A conceptual model of psychological contracts in construction projects

© 2016 Yongjian Ke, Peter Davis and Marcus Jefferies. The strategic importance of relationship style contracting is recognised in the construction industry. Both public and private sector clients are stipulating more integrated and collaborative forms of procurement. Despite relationship and integrated contractual arrangement being available for some time, it is clear that construction firms have been slow to adopt them. Hence it is timely to examine how social exchanges, via unwritten agreement and behaviours, are being nurtured in construction projects. This paper adopted the concept of Psychological Contracts (PC) to describe unwritten agreement and behaviours. A conceptual model of the PC is developed and validated using the results from a questionnaire survey administered to construction professionals in Australia. The results uncovered the relationships that existed amongst relational conditions and relational benefits, the PC and the partners’ satisfaction. The results show that all the hypotheses in the conceptual model of the PC are supported, suggesting the PC model is important and may have an effect on project performance and relationship quality among contracting parties. A validated model of the PC in construction was then developed based on the correlations among each component. The managerial implications are that past relationships and relationship characteristics should be taken into account in the selection of procurement partners and the promise of future resources, support and tangible relational outcomes are also vital. It is important for contracting parties to pay attention to unwritten agreements (the PC) and behaviours when managing construction projects

An investigation of psychological contracts in construction procurement

Purpose: A psychological contract (PC) is an unwritten contract with mutual obligations as the central issue and it fills the gaps in a relationship and shapes employee behaviour. To date, there has been limited research that has examined PC with respect to procurement methods in construction projects. There is a lot written about PCs, as a theoretical framework in areas such as strategic supplier partnering and relationships, but little research has been undertaken within a construction management context. An increased understanding of PC would enable procurement teams to identify the nuances associated with relationships in procurement and stakeholder selection. Aim/Objectives: This research aims to examine social exchanges in construction contracts so that partners can better manager their relationships in projects. Specific objectives of the broader research are to: identify the presence of psychological contracts in construction projects; identify and catalogue the affect that the PC’s has on the teams in various procurement models currently utilised within construction management and deliver a conceptual model of the PC in traditional and relationships style procurement scenarios. Method: This paper reports on the first stage of a broader research project. To check and maintain currency of the topic, focus groups are held with key industry players and this is followed by the development of a survey instrument administered to a large sample of construction professionals involved with project delivery (n=100). Results: PCs are clearly present in the construction delivery team and they have considerable effect on the interaction between the project stakeholders. It appears that the PC variables underpin behaviours to a considerable extent. The next stage of the research is to use the output from the triangulated survey to develop a conceptual model of the PC in traditional and relationships style procurement scenarios

Probabilistic divergence time estimation without branch lengths: dating the origins of dinosaurs, avian flight and crown birds

Branch lengths—measured in character changes—are an essential requirement of clock-based divergence estimation, regardless of whether the fossil calibrations used represent nodes or tips. However, a separate set of divergence time approaches are typically used to date palaeontological trees, which may lack such branch lengths. Among these methods, sophisticated probabilistic approaches have recently emerged, in contrast with simpler algorithms relying on minimum node ages. Here, using a novel phylogenetic hypothesis for Mesozoic dinosaurs, we apply two such approaches to estimate divergence times for: (i) Dinosauria, (ii) Avialae (the earliest birds) and (iii) Neornithes (crown birds). We find: (i) the plausibility of a Permian origin for dinosaurs to be dependent on whether Nyasasaurus is the oldest dinosaur, (ii) a Middle to Late Jurassic origin of avian flight regardless of whether Archaeopteryx or Aurornis is considered the first bird and (iii) a Late Cretaceous origin for Neornithes that is broadly congruent with other node- and tip-dating estimates. Demonstrating the feasibility of probabilistic time-scaling further opens up divergence estimation to the rich histories of extinct biodiversity in the fossil record, even in the absence of detailed character data

Episodic-Like Memory for What-Where-Which Occasion is Selectively Impaired in the 3xTgAD Mouse Model of Alzheimer’s Disease

