Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article describes how a recent survey conducted by the American Road and Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) suggests ‘hunkering down’ may be the best planning strategy for a while. Knowing exactly where you are is the key to getting to where you want to be. This survey of ARBTA contractor members for the quarter ending March 31 makes it hard to ignore the fact that the industry is not in a good place. Nearly half of ARTBA’s respondents are working below 75 percent of capacity. The net rising indices for construction work performed, employment, backlogs and capital spending indicate many contractors are struggling in the current economy and the overall market is still contracting, according to ARTBA. There are more contractors reporting they are doing less work on transportation construction projects than for the first quarter of last year. This survey states that some participants reported that the highway and bridge construction market is the worst they’ve experienced in their lifetimes and the expectations for the remainder of 2011 are poor. But there were some indications of a “marginal improvement” in some areas. Whether that is a trend or not, says ARTBA, will be determined by market activity over the next six months and progress on a federal surface transportation bill in that same time frame. Some contractors tell ARTBA they face a lack of work to bid on. Some report that competition is not as stiff as last year, but this news is offset by respondent reports that projects are still priced extremely low and margins are non-existent. ARTBA highlights this response from one contractor: “If I don’t pick up some contracts soon, I will have to shut down operations.”
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".