Multi-million Dollar Project Research Articles

Hamburger Plus: A Case Analysis

Due to Hamburger Plus’ global operations, it is planning to spend $1.5 billion over the next 5 years to make its operations digitally mastered through a system called Creative. Rapid decline in sales and numerous customer complaints from one branch to another have prompted this move. Creative is an ambitious multi-million dollar project that would allow Hamburger Plus management to monitor and actively see the physical count of the products produced at any of its stores at any time of the day. Additionally, the management has the ability to verify whether customers are receiving service at their preferred time. It is believed that Creative would bring Hamburger Plus back to what it is known for: the fastest, most consistent service in the industry. Despite its very promising outcomes, there are members of the management team who are not in favor of Creative primarily because of its cost, which would mean a 200% reduction in stockholder’s shares plus closing down at least 300 of its outlets within the next 5 years. These conditions are needed before Creative can do its work and for the company to recoup its investments. The majority of stockholders believe that the upcoming technology is not the cause of customers being sent away during lunch break but because of the sluggish customer service provided by the service crew. A member pointed out that the faltering customer service is due to the general slowdown in cooking burgers. It is also added that customers are so irritated by the long lines and long periods of waiting time before burgers are served. One stockholder said that Hamburger Plus hasn’t introduced another hit product like burger patty strips since 1985. Despite the objections, the CEO is still very optimistic about investing in Creative. He believes that it would give executives the opportunity to monitor operations and ensure product consistency and service that meets customer satisfaction.

Ultrasonic thickness measuring in-pipe robot for real-time non-destructive evaluation of polymeric spray linings in drinking water pipe infrastructure

Drinking water pipelines are mainly underground and exposed to corrosion. Polymeric spray liners are used as an economical renewal method to mitigate the consequences of internal corrosion of pipelines and prolong their useful service life by many water utilities around the globe. The quality assurance of such applications is currently limited to closed-circuit television (CCTV), which only provides visual information. As part of the Australian government-funded, thirty-four partner multi-million dollar project (CRC-P: Smart Linings for Pipes and Infrastructure project), this work focuses on measuring the post-application thickness of spray liners in pipes. In this article, we report the innovative development of in-pipe robotic sensing suite that leverages ultrasonic sensing to continuously inspect the thickness of the spray linings through non-destructive measurements. The ultrasonic sensor was calibrated by fabricating laboratory test sample made from polymeric spray linings. Continuous uninterrupted coupling was achieved through a custom designed mechanism which was proven to be reliable through field deployments. Extensive lab tests were conducted to validate the sensor measurements with the benchmark measurements producing results with sub-millimeter accuracy. Following lab validations, field trials in buried pipe assets of Sydney Water were conducted for pipe lengths over 35 m, and the field test results show the robotic system is capable of reliably providing accurate spray liner thickness along the pipeline in real-time through non-destructive evaluation.

Hurricane Irma–Navy's Displaced Vessel and Oil Spill Response

On the evening of 09–10 September 2017, the Florida Keys were pummeled by Hurricane Irma - a Category 4 storm that was the fifth-costliest hurricane to hit mainland United States, causing an estimated $50 billion in damages, and 34 lives lost in Florida alone. In the Keys, approximately 1350 boats were destroyed or damaged, and approximately 2000 boats were removed from the waters and shorelines from a Unified Command (UC) comprised of U.S. Coast Guard, EPA and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission funded from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), under an ESF10 Mission Assignment to remove those vessels displaced from the storm where they had sunk, submerged, or been stranded along the shoreline. On September 28, 2017, the UC decided that boats that were on federal property were the responsibility of that agency to manage, and furthermore, since each of these boats had batteries and in most cases fuel on board they posed an immediate hazardous substance and/or oil spill threat, so requested that Navy undertake operations immediately as the lead FOSC to address each of the vessels sunk, submerged, stranded or otherwise displaced on Navy property in the Key West area. On October 1, 2017, the Navy On-Scene Coordinator Representative (NOSC-R) from Navy Region Southeast (NRSE) deployed to Naval Air Station Key West (NASKW) to manage the response. Once adequate funds were identified and secured, NRSE contracted Navy Supervisor of Salvage (SUPSALV), who quickly arrived on-scene with a contracted private salvor. Operations fell into several stages: locating each vessel on NASKW property and determining its condition; identifying each owner/representative; retrieval and temporary storage of each vessel or its remains on Navy property; contacting vessel owners/representatives to making arrangements for owner or insurance company to retrieve the vessel, or surrender it to Navy custody for final destruction at Navy's expense. A number of challenges arose during this response: finding adequate funds at the end of a fiscal year for an un-programmed multi-million dollar project; identifying owners and contact information; negotiating final disposition of each vessel; allowing owners access to vessels stored on Navy property. After 9 weeks of vessel location and identification, and owner notifications, 15 vessels were retrieved by owners, 13 vessels were towed away or otherwise removed by owner insurance companies, and 52 were barged off to a boatyard for final destruction at Navy's expense. In total, $3M was spent by Navy for this operation.

