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The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the current stage of implementation of telework in Romania and to determine potential positive and sustainable effects generated by its development on a large scale. The research methodology used is based on descriptive analysis, comparative analysis, but also on econometric analysis. The general results obtained show that Romania registers a very low level of telework employees, this being influenced, not only by the low share of those with tertiary education and high skilled professionals, but also by the fact that most Romanian employees do not want to practice this type of work. The results also showed that telework can generate significant economic and social benefits. The potential solutions we have identified for the sustainable development of the telework phenomenon in Romania include investments in tertiary education and awareness campaigns among both employees and companies, regarding the positive effects that can be obtained through telework and business development.
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[...]the social dimension of well-being, which includes our experiences of positive relationships and positive interactions, is the strongest predictor of our overall perception of wellbeing (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018). Virtual collaborations have also added new opportunities for creativity and information sharing in that Zoom allows us to work with colleagues to add ideas to a shared whiteboard or to synchronously annotate a text, for example, during interactive workshops and breakout group sessions at online/hybrid conferences. Another example is one of the author's participation in a new collaborative project with a European research group on the representation of hunting in German literature and art. Other instructional practices we have implemented to foreground social connectedness and students' sense of belonging include frequent check-ins (Stanton et al., 2016;Simon Fraser University, 2023) with students, for example, by using memes such as "Welche Katze bist du heute?," explicit conversations about resources and sense of belonging (a module with local resources added to our Learning Management System [Canvas]), and more intentional focus on integrating students' lived experiences and self-reflections into assignments.
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PurposeWhile strong risk management and contingency planning are important for building capabilities useful for quick adaptation to foreseeable disruptions, they may not be useful for preparing for black swan-type events or situations that lack sufficient precedent to understand how they impact businesses. The key to creating a resilient organization relies most on resilient human capital, who are capable of withering whatever changes Chance may throw at them and the organization.Design/methodology/approachUsing company data and semi-structured interviews, this paper presents the case study of ASK Consulting, a medium-size entrepreneurial enterprise that learned that human resources are the cornerstone of a resilient organization.FindingsResilient people exhibit three common traits: discipline, open-mindedness to change, and a sense of service to the team rather than themselves. Insights about these traits can be elicited by asking prospective employees three questions during their interview.Practical implicationsThis case provides an illustrative case study and straightforward guidance for identifying whether a job candidate has the traits of a resilient person.Originality/valueMuch of the research into organizational resilience focuses on scenario planning, contingencies, and building organizational capabilities. This provides a much more straightforward and actionable approach that focuses on only one type of resource and is not contingent on the availability of slack time and money to implement.
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WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SPEAK of "global Classics” in the "post-COVID era?” Reaching the post-COVID period may have eluded us, but the notion of a global Classics—Classics as it is received outside the West—has been a topic of serious interest in the field over the past decade, even in advance of the new opportunities for conferences and conversations across time zones made possible by Zoom and the virtual office.1 Paradoxically enough, the question of how to read—and interpret—the texts of the Classical tradition in a globalized world arises just as the field is facing critique from within, as texts once standard in university curricula are condemned for their historical use in the service of empire, expansion, ideology, and propping up hierarchies of class, race, and gender. At a 2019 conference on "Classics and Global Humanities” at the University of Ghana,2 (non-globalized) Classics' involvement in the ideologies of colonialism was openly acknowledged, but new frameworks were also suggested within which these texts could speak to topics relevant to the present, spurring readers to discuss such subjects as academic freedom and politics, race in the canon, citizenship and migration, globalization and education, and more.3 As Erin Mee (2010: 314) puts it in her review essay of Classics in Post-colonial Worlds and Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora, "What better way to challenge colonialism (either before, during, or after the ‘official' period of colonization) than by using the very tools that colonial powers used to justify their cultural superiority and therefore their dominance?”4 Other voices agree: Here, then, "global Classics” strives to be truly global by cutting across social and economic status in its search for representative texts—representative, perhaps, of "the human condition,” to the extent that is possible. Unfortunately, the Yale-NUS liberal arts college (and its vibrant international student body with it) has just been shut down by policy makers at NUS: the challenges of teaching a broad-ranging core in a country without complete freedom of speech apparently proved to be too much.11 Here politics confronts the habits of mind of the liberal self, which is often prompted by the classical texts of any culture to ask questions about human beings' relationship to themselves and their society that do not mesh well with nationalism, autocracy, or the control of propaganda.
