Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is the first of a three-part examination of the operational costs of being a contractor in the current era of high prices for supplies and labor. Among the largest influences are the rise in the cost of steel, a cement shortage, high fuel prices and a shortage of asphalt in some regions. Part of the difficulty for contractors is that the bidding process requires them to estimate accurately costs for items that might cost more by the time a contract is completed. For example, materials prices in 2006 were up an average of 10.8 percent over 2005. In 2005 they were up 13 percent over 2004, according to the American and Road Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA). This kind of average annual increase is much higher than the 2 percent rises during the 10 years from 1993 to 2003. Labor is another source of concern. According to ARTBA, 30 to 50 percent of its members reported labor shortages in the most recent quarter. Wages are not rising significantly, but that could change. With rising insurance costs, contractors are turning to pooled coverage in some cases.
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 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 | 0.004 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.140 | 0.035 |
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".