A Complete SMOCkery: Daily Online Testing Did Not Boost College Performance

In an article published in an open-access journal, (Pennebaker et al. PLoS One, 8(11), e79774, 2013) reported that an innovative computer-based system that included daily online testing resulted in better student performance in other concurrent courses and a reduction in achievement gaps between lower and upper middle-class students. This article has had high impact, not only in terms of citations, but it also launched a multimillion-dollar university project and numerous synchronous massive online courses (SMOCs). In this study, I present a closer look at the data used in the Pennebaker et al. study. As in many cases of false claims, threats to internal validity were not adequately addressed. Student performance increases in other courses can be explained entirely by selection bias, whereas achievement gap reductions may be explained by differential attrition. It is hoped that the findings reported in this paper will inform future decisions regarding SMOC courses. More importantly, our field needs watchdogs who expose such unsupported extravagant claims—especially those appearing in pay-to-publish journals.

Transforming a National Historic Landmark Into a Green Nanogrid: The Case of Crown Hall

S.R. Crown Hall, depicted in figure 1, located at 3360 South State Street, Chicago, Illinois, on the main campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), is home to the College of Architecture. Crown Hall is a modern masterpiece that Time magazine called, one of the world's most influential, inspiring and astonishing structures. Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1956, Crown Hall cohesively represents his architectural concepts and theories in their most complete and mature form. Crown Hall is a straightforward expression of construction and materiality, allowing the structure to transcend into art. Its refinement and innovation place Crown Hall among the most distinguished buildings of its age and define its importance in the history of architecture. Crown Hall was granted National Historic Landmark status in 2001 by the National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. Crown Hall was last restored in 2005 by the architects Mark Sexton and Gunny Harboe, who led the multimillion dollar restoration project of this landmark building.

Deep Learning – A Review

In recent years, tech giants in various parts are showing Curiosity on Artificial Intelligence by investment on the project that can be a game-changer for both corporate and researchers. A company such as Google, Baidu, and Yandex have already started their multimillion-dollar project in this pitch. This article presents the latest progress and also tries to paint a predictive picture of future research directions and developments in the domain of deep learning. Each of the said research directions and avenues is analyzed and summarized in a brief yet concise manner in this article. Initially, an outline of the three elementary models of deep learning that including multilayer perceptions and perceptrons, convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks. Building on the bases of foundation, further analyses of the emerging new types of convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks are also undertaken in this current study. This article then summarizes deep learning and its applications in the domain of artificial intelligence, counting speech processing, computer vision, and natural language processing. Finally, the purpose of deep learning is discussed. The current article also delves a little deeper into the inner workings of the neural networking architecture associated with object detection and computer vision.

Humanities Fiction: Translation and ‘Transplanetarity’ in Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival

Abstract One of the more interesting science fiction movies of recent years, at least to Humanities academics, is Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 alien-invasion movie, Arrival. It is a film which not only features a Professor of Linguistics as its heroine, but the plot of which is organised around the critical global importance of a multi-million dollar translation project. This essay compares the film with the original novella upon which it was based – Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (1998) – to examine the role translation plays in both, with the aim of placing this in the context of the crisis in the Humanities which has marked universities over the last few years, and can be linked to a more general crisis in liberal values. While founded upon a time-honoured science fiction scenario the movie also clearly articulates the sense of global peril which is typical of much of the cultural production of our current times, manifested in fears about ecological catastrophe, terrorist attacks, and the anthropocene, etc. Another of its crisis-points is also ‘very 2016’: its ability to use science fiction tropes to express an anxiety about how liberal values are in danger of being overtaken by a self-interested, forceful, intolerant kind of politics. Arrival is as much a work of ‘hu-fi’ as it is ‘sci-fi’, that is, ‘Humanities fiction’, a film which uses Chiang’s original novella to convey a message about the restorative potential of ‘Humanities values’ in the face of a new global threat.

