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Improving the ethical thinking and analysis of university students is becoming an essential goal of modern curricula and program designers in various disciplines. To support ethics learning via practical applications and decision-making scenarios, ethics instructors are adding innovative methods to their multidisciplinary courses by following creative teaching practices and including diverse activities inside and outside the classroom. In this paper, a review of activities that promote ethics learning and engagement of undergraduate students is presented as a guide to devise a comprehensive framework for applying and promoting ethics. Ethics centers are also introduced as well-organized hubs that plan, organize, and host activities to support ethics teaching and enhance student intellectual growth and community services. The paper is enriched with numerous examples of activities and strategies for instructors and incentives for students extracted from an intensive review conducted on more than 60 ethics centers and 40 syllabi of ethics courses offered in international colleges and universities.

Illegal dumping of construction and demolition waste continues to be a problem hindering circular economy efforts. Controlling illegal dumping necessitates establishing an effective surveillance scheme and investigating the proper penalty value. This problem has previously been described as a game theory problem, with the government and construction contractors as the players. Taking into account illegal dumping hotspots, which can often be identified through topographical and geographical characteristics, is also important when establishing supervision strategies. This study develops an evolutionary game-theoretic model that can assist in devising effective supervision strategies to control the spread of illegal dumping, while taking into consideration hotspots. In specific, this study investigates the suitability of two alternative strategies: police patrols and hybrid monitoring through both patrols and the installation of closed-circuit television cameras in hotspots. The model was applied to two case studies, using parameters informed by real-world contexts, to demonstrate its potential for selecting suitable strategies according to local situations. The results suggest that nine possible scenarios govern the stable evolutionary strategies of game players, with five scenarios in which contractors converge to adopt legal dumping. Accordingly, based on the parameters of the region (hotspot areas, cost of supervision, efficiency of patrols, penalties, etc.), governments would be able to assess which of the strategies would lead to long-term compliance of contractors while also increasing their payoffs. Further analysis allowed to determine the minimum efficiency required, and simulations were performed to demonstrate the influence of different supervision efficiencies and penalties on the evolutionary strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little attention has been paid to the interaction or synergy among construction and demolition (C&D) waste management stakeholders. A framework allowing for interaction among the various C&D waste players is especially important in regions with mature C&D waste infrastructure, where various recycling, reuse and disposal facilities are present. In such an expanded infrastructure, these facilities differ in terms of the C&D waste materials they accept, the nature of the waste accepted (sorted/unsorted), as well as the services they provide. This makes developing the optimal C&D waste management plan (WMP) more cumbersome for contractors. To address the challenges arising from the poor dynamics associated with the overarching waste management infrastructure, this paper proposes a novel digital platform, namely the 'Construction and Demolition Waste Management Kernel' (C&D WMK). The C&D WMK has three main objectives: it allows for data exchange between the different stakeholders, provides guidance to contractors when developing C&D WMPs and allows for governmental supervision and regulation. This paper introduces the concept behind the C&D WMK, presents the optimization model embedded in the system, and demonstrates its application in a case study leveraging real-world data. Finally, a scenario analysis is conducted to show how the C&D WMK can be used by governments to identify pitfalls in the state of practice at the regional scale, and to determine effective solutions to enhance the C&D waste management performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction industry in the United States and other parts of the world has been facing several challenges, including a shortage of skilled workers. A review of the relevant body of knowledge indicates that one of the key reasons for this problem is the absence of human resource management strategies for construction workers at project, corporate, regional, or industry levels. This paper addresses the issues of workforce training and allocation on construction projects. It presents a framework to optimize the investment in, and to make the best use of, the available workforce with the intent to reduce project costs and improve schedule performance. A linear program model, entitled the Optimal Workforce investment Model, is built to provide an optimization-based framework for matching supply and demand of construction labor most efficiently through training, recruitment, and allocation. Given a project schedule or demand profile and the available pool of workers, the suggested model provides human resource managers a combined strategy for training the available workers and hiring additional workers. The input data to the proposed model consists of a certain available labor pool, cost figures for training workers in different skills, the cost of hiring workers, hourly labor wages, and estimates of affinities between the different considered skills. The objective of the model is to minimize labor costs while satisfying project labor demands. Results from application of the model to typical situations are presented, and recommendations for future developments are made. CE Database subject headings: Construction industry: Optimization: Training; Employees; Computer programming.

This paper briefly characterizes today's United States (U.S.) construction workforce, and attempts to provide evidence for what the construction industry most values in its workers. It presents the social and demographic characteristics of a sample of 862 construction workers, from 19 project sites that were interviewed in 2002, as part of a research effort at the University of Texas at Austin, and compares them with broader-based Bureau of Labor Statistics data to establish the degree to which they represent the U.S. construction workforce. Via statistical analysis, the paper explores the relationships between workers' attributes and how the industry compensates them as reflected in both hourly wages and average annual incomes. The statistical results reinforce what is known about the importance of years of experience: however, it also provides evidence of the importance of number of crafts each worker possessed, and computer knowledge. Less, but significant, evidence was obtained for the importance of the number of years spent with his/her current firm, craft training hours, age, or self-assessed performance. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)0733-9364(2006)132:10(1053) CE Database subject headings: Construction industry: Salaries: Employees: Regression analysis: Training.