Synthetic rating system for railway bridge management

Railway bridges deteriorate with age. Factors such as environmental effects on different materials of a bridge, variation of loads, fatigue, etc. will reduce the remaining life of bridges. Dealing with thousands of bridges and several factors that cause deterioration, makes the rating process extremely complicated. Current simplified but practical methods of rating a network of bridges are not based on an accurate structural condition assessment system. On the other hand, the sophisticated but more accurate methods are only used for a single bridge or particular types of bridges. It is therefore necessary to develop a practical and accurate system, which will be capable of rating a network of railway bridges. This article introduces a new method to rate a network of bridges based on their current and future structural conditions. The method identifies typical bridges representing a group of railway bridges. The most crucial agents will be determined and categorized to criticality and vulnerability factors. Classification based on structural configuration, loading, and critical deterioration factors will be conducted. Finally a rating method for a network of railway bridges that takes into account the effects of damaged structural components due to variations in loading and environmental conditions on the integrity of the whole structure will be proposed. The outcome of this article is expected to significantly improve the rating methods for railway bridges by considering the unique characteristics of different factors and incorporating the correlation among them.

Trial by jury in civil proceedings : “convenience” and the philosophy of the UCPR

In Syddall v National Mutual Life Association of Australasia Limited [2008] QSC 101 Daubney J ordered the action be tried without a jury. His judgment considered the circumstances in which a trial involves any technical, scientific or other issue that can not be “conveniently” considered and resolved by a jury as provided in r 474 of the Uniform Civil Procedure Rules 1999 (Qld)

Construction Prices : the Market Effect

Teachers of construction economics and estimating have for a long time recognised that there is more to construction pricing than detailed calculation of costs (to the contractor). We always get to the point where we have to say "of course, experience or familiarity of the market is very important and this needs judgement, intuition, etc". Quite how important is the matter in construction pricing is not known and we tend to trivialise its effect. If judgement of the market has a minimal effect, little harm would be done, but if it is really important then some quite serious consequences arise which go well beyond the teaching environment. Major areas of concern for the quantity surveyor are in cost modelling and cost planning - neither of which pay any significant attention to the market effect. There are currently two schools of thought about the market effect issue. The first school is prepared to ignore possible effects until more is known. This may be called the pragmatic school. The second school exists solely to criticise the first school. We will call this the antagonistic school. Neither the pragmatic nor the antagonistic schools seem to be particularly keen to resolve the issue one way or the other. The founder and leader of the antagonistic school is Brian Fine whose paper in 1974 is still the basic text on the subject, and in which he coined the term 'socially acceptable' price to describe what we now recognise as the market effect. Mr Fine's argument was then, and is since, that the uncertainty surrounding the contractors' costing and cost estimating process is such that the uncertainty surrounding the contractors' cost that it logically leads to a market-orientated pricing approach. Very little factual evidence, however, seems to be available to support these arguments in any conclusive manner. A further, and more important point for the pragmatic school, is that, even if the market effect is as important as Mr Fine believes, there are no indications of how it can be measured, evaluated or predicted. Since 1974 evidence has been accumulating which tends to reinforce the antagonists' view. A review of the literature covering both contractors' and designers' estimates found many references to the use of value judgements in construction pricing (Ashworth & Skitmore, 1985), which supports the antagonistic view in implying the existence of uncertainty overload. The most convincing evidence emerged quite by accident in some research we recently completed with practicing quantity surveyors in estimating accuracy (Skitmore, 1985). In addition to demonstrating that individual quantity surveyors and certain types of buildings had significant effect on estimating accuracy, one surprise result was that only a very small amount of information was used by the most expert surveyors for relatively very accurate estimates. Only the type and size of building, it seemed, was really relevant in determining accuracy. More detailed information about the buildings' specification, and even a sight to the drawings, did not significantly improve their accuracy level. This seemed to offer clear evidence that the constructional aspects of the project were largely irrelevant and that the expert surveyors were somehow tuning in to the market price of the building. The obvious next step is to feed our expert surveyors with more relevant 'market' information in order to assess its effect. The problem with this is that our experts do not seem able to verbalise their requirements in this respect - a common occurrence in research of this nature. The lack of research into the nature of market effects on prices also means the literature provides little of benefit. Hence the need for this study. It was felt that a clearer picture of the nature of construction markets would be obtained in an environment where free enterprise was a truly ideological force. For this reason, the United States of America was chosen for the next stage of our investigations. Several people were interviewed in an informal and unstructured manner to elicit their views on the action of market forces on construction prices. Although a small number of people were involved, they were thought to be reasonably representative of knowledge in construction pricing. They were also very well able to articulate their views. Our initial reaction to the interviews was that our USA subjects held very close views to those held in the UK. However, detailed analysis revealed the existence of remarkably clear and consistent insights that would not have been obtained in the UK. Further evidence was also obtained from literature relating to the subject and some of the interviewees very kindly expanded on their views in later postal correspondence. We have now analysed all the evidence received and, although a great deal is of an anecdotal nature, we feel that our findings enable at least the basic nature of the subject to be understood and that the factors and their interrelationships can now be examined more formally in relation to construction price levels. I must express my gratitude to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors' Educational Trust and the University of Salford's Department of Civil Engineering for collectively funding this study. My sincere thanks also go to our American participants who freely gave their time and valuable knowledge to us in our enquiries. Finally, I must record my thanks to Tim and Anne for their remarkable ability to produce an intelligible typescript from my unintelligible writing.