Effective ESCO Project Management

ABSTRACTCongratulations! The performance contracting opportunity you have been working on for the past 6–12 months has finally been negotiated and awarded. Now it's time to perform for your company and the customer. As the energy service company (ESCO) project manager in charge of this project, you have a tremendous opportunity to make money for your company, enhance your career, save your customer a lot of energy and dollars, build an enduring and mutually beneficial relationship with that customer and lay the groundwork for future performance contracts with this and other customers. To do this, you must now manage this multimillion dollar project. You can do it, but your solid engineering skills that have served you so well up to the present must now share the spotlight with your professional project management skills. You need to think like a manager—the person who has to make it all happen. You must now manage the financial, technical and schedule performance of the project in a manner that satisfies ...

Delegation and Judicial Review

One of the subthemes in the delegation debate concerns the importance of judicial review. Supreme Court has often upheld broad delegations to administrative actors and in so doing has pointed out that judicial review is available to safeguard citizens from the abuse of unconstrained government power. (1) Broad delegations of power to executive actors are constitutionally permissible, the Court has suggested, in significant part because courts stand ready to assure citizens that the executive will discharge its discretion in a manner consistent with Congress's mandate and in a fashion that otherwise satisfies the requirements of reasoned decision making. (2) Administrative law professors have underscored this point. Professor Kenneth Culp Davis, in his inimitable style, took the theme to the utmost extreme. He argued that what is really significant about the nondelegation doctrine is not that Congress must provide an intelligible principle, but that judicial review is available to make sure that administrative agencies follow the principle. (3) What matters is that someone, somewhere, supplies a standard for the exercise of administrative discretion and that the courts can enforce this standard. (4) It does not really matter where the standard comes from. Congress might supply it, but so too might an agency or even a court. important thing is to have some standard to control discretion, plus judicial review. Court rejected this particular idea in Whitman v. American Trucking Associations. (5) Justice Scalia, writing for the Court, dismissed as internally contradictory the notion that an agency could cure a nondelegation problem by adopting a self-limiting standard. (6) As he explained: The very choice of which portion of the power to exercise--that is to say, the prescription of the standard that Congress had omitted--would itself be an exercise of the forbidden legislative authority. (7) What has been less noticed about American Trucking is that the Court, having interred the self-limiting-standards idea, also omitted the ritual bow to judicial review as an important safeguard against abuses of broad delegations. To be sure, the Court reaffirmed that the question whether a statute violates the nondelegation doctrine is for the courts to decide. (8) And the Court engaged in vigorous judicial review of the agency decision that triggered the nondelegation challenge, holding that the agency's decision was unreasonable. (9) But neither Justice Scalia nor any of the concurring Justices said that the availability of judicial review was itself a relevant element in resolving the delegation challenge. Which leads to my topic: What is the role of judicial review in determining the constitutionality of broad delegations of power in a world in which the intelligible principle doctrine is, for practical purposes, dead? To make this question concrete, let me describe a petition for certiorari recently denied by the Supreme Court in County of El Paso v. Napolitano. (10) petition was filed in December 2008 by the Yale Law School Supreme Court Clinic, of which I am currently a supervisor. Court denied certiorari on June 15, 2009, (11) after the conference relisted the petition seven times. (12) As is usual, the Court gave no explanation for the denial. petition challenged an amendment to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), (13) which instructs the Secretary of Homeland Security to build a barrier fence along portions of the border between Mexico and the United States to help control illegal entry into the United States. (14) Congress sought to assure that the fence was built as quickly as possible and, in particular, that this multimillion dollar construction project would not become bogged down in litigation. To achieve this objective, Congress amended IIRIRA in 2005. (15) amended statute, in Section 102(c), delegates authority to the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive all legal requirements such Secretary, in such Secretary's sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of [the fence]. …

Contributors

Contributors

Risky Trust: How Multi-Entity Teams Develop Trust in a High Risk Endeavor

This paper explicates the challenge of risky trust, which we define as trust that exists between parties vulnerable to high economic, legal or reputational risks at individual or organizational levels. Drawing from analyses of data collected in a grounded case study of a multi-million dollar construction project, we identify dimensions, antecedents and behavioral consequences of risky trust. Undertaken in the United States construction industry, a context known for its lack of trust, our study offers insights for trust repair.

