December 22, 2021

How To Improve Communication In Construction Sites

Poor communication must be avoided in construction sites because it is one of the main reasons for project delays. This may take various forms like unclear communication resulting in wrong interpretation or confusion, delays in the flow of information, and pointing communication to the wrong area or people.  These components

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What are the Alternatives to CAPTCHA?

Bots traffic continues to increase day after day, thanks to their various uses. There are two types of bots, the malicious bots and the god bots. Bots can be used in communication, indexing websites, scraping content from a website, or even launching attacks on the online infrastructure. With the bad

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Issue 322 : Nov 2024

December 22, 2021

How To Improve Communication In Construction Sites

Poor communication must be avoided in construction sites because it is one of the main reasons for project delays. This may take various forms like unclear communication resulting in wrong interpretation or confusion, delays in the flow of information, and pointing communication to the wrong area or people.  These components of poor or ineffective communication may lead to mistakes and delays. Ordering the wrong materials and mislaid steps in the construction processes may also lead to project delays. In worst-case scenarios, disputes may arise. This is because a lack of proper communication could lead to misunderstandings in a construction project. Thus, it’s crucial to keep everyone updated on the project to prevent miscommunication.  Fortunately, these problems can be avoided by improving communication in the construction sites. With proper communication, all information will be delivered and received, and thus, miscommunication is less likely to happen. The question is, how can communication be improved in these areas? Here are some of the ways to do it:  1. Allow Field And Office Workers To Communicate With One Another In construction sites, communication breakdowns often take place between field and office teams. Thus, it can form a conflict as well as delay production. To reduce problems that may come up during the construction project, consider fixing the gap between these two teams.  When everyone in your company works together, blunders are restricted and morale remains high. In this case, you need to look for the right technology. This will help in centralizing the communication as well as facilitating collaboration. As a result, you’ll have a real-time view of a project’s progress, while allowing the teams to connect across the construction site and office.  For instance, you can invest in wave communications to have a reliable internet connection in the area. With poor connection, there is a tendency for some workers not to receive the information coming from the office and vice versa, which may lead to project delays.  2. Build Trust With One Another  Keep in mind that the construction industry deeply depends on a relationship. One major part of that includes trusting all workers to get the job done and communicate your messages properly and effectively.  While improving trust in this industry may involve a culture shift, know that there are ways you can do to improve communication with your employees. For instance, build trust, lessen doubt, simplify collaborations, and take responsibility from the top management to the bottom-rung workers in every aspect of construction projects.  3. Make Communication Simple Proper communication may boost productivity in construction as there will be no room for confusion. Better communication is possible by relaying concise and clear messages across all employees. The importance of understanding a message completely the first time it was sent is immeasurable, most especially in construction sites. Avoid using jargon and other terms that others may not understand. Keep messages simple, direct to the point, and brief. In addition, you need to focus on the most important and relevant details every team member needs to know. Meanwhile, you must give as much information as possible so confusion may less likely to transpire. 4. Offer Training Make sure to allow workers to improve their skills and obtain new ones. You can do this by training your employees on the use of new software, apps, equipment, regulation, and safety features. In a way, this will benefit your business as well as your workers.  Through training, you keep the relationship between the employees and company strong and improve the communication in all teams. This will also lessen the possibility of your employees leaving because they’ll feel wanted and valued by their employer. Investing in employee training can give an advantage to employers as this will lead to more skilled employees. Remember that workers are more attracted to companies offering the right training as they feel these are where they’d love to stay until their retirement.  Thus, if your employees matter to you, do everything you can to keep them in your care. Conclusion Clear lines of communication should be one of the top priorities to achieve a successful construction project. When proper and effective communication is practised consistently, the involved parties can serve the clients better while keeping in line with company and industry standards. This will result in an enhanced quality of collaboration, so unclear instructions and misunderstandings will be avoided. Furthermore, projects will flow smoothly if the teams communicate well with one another. Hopefully, the tips mentioned here will be beneficial in improving communication in construction sites. 

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What are the Alternatives to CAPTCHA?

