Investigating Crowdworkers' Identify, Perception and Practices in Micro-Task Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is rapidly gaining popularity among academic and business communities. Yet, our understanding of this work way is still in its incipient stage, in particular regarding the increasingly large and diverse crowdworkers. As such, we aim to understand crowdworkers' perception and experience to themselves and their work from their own perspective. We explore this by a mix-methods study of crowdworkers in Ali, one of prominent micro-task crowdsourcing platforms in China. Our findings highlight crowdworker in Ali is not only a coded name, but also an identity with some positive attitudes and beliefs towards work and life. In particular, this identity provides many socio-psychological benefits for crowdworkers, which further contributes to their consistent engagement in Ali and proactive practices to improve crowdworker communities and Ali platform collaboratively. We according suggest that taking crowdworker identity as a lens for crowdsourcing research, and turning attention towards construction and expressions of crowdworkers' identity and values in their own context.

Lightweight and Anonymous Mutual Authentication Protocol for Edge IoT Nodes with Physical Unclonable Function

Internet of Things (IoT) has been widely used in many fields, bringing great convenience to people’s traditional work and life. IoT generates tremendous amounts of data at the edge of network. However, the security of data transmission is facing severe challenges. In particular, edge IoT nodes cannot run complex encryption operations due to their limited computing and storage resources. Therefore, edge IoT nodes are more susceptible to various security attacks. To this end, a lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement protocol is proposed to achieve the security of IoT nodes’ communication. The protocol uses the reverse fuzzy extractor to acclimatize to the noisy environment and introduces the supplementary subprotocol to enhance resistance to the desynchronization attack. It uses only lightweight cryptographic operations, such as hash function, XORs, and PUF. It only stores one pseudo-identity. The protocol is proven to be secure by rigid security analysis based on improved BAN logic. Performance analysis shows the proposed protocol has more comprehensive functions and incurs lower computation and communication cost when compared with similar protocols.

Educational Film Experiment at Workplaces: Can Sex-Role Attitudes and Work and Life Balance Capabilities Related to Maternity Be Treated?

In order to understand the impact of educational videos on the sex-role attitudes and perceptions of maternity at workplaces, an experimental research design was selected. Our survey data originates from a randomized control trial of 262 employees across Estonian organisations. After using a randomization method to select five companies from Estonian company TOP 100 ranking, an equal size control and treatment groups within these companies were randomly selected. Employees of the control group were treated with a 20-minute educational film which was designed originally for highschool students for treating a traditional male-breadwinner type of sex-role attitudes. Research goal was to explore whether an educational film as a teaching tool could be also used in organisations to affect sex role attitudes and challenges of work and life balance with focus on maternity at workplaces. Survey data collection was arranged in companies by randomly splitting the employees into treatment and control groups, and they were guided through the experiment via written instructions and HR specialist support. For data analysis, author used descriptive analysis to measure the differences between the control and treatment group by analysing employees’ responses to 20 individual statements in Likert scale, with a focus on sex-role attitudes and maternity challenges questions. More specifically, author compared the differences between control and treatment group as well as the gender differences across the two groups (i.e whether an educational film had a greater affect to one over the other sex). This experiment suggests which topics in educational videos could positively affect sex-role attitudes and perceptions of maternity at workplace. The article also makes suggestions how context supporting training tools can be used together with educational videos at workplaces.

Academic Work and Life of Public Administration Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Slovenia

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed the lives of people, including higher education students. Thus, the main aim of the chapter is to present the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on academic work and life of public administration students in Slovenia compared with their counterparts from other fields of study. The analysis is based on 1,049 Slovenian respondents, covering 211 students from public administration and 838 students from other fields of study. The results show that at the time of the lockdown public administration students were the most satisfied with real-time online lectures, followed by asynchronous forms of lectures. Compared with the students from other fields of study, they were in general more satisfied with provided course assignments and feedback on performance but less satisfied with lecturers' response, openness, and information. They also found it more difficult to focus, adapt, and achieve better performance in the online environment and were in general less confident in computer skills compared to their counterparts from other fields of study.