Developing Trust In Virtual Software Development Teams

Today globally distributed software development has become the norm for many organizations and the popularity of implementing such an approach continues to increase. In these circumstances a strategy often employed is the use of virtual software development teams. Due to the collaborative nature of software development this has proved a difficult and complex endeavor. Research has identified distance in its various forms as an important factor which negatively impacts on global software development and on virtual software team operation in particular. In this context, the aspects of distance have been defined as temporal, geographical, cultural and linguistic. A key element for the success of any team based project is the development of trust and cooperation. Each aspect of distance can negatively impact on the development of trust and hamper cooperation particularly in the virtual team environment. An additional factor which this research identified is the importance and negative impact fear plays. The serious implications of these factors are due to the need for dependence on asynchronous and online communication which is inherent to global software development and the operation of virtual software teams in particular. The findings presented here are the results from four independent studies undertaken over a twelve year period which consider each of these issues. Having identified the problems associated with trust and communication, how these issues were successfully addressed and managed on a multimillion dollar project which was heading for failure is outlined.

Negotiating new visions: An interview with Anthony Shelton by Gustaaf Houtman

In his interview, Anthony Shelton reflects on his past 25 years working in museums and universities and the changing relationship between anthropology and ethnographic exhibitions and museum practices. Shelton talks about the field of critical museology which he has theorized and set out over many years and which stands as a substantial critique of conventional museum practice, and answers questions about the emergence and potential of new radical approaches to the exhibition of indigenous cultures as exemplified by the UBC Museum of Anthropology's multi‐million dollar project, ‘A Partnership of Peoples’ which is due to open in January of 2010.

ThermoEnergy awarded a multi-million dollar water project by URS

ThermoEnergy awarded a multi-million dollar water project by URS

Heavy duty pumps help to lay the foundations for a new bridge in the U.S.

A massive multi-million dollar project is underway in and around Washington, D.C., in the USA, to expand the area's road and transport facilities. The so-called beltway project encompasses much of the suburban region of the capital and is intended to ease the transit of millions of commuters in and out of the city. As part of this project a new 12-lane bridge will replace the existing Woodrow Wilson Bridge that currently spans the Potomac River. A pair of heavy duty pumps were needed during the foundation stage of the construction process to ensure that no water leaked into the cofferdams and to ensure strong foundations in the difficult marine environment.

Iraq Marshland Restoration Begins

A multi-million dollar project to restore the marshlands of southern Iraq, funded by the government of Japan and implemented by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), could provide a lifeline for the region's vanishing wildlife. Mesopotamian marsh? lands covering southern Iraq and a small area of south-west Iran are home to a number of threatened bird species and provide a stop-over for many migrating birds. According to UNEP, the marshes have been reduced to 7% of their original size as a result of massive drainage opera? tions by the previous Iraqi regime and dam construction on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq, neighboring Syria, and Turkey in the late 20th century. The Mesopotamian marshes were once one of the biggest wetland areas in the world, covering 20 000 km2, Basra reed-warbler recently design ted as endangered.

