Category: Construction

For this assignment, we will be exploring the services, benefits, and support options available to personnel in your agency as it pertains to mental health.
You have noticed one of your colleagues acting differently around the firehouse. They are quieter than normal and are not engaging with the rest of the company in the kitchen.
You are concerned and decide to reach out. As you approach your colleague and ask how they are doing, they tell you that everything is fine. As you continue to engage, offering reassurance and support, they share with you that they are dealing with a significant personal issue and are not sure where to turn. They explain that it has been difficult to get quality sleep, and it is affecting work and family. You ask if they would be willing to seek professional help and they indicate that they would consider it. The firefighter thanks you for your concern. You advise that you will follow up with more information.
To properly assist your colleague, you need to seek out more information.
Seek out and interview an appropriate individual who can provide more information on the questions listed below. They may be from inside or outside of your agency.
Questions:
What cultural change in the fire service needs to happen? What NFFF life safety initiative applies?
Why is it important to maintain physical and mental wellness in the fire service?
What types of threat to life and health have you seen associated with the fire service?
Do the department personnel have access to any type of peer support team? If so, is it local or regional?
Do the department personnel have access to any type of behavioral health assistance program? If so, what are the details?
Who needs to be accountable for health and safety?
What treatment facilities, if any, are available for department personnel who are dealing with a mental health or substance use disorder? If any, where are they located? How are they accessed?
Are there costs associated with accessing treatment for mental health services?
Does the department have a policy in place for personnel who need time off for a mental health issue? Does the policy address the personnel’s return to duty?
Does the department provide any type of training to personnel on how to recognize mental health issues? If so, please provide details.
Question for you to ponder: Do you feel adequately prepared to engage this person in a conversation about suicide? Why, or why not? (This does not have to be included in your assignment. It is just for you think about.)
After you conduct your interview, compile your research in an essay that focuses on the information you gathered. Make sure to include:
a title page,
an introduction in which you offer information about your interviewee,
the bulleted list of the questions that were asked along with the interviewee’s responses to each question,
a summary of your thoughts about the interviewee’s responses, and
a conclusion summarizing your research and what you learned.
Write a minimum of two pages. Use Times New Roman 12-point font and double space the entire document. Provide links to any resources, if appropriate.

(a) Explain how well the health and safety risks while using the bench- mounted circular sawhave been controlled.
(22)

Note: You should support your answer, where applicable, using relevant information from the scenario.

(b) Based on the scenario only, what improvements could be made to the existing working environment in the woodworkshop?
(12)

I would like to have a building simulation using BIM including the following:
1-BIM- Thermal building simulation.
2- Optimization of the construction site logistics.
3-automatic code checking.
provide the BIM file and Pictures of the previous requests.

CHAPTER 2 EXERCISES
What is a bar chart? What other term is synonymous with bar chart? How did the other term originate?
What are the main advantages of bar charts that have made them so popular? What are their main disadvantages?
In the following exercises, draw a bar chart that shows the time scale on the x‐axis. Use engineering paper or draw light vertical lines at certain intervals (e.g., every 5 days) to help you read the start and end dates of any activity. Make simplifying assumptions whenever necessary. Be sure to mention these assumptions.
You are running out of space in your house, so you have decided to transform your two‐car garage into a family room. In addition, you will build a simple carport in your driveway. Make a bar chart for this project, breaking your project into 10–15 work activities.
Think about obtaining a bachelor’s degree from a college as a project. You are advising a friend, a senior in high school who plans to attend college next year. Prepare a bar chart for him, depicting all of the courses that he must take from the start of college until graduation. Obtain the program course list. Make sure you do not overlook any prerequisite requirements. Make the following simplifying assumptions:
Your friend is smart. He will not fail any course.
All courses are available during every fall and spring semester.
No summer semesters are included. Your friend will work during the summer.
Your friend’s total load every semester should be no less than 15 credit hours and no more than 18. You can let him take as many as 20 credit hours in one semester only, but only during the last year.
Your friend must graduate in eight semesters.
After finishing the bar chart, show it to your adviser and get his or her approval on your sequence of courses. Note that several correct solutions to this problem may be possible (which is often the case with construction projects).
Draw a bar chart for building a detached shed in your backyard. Break your project into 10–15 work activities.
You are given the task of replacing the worn‐out carpet in your office. Draw a bar chart showing all activities involved for this task (including removing and reinstalling baseboards; removing and disposing of the old carpet and the pad; selecting, purchasing, and delivering the new carpet and a new pad; cleaning up before and after installing the new carpet; and any other relevant activity).
Prepare a bar chart for building an in‐ground swimming pool. If you do not know the steps involved, ask a friend or a local contractor.
Prepare a bar chart for making a cake (from scratch; don’t use a ready mix). Choose the appropriate time unit (minutes, or 5‐ or 10‐minute intervals).
Contact a contractor and ask the contractor whether he or she uses bar charts (they may be called Gantt charts). Ask about the main types of bar chart reports. Which groups of activities are included? Ask if the bar charts are prepared as bar charts or as an output for a CPM schedule.
To demonstrate the concept of summary bars, draw bar charts for building a new home. Use a few summary activities, such as laying the foundation, putting a slab on a grade, framing, electrical work, plumbing, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air‐conditioning), putting on the roof, installing doors and windows, and doing the finishing. You may need to show some of these activities (e.g., the electrical work or the plumbing) as discontinuous bars because you will start the activity (do a rough‐in), stop, and then return and finish it. Take the chart to a specialized contractor and expand one of the bars. Expanding a summary bar means breaking it down into a number of activities that make up the summary activity. For example, you can expand Framing to Installing First‐Floor Bottom Plates, Installing First‐Floor Studs, Installing First‐Floor Blocking, Installing First‐Floor Top Plates, Installing Second‐Floor Joists, and so forth. Note that the total duration of the summary activity must equal the total duration (not necessarily the algebraic summation) of the detailed activities within the summary activity.
NOTE
1 The notion that bar charts and Gantt charts are two different types of charts is baseless. There is a variety of bar chart types, and any of them can be called Gantt chart. Even though the PMI when defining bar charts says “also known as Gantt charts,” it defines a Gantt chart as “a bar chart of schedule information where activities are listed on the vertical axis, dates are shown on the horizontal axis, and activity durations are shown as horizontal bars placed according to start and finish dates.” This is not much different from the bar chart definition given previously.

