Mahmoud B. Alhasanat

Implementing total quality management (TQM) in the Palestinian construction industry

Purpose – The construction industry has been one of the most important industries for the development of the Palestinian infrastructure and economy. Total quality management (TQM) is considered one of the most important approaches to the success of construction industry. The purpose of this paper is to determine the success factors necessary for the implementation of TQM at various phases of project planning, design and construction in the Gaza Strip. Design/methodology/approach – A computer model was developed to assess the current strengths and weaknesses of each component of the construction industry, such as owner, consultant and contractor, regarding their use of quality management methodologies. Findings – The research determined a total of eight major factors and 81 sub-factors. It was identified that seven critical success factors with 38 significant sub-factors were required for the successful implementation of TQM in Gaza Strip construction organizations. Originality/value – An original assessme...

The History and Distribution of ṭāb: A Survey of Petra’s Gaming Boards

The rules and presence of the game of ṭāb have been described for only a few parts of the Near East. In recent years, occasional attestations of game boards have been found in rock surfaces corresponding with geographical locations at the outer borders of the Ottoman Empire, such as Sudan and Oman. In those locations, the game boards were differentiated from Roman gaming practices. This survey of the archaeological region of Petra in Jordan reveals an unusually large number of ṭāb playing boards carved in rock surfaces. The study presents the implications of these finds for our understanding of the game, as well as the importance of this game for the history of the region. The history and distribution of the game known as ṭāb has been linked to the expansion of Islam.1 It is almost exclusively associated with areas that are part of the Muslim world, and is not found in sub-Saharan Africa or beyond the Near East. Early references to the game are not necessarily conclusive, as they do not include playing rules, but Thierry Depaulis2 has argued that Franz Rosenthal’s3 mention of a game found in an early fourteenth century poem is a reference to ṭāb.

Victory sign biometrie for terrorists identification: Preliminary results

Covering the face and all body parts, sometimes the only evidence to identify a person is their hand geometry, and not the whole hand-only two fingers (the index and the middle fingers) while showing the victory sign, as seen in many terrorists videos. This paper investigates for the first time a new way to identify persons, particularly (terrorists) from their victory sign. We have created a new database in this regard using a mobile phone camera, imaging the victory signs of 50 different persons over two sessions. Simple measurements for the fingers, in addition to the Hu Moments for the areas of the fingers were used to extract the geometric features of the shown part of the hand shown after segmentation. The experimental results using the KNN classifier with three different distance metrics were encouraging for most of the recorded persons; with about 40% to 93% total identification accuracy, depending on the features, distance metric and K used.

Enhancing genetic algorithms using multi mutations

Mutation is one of the most important stages of the genetic algorithm because of its impact on the exploration of global optima, and to overcome premature convergence. There are many types of mutation, and the problem lies in selection of the appropriate type, where the decision becomes more difficult and needs more trial and error. This paper investigates the use of more than one mutation operator to enhance the performance of genetic algorithms. Novel mutation operators are proposed, in addition to two selection strategies for the mutation operators, one of which is based on selecting the best mutation operator and the other randomly selects any operator. Several experiments on some Travelling Salesman Problems (TSP) were conducted to evaluate the proposed methods, and these were compared to the well-known exchange mutation and rearrangement mutation. The results show the importance of some of the proposed methods, in addition to the significant enhancement of the genetic algorithms performance, particularly when using more than one mutation operator.

The Order Classes of 2-Generator

In order to classify a finite group using its elements orders, the order classes are defined. This partition determines the number of elements for each order. The aim of this paper is to find the order classes of 2-generator -groups of class 2. The results obtained here are supported by Groups, Algorithm and Programming ( GAP ).