Sediment and Metals Modeling in Shallow River

It is a challenge to apply coupled hydrodynamic, sediment process, and contaminant fate and transport models to the studies of surface water systems. So far, there are few published modeling studies on sediment and metal transport in rivers that simulate storm events on an hourly basis and use comprehensive data sets for model input and model calibration. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) in 1997 emphasized the need for credible modeling tools that can be used to quantitatively evaluate the impacts of point sources, nonpoint sources, and internal transport processes in 1D/2D/3D environments. A 1D and time-dependent hydrodynamic, sediment, and toxic model, within the framework of the 3D Environmental Fluid Dynamics Code (EFDC), has been developed and applied to Blackstone River, Mass. The Blackstone River Initiative (USEPA) in 1996, a multiyear and multimillion-dollar project, provided the most comprehensive surveys on water quality, sediment, and heavy metals in the river, and served as the primary data set for this study. The model simulates three storm events successfully. The river flow rates are well calculated both in amplitude and in phase. The sediment transport and resuspension processes are depicted satisfactorily. The concentrations of sediment and five metals (cadmium, chromium, copper, nickel, and lead) during the three storm events are also simulated very well. Numerical analyses are conducted to clarify the impacts of contaminant sources and sediment resuspension processes on the river. While point sources are important to sediment contamination in the river, other sources, including nonpoint sources from watershed and bed resuspension, were found to contribute significantly to the sediment and metals in the river. Point sources alone cannot account for the total metals in the river. The model presented in this paper can be a useful tool for studying sediment and metals transport in shallow rivers and for water resource management.

Overview of a Large-Scale Bioremediation Soil Treatment Project

How long does it take to remediate 290,000 yd{sup 3} of impacted soil containing an average total petroleum hydrocarbon concentration of 3,000 ppm Approximately 15 months from start to end of treatment using bioremediation. Mittelhauser was retained by the seller of the property (a major oil company) as technical manager to supervise remediation of a 45-ac parcel in the Los Angeles basin. Mittelhauser completed site characterization, negotiated clean-up levels with the regulatory agencies, and prepared the remedial action plan (RAP) with which the treatment approach was approved and permitted. The RAP outlined the excavation, treatment, and recompaction procedures for the impacted soil resulting from leakage of bunker fuel oil from a large surface impoundment. The impacted soil was treated on site in unline Land Treatment Units (LTUs) in 18-in.-thick lifts. Due to space restraints, multiple lifts site. The native microbial population was cultivated using soil stabilization mixing equipment with the application of water and agricultural grade fertilizers. Costs on this multimillion dollar project are broken down as follows: general contractor cost (47%), bioremediation subcontractor cost (35%), site characterization (10%), technical management (7%), analytical services (3%), RAP preparation and permitting (1%), and civil engineering subcontractor cost (1%). Start-up of field workmore » could have been severely impacted by the existence of Red Fox habitation. The foxes were successfully relocated prior to start of field work.« less

The Esso-Bernicia Oil Spill, Shetland, 1978-79: Experiences and Lessons

About 200 tons of Bunker C fuel oil escaped from a ruptured tank in a berthing incident in the winter of 1978-79. The worst weather conditions in a decade and failure of equipment led to widespread environmental damage. Local crofters also suffered some loss of sheep through oiling and subsequent drowning (sheep graze backshore beach areas of Shetland). The environmental response to the experiences of this accident produced reinforcement of baseline and operational monitoring of the physical and biological environments. SOTEAG (the Shetland Oil Terminal Environmental Group - a committee set up and funded jointly by industry (the terminal and pipeline operators) and Shetland Island Council and including the Port of Sullom Voe Harbour Authority) also commissioned special surveys to investigate other claims of environmental damage. At a managerial level, links between the Sullom Voe Oil Spills Advisory Committee (SVOSAC) and SOTEAG were reinforced. To prevent any recurrence of the widespread damage caused by 'Bernicia' a multimillion dollar engineering project was completed to build permanent spill booms to intercept oil moving along the coast at strategic points and to boom-off environmentally sensitive areas. Oil spill response equipment and deployment capacity were also increased substantially. Although not related directly to 'Bernicia,'more » other improvements over the last decade have included an 'area of avoidance' for the prescribed westerly, Atlantic, tanker approach to the terminal (effectively at least 10 mi away from land), aerial and video inspection of all inbound tankers, and the introduction of legislation relating to the amount and quality of ballast water.« less

Human Factors in System Development: Project Team Approaches & Recommendations

Approaches to large scale Electronic Data Processing (EDP) projects can vary considerably from one organization to the next. Success of the project depends to a large degree, upon the effectiveness of the philosophy and of the approach taken by one organization. The present paper reviews the philosophy and methods used by an AT&T project team to complete a successful multi-million dollar EDP project. The paper shows the importance of and the role played by the Human Factors Engineer on this project.