Conceptualising public-private partnerships: a critical appraisal of approaches to meanings and forms

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to survey various meanings attached to a public-private partnership (PPP) and related aspects in Western literature, and identify commonalities and differences between them. Additionally, the article intends to critically assess conflicting and overlapping views on contractual and institutional PPPs, their forms and models, and draw insights for transitional economies. Design/methodology/approach – The article contrasts and compares views on PPP meanings, forms and models within Western PPP literature, and also draws comparisons with understanding of partnership aspects in the Russian language sources. The paper examines theories underpinning PPPs, builds connections to PPP advantages and drawbacks, and provides critical assessment of net benefits that PPPs may bring along to the society. Findings – The article concludes that future PPP research in transitional countries such as Kazakhstan and Russia, particularly in the area of organisational and power arrangements in partnerships, may delineate new concepts such as government as a guarantor of a PPP project, social significance of a PPP project, and risk management in a country’s contextual environment. Practical implications – In transitional countries, in which PPPs are in their infancy, clarification of theoretical positions, and identification of commonalities and differences between meanings attached to the PPP terminology may enable better decisions by researchers and practitioners in their selection and further development of partnerships and related concepts. Originality/value – Research in the field of PPPs in transitional countries such as Russia and Kazakhstan is in its infancy. The paper intends to contribute to the body of knowledge about PPPs by providing detailed account and categorisation of their principal meanings, forms, models, underpinning theories, and drawing insights for future research in transitional countries.

Using multiple GPUs to accelerate string searching for digital forensic analysis

String searching within a large corpus of data is an important component of digital forensic (DF) analysis techniques such as file carving. The continuing increase in capacity of consumer storage devices requires corresponding im-provements to the performance of string searching techniques. As string search-ing is a trivially-parallelisable problem, GPGPU approaches are a natural fit – but previous studies have found that local storage presents an insurmountable performance bottleneck. We show that this need not be the case with modern hardware, and demonstrate substantial performance improvements from the use of single and multiple GPUs when searching for strings within a typical forensic disk image.