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The briefing stage is of utmost importance to public private partnership (PPP) projects as it conveys the major message regarding what stakeholders need. However, stakeholders' needs are not often stated clearly at the briefing stage. In considering this, the current paper aimed at analyzing the key stakeholders' needs that should be known by project participants. Eighteen factors related to stakeholders' needs were identified based on literature and interviews. The importance of these factors was rated using a questionnaire survey in Hong Kong. Also, it was expected that some background This is the Pre-Published Version.variables should be taken into account when rating these factors. Therefore, other than using simple rating methods, a custom-made weighted ranking method was developed, which could enable an estimation of the weighted importance of stakeholder-related factors. In this research, four background variables were identified and their effects on the aspects such as type and nature of a PPP project, role in a PPP project, and experience working in a PPP project were examined. In order to group the factors, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted and four dimensions were extracted. The relationship of these dimensions with the four background variables were then tested by means of either t-test or ANOVA. Results indicate that the four background variables were important in ranking the aspects. After incorporating the effect of the four background variables, the weighted importance of the 18 factors was analyzed with the weighted ranking method.Finally, discussion about the rank order of the factors is provided.

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The past few years have been an exciting period in the field of the structure of retinal proteins, especially the visual pigments, A significant achievement is the 9 A projection map of bovine rhodopsin. This not only provides knowledge of the three-dimensional structure of visual pigments, but also establishes a more reliable basis for the structural modeling of all the G-protein-coupled receptors, The modeling of such three-dimensional structures will eventually lead to a better understanding of the function of visual pigments and other G-proteincoupled receptors, Our goal in this article is to draw attention to recent developments in the structure of retinal proteins, with special emphasis on visual pigments, By combining a wide range of existing experimental data with the results of theoretical calculations, a new three-dimensional structure of visual pigments, which differs from the models which have so far been reported, is proposed.

a department of civil and environmental engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-champaign, Urbana, Il, Usa; b department of Building and real estate, the Hong Kong polytechnic University, Hong Kong, china; c school of construction management and real estate, the chongqing University, chongqing, china ABSTRACT Although many studies in developed countries on the practice of EIA have been conducted, there is a lack of similar attention in Hong Kong. This gap in knowledge is addressed in this study which summarises and records the current practice and lessons learned from priority projects. In the case of Hong Kong, this lack of understanding is important, since a significant number of infrastructure projects with applications pending for environmental approvals were delayed, awaiting the court ruling of the judicial review. In this research, the EIA system and practices in Hong Kong were comprehensively reviewed by a comparison study between Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore. Then field work of interviews with professionals and focus group meetings with Green Groups were conducted to seek opinions of interviewees and members about the mechanism of EIA. Recommendations on aspects of EIA systems are provided at the end of the paper.