Delay causes analysis in complex construction projects: a Semantic Network Analysis approach

Delays are among the most crucial adversaries to the success and performance of construction projects, making delay analysis and management a critical task for project managers. This task will be highly complicated in large-scale projects such as construction, which usually consist of a complex network of heterogeneous entities in continuous interaction. Traditional approaches and methods for the analysis of delays and their causes have been criticised for their ability to handle complex projects, and for considering the interrelationships between delay causes. Addressing this gap, this research introduces an alternative approach for delay causes analysis by adopting Semantic Network Analysis (SNA) method. The paper reports the results from an investigation of delays in construction projects in the Oil-Gas-Petrochemical sector using SNA. The method’s capacity to identify and rank delay causes, which can assist managers in selecting appropriate measures for eliminating them, are empirically examined and discussed. The paper argues that SNA leads to a more comprehensive understanding of the main causes of delay in large and complex projects, allowing a better identification and mapping of the interrelationships between these discrete factors.     

Importance-Performance Matrix Analysis of the Researcher’s Competence in the Formation of University-Industry Collaboration Using Smart PLS

This study empirically identified and investigated the importance and performance of researcher’s competence which serves as crucial stimuli in initiating university-industry collaborative activities in Malaysian research universities using Importance-Performance Matrix Analysis (IPMA). The findings are endorsed by the IPMA that the importance and performance of domain knowledge are high in contributing to sustainability entrepreneurship thus lead to the university-industry collaboration formation. It is also found that social capital and market knowledge are important but the performance of these areas required attention from the management to further enhance. Unexpectedly, it is suggested that the management should pay less attention to researcher reputation as this is the least priority area for improvement as demonstrated by the results generated by the IPMA. Essentially, the findings contribute to the benefit of the university leaders to understand the diversity of competence possessed by the academic researchers as valuable resources in spotting and seizing a business opportunity.

     

Human Capital Outflow and Economic Misery: Fresh Evidence for Pakistan

This paper visits the impact of economic misery on human capital outflow using time series data over the period of 1975–2012. We have applied the combined cointegration tests and innovation accounting approach to examine long run and causal relationship between the variables. Our results affirm the presence of cointegration between the variables. We find that economic misery increases human capital outflow. Foreign remittances add in human capital outflow from Pakistan. The migration from Pakistan to rest of world is boosted by depreciation in local currency. Income inequality is also a major contributor to human capital outflow. The present study is comprehensive effort and may provide new insights to policy makers for handling the issue of human capital outflow by controlling economic misery in Pakistan.

     

Oasis in a concrete jungle: arts-informed methods in social work classrooms

This article presents a qualitative arts-informed inquiry on teaching and learning in social work education. Using arts-informed research methodology and grounded theory methodology, the research analyses ten interviews of social work educators in two Canadian provinces. This article focused on how university educators use arts-informed methods of teaching about social justice through anti-racist and decolonizing lenses; also discussed are the educators’ personal and professional transformation and development within this process. The main findings discuss the importance of creating an ‘artful’ space as a platform for experiential, embodied and emotive learning, which offers an innovative, more holistic and comprehensive way of teaching social justice. This way of teaching emphasizes personal transformation, giving space to marginalized voices and expression; as well as collective co-creation of meaning and creating practical tools for future social change. The study also touches upon challenges and gaps in using an arts-informed approach, which include student resistance to alternative ways of education, expressed specifically by racialized educators and ambiguity related to assessing artful works in an academic setting. The paper ends with recommendations for social work education.     

Performance of ridge estimator in inverse Gaussian regression model

The presence of multicollinearity among the explanatory variables has undesirable effects on the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE). Ridge estimator (RE) is a widely used estimator in overcoming this issue. The RE enjoys the advantage that its mean squared error (MSE) is less than that of MLE. The inverse Gaussian regression (IGR) model is a well-known model in the application when the response variable positively skewed. The purpose of this paper is to derive the RE of the IGR under multicollinearity problem. In addition, the performance of this estimator is investigated under numerous methods for estimating the ridge parameter. Monte Carlo simulation results indicate that the suggested estimator performs better than the MLE estimator in terms of MSE. Furthermore, a real chemometrics dataset application is utilized and the results demonstrate the excellent performance of the suggested estimator when the multicollinearity is present in IGR model.     

Troubling constructions of Canada as a ‘land of opportunity’ for immigrants: a critical disability lens

This article presents the findings of a critical discourse analysis study of the constructions of people with disabilities within the Canadian immigration system and how this shapes the immigration experiences of people with disabilities, especially those from countries in the Global South. Findings suggest that dominant discourses of opportunities not only construct Canada as a ‘land of dreams’ for immigrants and newcomers but are also used to hide, justify, normalize and facilitate the operation of ableist, racist and colonial discourses that immigrants and newcomers with disabilities experience during their immigration. Recommendations for settlement workers involved in facilitating the settlement and integration process for immigrants and newcomers with disabilities are also presented. The article concludes by emphasizing the actual and potential contributions of postcolonial and critical disability lenses for a social justice-oriented practice at the intersection of disability and immigration.     

Bayesian bridge quantile regression

Regularization methods for simultaneous variable selection and coefficient estimation have been shown to be effective in quantile regression in improving the prediction accuracy. In this article, we propose the Bayesian bridge for variable selection and coefficient estimation in quantile regression. A simple and efficient Gibbs sampling algorithm was developed for posterior inference using a scale mixture of uniform representation of the Bayesian bridge prior. This is the first work to discuss regularized quantile regression with the bridge penalty. Both simulated and real data examples show that the proposed method often outperforms quantile regression without regularization, lasso quantile regression, and Bayesian lasso quantile regression.     

Explaining Unequal Levels of Social Capital in Tehran

Social capital may act as an asset to serve people in various situations. However, people do not equally enjoy the same level of social capital and there is inequality in distribution of this asset in societies. There is few research within the wider literature exploring the determinants of inequality in social capital. This study measured and decomposed inequality in the distribution of social capital in Tehran using a concentration index approach. Data was gathered through a survey in 2008, the sample included 2484 of over 18-year old residents. Social Capital Integrated Questionnaire was used to measure social capital status, its dimensions (networking, trust, and cooperation) and outcomes (cohesion and political action). Most of social capital dimensions/outcomes were unequally distributed in Tehran, favouring the rich. However, in terms of political action, the poor were more politically active than the rich in Tehran. Decomposition showed that economic status and education had the highest contributions to the observed inequalities. In efforts to move towards a more just society, these findings can inform future policies in Iran to tackle the observed inequalities in social capital.     

Combined estimating function for random coefficient models with correlated errors

ABSTRACT

Estimating functionshave been shown to be convenient to study inference for non linear time series models. Recently, Thavaneswaran et al. (2012 Thavaneswaran, A., Liang, Y., Frank, J. (2012). Inference for random coefficient volatility models. Stat. Probab. Lett. 82(12):2086–2090.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) used combined estimating functions to study inference for random coefficient autoregressive (RCA) models with generalized autoregressive heteroscedasticity errors. While most RCA modeling assumes that the random term and the error are independent, Chandra and Taniguchi (2001 Chandra, S.A., Taniguchi, M. (2001). Estimating functions for nonlinear time series models. Ann. Inst. Stat. Math 53(1):125–141.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) studied inference for RCA models with correlated errors using linear estimating functions. In this paper, we derive the quadratic estimating functions for the joint estimation of the conditional mean, variance, and correlation parameters of the RCA models with correlated errors.