Episodic memory loss is a defining feature of early-stage Alzheimer’s disease (AD). A test of episodic-like memory for the rat, the What-Where-Which occasion task (WWWhich), requires the association of object, location, and contextual information to form an integrated memory for an event. The WWWhich task cannot be solved by use of non-episodic information such as object familiarity and is dependent on hippocampal integrity. Thus, it provides an ideal tool with which to test capacity for episodic-like memory in the 3xTg murine model for AD. As this model captures much of the human AD phenotype, we hypothesized that these mice would show a deficit in the WWWhich episodic-like memory task. To test the specificity of any episodic-like deficit, we also examined whether mice could perform components of the WWWhich task that do not require episodic-like memory. These included object (Novel Object Recognition), location (Object Location Task, What-Where task), and contextual (What-Which) memory, as well as another three-component task that can be solved without reliance on episodic recall (What-Where-When; WWWhen). The results demonstrate for the first time that control 129sv/c57bl6 mice could form WWWhich episodic-like memories, wherea, 3xTgAD mice at 6 months of age were impaired. Importantly, while 3xTgAD mice showed some deficit on spatial component tasks, they were unimpaired in the more complex WWWhen combination task (which includes a spatial component and is open to non-episodic solutions). These results strongly suggest that AD pathology centered on the hippocampal formation mediates a specific deficit for WWWhich episodic-like memory in the 3xTgAD model

Compliance within a regulatory framework in implementing public road construction projects

© 2018 by the author(s). The construction industry faces a lack of compliance with policy that in Uganda public road construction projects affects the attainment of Government goals and disrupts infrastructure project delivery. For decades, public entities have been known for a lack of compliance that manifest in: poor performance, poor personnel management, poor resource utilization and unprofessionalism. In Uganda, this has resulted in several restructures aimed at improving service delivery. Despite this, compliance remains an issue. The purpose of this study is to establish factors affecting compliance within a public procurement regulatory framework in public road construction projects and foster economic development. A cross-sectional research design including a structured self-administered questionnaire survey and PLS-SEM data analysis by SmartPLS3 was conducted. The research reveals that three factors positively affect compliance with a regulatory framework that govern public road construction projects; sanctions on staff, inefficiency of the public procurement regulatory framework and contractors’ resistance to non-compliance. While a further three factors have little positive effect on compliance; familiarity, monitoring activities and professionalism. Hence, the research contributes to construction management by showing that sanctions, perceived inefficiency and contractors’ resistance significantly enhance compliance within a public procurement regulatory framework

Inclusive GAN: Improving Data and Minority Coverage in Generative Models

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have brought about rapid progress towards generating photorealistic images. Yet the equitable allocation of their modeling capacity among subgroups has received less attention, which could lead to potential biases against underrepresented minorities if left uncontrolled. In this work, we first formalize the problem of minority inclusion as one of data coverage, and then propose to improve data coverage by harmonizing adversarial training with reconstructive generation. The experiments show that our method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of data coverage on both seen and unseen data. We develop an extension that allows explicit control over the minority subgroups that the model should ensure to include, and validate its effectiveness at little compromise from the overall performance on the entire dataset. Code, models, and supplemental videos are available at GitHub.Comment: Accepted to ECCV'2

Distributed and Interactive Simulations Operating at Large Scale for Transcontinental Experimentation

This paper addresses the use of emerging technologies to respond to the increasing needs for larger and more sophisticated agent-based simulations of urban areas. The U.S. Joint Forces Command has found it useful to seek out and apply technologies largely developed for academic research in the physical sciences. The use of these techniques in transcontinentally distributed, interactive experimentation has been shown to be effective and stable and the analyses of the data find parallels in the behavioral sciences. The authors relate their decade and a half experience in implementing high performance computing hardware, software and user inter-face architectures. These have enabled heretofore unachievable results. They focus on three advances: the use of general purpose graphics processing units as computing accelerators, the efficiencies derived from implementing interest managed routers in distributed systems, and the benefits of effective data management for the voluminous information

Incorporating Economic Resilience Metrics into INDOT’s Transportation Decision-Making

The 2007 Great Recession is widely considered the worst economic downturn in recent United States History. In Indiana, the unemployment rate reached 10.6%, and took nearly seven years to return to pre-recession levels. However, employment data from this period shows that the change in total employment at the county level ranged from -20% to +5%, indicating that while many counties suffered from high unemployment, other counties experienced gains in total employment. Various research efforts, including this project, have been undertaken to understand the local characteristics that influence the differing degrees to which regional/city economies were able to resist or cope with the effects of the recession. In the literature, this ability is referred to as regional economic resilience (RER). This research project’s primary objective is to develop a framework and tool that could be used by INDOT’s Asset Planning & Management Division and Indiana metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to evaluate the role of transportation accessibility in building RER of Indiana’s regions to economic shocks. The following tasks were undertaken: the development of a resilience index to inform stakeholders of the comparative RERs in Indiana; the estimation of an econometric model to evaluate the association between Indiana counties’ regional characteristics and the resilience index; the development of a framework in which results of previous tasks can be incorporated into transportation decision-making at the sketch level by MPOs, regional development organizations, and other similar agencies; and design of a tool to allow planners to examine the potential changes to RER due to policies or other exogenous shocks