissions from these stadiums are extraordinary in comparison to most other areas in the cities in which they are located. Here we present space-based observations of the radiance of fourteen stadiums located in towns and cities of varying sizes and in varying geographical locations across England which each have a Premier League football stadium. We show that stadiums have dramatically brightened (typically by factors of 2-5) in recent years compared to the situation in 2012. We also show that stadiums are often responsible for an important fraction of the total light emission of the cities they are in (often 10% or more, and in one case up to 30%). Because the light emissions from many English towns have been reducing in recent years, the overall fraction of light due to the stadiums is increasing. In some cases, total city emissions have actually increased due to the stadiums, undermining the environmental impact of reductions in radiance in the rest of the community. We believe that stadium grow lights are an excellent target for sustainable lighting initiatives, both because of their considerable environmental impact (especially when located near sensitive areas) and the possibility of high profile and successful waste light mitigation projects.

Artificial intelligence in interdisciplinary life science and drug discovery research.

Artificial intelligence in interdisciplinary life science and drug discovery research.

Bias versus error: why projects fall short

PurposeWorldwide, major projects often make the headlines as they suffer from a fourfold whammy of delays, cost blowouts, benefit shortfalls and stakeholder disappointments. It seems that error and bias can explain their underperformance. Which overarching explanation outweighs the other? It is the question this paper aims to address.Design/methodology/approachInsights are garnered from decades of research on thousands of major projects in developed and developing countries worldwide. In particular, two high-profile project cases, the Veteran Affairs Hospital in Aurora, Colorado (USA) and the Philharmonie de Paris (France), are explored.FindingsThe case projects show that error and bias combine to best explain project (under) performance. Applying best practices or debiasing project cost and benefit estimates is insufficient to prevent cost blowouts and benefit shortfalls. The confrontation of the two overarching explanations is not merely platonic. It is real and may lead to a media and legal battle.Originality/valueThis viewpoint calls practitioners to transcend the error versus bias debate and reconcile two key characters in the world of major projects: the “overoptimistic” who hold a bias for hope and firmly believe that, despite error down the road, many projects would, in the end, “stumble into success” as creativity may come to the rescue; and the “overpessimistic” who hold a bias for despair and think many projects should not have been started.

Supranational authorities and private actors as drivers of single market integration? The state of the Union in electricity and banking

ABSTRACT The creation of a European Banking Union and a European Energy Union have been two high-profile integration projects in a decade characterised by multiple crises. While recent research has focused on the direct effects of crisis on European integration dynamics, less attention has been paid to policy outcomes of market integration in sectors such as banking and energy. To address this gap, the study examines how distinct paths of integration, and the types of institutional change they involve, translate into patterns of sectoral governance. Further, it analyses the consequences of diverging patterns of sectoral governance for policy outcomes, examining whether the existence of supranational coordination bodies and public–private interaction is conducive to market integration. The findings from the analysis of the banking and electricity sectors suggest that while we see resilience and renewed integration in institutional terms, the change affecting policy outcomes appears to be more limited.

How to deliver bad news

You’re at the end of a meeting with a senior manager at your company, updating her on the status of an important project. She looks concerned but not displeased. She says, “Thank you for letting me know, and please keep me updated.” When you walk out of the room or hit “End meeting for all,” you sigh and say to yourself, “That didn’t go as badly as it could have.” Congratulations! You’ve just delivered bad news on a project to the boss, and while it was painful, it wasn’t a disaster. In fact, you may have advanced your career and made a good impression. Let’s rewind a day, or perhaps a week. You are in the middle of a high-profile project within your company. You’re looking at some new data, and they don’t look good. Perhaps it’s an impurity that cannot be removed or an unusually low yield. This is

