Unpacking Ambiguity in Building Requirements to Support Automated Compliance Checking

In the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry, manual compliance checking is labor-intensive, time-consuming, expensive, and error-prone. Automated compliance checking (ACC) has been extensively studied in the past 50 years to improve the productivity and accuracy of the compliance checking process. While numerous ACC systems have been proposed, these systems can only deal with requirements that include quantitative metrics or specified properties. This leaves the remaining 53% of building requirements to be checked manually, mainly due to the ambiguity embedded in them. In the literature, little is known about the ambiguity of building requirements, which impedes their accurate interpretation and automated checking. This research thus aims to address this issue and establish a taxonomy of ambiguity. Building requirements in health building notes (HBNs) are analyzed using an inductive approach. The results show that some ambiguous clauses in building requirements reflect regulators’ intention while others are unintentional, resulting from the use of language, tacit knowledge, and ACC-specific reasons. This research is valuable for compliance-checking researchers and practitioners because it unpacks ambiguity in building requirements, laying a solid foundation for addressing ambiguity appropriately

The Corporate Purpose of Social License

This Article deploys the sociological theory of social license, or the acceptance of a business or organization by the relevant communities and stakeholders, in the context of the board of directors and corporate governance. Corporations are generally treated as “private” actors and thus are regulated by “private” corporate law. This construct allows for considerable latitude. Corporate actors are not, however, solely “private.” They are the beneficiaries of economic and political power, and the decisions they make have impacts that extend well beyond the boundaries of the entities they represent. Using Wells Fargo and Uber as case studies, this Article explores how the failure to account for the public nature of corporate actions, regardless of whether a “legal” license exists, can result in the loss of “social” license. This loss occurs through publicness, which is the interplay between inside corporate governance players and outside actors who report on, recapitulate, reframe and, in some cases, control the company’s information and public perception. The theory of social license is that businesses and other entities exist with permission from the communities in which they are located, as well as permission from the greater community and outside stakeholders. In this sense, businesses are social, not just economic, institutions and, thus, they are subject to public accountability and, at times, public control. Social license derives not from legally granted permission, but instead from the development of legitimacy, credibility, and trust within the relevant communities and stakeholders. It can prevent demonstrations, boycotts, shutdowns, negative publicity, and the increases in regulation that are a hallmark of publicness — but social license must be earned with consistent trustworthy behavior. Thus, social license is bilateral, not unilateral, and should be part of corporate strategy and a tool for risk management and managing publicness more generally. By focusing on and deploying social license and publicness in the context of board decision-making, this Article adds to the discussions in the literature from other disciplines, such as the economic theory on reputational capital, and provides boards with a set of standards with which to engage and address the publicness of the companies they represent. Discussing, weighing, and developing social license is not just in the zone of what boards can do, but is something they should do, making it a part of strategic, proactive cost-benefit decision-making. Indeed, the failure to do so can have dramatic business consequences

The Determinants of the Development of Russian Assistive Technologies Market: Analysis of Experts’ Interviews

Not all people with disabilities are provided with assistive technologies and devices (ATD) they need. The Russian researchers appeal to the development of assistive technologies, however, focus only on one specific social objective of ATD provision or on engineering, economic and production aspects of the problem. This study identifies the key determinants of the development of the assistive technologies market in Russia and trends over the next 10–15 years. We conducted a qualitative study using a grounded theory based on open and axial coding procedure. We collected data using semi-structured interviews with 12 experts recruited through snowball sampling with multiple entry points. The results show that the focus on the development of individual rehabilitation programs, individual fitting of devices, the increasing demand for measures of medical and social support for people with disabilities create conditions for the growth of demand for ATD. Changes in the paying capacity of the population, the rules of budget financing, as well as the population\u27s attitude towards the inclusion of people with disabilities in everyday activities, the labor market, education will also cause changes in demand for ATD

Age and productivity capacity: Descriptions, causes and policy options

This article reviews how work performance differs over the life cycle by describing and discussing findings from various approaches. This includes managers evaluations, the quantity and quality of goods and services produced by workers of different ages, the performance of age-mixed teams, to what extent the age distribution of employees depends on the type of work and how the age distribution changes due to technological change and business cycle shocks, analyses of employer-employee datasets, descriptions of age-earnings profiles in settings where they could reflect performance and the output of researchers and artists over the life cycle. The causes of productivity variation by age are also considered, with a particular focus on experience and cognitive abilities. The findings suggest that productivity tend to increase during the initial years in the labour market before it stabilizes and often declines towards the end of the working life. Productivity reductions at older ages are strongest in job tasks where problem solving, learning and speed are important, while for work tasks where experience and verbal abilities matter more, there is less or no reduction in productivity among elderly workers. Trends in the age-productivity relation are discussed in relation to changing work tasks and job requirements, combined with changes in the requirement of skills (decline in demand for physical strength, increase in the need to learn new skills). Policies that could be considered to raise productivity among senior workers include on-the-job training, education and promotion of health. However, a later retirement could also raise incentives to update ones own skills and work harder at older ages (which may be achieved through pension reforms and wage liberalisation). Moreover, a better agemix in the workplace, allowing older and younger individuals to benefit from their comparative advantages, is likely to improve overall productivity in ageing nations

Who Cares: Who Pays? A Report on Personalisation in Social Care

This report looks at the impact of recent moves towards personalisation of social care services and assesses their impact on providers, care recipients and gender inequalities more generally. It also provides an alternative vision for the provision of care in a more gender equal future

The social consequences of industrial accidents : disabled mine workers in Lesotho

No abstract providedGR 201

Towards A Framework for Holistic Contextual Design for Low-Resource Settings

Healthcare inequality is ubiquitous globally, but the effects are most striking in low-resource settings. In these settings, current methods for the design of medical devices are failing to address specific needs. The associated publications rarely describe how the context was studied at the front-end of design. There is a latent need for a holistic contextual framework for guiding the design decision-making process for devices in these complex contexts. We present results from a systematic literature review and expert interviews that informed the development of a framework for contextualized design for low-resource settings. The contextual factors identified are described and compared for different types of medical devices. This taxonomical framework aims to guide designers towards gaining a better understanding of the context of use when designing products for global challenges in low-resource settings.The National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) in Mexico supported this research