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Record W818459361

Paying for It: Cost to be a Contractor

2007· article· en· W818459361 on OpenAlex
Bill Wilson

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueRoads & bridges/Roads & bridges (Des Plaines, Ill. Online) · 2007
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicBIM and Construction Integration
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEconomic shortageBiddingQuarter (Canadian coin)TruckOperations managementBusinessCost estimateEconomicsEngineeringActuarial scienceMarketingGovernment (linguistics)
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.832
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.030
GPT teacher head0.278
Teacher spread0.248 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it