Gene Set Knowledge Discovery with Enrichr

Profiling samples from patients, tissues, and cells with genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics, and metabolomics ultimately produces lists of genes and proteins that need to be further analyzed and integrated in the context of known biology. Enrichr (Chen etal., 2013; Kuleshov etal., 2016) is a gene set search engine that enables the querying of hundreds of thousands of annotated gene sets. Enrichr uniquely integrates knowledge from many high-profile projects to provide synthesized information about mammalian genes and gene sets. The platform provides various methods to compute gene set enrichment, and the results are visualized in several interactive ways. This protocol provides a summary of the key features of Enrichr, which include using Enrichr programmatically and embedding an Enrichr button on any website. © 2021 Wiley Periodicals LLC. Basic Protocol 1: Analyzing lists of differentially expressed genes from transcriptomics, proteomics and phosphoproteomics, GWAS studies, or other experimental studies Basic Protocol 2: Searching Enrichr by a single gene or key search term Basic Protocol 3: Preparing raw or processed RNA-seq data through BioJupies in preparation for Enrichr analysis Basic Protocol 4: Analyzing gene sets for model organisms using modEnrichr Basic Protocol 5: Using Enrichr in Geneshot Basic Protocol 6: Using Enrichr in ARCHS4 Basic Protocol 7: Using the enrichment analysis visualization Appyter to visualize Enrichr results Basic Protocol 8: Using the Enrichr API Basic Protocol 9: Adding an Enrichr button to a website.

Critical success factors of strategy-led planning of high-profile projects

This study investigates the relationship between project strategies and project outcomes. Technical rationality theory is critical to this relationship; although it has been criticised in extant studies for its inability to define soft issues that associate with real-world scenarios. Strategy-led approach is an alternative to technical rationality. Normative studies have acknowledged the ability of strategy-led approach to project implementation as though it facilitates reflective interaction with problem-solving. This study targeted 154 organizations that won practice excellence awards of the New Zealand Institute of Building’s (NZIOB) between 2001 and 2014. The awards are given to construction firms, adjudged through a rigorous competitive process as the most outstanding in the successful completion of high-profile projects in New Zealand. 40 valid responses from construction managers who completed projects that won NZIOB’s practice excellence awards were analysed to evaluate the impact of strategies on project objectives. In addition, 35 critical success factors explored from literature were considered for statistical analysis. Findings from regression analyses show project strategies impacted 13 critical success factors that significantly shaped cost, time and quality outcomes of award winners’ projects. Negative impact of critical success factors was reported also. The study concludes that construction managers rely on project strategies as projects became increasingly challenging; the systems approach developed from such success-driven practices will benefit both the research and practice communities as they seek ways to optimise project success.

Analysis of COVID‐19 Mathematical and Software Models: Or How NOT to Set Up a Softward Project

This report discusses the open-source software that implements the COVID-19 model in [1] (announced March 16, 2020), led by Dr. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London (ICL). My personal interest was to investigate how the model was implemented after having seen it described as a system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) on BBC News on March 17, 2020. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the original program (written in C) is at least 20 years old and it is undocumented (nothing new in the software world; the programmers in this case probably thought it was not necessary to write readable and maintainable software). Furthermore, all the 15,000 lines of code were in a single file (sometimes called balls of mud). On April 22, 2020 a modified version (called 0.7.0, seemingly produced by Microsoft) appeared consisting of approximately 12 separate source files. This is the version of the program that we review in this article. We do not investigate the fixes that have been made between April 22 and the time of writing of this report. Finally, we note that version 0.7.0 is not an implementation of the ODEs that were announced on BBC News with great aplomb on the evening of Saint Patrick's Day 2020. For a discussion of ODEs in epidemiology, see [2]. Before I discovered that the ICL model was not ODE-based (seemingly contradicting the BBC announcement) I solved the MSEIR (iMmune, Susceptible, Exposed, Infective, Recovered) ODE model numerically in C++. The system of equations is relatively benign and we used the C++ Boost odeint library to solve them. (A word of advice: it is tempting to use the Euler method but don't use it, not even for producing cute S-curves in your blogs.) Summarizing, this report is a critique of the quality of 0.7.0 code based on my experience, background, and how I view software. I was unable to analyze the underlying mathematical model because it is not documented and the code is unreadable. However, I do have something to say about the (lack of) quality of code, random number generation (RNG), and (univariate) statistical distributions as these are of central importance in computational finance, an area in which I am involved (see [3], [4], [5], [6]). This critique is based on incomplete information, namely the bespoke open-source C code. I was unable to find further relevant documentation. Nonetheless, a robust review is still possible. Finally, this report has wider applicability than just the current software system. It pinpoints some of the things that can (and do) go badly wrong in software projects. I will distribute this report to my clients and students. I have been preaching the same “doctrine” for more than 30 years and now is a special opportunity to use it to shine a light to expose the shortcomings of such a high-profile project. It will be interesting to follow developments in the coming years. One reason for writing this report was to counter some of the technically superficial and somewhat partisan blogs written by what we flippantly call nameless internet warriors (see [17]). It is never clear to me if there are ulterior or political motives behind these blogs. They are irrelevant here. On the other hand, these kinds of blogs may provide more information on some structural problems in software projects (see [18] for some horror stories).