Analysis and control of cracking due to shrinkage in cast-in-place reinforced concrete slabs

The numerical analysis method of cracking in cast-in-place reinforced concrete slabs is presented. T he results agree w ell with the actual conditions. T he current state of knowledge and some new research findings on crack-control are introduced such as increasing the quantities of the distribution steel, adopting fibre reinforced concrete etc. Some recommended crack-control procedures used in design construction is presented based on the investigation and study of cracking in a frame structure.

What is a good project manager? Reconceptualizing the “do” : an Aristotelian perspective

In Social Science (Organization Studies, Economics, Management Science, Strategy, International Relations, Political Science…) the quest for addressing the question “what is a good practitioner?” has been around for centuries, with the underlying assumptions that good practitioners should lead organizations to higher levels of performance. Hence to ask “what is a good “captain”?” is not a new question, we should add! (e.g. Tsoukas & Cummings, 1997, p. 670; Söderlund, 2004, p. 190). This interrogation leads to consider problems such as the relations between dichotomies Theory and Practice, rigor and relevance of research, ways of knowing and knowledge forms. On the one hand we face the “Enlightenment” assumptions underlying modern positivist Social science, grounded in “unity-of-science dream of transforming and reducing all kinds of knowledge to one basic form and level” and cause-effects relationships (Eikeland, 2012, p. 20), and on the other, the postmodern interpretivist proposal, and its “tendency to make all kinds of knowing equivalent” (Eikeland, 2012, p. 20). In the project management space, this aims at addressing one of the fundamental problems in the field: projects still do not deliver their expected benefits and promises and therefore the socio-economical good (Hodgson & Cicmil, 2007; Bredillet, 2010, Lalonde et al., 2012). The Cartesian tradition supporting projects research and practice for the last 60 years (Bredillet, 2010, p. 4) has led to the lack of relevance to practice of the current conceptual base of project management, despite the sum of research, development of standards, best & good practices and the related development of project management bodies of knowledge (Packendorff, 1995, p. 319-323; Cicmil & Hodgson, 2006, p. 2–6, Hodgson & Cicmil, 2007, p. 436–7; Winter et al., 2006, p. 638). Referring to both Hodgson (2002) and Giddens (1993), we could say that “those who expect a “social-scientific Newton” to revolutionize this young field “are not only waiting for a train that will not arrive, but are in the wrong station altogether” (Hodgson, 2002, p. 809; Giddens, 1993, p. 18). While, in the postmodern stream mainly rooted in the “practice turn” (e.g. Hällgren & Lindahl, 2012), the shift from methodological individualism to social viscosity and the advocated pluralism lead to reinforce the “functional stupidity” (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012, p. 1194) this postmodern stream aims at overcoming. We suggest here that addressing the question “what is a good PM?” requires a philosophy of practice perspective to complement the “usual” philosophy of science perspective. The questioning of the modern Cartesian tradition mirrors a similar one made within Social science (Say, 1964; Koontz, 1961, 1980; Menger, 1985; Warry, 1992; Rothbard, 1997a; Tsoukas & Cummings, 1997; Flyvbjerg, 2001; Boisot & McKelvey, 2010), calling for new thinking. In order to get outside the rationalist ‘box’, Toulmin (1990, p. 11), along with Tsoukas & Cummings (1997, p. 655), suggests a possible path, summarizing the thoughts of many authors: “It can cling to the discredited research program of the purely theoretical (i.e. “modern”) philosophy, which will end up by driving it out of business: it can look for new and less exclusively theoretical ways of working, and develop the methods needed for a more practical (“post-modern”) agenda; or it can return to its pre-17th century traditions, and try to recover the lost (“pre-modern”) topics that were side-tracked by Descartes, but can be usefully taken up for the future” (Toulmin, 1990, p. 11). Thus, paradoxically and interestingly, in their quest for the so-called post-modernism, many authors build on “pre-modern” philosophies such as the Aristotelian one (e.g. MacIntyre, 1985, 2007; Tsoukas & Cummings, 1997; Flyvbjerg, 2001; Blomquist et al., 2010; Lalonde et al., 2012). It is perhaps because the post-modern stream emphasizes a dialogic process restricted to reliance on voice and textual representation, it limits the meaning of communicative praxis, and weaking the practice because it turns away attention from more fundamental issues associated with problem-definition and knowledge-for-use in action (Tedlock, 1983, p. 332–4; Schrag, 1986, p. 30, 46–7; Warry, 1992, p. 157). Eikeland suggests that the Aristotelian “gnoseology allows for reconsidering and reintegrating ways of knowing: traditional, practical, tacit, emotional, experiential, intuitive, etc., marginalised and considered insufficient by modernist [and post-modernist] thinking” (Eikeland, 2012, p. 20—21). By contrast with the modernist one-dimensional thinking and relativist and pluralistic post-modernism, we suggest, in a turn to an Aristotelian pre-modern lens, to re-conceptualise (“re” involving here a “re”-turn to pre-modern thinking) the “do” and to shift the perspective from what a good PM is (philosophy of science lens) to what a good PM does (philosophy of practice lens) (Aristotle, 1926a). As Tsoukas & Cummings put it: “In the Aristotelian tradition to call something good is to make a factual statement. To ask, for example, ’what is a good captain’?’ is not to come up with a list of attributes that good captains share (as modem contingency theorists would have it), but to point out the things that those who are recognized as good captains do.” (Tsoukas & Cummings, 1997, p. 670) Thus, this conversation offers a dialogue and deliberation about a central question: What does a good project manager do? The conversation is organized around a critic of the underlying assumptions supporting the modern, post-modern and pre-modern relations to ways of knowing, forms of knowledge and “practice”.

