Forensic analysis of the disputes typology of the NSW construction industry using PLS-SEM and prospective trend analysis

Project claim management is the central pillar of the overlapping areas of contract administration, contract law and building regulations. Delays caused by inefficiency of the procedures designed to avoid disputes emerge at the pre-project phase and continue during construction. The quantum of research addressing this issue is not immediately transferrable between jurisdictions, mainly due to local specificity of construction practices, contract and construction laws, as well as clients’ preferences. The primary aim of this study is to identify the underlying causes of disputes that have arisen in the NSW construction industry in the past two decades and to analyze the inter-relationships between the causes. To achieve this purpose, PLS-SEM quantitative models were utilized to study different factors influencing disputes. Through a detailed quantitative analysis of 230 cases, based on dispute frequencies, causes and effect analysis and the resultant loop cause diagrams, the dispute triggers, types, and root causes have been analyzed as the basis for developing a model to predict the future likelihood of disputes. Finally, 13 causes of disputes have been recognized as the main causal factors in the construction projects in NSW. This study also has shown that payment and reimbursement-related disputes are the most frequent in NSW construction, except for the last two years

Can the European Community Afford to Neglect the Need for More Accountable Safety-Net Management?

As financial institutions and markets transact more and more cross-border business, gaps and flaws in national safety nets become more consequential. Because citizens of host (home) countries may be made to pay for mistakes made in the home (host) country, Basel's lead-regulator paradigm violates the principle of democratic accountability. Because important differences exist in policymaking authority, instruments, and goals, banking supervisors need to improve their ability to monitor and mitigate the consequences of defects in one another's performance. A straightforward way to enhance both capacities would be to establish opportunities for public trading in debt obligations and reinsurance derivatives issued by country-level deposit-insurance entities.

The Real Conflict Between Science and Religion: Alvin Plantinga’s Ignoratio Elenchi

By focussing on the logical relations between scientific theories and religious beliefs in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies, Alvin Plantinga overlooks the real conflict between science and religion. This conflict exists whenever religious believers endorse positive factual claims to truth concerning the supernatural. They thereby violate an important rule of scientific method and of common sense, according to which factual claims should be endorsed as true only if they result from validated epistemic methods or sources

An IR-based Approach Towards Automated Integration of Geo-spatial Datasets in Map-based Software Systems

Data is arguably the most valuable asset of the modern world. In this era, the success of any data-intensive solution relies on the quality of data that drives it. Among vast amount of data that are captured, managed, and analyzed everyday, geospatial data are one of the most interesting class of data that hold geographical information of real-world phenomena and can be visualized as digital maps. Geo-spatial data is the source of many enterprise solutions that provide local information and insights. In order to increase the quality of such solutions, companies continuously aggregate geospatial datasets from various sources. However, lack of a global standard model for geospatial datasets makes the task of merging and integrating datasets difficult and error-prone. Traditionally, domain experts manually validate the data integration process by merging new data sources and/or new versions of previous data against conflicts and other requirement violations. However, this approach is not scalable and is hinder toward rapid release, when dealing with frequently changing big datasets. Thus more automated approaches with limited interaction with domain experts is required. As a first step to tackle this problem, in this paper, we leverage Information Retrieval (IR) and geospatial search techniques to propose a systematic and automated conflict identification approach. To evaluate our approach, we conduct a case study in which we measure the accuracy of our approach in several real-world scenarios and we interview with software developers at Localintel Inc. (our industry partner) to get their feedbacks.Comment: ESEC/FSE 2019 - Industry trac

The Conflict Notion and its Static Detection: a Formal Survey

The notion of policy is widely used to enable a flexible control of many systems: access control, privacy, accountability, data base, service, contract , network configuration, and so on. One important feature is to be able to check these policies against contradictions before the enforcement step. This is the problem of the conflict detection which can be done at different steps and with different approaches. This paper presents a review of the principles for conflict detection in related security policy languages. The policy languages, the notions of conflict and the means to detect conflicts are various, hence it is difficult to compare the different principles. We propose an analysis and a comparison of the five static detection principles we found in reviewing more than forty papers of the literature. To make the comparison easier we develop a logical model with four syntactic types of systems covering most of the literature examples. We provide a semantic classification of the conflict notions and thus, we are able to relate the detection principles, the syntactic types and the semantic classification. Our comparison shows the exact link between logical consistency and the conflict notions, and that some detection principles are subject to weaknesses if not used with the right conditions

ClaimChain: Improving the Security and Privacy of In-band Key Distribution for Messaging

The social demand for email end-to-end encryption is barely supported by mainstream service providers. Autocrypt is a new community-driven open specification for e-mail encryption that attempts to respond to this demand. In Autocrypt the encryption keys are attached directly to messages, and thus the encryption can be implemented by email clients without any collaboration of the providers. The decentralized nature of this in-band key distribution, however, makes it prone to man-in-the-middle attacks and can leak the social graph of users. To address this problem we introduce ClaimChain, a cryptographic construction for privacy-preserving authentication of public keys. Users store claims about their identities and keys, as well as their beliefs about others, in ClaimChains. These chains form authenticated decentralized repositories that enable users to prove the authenticity of both their keys and the keys of their contacts. ClaimChains are encrypted, and therefore protect the stored information, such as keys and contact identities, from prying eyes. At the same time, ClaimChain implements mechanisms to provide strong non-equivocation properties, discouraging malicious actors from distributing conflicting or inauthentic claims. We implemented ClaimChain and we show that it offers reasonable performance, low overhead, and authenticity guarantees.Comment: Appears in 2018 Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES'18

A communicative robot to learn about us and the world

We describe a model for a robot that learns about the world and her com-panions through natural language communication. The model supports open-domain learning, where the robot has a drive to learn about new con-cepts, new friends, and new properties of friends and concept instances. The robot tries to fill gaps, resolve uncertainties and resolve conflicts. The absorbed knowledge consists of everything people tell her, the situations and objects she perceives and whatever she finds on the web. The results of her interactions and perceptions are kept in an RDF triple store to enable reasoning over her knowledge and experiences. The robot uses a theory of mind to keep track of who said what, when and where. Accumulating knowledge results in complex states to which the robot needs to respond. In this paper, we look into two specific aspects of such complex knowl-edge states: 1) reflecting on the status of the knowledge acquired through a new notion of thoughts and 2) defining the context during which knowl-edge is acquired. Thoughts form the basis for drives on which the robot communicates. We capture episodic contexts to keep instances of objects apart across different locations, which results in differentiating the acquired knowledge over specific encounters. Both aspects make the communica-tion more dynamic and result in more initiatives by the robo