The many faces of Reigate Stone: an assessment of variability in historic masonry based on Medieval London\u2019s principal freestone

Reigate Stone was used in high profile projects across London during a key growth period and represents an important chapter of architectural heritage. Historic Reigate masonry is subject to inherent variability. It is prone to rapid decay; however, highly decayed and well-preserved stones are frequently adjacent. This inherent variability in masonry can present a challenge to the design of conservation strategies by obscuring or complicating the identification of decay processes. This paper presents a model for assessing the combined impact of construction economies and mineralogical variability (Graphical abstract), by synthesising archival research on the history of Reigate Stone with experimental analysis of its properties. The limitations of the local geography coupled with the demands of the medieval building industry are shown to have introduced inherent variability into the built fabric at an early stage. Later socio-economic factors are shown to have compounded these by contributing to selective recycling, replacement and contamination of Reigate Stone. These historic factors augmented pre-existing mineralogical variability. This variability makes classification according to commonly used stone types difficult. Experimental analysis correlates variable cementing components with hygro-physical properties related to resilience. Calcite content influences strength properties and capillarity; clay content influences moisture adsorption and retention; opal-CT forms a weakly cemented, porous matrix. These presented different decay pathways to a range of environmental mechanisms and agents of decay. The findings suggest that inherent mineralogical variability, environmental changes, and historic contingency must all be considered in the design of ongoing Reigate Stone conservation strategies.

My First Power Supply Design [White Hot

Discusses the editor's first power design. This included the task of designing a power supply for the Professional 350, DEC’s first desktop computer, which was using a processor chipset from the PDP-11 computer family. This was a very high-priority and high-profile project.

Breaking down barriers: Stewardship of born-digital materials at Columbia University’s special collections repositories

Over the past ten years, Columbia University has completed a number of successful high-profile projects to preserve and publish digital materials. However, up to now, the work on curating and archiving born-digital assets has remained largely project-based and not routinised or scalable. Columbia University’s Born Digital Strategic Initiative Team was tasked with assessing Columbia University Libraries’ approach to collecting born-digital content and making recommendations on how to operationalise that work so that acquiring, processing and providing access to digital assets becomes as routine as going through all these steps with paper-based library collections. This article shares the methodology used by the team to analyse the current situation and develop recommendations for the future.

Business investment in education in emerging markets since the 1960s

This article examines non-profit investments by business in education in emerging markets between the 1960s and the present day. Using a sample of 110 interviews with business leaders from a recently developed oral history database, the study shows that more than three-quarters of such leaders invested in education as a non-profit activity. The article explores three different types of motivations behind such high levels of engagement with education: values driven, context focussed, and firm focussed. The article identifies significant regional variations in terms of investment execution, structure, and impact. In South and Southeast Asia, there was a preference for long-term investment in primary and secondary education. In Africa and Latin America, some initiatives sometimes had a shorter-term connotation, but with high-profile projects in partnerships with international organisations and foreign universities. In Turkey, there was heavy focus on training and the creation of universities. The article concludes by examining the impact of this investment, comparing Chile and India especially. It discusses issues such as the paucity of financial data and the challenges of comparing different types of educational spending, which make robust conclusions hard, but does suggest that although such spending did not resolve major educational roadblocks across the emerging world, it represented a positive overall social gain.