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The Metaverse allows the integration of physical and digital versions of users, processes, and environments where entities communicate, transact, and socialize. With the shift towards Extended Reality (XR) technologies, the Metaverse is envisioned to support a wide range of applicative verticals. It will support a seamless mix of physical and virtual worlds (realities) and, thus, will be a game changer for the Future Internet, built on the Semantic Web framework. The Metaverse will be ably assisted by the convergence of emerging wireless communication networks (such as Fifth-Generation and Beyond networks) or Sixth-Generation (6G) networks, Blockchain (BC), Web 3.0, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). It has the potential for convergence in diverse industrial applications such as digital twins, telehealth care, connected vehicles, virtual education, social networks, and financial applications. Recent studies on the Metaverse have focused on explaining its key components, but a systematic study of the Metaverse in terms of industrial applications has not yet been performed. Owing to this gap, this survey presents the salient features and assistive Metaverse technologies. We discuss a high-level and generic Metaverse framework for modern industrial cyberspace and discuss the potential challenges and future directions of the Metaverse's realization. A case study on Metaverse-assisted Real Estate Management (REM) is presented, where the Metaverse governs a Buyer–Broker–Seller (BBS) architecture for land registrations. We discuss the performance evaluation of the current land registration ecosystem in terms of cost evaluation, trust probability, and mining cost on the BC network. The obtained results show the viability of the Metaverse in REM setups.
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Work from Home (WFH) remains one of the most sought-after opportunities availed, especially during the critical years of the Covid-19 pandemic, and is here to stay. This facility has benefitted millions of vulnerable working class, who could not commute to their workstations due to enforced lockdowns in their countries. Today, this arrangement has given a new lease of life to both employers and employees alike, and has also become an important policy priority for governments and the private sector across the globe. This study provides a unique insight as to how WFH strategies help businesses respond to emerging needs and play an important role in helping reconstruct the conventional structure of working hours while allowing for more flexibility in the working ecosystem with a human face. Further, it highlights the impacting factors on the workers' physical and mental health while pursuing WFH, and also provides a foundation for considering how to support a positive WFH experience along all verticals. While discussing the pros and cons, the study also explores if this working facility will remain just transitory for tackling any emergency situation or could be used as an alternative option in the days to come.
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While HIPAA restrictions were eased during the pandemic, you should by now have secure connections and HIPAA-compliant policies and procedures in place. Professionalism: Make sure your appointment scheduling, processing, payment procedures, and behavior look and feel like a face-to-face visit to your practice. Source: Physicians Practice, December 10, 2021;https://www.physicianspractice. com/view/choosing-the-right-setting-fora-telemedicine-call
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The purpose of a ventilation system for indoor spaces is to create a safe environment for the occupants by diluting the concentration levels of hazardous contaminants and to minimize the risk of infection due to spread of airborne pathogens. The effectiveness of ventilation system depends on several inter related factors including the supply airflow rate, number and locations of supply diffusers, and number and locations of return grilles. With the help of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analyses, this study systematically evaluates the impact of three different HVAC configurations on the airflow patterns, distribution of contaminant, and the risk of infection in a small office space with two cubicles. The HVAC configuration with a single supply and a single return can create adverse airflow patterns which can promote spread of contaminants and increase the risk of infection farther from the source. When an additional supply diffuser is introduced with the same single return, the zone of high risk of infection remained in the vicinity of the source. However, the overall risk of infection in the space remained the same. Addition of another return created aerodynamic containment zones in the space which provided easy path for the contaminated air to leave the space and reduced the overall risk of infection. Since the location of an infected individual is not known a priori, the aerodynamic containment with distributed supply and distributed return can be the best strategy for reducing the probability of infection in indoor spaces. These studies demonstrate that CFD analyses can help in identifying the potential risk of high infection due to poor airflow distribution into a space and can provide valuable insights for developing appropriate mitigation strategies to create safe indoor environment.
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Purpose>This study aims to explore how changing technology can be harnessed by HR teams to improve the efficiency of the workplace and elevate the employee experience. It analyses whether technology contributes to more issues than it solves, and whether HR teams should consider adopting measures grounded in technology.Design/methodology/approach>This study stemmed from the recent publishing of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development employee well-being report and months of research into the key issues that HR teams face within the industry, offering a perspective on why they should consider technology as the solution to these.Findings>By adapting HR strategy, technology can be used to better employee health and well-being, as well as business turnover. The future of HR doesn’t lie in rejecting these new systems and ways of working, but rather by accepting them and implementing the necessary boundaries to preserve and even improve employee health.Originality/value>The value of this study is to provide HR teams with a comprehensive take on the role that technology currently plays, and will continue to play, as a solution to the issues that plague the industry.