This session will work on a group project where you will need to display and describe a data set of your choosing. In order to compute and graph the various statistics and graphs, there are a few sessions devoted to learning a statistical software called StatKey.
Project Information
This will be a group project. The size of the groups is between 1-3. You can choose your own groups. In order to see the assignment, you must join a group.
For this project, you must find some sort of published, existing data. Possible sources include almanacs, magazines, and journal articles, textbooks, web resources, athletic teams, newspapers, reference materials, campus organizations, professors with experimental data, electronic data repositories, the sports pages.
The dataset you select must have at least 25 cases. It also must have at least two categorical variables and at least two quantitative variables. It is very helpful to have a dataset that interests you.
Your project report should be clearly written. All tables, graphics, and figures must have full captions, that is one should be able to read the caption and understand fully what is portrayed in the figure. More detailed instructions for the project are contained in the attached documents in the assignment.
Data Sets
There is an attached file called “Data Set Descriptive Guide”. This has many data set you are free to use or you can find your own data sets. All of the data in this guide is on Blackboard for you to download.
There are many other interesting data set for you to find. Below are some webpages that may help spur on ideas for questions of interests for your projects
US Census Bureau https://www.census.gov/popclock/world,
College Scorecard. https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/
The General Social Survey. https://gss.norc.org/
National Center for Education Statistics https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?id=243665#finaid
StatKet -Software
You should StatKey to complete all the descriptive statistics, figures, tables, and graphics. For your report, you can clip the images you want into your project report.
Appendix
Attach as an appendix the data used for this report.

CHAPTER 1 EXERCISES
Define project planning and scheduling. Differentiate between the two terms.
What is a project. What makes planning and scheduling construction projects different from general planning? (Hint: Think of the key words in the definition of project.)
Are the following projects? If not, make modifications that would qualify them as projects:
Repair of a broken diesel generator
Raising my two kids to be the best
Cooking daily for my family
Preparing for my son’s wedding
Investing in the stock market
Periodically backing up the data on my hard drive
Converting my garage to a play room
Define portfolio and program in the context of project management. Give examples of each.
What is a project management plan? Give an example.
What is project control? Why is it important?
Think of a construction project in which you participated or that you observed. Write down the steps involved in its planning and the steps involved in its scheduling (without much specificity).
List the benefits of CPM scheduling in construction projects from the contractor’s perspective.
List the benefits of CPM scheduling in construction projects from the owner’s perspective.
Do all construction projects have the same need for CPM scheduling? Why or why not? Give examples.
What characteristics must a scheduler of a building project have? Can the same person be a scheduler for an industrial project? Why or why not?
Meet with a project manager for a construction project. Ask whether he or she uses CPM scheduling. If so, discuss the benefits obtained from such scheduling. If not, politely ask why.
Search for an article on a CPM scheduling topic (ENR, Civil Engineering, PM Network, and Cost Engineering are magazines that are good sources; avoid scholarly journals). Summarize and discuss the article.