Public-private partnerships: market development through management reform

The transformation of public infrastructure and services into vehicles of profit-making through privately financed and operated partnerships (PPPs) has successfully weathered high profile project failures, changes in government, scathing audits, public resistance, financial crises, fiscal austerity, and found a home around the world despite vastly different legal, cultural, and institutional contexts. Public procurement and traditional budgeting practices are now a distant memory in many jurisdictions – not by happenstance but through dogged efforts to transform public sectors from service provider into commodity purchaser. Understanding the political economy of global PPP markets requires knowing the connection to managerialism underpinning the story of public administration as contract management. This paper explores the emergence, sophistication, and normalization of PPP using primary and secondary sources including interviews with those involved in, or keenly aware of, the historical creation of pioneering PPP markets. It identifies three apposite categories of PPP management: models, methods, and mindsets. Models are homogenously portable yet malleable templates for partnering. Methods include accounting treatment and standards, and new budgeting and tendering practices. Mindsets are the ideas and ideals initially spread by enthusiasts like the Big Five consultancy firms and Macquarie Bank, later entrenched through specialized quasi-public agencies such as Partnerships UK and the World Bank’s PPIAF.

An analysis of the quality of experimental design and reliability of results in tribology research

In recent years several high profile projects have questioned the repeatability and validity of scientific research in the fields of psychology and medicine. In general, these studies have shown or estimated that less than 50% of published research findings are true or replicable even when no breaches of ethics are made. This high percentage stems from widespread poor study design; either through the use of underpowered studies or designs that allow the introduction of bias into the results.In this work, we have aimed to assess, for the first time, the prevalence of good study design in the field of tribology. A set of simple criteria for factors such as randomisation, blinding, use of control and repeated tests has been made. These criteria have been used in a mass review of the output of five highly regarded tribology journals for the year 2017. In total 379 papers were reviewed by 26 reviewers, 28% of the total output of the journals selected for 2017.Our results show that the prevalence of these simple aspects of study design is poor. Out of 290 experimental studies, 2.2% used any form of blinding, 3.2% used randomisation of either the tests or the test samples, while none randomised both. 30% repeated experiments 3 or more times and 86% of those who repeated tests used single batches of test materials. 4.4% completed statistical tests on their data.Due to the low prevalence of repeated tests and statistical analysis it is impossible to give a realistic indication of the percentage of the published works that are likely to be false positives, however these results compare poorly to other more well studied fields. Finally, recommendations for improved study design for researchers and group design for research group leaders are given.

Movement, Space and Social Mobility in early and mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

ABSTRACTThe enthusiasm for creating new histories of social mobility has grown at a moment when sociologists in Britain have been engaged in a high-profile project to update the models of class they have used for more than 50 years. These endeavours share the same intellectual ambition: to show class and social mobility are multi-dimensional phenomena. However, as this article shows, these developments recall the infancy of British social mobility research, during the first three decades of the twentieth century, when the relationships between disciplines, institutions and ideas had yet to take the shape we now recognise.

Hard data and human empathy.