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The wavelength band of200-280 nm of UV-C radiation generated by the Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI) system can destroy the reproduction ability of microorganisms. Severalfactors related to UVfixtures, HVAC layout, and the resulting airflow flow patterns can affect the performance of upper-room UVGI applications. With the help of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analyses, this study systematically evaluates the impact of UV-C intensities on the effectiveness of an upper room UVGI system. It shows that the addition of even a small amount of UV-C energy in the upper region of space can significantly reduce the probability of infection as predicted by the Wells-Riley model. Increasing the UV-C output shows a further reduction in the infection probability, although with a diminishing impact. A further investigation is necessary to evaluate the effect of airflow patterns on the performance of UVGI systems. These studies demonstrate that CFD analyses can help optimize the performance of UVGI systems to minimize the probability of infection in indoor spaces.
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Online courses have moved from the margins to the center of higher education. Some scholars greet this trend cheerfully while others express concerns about quality and equity. Regardless of one's position, online education is here to stay and we have a limited window in which to chart the course of its development. While scholars debate many aspects of online education, we advocate focusing on three priorities (1) reasonable class sizes, (2) meaningful student-faculty connection, and (3) equity in fostering humanistic education. In the following work, we ground this argument in the current literature and our experiences as college educators and researchers.
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The students now looked to faculty to help them understand what their old face-to-face, on-campus course was going to be like as a new virtual pandemic course and how we were going to help them get through it. How were international students who went home over spring break going to maintain contact with the content now that they were banned from returning to the states and were living a continent away? Because I didn't want my students to flounder, or stumble or falter, my new provisions included releasing my own intact lecture notes in both PowerPoint and PDF formats fully online;previously, the student version of the notes made available to them contained fill-in-the-blank slides as an incentive to attend class. [...]I revamped our lively classroom conversations for those who could not physically join us by creating real-time interactive discussion groups on a virtual discussion board or through chat rooms in D2L, our online learning course management system. Summer's Stride and Fall's Foreshadowing As with my spring colleagues, we summer educators worked extraordinarily long hours and demonstrated astonishing dedication in preparing course materials for our virtual classes.
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[...]this hat is interwoven with my brain cells, so it is never really removed when I wear my other hats, but that is a different story. [...]early March, we had heard of the news about the COVID-19 virus and its spread in other areas of the world. Interest rates were declining to historic lows, and new houses were being built at reasonable prices (well, up to a certain point of time before they sky rocketed). Higher education institutes started offering sought-after courses for free online, libraries doubled or even tripled their educational offerings for all ages starting with infants all the way to senior citizens, major publishers and content developers offered their products for free or at a discounted rate (especially for educators), tutoring services and homeschooling programs flourished and developed, innovative educational content was being created and available for all at no cost, world-renowned magazines and journals became open access to benefit all of humanity, to those who cared to learn, and doors opened for all.
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PurposeThe purpose of this study is to propose a conceptual framework of beautification/modification services, to introduce the special issue on the topic “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall! Examining the Bright and Dark Side of Face and Body Beautification/Modification Services” and to provide a future research agenda.Design/methodology/approachBuilding on the available literature, the authors developed the “Nip and Tuck” service framework of beautification/modification services depicting the motives, benefits and outcomes while it identifies current industry trends.FindingsThe authors explore the antecedents and consequences (positive and negative) of consuming face and body beautification/modification services and integrate these in the “Nip and Tuck” service framework. In the framework, the authors acknowledge the critical role of new technologies such as augmented reality apps and the internet in enabling and transforming beautification/modification services into commodities. The framework also identifies the benefits consumers seek and derive from these services while it recognizes current trends that shape the industry. The authors conclude with a set of future research directions that arise from the framework and the papers in the special issue.Practical implicationsThe attained insights are useful to managers of beautification and modification services seeking to understand and satisfy their customers’ needs while securing their well-being.Social implicationsUnderstanding the role of beautification and modification services in consumers’ well-being is essential for business managers and policymakers.Originality/valueThe authors propose a novel, “Nip and Tuck” framework of face and body beautification/modification services and its key antecedents and consequences while considering both their bright and dark sides.