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1 – 4 of 4Haiyan Xie, Ying Hong, Mengyang Xin, Ioannis Brilakis and Owen Shi
The purpose of this study is to improve communication success through barrier identification and analysis so that the identified barriers can help project teams establish…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to improve communication success through barrier identification and analysis so that the identified barriers can help project teams establish effective information-exchange strategies.
Design/methodology/approach
The recent publications on construction communication about time management are reviewed. Then, the semi-structured interviews are performed with both questionnaires and audio recordings (n1 = 18). Next, the collected data are analyzed using both statistical measures on the questionnaire survey and qualitative coding analysis on the text transcripts from an audio recording. Particularly, the identified barriers are substantiated using a scientometrics approach based on the published articles (2011–2020, n2 = 52,915) for purposeful information-sharing solutions in construction time management. Furthermore, the intervention strategies from the top 10 most-cited articles are analyzed and validated by comparisons with the results from construction surveys and relevant studies.
Findings
Based on the discussed communication difficulties, five main barriers were identified during time-cost risk management: probability and statistical concepts, availability of data from external resources, details of team member experiences, graphics (and graphical presentation skills), and spatial and temporal (a.k.a. 4D) simulation skills. For the improvement of communication skills and presentation quality regarding probability and statistical concepts, project teams should emphasize context awareness, case studies and group discussions. Details of communication techniques can be adjusted based on the backgrounds, experiences and expectations of team members.
Research limitations/implications
The dataset n1 has both size and duration limits because of the availability of the invited industry professionals. The dataset n2 considers the literature from 2011 to 2020. Any before-the-date and unpublished studies are not included in the study.
Practical implications
A thorough comprehension of communication barriers can help project teams develop speaking, writing and analytical thinking skills that will enable the teams to better deliver ideas, thoughts and meanings. Additionally, the established discussion on barrier-removal strategies may enhance time management effectiveness, reduce project delays, avoid confusion and misunderstanding and save rework costs.
Social implications
This research calls for the awareness of communication barriers in construction project execution and team collaboration. The identified barriers and the established solutions enrich the approaches of construction companies to share information with communities and society.
Originality/value
This is the first identification model for communication barriers in the time management of the construction industry to the authors' knowledge. The influencing factors and the countermeasures of communication difficulties highlighted by the research were not examined systematically and holistically in previous studies. The findings provide a new approach to facilitate the development of powerful communication strategies and to improve project execution.
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Renato Russo and Paulo Blikstein
There are several connections between education and disinformation, including the association between years of schooling and vulnerability to unfounded hypothesizing. The purpose…
Abstract
Purpose
There are several connections between education and disinformation, including the association between years of schooling and vulnerability to unfounded hypothesizing. The purpose of this paper is to inquire into a competing explanation: political leaders might be exploring powerful teaching and learning strategies to disseminate agendas based on baseless assumptions, exploiting human’s tendency to generate robust theories even with incomplete or incorrect information.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors analyzed ten videos published online by a highly partisan YouTube channel. The footage contained informal encounters between former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and supporters in front of his official residence. The team sought to answer two research questions: Do Mr Bolsonaro’s discursive moves include activators that lead the audience to understand that they are theorizing and reaching conclusions “on their own?” Does Mr Bolsonaro’s audience follow those clues and mention politically motivated hoaxes and conspiracy theories in their comments? This paper draws on perspectives from the field of educational research to investigate the mechanisms used by the president to shape public opinion.
Findings
The authors found evidence of the employment of elements akin to classroom discourse in the dialogues led by Mr Bolsonaro. Specifically, different types of rhetorical questions are present to a substantial extent in the data subset analyzed for this paper.
Originality/value
This work offers an alternative perspective to analyzing disinformation. By drawing from established literature from education research, this paper departs from facile explanations that take for granted the lack of intelligence of the audience. Conversely, it argues that popular, if not powerful, teaching and learning strategies might play an undesired role by shaping individuals’ cognitive processes to create robust, internally consistent theories about the world using flawed assumptions and incorrect “building blocks.”
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Magdalena Glas, Manfred Vielberth, Tobias Reittinger, Fabian Böhm and Günther Pernul
Cybersecurity training plays a decisive role in overcoming the global shortage of cybersecurity experts and the risks this shortage poses to organizations' assets. Seeking to make…
Abstract
Purpose
Cybersecurity training plays a decisive role in overcoming the global shortage of cybersecurity experts and the risks this shortage poses to organizations' assets. Seeking to make the training of those experts as efficacious and efficient as possible, this study investigates the potential of visual programming languages (VPLs) for training in cyber ranges. For this matter, the VPL Blockly was integrated into an existing cyber range training to facilitate learning a code-based cybersecurity task, namely, creating code-based correlation rules for a security information and event management (SIEM) system.
Design/methodology/approach
To evaluate the VPL’s effect on the cyber range training, the authors conducted a user study as a randomized controlled trial with 30 participants. In this study, the authors compared skill development of participants creating SIEM rules using Blockly (experimental group) with participants using a textual programming approach (control group) to create the rules.
Findings
This study indicates that using a VPL in a cybersecurity training can improve the participants' perceived learning experience compared to the control group while providing equally good learning outcomes.
Originality/value
The originality of this work lies in studying the effect of using a VPL to learn a code-based cybersecurity task. Investigating this effect in comparison with the conventional textual syntax through a randomized controlled trial has not been investigated yet.
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Yi-Hung Liu and Sheng-Fong Chen
Whether automatically generated summaries of health social media can assist users in appropriately managing their diseases and ensuring better communication with health…
Abstract
Purpose
Whether automatically generated summaries of health social media can assist users in appropriately managing their diseases and ensuring better communication with health professionals becomes an important issue. This paper aims to develop a novel deep learning-based summarization approach for obtaining the most informative summaries from online patient reviews accurately and effectively.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper proposes a framework to generate summaries that integrates a domain-specific pre-trained embedding model and a deep neural extractive summary approach by considering content features, text sentiment, review influence and readability features. Representative health-related summaries were identified, and user judgements were analysed.
Findings
Experimental results on the three real-world health forum data sets indicate that awarding sentences without incorporating all the adopted features leads to declining summarization performance. The proposed summarizer significantly outperformed the comparison baseline. User judgement through the questionnaire provides realistic and concrete evidence of crucial features that remarkably influence patient forum review summaries.
Originality/value
This study contributes to health analytics and management literature by exploring users’ expressions and opinions through the health deep learning summarization model. The research also developed an innovative mindset to design summarization weighting methods from user-created content on health topics.
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