Crowdworkers' temporal flexibility is being traded for the convenience of requesters through 19 'invisible mechanisms' employed by crowdworking platforms

Crowdworking platforms are a prime example of a product that sells flexibility to its consumers. In this paper, we argue that crowdworking platforms sell temporal flexibility to requesters to the detriment of workers. We begin by identifying a list of 19 features employed by crowdworking platforms that facilitate the trade of temporal flexibility from crowdworkers to requesters. Using the list of features, we conduct a comparative analysis of nine crowdworking platforms available to U.S.-based workers, in which we describe key differences and similarities between the platforms. We find that crowdworking platforms strongly favour features that promote requesters’ temporal flexibility over workers’ by limiting the predictability of workers’ working hours and restricting paid time. Further, we identify which platforms employ the highest number of features that facilitate the trade of temporal flexibility from workers to requesters, consequently increasing workers’ temporal precarity. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of the results

Controlling structural transitions in AuAg nanoparticles through precise compositional design

We present a study of the transitional pathways between highsymmetry structural motifs for AgAu nanoparticles, with a specific focus on controlling the energetic barriers through chemical design. We show that the barriers can be altered by careful control of the elemental composition and chemical arrangement, with core@shell and vertex-decorated arrangements being specifically influential on the barrier heights. We also highlight the complexity of the potential and free energy landscapes for systems where there are low-symmetry geometric motifs that are energetically competitive to the high-symmetry arrangements. In particular, we highlight that some core@shell arrangements preferentially transition through multistep restructuring of lowsymmetry truncated octahedra and rosette-icosahedra, instead of via the more straightforward square-diamond transformations, due to lower energy barriers and competitive energetic minima. Our results have promising implications for the continuing efforts in bespoke nanoparticle design for catalytic and plasmonic applications

Exploring Citizen Psych-Science and the Motivations of Errordiary Volunteers

Although virtual citizen science projects have the potential to engage large networks of people in science research, seeding and maintaining such networks can be difficult. A feature of successful projects is that they have well-motivated volunteers. What makes volunteers motivated rather than apathetic? In this paper we focus on projects that contribute to psychology research, which we term ‘citizen psych-science’. This differs from typical citizen science because volunteers are asked to contribute themselves as data. We describe research studies that we conducted with Errordiary — a citizen psych-science project where volunteers tweet about their everyday experiences of human error. These studies were: (1) an interview study, to explore the motivations of eight Errordiary volunteers; and (2) three focus groups, to explore the potential of attracting new communities to Errordiary. We found that the personal nature of the data can influence participation in positive and negative ways. We suggest several factors that scientists need to consider when encouraging citizen psych-science volunteers to contribute their personal experiences towards research

MOODs: Building massive open online diaries for researchers, teachers and contributors

Internet-based research conducted in partnership with paid crowdworkers and volunteer citizen scientists is an increasingly common method for collecting data from large, diverse populations. We wanted to leverage web-based citizen science to gain insights into phenomena that are part of people’s everyday lives. To do this, we developed the concept of a Massive Open Online Diary (MOOD). A MOOD is a tool for capturing, storing and presenting short updates from multiple contributors on a particular topic. These updates are aggregated into public corpora that can be viewed, analysed and shared. MOODs offer a novel method for crowdsourcing diary-like data in a way that provides value for researchers, teachers and contributors. MOODs also come with unique community-building and ethical challenges. We describe the benefits and challenges of MOODs in relation to Errordiary.org, a MOOD we created to aid our exploration of human error

The New Normals of Work: a framework for understanding responses to disruptions created by new futures of work

The COVID-19 pandemic led to governments advising citizens to engage in ’social distancing’ measures. These measures included working from home rather than in an office. As a result, many people had to rapidly develop new working strategies. As we look to a new future of work, with many workplaces examining long-term remote or hybrid working set-ups, it is important to understand how people developed remote working strategies and the contextual factors that precluded workers from maximising the potential of technology. Using a two-stage approach including a qualitative survey and a series of in-depth interviews, we investigated the challenges people experienced in creating effective workspaces, getting work done and connecting with others that surfaced during the COVID-19 crisis. We adapt a framework used in healthcare to the work context to make sense of how people cope with this disruption to find a new normal. From this, we identify instances of how people adapt to the new normal, where they avoid adaption and where they anticipate future changes. This gives us an understanding of how people adapt to the changing nature of work in response to the pandemic and offers a lens that may help to understand other future disruptions to work

