107,482 research outputs found
Service Equality in Virtual Reference
Research is divided about the potential of e-service to bridge communication gaps, particularly to diverse user groups. According to the existing body of literature, e-service may either increase or decrease the quality of service received. This study analyzes the level of service received by different genders and ethnic groups when academic and public librarians answer 676 online reference queries. Quality of e-service was evaluated along three dimensions: timely response, reliability, and courtesy. This study found no significant differences among different user groups along any of these dimensions, supporting the argument that the virtual environment facilitates equitable
service and may overcome some challenges of diverse user groups
Gender Equality in Virtual Work II.: Regulatory Suggestions
This article focuses on gender equality in virtual work, taking special account of the regulatory
challenges. It contributes to broader debates on the workers' situation in the sharing economy in two
ways. Firstly, it makes an inaugural attempt to evaluate the implications of the new forms of work in
the sharing economy for female virtual workers, looking at the issue of equal treatment. Secondly, it
offers preliminary suggestions regarding a future regulation to improve equality between genders in
virtual work.
This is the second part of a paper on gender equality in virtual work. The first part (published in
the 2018/1 issue of the Hungarian Labour Law E-Journal) defined "virtual work", classified its two
basic forms and emphasised the specific traits of this form of work to demonstrate the need of special
protection against discrimination. Subsequently, it identified the possible beneficial and adverse
implications of virtual work for female workers and gender equality.
This second part firstly provides a summary of the gender equality law of the European Union
that serves as a point of reference when speaking about antidiscrimination law. Section 2 offers three
normative perspectives and suggestions as to how to enhance gender equality in virtual work. Finally,
the paper concludes
Gender Equality in Virtual Work I.: Risks
This article focuses on gender equality in virtual work, taking special account of the regulatory
challenges. It contributes to broader debates on the workers' situation in the sharing economy in two
ways. Firstly, it makes an inaugural attempt to evaluate the implications of the new forms of work in
the sharing economy for female virtual workers, looking at the issue of equal treatment. Secondly, it
offers preliminary suggestions regarding a future regulation to improve equality between genders in
virtual work.
The paper is divided into four main parts. The first section defines "virtual work", classifies its two
basic forms and emphasises the specific traits of this form of work to demonstrate the need of special
protection against discrimination. Secondly, the paper identifies the possible beneficial and adverse
implications of virtual work for female workers and gender equality. Thirdly, the paper provides a
summary of the gender equality law of the European Union that serves as a point of reference when
speaking about antidiscrimination law. Section 4 offers three normative perspectives and suggestions
as to how to enhance gender equality in virtual work. Finally, the paper concludes.
This first part of this two-part paper concentrates on the risks of virtual work for equal treatment,
while the second part is going to address the regulatory options and suggestions
Digital exclusion: potential implications for social work education
QAA Subject Benchmark 5.9 requires social work students to demonstrate the ability to have a critical understanding of the social impact of ICT, including an awareness of the impact of the 'digital divide'. In the twenty-first century, the implications of digital exclusion may become increasingly relevant for the social work profession with its values of empowerment and anti-oppressive practices. As governments and organisations move closer to the provision of online services, the social worker may find themselves addressing the disempowerment of service users and carers disconnected from a virtual welfare state. The concern is that Benchmark 5.9 does not go far enough, that the full significance of this requirement may not be sufficiently realised and a greater awareness urgently called for
Safety-related Tasks within the Set-Based Task-Priority Inverse Kinematics Framework
In this paper we present a framework that allows the motion control of a
robotic arm automatically handling different kinds of safety-related tasks. The
developed controller is based on a Task-Priority Inverse Kinematics algorithm
that allows the manipulator's motion while respecting constraints defined
either in the joint or in the operational space in the form of equality-based
or set-based tasks. This gives the possibility to define, among the others,
tasks as joint-limits, obstacle avoidance or limiting the workspace in the
operational space. Additionally, an algorithm for the real-time computation of
the minimum distance between the manipulator and other objects in the
environment using depth measurements has been implemented, effectively allowing
obstacle avoidance tasks. Experiments with a Jaco manipulator, operating in
an environment where an RGB-D sensor is used for the obstacles detection, show
the effectiveness of the developed system
Joint Scheduling and ARQ for MU-MIMO Downlink in the Presence of Inter-Cell Interference
User scheduling and multiuser multi-antenna (MU-MIMO) transmission are at the
core of high rate data-oriented downlink schemes of the next-generation of
cellular systems (e.g., LTE-Advanced). Scheduling selects groups of users
according to their channels vector directions and SINR levels. However, when
scheduling is applied independently in each cell, the inter-cell interference
(ICI) power at each user receiver is not known in advance since it changes at
each new scheduling slot depending on the scheduling decisions of all
interfering base stations. In order to cope with this uncertainty, we consider
the joint operation of scheduling, MU-MIMO beamforming and Automatic Repeat
reQuest (ARQ). We develop a game-theoretic framework for this problem and build
on stochastic optimization techniques in order to find optimal scheduling and
ARQ schemes. Particularizing our framework to the case of "outage service
rates", we obtain a scheme based on adaptive variable-rate coding at the
physical layer, combined with ARQ at the Logical Link Control (ARQ-LLC). Then,
we present a novel scheme based on incremental redundancy Hybrid ARQ (HARQ)
that is able to achieve a throughput performance arbitrarily close to the
"genie-aided service rates", with no need for a genie that provides
non-causally the ICI power levels. The novel HARQ scheme is both easier to
implement and superior in performance with respect to the conventional
combination of adaptive variable-rate coding and ARQ-LLC.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communications, v2: small
correction
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