CONSTRUCTION PROFESSIONALS’ PERCEPTION OF A WEB-BASED RECRUITING SYSTEM FOR SKILLED LABOUR

Globally, the construction industry is experiencing shortage of skilled labour to handle most of its construction projects. There is the need to develop a two-way collaborative technology that adequately connects the available skilled labour to the construction projects where they are needed and vice versa in order to reduce the shortage. By harnessing the strength of web-based technologies, this study intended to evaluate construction professionals’ perception of a web-based recruiting system for skilled labour. The study developed a web-based recruiting system using CSS, HTML, Javascript and MyQSL. System block design and a use case diagram was used to model the web-based systems which are presented in screen shots in this study. A total of one hundred (100) structured questionnaires were distributed to construction professionals in the attitudinal survey on the developed web-based system. The data obtained was analysed and presented using SPSS v21. Statistical tools such as stacked bars, mean score, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Kruskall Wallis test were utilized. Based on the designed web-based platform, the study revealed that in recruiting skilled labour for construction projects, construction professional are mostly concerned with having the sufficient number of skilled labour which are readily available to the site location, properly screened and obtained through a low-cost recruiting process in order to improve their competitive advantage in the construction industry. The study identified lack of knowledge about using a web-based system, low IT training among skilled labour and inaccurate information supplied by worker as major drawbacks to using a web-based system for sourcing for skilled labour. The study revealed that there was a statistically significant difference in the drawbacks to the use of web-based recruiting system for sourcing for skilled labour among the construction professionals. The study recommended that there is need to increase ICT trainings among construction professionals and its ancillary stakeholders in order to utilize new innovative ICT tools in the construction industry. Innovative ICT tools can be used to complement traditional methods in use in the construction industry so as to enhance the delivery of construction projects

Electronic Recruiting (E-Recruiting) Strategy and Corporate Adoption in Nigeria

The paper examines Electronic Recruiting (e-recruiting) Strategy and Corporate adoption in Nigeria. The objective of this paper is to empirically investigate the successes associated with adopting electronic recruiting strategy by corporations in Nigeria since many corporations have not adopted or accepted this form of strategy. The paper adopts the documentary and survey methods. The statistical tool adopted for this paper adopts Spearman Rank Order Correlation Coefficient and the Pearson Product Moment Correlation with the aid of statistical package for social sciences. The paper finds that there is a significant relationship between website design and relative advantage; significant relationship between web design and complexity on corporate adoption in Nigeria, and that trust indicated an influence on the relationship between E-recruitment strategy and Corporate adoption in Nigeria. The paper recommends amongst others: improvement of service delivery to achieve efficient and effective web-based, e-recruiting; effective base for data-ware houses; the recruiting website should be interactive, pleasing and user-friendly. The paper suggests that further studies should be carried on diffusion study of e-recruiting to identify the underlying determinants of the level of acceptance of this technology by corporations in Nigeria. Keywords: E-recruiting, Corporate adoption, Website design, relative advantage, Complexity, Information Technology, Trust on Systems Security

Semantic Matchmaking as Non-Monotonic Reasoning: A Description Logic Approach

Matchmaking arises when supply and demand meet in an electronic marketplace, or when agents search for a web service to perform some task, or even when recruiting agencies match curricula and job profiles. In such open environments, the objective of a matchmaking process is to discover best available offers to a given request. We address the problem of matchmaking from a knowledge representation perspective, with a formalization based on Description Logics. We devise Concept Abduction and Concept Contraction as non-monotonic inferences in Description Logics suitable for modeling matchmaking in a logical framework, and prove some related complexity results. We also present reasonable algorithms for semantic matchmaking based on the devised inferences, and prove that they obey to some commonsense properties. Finally, we report on the implementation of the proposed matchmaking framework, which has been used both as a mediator in e-marketplaces and for semantic web services discovery

Randomised controlled feasibility trial of a web-based weight management intervention with nurse support for obese patients in primary care