Review : "Ghosts...of the Civil Dead" -- John Hillcoat

Synopsis and review of the Australian prison film Ghosts...of the Civil Dead (John Hillcoat, 1988). Drawing heavily from the book In the Belly of the Beast by American author and long-term prisoner Jack Henry Abbott, as well as from the historical and philosophical work of Michel Foucault (the credits include ‘Foucault Authority – Simon During’), Ghosts… Of the Civil Dead is a searing critique of the so-called ‘new generation’ prison system developed in the United States and recently introduced in Australia. Director John Hillcoat and producer Evan English conducted extensive research for the film, including spending time at the National Institute of Corrections, a think tank in Colorado, and visiting numerous institutions like the ‘new Alcatraz’ at Marion Illinois and other maximum security prisons across the United States. Using a mix of professionals and non-actors, including former prisoners and prison guards, the ‘story’ was workshopped during a lengthy rehearsal period with many actual events and experiences of participants incorporated into the film. The end result deliberately blurs the line between American and Australian prison experience to make the political point that what had happened in the US – from where many events and characters, and much of the architecture and design of the prison are drawn – was beginning to happen in Australia. The film emphasises the vicious cycle of institutionalisation, and highlights the role state authorities play in manufacturing, provoking and manipulating violence and fear both in prisons and in wider society as a means to augment policing and surveillance of the population, to oppress the working classes, and to maintain the political status quo...

Improving the quality of fourth year civil engineering research projects through bibliographic instruction

Faculty and reference librarians at the Queensland University of Technology have collaborated in an attempt to improve the quality of literature reviews in civil engineering final -year research projects. This article describes the instructional program devised and the level of faculty support for the librarians' contribution, and presents survey results revealing how students could most benefit from BI and how the classroom collaboration affected student project work. The authors offer some observations about the possible impact of 81 in general, and on engineers in particular, which may provide a focus for future research.

Developing research skills for civil engineers: A library contribution

A course-integrated programme of library instruction has been developed for the School of Civil Engineering at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia; library instruction being one of the means selected to improve the research efforts of fourth year project students. The programme has been developed through consultation between the Civil Engineering Research Project Coordinator and the Civil Engineering Reference Librarian. Its aims are derived from those established for the fourth year research projects. Attention is focussed on the nature of the programme and the impact of instruction on fourth year research project students. Students who had received extended library instruction were compared with students from the previous year. Evidence suggests that the instruction has improved the information seeking behaviour of the students and their literature reviews.

