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Within earned value management, the cost performance index (CPI) and the critical ratio (CR) are used to generate the estimates at completion (EACs). According to the research in the 1990s, estimating the final contract’s cost at completion (CAC) using EAC_CR is a quicker predictor of the actual final cost versus using EAC_CPI. This paper aims to investigate whether this trend stills holds for modern department of defense contracts.

Accessing the Cost Assessment Data Enterprise (CADE) database, 451 contracts consisting of 863 contract line item numbers (CLINs) were initially retrieved and analyzed in three stages. The first replicated the work conducted in 1990s. The second stage entailed calculating 95 per cent confidence intervals and hypothesis tests regarding percentage accuracy of EACs for a contract’s final CAC. Lastly, regression analysis was conducted to characterize major, moderate and minor influencers on EAC reliability.

For modern contracts, EAC_CR aligns more with EAC_CPI and no longer demonstrates early accuracy of a contract’s final CAC. Contract percentage completion strongly reduced the per cent error of estimating CAC, while cost-plus-fixed-fee contracts and those with no work breakdown structure greater than Level 2 negatively affected accuracy.

To militate against optimism of early assessment of a contract's true cost.

This paper provides empirical evidence that EAC_CR behaves more like EAC_CPI with respect to modern contracts, suggesting that today’s contracts have relatively high SPI. Therefore, caution is warranted for program managers when estimating the CAC from contract initiation up to and slightly beyond the mid-point of completion.

The most common technique to determine the predicted final cost of a Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition contract, or the Estimate at Completion (EAC), involves the use of performance indices to adjust the EAC. Other methods including simple linear regression and time series analysis have been developed to predict the final cost, but these methods are not widely publicized or have limited applicability. As a potential remedy, this research utilizes the historical contract data reported in the Defense Acquisition Executive Summary database and provides to the analyst a set of five working multiple regression models. Useful over the life of the contract, they accurately predict the final cost of the average major weapons system contract using contractor Cost Performance Report data.

This article outlines the work of close supervision centres within the prison services. The work outlines the development of such centres and how they currently manage those prisoners considered to be highly dangerous. The author illustrates how the role of the forensic psychiatric nurse in such a setting contributes to the assessment and management of severe personality disorder among such prisoners, and how the use of evidence based practice can enhance care of this client group.

Purpose – This chapter explores which factors women see as limiting their ability to achieve preferred traditional and egalitarian gender roles.Design/methodology/approach – Data from 25 in-depth interviews and questionnaires with Black and White wives in same-race and interracial Black/White marriages are used. Analysis relies on an intersectional framework to illustrate how gendered power, race, and resources create obstacles in realizing gender ideology.Findings – Wives who were unable to fulfill egalitarian ideals faced gendered power issues. Wives who desired “traditional” gender roles encountered structural limitations related to class position and racial discrimination in the workplace.Research limitations – This study is limited to the perspectives of Black and White women living in the Atlanta, GA metropolitan area. Future research should look further at how socialization that gives men greater power than women affects intimate relationships while taking into account how the experiences of gender are influenced by other aspects of status, including class, race, and location.Originality/value – Findings from this study add to sociological knowledge of gender by conveying the intersectional nature of race, class, and gender in the family and by further illustrating the importance of applying theories of intersectionality to empirical research in this area.

The Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act (WSARA) was enacted in 2009 to improve Department of Defense public procurement processes and limit cost overruns in major acquisition programs.

Seven years later, the authors investigate the effects of WSARA on cost overruns for major Air Force acquisition programs and then conduct an exploratory case study specifically targeting WSARA impacts on the Operations and Support phase of a program’s life cycle.

The authors find that while there are some positive impacts on cost overruns in limited areas, the majority of the models demonstrate either no statistically significant effect from WSARA or an increase in cost overruns post implementation.

These findings are consistent with much of the literature on the historical ineffectiveness of previous acquisition reforms to ameliorate cost overruns.

AFTER the trenchant paper by Mr. A. O. Jennings, read at the Brighton meeting of the Library Association, and the very embarrassing resolution which was carried as a result, one can only approach the subject of the commonplace in fiction with fear and diffidence. It is generally considered a bold and dangerous thing to fly in the face of corporate opinion as expressed in solemn public resolutions, and when the weighty minds of librarianship have declared that novels must only be chosen on account of their literary, educational or moral qualities, one is almost reduced to a state of mental imbecility in trying to fathom the meaning and limits of such an astounding injunction. To begin with, every novel or tale, even if but a shilling Sunday‐school story of the Candle lighted by the Lord type is educational, inasmuch as something, however little, may be learnt from it. If, therefore, the word “educational” is taken to mean teaching, it will be found impossible to exclude any kind of fiction, because even the meanest novel can teach readers something they never knew before. The novels of Emma Jane Worboise and Mrs. Henry Wood would no doubt be banned as unliterary and uneducational by those apostles of the higher culture who would fain compel the British washerwoman to read Meredith instead of Rosa Carey, but to thousands of readers such books are both informing and recreative. A Scots or Irish reader unacquainted with life in English cathedral cities and the general religious life of England would find a mine of suggestive information in the novels of Worboise, Wood, Oliphant and many others. In similar fashion the stories of Annie Swan, the Findlaters, Miss Keddie, Miss Heddle, etc., are educational in every sense for the information they convey to English or American readers about Scots country, college, church and humble life. Yet these useful tales, because lacking in the elusive and mysterious quality of being highly “literary,” would not be allowed in a Public Library managed by a committee which had adopted the Brighton resolution, and felt able to “smell out” a high‐class literary, educational and moral novel on the spot. The “moral” novel is difficult to define, but one may assume it will be one which ends with a marriage or a death rather than with a birth ! There have been so many obstetrical novels published recently, in which doubtful parentage plays a chief part, that sexual morality has come to be recognized as the only kind of “moral” factor to be regarded by the modern fiction censor. Objection does not seem to be directed against novels which describe, and indirectly teach, financial immorality, or which libel public institutions—like municipal libraries, for example. There is nothing immoral, apparently, about spreading untruths about religious organizations or political and social ideals, but a novel which in any way suggests the employment of a midwife before certain ceremonial formalities have been executed at once becomes immoral in the eyes of every self‐elected censor. And it is extraordinary how opinion differs in regard to what constitutes an immoral or improper novel. From my own experience I quote two examples. One reader objected to Morrison's Tales of Mean Streets on the ground that the frequent use of the word “bloody” made it immoral and unfit for circulation. Another reader, of somewhat narrow views, who had not read a great deal, was absolutely horrified that such a painfully indecent book as Adam Bede should be provided out of the public rates for the destruction of the morals of youths and maidens!