<b>Background</b><p></p> There is a need for cost-effective weight management interventions that primary care can deliver to reduce the morbidity caused by obesity. Automated web-based interventions might provide a solution, but evidence suggests that they may be ineffective without additional human support. The main aim of this study was to carry out a feasibility trial of a web-based weight management intervention in primary care, comparing different levels of nurse support, to determine the optimal combination of web-based and personal support to be tested in a full trial.<p></p> <b>Methods</b><p></p> This was an individually randomised four arm parallel non-blinded trial, recruiting obese patients in primary care. Following online registration, patients were randomly allocated by the automated intervention to either usual care, the web-based intervention only, or the web-based intervention with either basic nurse support (3 sessions in 3 months) or regular nurse support (7 sessions in 6 months). The main outcome measure (intended as the primary outcome for the main trial) was weight loss in kg at 12 months. As this was a feasibility trial no statistical analyses were carried out, but we present means, confidence intervals and effect sizes for weight loss in each group, uptake and retention, and completion of intervention components and outcome measures.<p></p> <b>Results</b><p></p> All randomised patients were included in the weight loss analyses (using Last Observation Carried Forward). At 12 months mean weight loss was: usual care group (n = 43) 2.44 kg; web-based only group (n = 45) 2.30 kg; basic nurse support group (n = 44) 4.31 kg; regular nurse support group (n = 47) 2.50 kg. Intervention effect sizes compared with usual care were: d = 0.01 web-based; d = 0.34 basic nurse support; d = 0.02 regular nurse support. Two practices deviated from protocol by providing considerable weight management support to their usual care patients.<p></p> <b>Conclusions</b><p></p> This study demonstrated the feasibility of delivering a web-based weight management intervention supported by practice nurses in primary care, and suggests that the combination of the web-based intervention with basic nurse support could provide an effective solution to weight management support in a primary care context

XTribe: a web-based social computation platform

In the last few years the Web has progressively acquired the status of an infrastructure for social computation that allows researchers to coordinate the cognitive abilities of human agents in on-line communities so to steer the collective user activity towards predefined goals. This general trend is also triggering the adoption of web-games as a very interesting laboratory to run experiments in the social sciences and whenever the contribution of human beings is crucially required for research purposes. Nowadays, while the number of on-line users has been steadily growing, there is still a need of systematization in the approach to the web as a laboratory. In this paper we present Experimental Tribe (XTribe in short), a novel general purpose web-based platform for web-gaming and social computation. Ready to use and already operational, XTribe aims at drastically reducing the effort required to develop and run web experiments. XTribe has been designed to speed up the implementation of those general aspects of web experiments that are independent of the specific experiment content. For example, XTribe takes care of user management by handling their registration and profiles and in case of multi-player games, it provides the necessary user grouping functionalities. XTribe also provides communication facilities to easily achieve both bidirectional and asynchronous communication. From a practical point of view, researchers are left with the only task of designing and implementing the game interface and logic of their experiment, on which they maintain full control. Moreover, XTribe acts as a repository of different scientific experiments, thus realizing a sort of showcase that stimulates users' curiosity, enhances their participation, and helps researchers in recruiting volunteers.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, 2013 Third International Conference on Cloud and Green Computing (CGC), Sept. 30 2013-Oct. 2 2013, Karlsruhe, German

Large-Scale Microtask Programming

To make microtask programming more efficient and reduce the potential for conflicts between contributors, I developed a new behavior-driven approach to microtasking programming. In our approach, each microtask asks developers to identify a behavior behavior from a high-level description of a function, implement a unit test for it, implement the behavior, and debug it. It enables developers to work on functions in isolation through high-level function descriptions and stubs. In addition, I developed the first approach for building microservices through microtasks. Building microservices through microtasks is a good match because our approach requires a client to first specify the functionality the crowd will create through an API. This API can then take the form of a microservice description. A traditional project may ask a crowd to implement a new microservice by simply describing the desired behavior in a API and recruiting a crowd. We implemented our approach in a web-based IDE, \textit{Crowd Microservices}. It includes an editor for clients to describe the system requirements through endpoint descriptions as well as a web-based programming environment where crowd workers can identify, test, implement, and debug behaviors. The system automatically creates, manages, assigns microtasks. After the crowd finishes, the system automatically deploys the microservice to a hosting site.Comment: 2 page, 1 figure, GC VL/HCC 2020, Graduate Consortiu