A few years after I finished a Ph.D. in anthropology, my World Wildlife Fund (WWF) colleague Yury Darman and I were in the Russian Far East, checking motion-sensing camera traps installed on a forested hillside. We were collecting data to estimate the population of the endangered Siberian tiger and the even more endangered Amur leopard. When we reached the summit, Yury pointed. “We stand here in Russia,” he said on that day in 2005. “One mile that way? China. One mile this way? North Korea. Our poor cats are the most diplomatically challenged animals in the world.” Thus began my career not only as a conservation scientist, but also as a cultural translator. ![Figure][1] ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NEUBECKER > “We must be able to talk to others with very different perspectives.” Yury went on to stress that these felines could come back from the brink of extinction if they had large blocks of forest with abundant prey. That, he emphasized, depended on the actions and influence of Russian timber companies, Chinese bureaucrats, U.S. consumers, and multinational corporations, to name just a few players. Ultimately, the animals' survival hinged on translation among those groups, with their vastly different perspectives and motives. Identifying the right people and helping them find a common future that included big cats was exhilarating—almost as much as spying one of these endangered animals in the wild. Over my 10 years with WWF, I sought that thin wedge of overlap on a complicated Venn diagram of groups that too often spoke right past one another. I would spend a day with a Walmart executive exploring what would persuade the company to change its strategy for procuring timber products, another with an undercover agent looking at patterns of illegal logging, and another with an architect eager to feature sustainably managed timber in a high-profile project. I learned that good conservation science needs to include equal parts hard data and human empathy. For our big cats to survive, all the players need not only to understand one another's language, but also to put themselves in one another's shoes. More recently, I was reminded that translation is a critical skill regardless of discipline or position. About a year after I became a college president, a 50-ton sperm whale died near our waterfront campus. Researchers at the college dragged the whale to shore so that students, staff, and faculty members could perform a necropsy—valuable both as a learning experience for our students and as a way to determine whether entanglement with fishing gear is killing whales, a subject of heated debate in coastal communities. We then needed to compost the animal underground for 18 months to reduce it to a skeleton, which would offer further educational opportunities. I decided the college's farm would be the perfect place for that macabre burial, but I failed to anticipate the perceptions and concerns of the 17 households abutting the farm and didn't do the necessary translation before we announced the plan. The neighbors weren't at all excited about the prospect of a gigantic whale decomposing near their pastoral backyards. They imagined horrible odors, pest invasions, and lowered property values. So, I was left with a public relations nightmare and a flensed whale, rapidly rotting in the August heat. We composted the animal elsewhere, but it took years to rebuild those important relationships with our neighbors. And I quickly learned that translating is as important for running a college as it is for conserving large predators. As a college president, I aim to inspire interest in translation not as a peripheral nicety, but as a core competency among our students. Traditional academic disciplines, especially in the sciences, have a long history of being siloed. But if scientists are going to help solve complex problems together, we must be able to talk to others with very different perspectives. Seeing students develop these translation skills early on in their academic careers gives me hope for humanity, and for the planet. [1]: pending:yes

Design and Construction of the New Champlain Bridge, Montreal, Canada

The New Champlain Bridge is a high-profile infrastructure project in North America due to its critical economic importance, the premature deterioration of the existing structure and its visibility throughout the metropolitan area. As the gateway into Montreal, significant architectural input is encapsulated in the project design criteria. Durability is a key aspect of the design with a 125 year service life specified. One of the most significant factors in the design, however, is the compressed construction schedule. The crossing is scheduled to open to traffic on 1 December 2018, with the notice to proceed announced in May 2015, permitting a total design and construction duration of just 42 months. Key elements of the design and construction which allow the project to be completed within the short timeframe, while meeting the challenges of environmental constraints, durability requirements and architectural considerations, are explored in this paper.

The Human Rights Act in a Culture of Control

This paper uses a socio-legal perspective to shed light on the UK’s current backlash against human rights. While Euro-scepticism and the UK’s political constitutionalist tradition does somewhat explain the hostility towards judicial protection of human rights, this paper argues that this is not the entire picture. Perspectives from politics, sociology and criminology reveal that the political conditions in which the HRA was introduced were already inimical to the judicial protection of human rights. Since the mid-to late Twentieth Century, criminal justice policy in the UK underwent what David Garland terms ‘dramatic changes’. These changes include, amongst other factors: an increasingly active legislature in the criminal justice field; changes in the emotional tone of crime policy; the politicisation of crime; and populist rhetoric and policies. This paper will argue that the current political climate that is hostile towards criminals or other ‘others’ (e.g. immigrants) is symptomatic of this ‘culture of control.’ Defenders of human rights have identified this problem of unpopular ‘others’ and have attempted to counter them by downplaying the role that human rights have had in such contentious cases or emphasising the importance of human rights in cases that are seen as more publicly pleasing. These defences however, fail to address why this othering occurs, and what, if anything, can be done to counter this. At the same time, the reach of the legislature in other areas of public policy has receded to the rise of the executive and ‘technocracy’ in what has been termed ‘the decline of parliaments’. High profile projects such as Policy Exchange’s ‘Judicial Power Project’ which make the case for a more restrained approach to judicial review are conceptualising the increase in judicial powers as a unilateral decision made by the judicial branch. This, however, ignores the aforementioned sociological and political factors that affect the dynamic and balance of power between the legislature and the executive, and in turn how this affects judicial power. By placing the existing debate regarding the judicial protection of rights in this broader context, a more comprehensive explanation of rights hostility can be understood. This paper will conclude by arguing that as a result of this culture of control, hostility towards the judicial protection of human rights in the UK will not abate with the repeal of the HRA and its replacement with a ‘British Bill of Rights’.