Bots traffic continues to increase day after day, thanks to their various uses. There are two types of bots, the malicious bots and the god bots. Bots can be used in communication, indexing websites, scraping content from a website, or even launching attacks on the online infrastructure. With the bad bot traffic at about 40% of all the internet traffic, it is only necessary to have various bot protection mechanisms. A Completely Automated Public Test to tell Computers and Human Apart (CAPTCHA) is one such mechanism for protecting your site against bad bots. What is a CAPTCHA Many internet users are asked to tick some boxes to prove they are not robots at one point. You may also have seen a set of images and asked to select one that contains a fire hydrant, chimney, or streetlights. All these are to prove that you are not a computer or a bot. A CAPTCHA is a test, a Turing test, to be specific. It is simple enough for any human to solve but complex for a computer to solve. Bots are automated scripts or computers. Therefore, they cannot be able to solve the test. Of all the internet security measures, CAPTCHA is the most loathed. In theory, CAPTCHAs are a good idea. Their objective is to keep the bot at bay and spam comments away. They are common online, with over 200 million of them completed daily. However, captchas pose a problem to the user experience. They do this in the following ways: CAPTCHA’s User experience issues Interrupting a user’s workflow CAPTCHA adds an extra irritating step between users and the task they seek to accomplish. Even the recent versions of CAPTCHA can be hard to read. For instance, although Re-Captcha is among the oldest CAPTCHA generators, it forces users to decipher text images from old books. The advantage here is that the text comprises actual words and not random strings of letters and numbers. This is an excellent idea, although the words can be hard to make out regardless of how good your vision is. Because of their hardness to read, they slow down your browsing experience. Accessibility issue For people e having visual difficulties, solving the CAPTCHA can be excessively hard. This is a critical usability issue. Some CAPTCHAS have audio alternatives but are, in most cases, even harder to decipher and sound scary. CAPTCHA puts a burden on legit users Beyond the accessibility and the usability concerns, at the core of CAPTCHA, there is a flaw. The fundamental issue is that CAPTCHAs force legitimate e users to complete undesirable tests because of issues that are far beyond their reach. That is not their fault. With CAPTCHAs, all the users are presumed guilty. Because of these reasons, there are many alternatives to CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA. These measures put bad bots away without affecting the user experience. Alternatives to CAPTCHA More enjoyable and more accessible tests As we have established above, completing a CAPTCHA is unpalatable. There are several user-friendly alternatives to CAPTCHA that have popped up. Some like Sweet CAPTCHA and PlayThru gamify the entire process of proving that you are a human being. However, while playing a game is better than entering an obscured string of text, the issue of accessibility remains for these processes. Visually impaired users cannot play the game. Furthermore, because people are accustomed to filling the traditional CAPTCHA, gamified alternatives to CAPTCHA are seen as juvenile or even annoying. Other alternatives to CAPTCHA like Egglue and Text CAPTCHA ask a series of simple questions that a human being can answer using intuition or logic. NuCAPTCHA employs behavioral analysis to assess the risk levels for each visitor. Based on how the user is likely to be a bot, the solution assigns CAPTCHAs of varying Difficulty levels. The downside of this alternative to CAPTCHA is that it still affects a user’s workflow. Honeypots These are traps set to catch bots without the human being noticing they were there. Honeypots are not visible to a human being. Hidden form fields are one of the most common forms of honeypots. An extra entry field is added to the webform. It is then hidden from human users using CSS or JavaScript. However, bots will still see the entry field and fill the entry. Reject the form automatically, and take measures to mitigate against the bot if the above happens. However, honeypots still are not perfect. Website visitors using screen reader software still encounter the field. This creates confusion and increases the chances of failing the test. Verified sign-in The other option that you can use to confirm the visitors is by requiring them to log in to your website using accounts like Facebook, Disqus, Gmail account, or Twitter. This solution is vital as it removes the anonymity that malicious users rely on when posting abusive or rude comments. By tying comments to a verified account, you add an extra layer of responsibility while discouraging trolls. The issue here is that not all the users have the required verified account. They may not be able to access the service. To solve this, you can use a tool like Gigya or Janrain that allows the user to select from various accounts to log in with. However, many users do not like the idea of using their social accounts to log into unfamiliar websites. It is because of privacy issues and spamming of the account with messages without their permission. Timestamps The next alternative to CAPTCHA is using timestamps. Bots are faster compared to human beings. When users come across a form, they take time to read the instructions, decide what they will key in, and enter the text. On the other hand, the bot populates the form instantly. You can use time stamps on our form to reject the forms that are filled too quickly. However, this method is not secure enough to be used alone. There are sneaker bots that are programmed to fill out the form slowly to

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