The Tubulation Activity of a Fission Yeast F-BAR Protein Is Dispensable for Its Function in Cytokinesis

F-BAR proteins link cellular membranes to the actin cytoskeleton in many biological processes. Here we investigated the function of the Schizosaccharomyces pombe Imp2 F-BAR domain in cytokinesis and find that it is critical for Imp2\u27s role in contractile ring constriction and disassembly. To understand mechanistically how the F-BAR domain functions, we determined its structure, elucidated how it interacts with membranes, and identified an interaction between dimers that allows helical oligomerization and membrane tubulation. Using mutations that block either membrane binding or tubulation, we find that membrane binding is required for Imp2\u27s cytokinetic function but that oligomerization and tubulation, activities often deemed central to F-BAR protein function, are dispensable. Accordingly, F-BARs that do not have the capacity to tubulate membranes functionally substitute for the Imp2 F-BAR, establishing that its major role is as a cell-cycle-regulated bridge between the membrane and Imp2 protein partners, rather than as a driver of membrane curvature

Short links and tiny keyboards::A systematic exploration of design trade-offs in link shortening services

AbstractLink-shortening services save space and make the manual entry of URLs less onerous. Short links are often included on printed materials so that people using mobile devices can quickly enter URLs. Although mobile transcription is a common use-case, link-shortening services generate output that is poorly suited to entry on mobile devices: links often contain numbers and capital letters that require time consuming mode switches on touch screen keyboards. With the aid of computational modeling, we identified problems with the output of a link-shortening service, bit.ly. Based on the results of this modeling, we hypothesized that longer links that are optimized for input on mobile keyboards would improve link entry speeds compared to shorter links that required keyboard mode switches. We conducted a human performance study that confirmed this hypothesis. Finally, we applied our method to a selection of different non-word mobile data-entry tasks. This work illustrates the need for service design to fit the constraints of the devices people use to consume services

The end of the active work break? Remote work, sedentariness and the role of technology in creating active break-taking norms

Excessive sedentariness can impair workers' health and productivity. The move to working from home as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic eliminated many workday opportunities for physical activity. This, coupled with a blurring of boundaries between work and non-work periods, put many at risk of overwork and musculoskeletal issues. We examined how the sudden transition to working from home influenced people's ability to take physically active work breaks. We found that the absence of social norms associated with the presence of colleagues in the work environment left workers uncertain about whether and when it is appropriate to take breaks. The pressure to demonstrate productivity while working asynchronously led to increased sedentariness and decreased break-taking. We propose that online tools that promote flexible social norms around break-taking could empower remote workers to incorporate regular physical activity into their days, without compromising the beneficial aspects of asynchronous working

Exploring the effects of non-monetary reimbursement for participants in HCI research

When running experiments within the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) it is common practice to ask participants to come to a specified lab location, and reimburse them monetarily for their time and travel costs. This, however, is not the only means by which to encourage participation in scientific study. Citizen science projects, which encourage the public to become involved in scientific research, have had great success in getting people to act as sensors to collect data or to volunteer their idling computer or brain power to classify large data sets across a broad range of fields including biology, cosmology and physical and environmental science. This is often done without the expectation of payment. Additionally, data collection need not be done on behalf of an external researcher; the Quantified Self (QS) movement allows people to reflect on data they have collected about themselves. This too, then, is a form of non-reimbursed data collection. Here we investigate whether citizen HCI scientists and those interested in personal data produce reliable results compared to participants in more traditional lab-based studies. Through six studies, we explore how participation rates and data quality are affected by recruiting participants without monetary reimbursement: either by providing participants with data about themselves as reward (a QS approach), or by simply requesting help with no extrinsic reward (as in citizen science projects). We show that people are indeed willing to take part in online HCI research in the absence of extrinsic monetary reward, and that the data generated by participants who take part for selfless reasons, rather than for monetary reward, can be as high quality as data gathered in the lab and in addition may be of higher quality than data generated by participants given monetary reimbursement online. This suggests that large HCI experiments could be run online in the future, without having to incur the equally large reimbursement costs alongside the possibility of running experiments in environments outside of the lab