Pragmatism and precision : psychology in the service of civil litigation

While forensic psychology is commonly associated with the criminal and family law domains, its ambit to offer skills and knowledge at the legal interface also makes it particularly suited to the civil law domain. At this time, civil law is arguably the least represented legislative area in terms of psychological research and professional commentary. However, it is also a broad area, with its very breadth providing scope for research consideration, as urged by Greene. The purposes of this article are (1) to review the broad role of the psychologist in the conduct of civil litigation matters in Australia, (2) to assist the novice to the area by indicating a non-exhaustive list of potentially ambiguous terms and concepts common to the conduct of professional practice, and; (3) to highlight, as an example, one area of practice not only where legal direction demands professional pragmatism but also where opportunity arises for psychological research to vitally address a major social issue.

Urban consolidation : reality or fantasy

Urban consolidation has been a policy objective of many local and state governments in Australia for the past decade. Densification of city centres and other identified activity centres is a sensible solution to a plethora of policy objectives including: growth management, housing affordability, housing choice and infrastructure utilisation etc whilst preserving the fabric of existing neighbourhoods. However despite the plethora of supportive policies and ripe redevelopment sites, urban sprawl continues to permeate city fringes and affordable urban densification in the post GFC environment slips into the “too hard” basket. This article discusses current issues facing the development industry, highlighting factors contributing to the disequilibrium between demand and supply in the medium to high density residential markets.

A new method for quantifying the contribution of different critical agents on railway bridge deterioration

Railway Bridges deteriorate over time due to different critical factors including, flood, wind, earthquake, collision, and environment factors, such as corrosion, wear, termite attack, etc. In current practice, the contributions of the critical factors, towards the deterioration of railway bridges, which show their criticalities, are not appropriately taken into account. In this paper, a new method for quantifying the criticality of these factors will be introduced. The available knowledge as well as risk analyses conducted in different Australian standards and developed for bridge-design will be adopted. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is utilized for prioritising the factors. The method is used for synthetic rating of railway bridges developed by the authors of this paper. Enhancing the reliability of predicting the vulnerability of railway bridges to the critical factors, will be the significant achievement of this research.

On the advanced analysis of steel frames allowing for flexural, local and lateral-torsional buckling

Detailed procedure for second-order analysis has been coded in the newest Eurocode 3 and the Hong Kong steel code (2005). The effective length method has been noted to be inapplicable to analysis of shallow domes of imperfect members exhibiting snap-through buckling, to portals with leaning columns and others. On the other hand, the advanced analysis is not limited to buckling design of these structures. This paper demonstrates its application to the design of a simple plane sway portal and a three diminsional non-sway steel building. The results by the advanced analysis and the first-order linear analysis are compared and the technique for practical second-order analysis steel structures is described. It is observed that the use of a straight element by itself cannot model the buckling resistance of columns governed by different buckling curves for hot-rolled and cold-formed sections of various shapes like I, H, hollow etc. Also the curvature of the conventional cubic Hermite element is not varied by the external axial force and thus it cannot simulate the response of a buckling column. Thus its use for second-order analysis is basically unacceptable. A technique for additional checking of beams undergoing lateral-torsional buckling is also suggested making the advanced analysis a complete design tool for conventional steel frames.

Applying quantile regression for modeling equivalent property damage only crashes to identify accident blackspots

Hot spot identification (HSID) aims to identify potential sites—roadway segments, intersections, crosswalks, interchanges, ramps, etc.—with disproportionately high crash risk relative to similar sites. An inefficient HSID methodology might result in either identifying a safe site as high risk (false positive) or a high risk site as safe (false negative), and consequently lead to the misuse the available public funds, to poor investment decisions, and to inefficient risk management practice. Current HSID methods suffer from issues like underreporting of minor injury and property damage only (PDO) crashes, challenges of accounting for crash severity into the methodology, and selection of a proper safety performance function to model crash data that is often heavily skewed by a preponderance of zeros. Addressing these challenges, this paper proposes a combination of a PDO equivalency calculation and quantile regression technique to identify hot spots in a transportation network. In particular, issues related to underreporting and crash severity are tackled by incorporating equivalent PDO crashes, whilst the concerns related to the non-count nature of equivalent PDO crashes and the skewness of crash data are addressed by the non-parametric quantile regression technique. The proposed method identifies covariate effects on various quantiles of a population, rather than the population mean like most methods in practice, which more closely corresponds with how black spots are identified in practice. The proposed methodology is illustrated using rural road segment data from Korea and compared against the traditional EB method with negative binomial regression. Application of a quantile regression model on equivalent PDO crashes enables identification of a set of high-risk sites that reflect the true safety costs to the society, simultaneously reduces the influence of under-reported PDO and minor injury crashes, and overcomes the limitation of traditional NB model in dealing with preponderance of zeros problem or right skewed dataset.