Facebook digital traces for survey research: Assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of a Facebook ad–based procedure for recruiting online survey respondents in niche and difficult-to-reach populations

Survey-based studies are increasingly experimenting with strategies that employ digital footprints left by users on social media as entry points for recruiting participants and complementary data sources. In this perspective, the Facebook advertising platform provides unique opportunities and challenges through its marketing tools that target advertisements based on users’ demographics, behaviors, and interests. This article presents a procedure that employed the most recent developments in Facebook marketing tools to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of an innovative method for recruiting niche and traditionally hard-to-reach respondents. Although the multiple innovations introduced in the method hinder a proper comparison with previous studies, the survey provides evidence concerning the efficacy of the procedure and offers scholars a set of implementations to design future comparable Facebook ad–based surveys. Challenges, opportunities, and results for effectiveness are discussed in light of a previous survey on Italian adults carried out with a panel-based computer-assisted web interviewing method

XML Based Online Resume Bank

Web-based recruiting site brings employers and employees together in a simple and accessible way, helping make the recruiting process more transparent for all involved. For job hunters, it is as simple as uploading a copy of their resumes to one of these sites which maintain enormous databases of resumes for potential employers to search by keyword. With effective interoperability, XML is emerging as an important meta-language in electronic commerce. This project applies the characteristics of XML to construct a meta-language for job application resume. The meta-language is intended as a common file format for staffing exchange in Malaysia. Apart from the meta-language, an XML based Online Resume Bank prototype has also been developed. It allows users to save, retrieve and query the resume information stored in the XML file

Web-Based VR Experiments Powered by the Crowd

We build on the increasing availability of Virtual Reality (VR) devices and Web technologies to conduct behavioral experiments in VR using crowdsourcing techniques. A new recruiting and validation method allows us to create a panel of eligible experiment participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Using this panel, we ran three different crowdsourced VR experiments, each reproducing one of three VR illusions: place illusion, embodiment illusion, and plausibility illusion. Our experience and worker feedback on these experiments show that conducting Web-based VR experiments using crowdsourcing is already feasible, though some challenges---including scale---remain. Such crowdsourced VR experiments on the Web have the potential to finally support replicable VR experiments with diverse populations at a low cost.Comment: The Web Conference 2018 (WWW 2018); update citation forma

Effect of folic acid supplementation in pregnancy on preeclampsia: The folic acid clinical trial study

Copyright © 2013 Shi Wu Wen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Preeclampsia (PE) is hypertension with proteinuria that develops during pregnancy and affects at least 5% of pregnancies. The Effect of Folic Acid Supplementation in Pregnancy on Preeclampsia: the Folic Acid Clinical Trial (FACT) aims to recruit 3,656 high risk women to evaluate a new prevention strategy for PE: supplementation of folic acid throughout pregnancy. Pregnant women with increased risk of developing PE presenting to a trial participating center between 80/7 and 166/7 weeks of gestation are randomized in a 1: 1 ratio to folic acid 4.0 mg or placebo after written consent is obtained. Intent-to-treat population will be analyzed. The FACT study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research in 2009, and regulatory approval from Health Canada was obtained in 2010. A web-based randomization system and electronic data collection system provide the platform for participating centers to randomize their eligible participants and enter data in real time. To date we have twenty participating Canadian centers, of which eighteen are actively recruiting, and seven participating Australian centers, of which two are actively recruiting. Recruitment in Argentina, UK, Netherlands, Brazil, West Indies, and United States is expected to begin by the second or third quarter of 2013. This trial is registered with NCT01355159. © 2013 Shi Wu Wen et al.The Canadian Institutes of Healt