Health and Wellbeing as Appreciative Inquiry in a Private University in Mexico

Appreciative inquiry (AI) has been used to promote positive change in different areas of organizational life. It is based on the 4D cycle which includes four distinct stages: discover, dream, design, and destiny. Organizational wellbeing is both a strategy and a responsibility, especially in recent times, when the line between work and life seems to be blurring, and there has been an increased concern about the role that work plays in the health and wellbeing of employees. AI is substantially different from other institutional analysis methodologies because it is not focused on solving problems, but on the positive aspects of organizational life and culture. This chapter presents the case of a private university in Puebla, Mexico, which has been promoting holistic programs to improve employees' wellbeing and happiness, reducing stress and other potential health problems through appreciative inquiry on what members dream, long for, and aspire in terms of better overall health. It is a descriptive study that presents a specific case.

Thinking Outside the Circle: The Geistkreis and the Viennese “Kreis Culture” in America

Besides their ideas and social networks, émigré intellectuals bring with them practices for engagement with intellectual work. This article focuses on one such practice: the intellectual Kreis [circle]. It focuses on the Geistkreis, an interwar Viennese interdisciplinary intellectual circle. Based on archival research, the article uses a number of case studies to show that the Kreis was employed by the Viennese émigrés as a mental scheme and as a recipe for action. It argues that the émigrés’ adherence to the Kreis structure explains the friction between them and their hosts. By following the attempts of former Geistkreis members to create Kreis-like institutions in America, the article shows that the Kreis was more than mere organizational form. It represented an epistemical commitment to knowledge making as a collective effort, and the preference of general theoretical knowledge over specialized research. It also entailed an intermingling of “work” and “life” that did not conform to American norms.

The Effect of Building Closures due to COVID 19 on the Perceptions and Practices of School Counselors

With school buildings shuttering due to COVID-19, school counselors’ work needed to shift to virtual environments. The shift in operations led us to wonder about school counselors’ perceptions and practices in these new and unfamiliar conditions. In our mixed-methods cross-sectional study, we gathered quantitative and qualitative data from 89 school counselors. Our findings include evidence of the counselors feeling disconnected from their students, lack of technology and student access, privacy issues, limited preparation to counsel in virtual environments, and work and life balance. We follow our results with a discussion, related implications, and directions for future research.

Challenges facing a Māori prison education leader

Māori are severely over-represented in the prison population of Aotearoa New Zealand, making up over half of all prisoners, despite being only about 15% of the national population. These Māori statistics are well-known, and support racist perceptions of Māori in general. There is substantial literature on Māori imprisonment in Criminology and related fields, but it mostly focuses on ‘fixing’ the prisoner. Prison education is a neglected topic in extant educational research. Little research exists on the experiences of those who work in prisons, and little or none about the experiences of Māori prison educators. Prison education focuses on changing behaviours that lead to offending and helping prisoners to gain work and life skills. But security concerns and managing the prison population take precedence and restrict the availability and priority given to education. The recent Hōkai Rangi strategy has generated enthusiasm, but has yet to translate into positive results.

Cervantes y la escritura de senectute (en torno al Viaje del parnaso)

This article applies the critical concept of de senectute writing, coined by Rozas, to Lope’s work, in the analysis of Viaje del Parnaso as the axis of a cycle and an authorial posture. It starts from the textual references to the old age in this autobiographical fiction and its creative environment. These are related to a sense of melancholy, which also connects the Viaje character with the attitude of the author. This attitude manifests itself in the revision of his work and life; a revision through which Cervantes contemplates the literary field, and sorts the narrative movement of the text. The round trip reveals his intent to recover a lost splendour, which materialises on the lyrical level in Naples, and is evoked, in the epic, with Lepanto, both key moments in Cervantes’s biography. Following the features pointed out by Rozas, this study shows that those features are present in the Cervantine cycle before they make their appearance in Lope.