Get Ready for a Rough One: While the Road Industry Looks Steady for 2008, Other Construction Sectors and the Overall Economy Look Shaky at Best
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article looks back at budget trends for the road industry in 2007, and predicts flat or slightly negative growth overall, except in the southern and western states and Canada. More than a third of state Departments of Transportation expect modest budget increases of two percent or better in 2008, but a quarter anticipate budget cuts of at least two percent. Township agencies and Canadian agencies expect larger budgets in 2008 and none anticipate budget cuts. Budget trends emphasize bridge maintenance repair, pavement maintenance, bridge deck repair and traffic safety. Highway and bridge contractors in North America did a better business than they had anticipated, but again it differed by region. For 2008, about one-third of contractors polled expect above average business, while about a quarter expect a below-average year. A number of charts and graphs illustrate these findings more thoroughly.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.029 | 0.013 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".