1,720,957 research outputs found
Social Return on Investment as a Metric to Prioritize Use of Accelerated Bridge Construction in Rural Regions
Get PDFAccelerated Bridge Construction (ABC) techniques have a great potential to minimize the traffic disruptions during the bridge repairs/replacements, promote traffic and worker safety, and improve the overall quality of the built bridges. Despite the major advances in design and construction of ABC techniques, transportation agencies are still hesitant about using ABC techniques largely due to perceived risks during construction and higher initial costs. Furthermore, the current decision process used to prioritize the candidate bridges for this type of construction is oftentimes solely based on metrics such as the average annual daily traffic (AADT). This paper proposes to use a metric employed by the World Bank to prioritize funding for aid in developing countries: social return on investment (SROI). SROI will measure the value of investment in ABC techniques to reduce social, economic, and environmental impacts to the road network users. The Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) completed the replacement of more than 500 bridges as part of the “Safe and Sound” project using the ABC techniques. This paper considers five counties, mostly with agricultural demographics in the state of Missouri, as the case study and estimates the SROI of the utilization of ABC. The results show that SROI provides a holistic measure to incorporate the socioeconomic aspects in the prioritization of the bridges that could benefit from ABC techniques.This paper was peer-reviewed by TRB and presented at the Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board, Washington, D.C. It can be cited as: Barutha, Philip J., Ning Zhang, Alice Alipour, and Douglas D. Gransberg. "Social Return on Investment as a Metric to Prioritize Use of Accelerated Bridge Construction in Rural Regions." Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting, (2017). Posted with permission.</p
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
A framework for value for money assessment on public private partnership mega-projects
Get PDFMuch of the transportation infrastructure was built in the middle of the 20th century using traditional design-bid-build (DBB) procurement method. Public agencies advertised prescriptive construction documents composed of project plan sets and specifications to be competitively bid by private contractors where the low bidders would then build the infrastructure to the specified design. The award of the contract was based on the lowest price to complete the project to the specified design. Throughout the nation, much of the infrastructure has reached or exceeded its design life. Aging infrastructure in the United States has drawn attention from national politicians to local agencies to the public users themselves. Public transportation demands have increased since those measured in the mid-20th century and used to design the national transportation network. Hence, public agencies are now looking at ways to more effectively maintain, replace, and expand the existing road network to support local economy and road user demands. As agencies attempt to keep pace with these increasing demands, they find themselves challenged to find the necessary resources to accommodate the demand. The constraints range from identifying the necessary public funding to obtaining the required number of qualified public employees.
The private sector offers many resources that are needed by public agencies as they work to find solutions to the aforementioned challenges, including providing access to private financing. Public agencies can partner with a private organization through the use of a public private partnership (P3). P3s are contractual arrangements between the public and private to where some of the public service is provided by the private sector. P3s are becoming an attractive option for public agencies. Public agencies are stewards of public dollars and must assess the use of these public dollars are being spent bringing the best value to the communities they serve. The traditional low bid procurement method for construction of an infrastructure project is one method of demonstrating value for money (VfM) to the public as it relies on competition to ensure the best price. P3 project delivery challenges the idea that value is totally defined by minimizing project cost. P3 projects permit public agencies to extend the value calculus beyond construction completion to the development, design, operations and maintenance phases of a project as well as to gain access to private finance to cover the gaps in public funding shortfalls. Quantifying VfM across a project's life cycle requires a much more robust assessment and doing so in a manner that is both fair and transparent to both the public and potential private industry partners demands a rigorous framework that combines the qualitative and quantitative evaluation in a manner that balances project risks between the agency and the P3 concessionaire. This research detailed in this thesis proposes just such a framework for agencies to assess whether or not P3 project delivery provides better Vfm than other available project delivery options.</p
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Integrated project delivery for industrial projects
Get PDFIndustrial capital projects are risky business ventures with increasing size, uncertainty, and complexity that frequently experience growth in cost and time to deliver, and oftentimes do not achieve their desired performance results. From Merrow (2011), “65% of all industrial projects fail to meet business objectives.” The misuse of capital project funds and resources does not provide a stable foundation for sustainable business development in the industrial sector to stay competitive in the global market. The adversarial environment created from the risk shedding structure of current project delivery methods not only impedes the performance of industrial projects but can also stifle innovation and create inefficiencies in the industrial project development sector. Industrial capital project delivery has suffered from stunted growth in productivity and broad industry innovation while seeing an increase in claims and disputes for a number of years dating back to the 20th century. Integrated project delivery (IPD) in the healthcare industry in the United States and alliance contracting on public infrastructure projects in Australia and New Zealand have proven to effectively use enhanced collaboration and integration strategies and methods to bring value for money to the overall project. Using the principles of IPD and alliancing can be a way to deliver industrial projects with more active collaboration of participants and with higher levels of integration of project stakeholders to reduce the probability of failed projects and to create a better environment of innovation and efficiency leading to a more efficient use of the industry’s available resources.
The dissertation aims to contribute to the body of knowledge by evaluating the use of increased integration and collaboration by applying the principles of IPD and alliancing in the industrial capital projects sector. The results of an industry-wide survey indicate industrial projects can benefit from implementing IPD and alliancing strategies with nearly all (98%) survey participants responding that more collaboration and integration increases overall project value for money on industrial projects. Thus, the research seeks to test the hypothesis;
Increased integration and collaboration by implementing IPD and alliancing principles can lead to better project performance and increase the probability of successfully achieving its business case objectives on an industrial project.
The research findings provide evidence to suggest industrial project performance is improved by increased collaboration and integration, demonstrating that industrial projects are good candidates for an IPD delivery. The findings also provide guidance to effectively structure project delivery with the right balance of IPD and alliancing collaboration and integration principles to enhance industrial project performance and achieve important business objectives. Finally, the research will propose an IPD framework for industrial projects, defining the principles and methods, as well as their expected impact and it will also report on barriers to implementation of this delivery method on an industrial project.</p
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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