Strategies for successful telework: how effective employees manage work/home boundaries

Purpose: This paper aims to 1) identify strategies used by successful teleworkers to create and maintain boundaries between work and home, and 2) determine how these strategies relate to employee preferences for segmentation or integration of work and home. Design/methodology/approach: Forty in-depth, face-to-face interviews were conducted with employees working from home either occasionally (occasional teleworkers), between 20-50% of the workweek (partial teleworkers), or the majority of the time (full teleworkers). Findings: Teleworkers use physical, temporal, behavioural and communicative strategies to recreate boundaries similar to those found in office environments. While teleworkers can generally develop strategies that align boundaries to their preferences for segmentation or integration, employees with greater job autonomy and control are better able to do so. Research limitations: A limitation of this research is its potential lack of generalizability to teleworkers in organizations with “always-on” cultures, who may experience greater pressure to allow work to permeate the home boundary. Practical implications: These findings can encourage organizations to proactively assess employee preferences for boundary permeability before entering a teleworking arrangement. The boundary management tactics identified can be used to provide teleworkers struggling to establish comfortable boundaries with tangible ideas to regulate interactions between home and work. Originality/value: This research makes a significant contribution to practitioner literature by applying a boundary management framework to the practice of teleworking, which is being adopted by organizations with increasing frequency

Time of your hate: The challenge of time in hate speech detection on social media

The availability of large annotated corpora from social media and the development of powerful classification approaches have contributed in an unprecedented way to tackle the challenge of monitoring users' opinions and sentiments in online social platforms across time. Such linguistic data are strongly affected by events and topic discourse, and this aspect is crucial when detecting phenomena such as hate speech, especially from a diachronic perspective. We address this challenge by focusing on a real case study: the "Contro l'odio" platform for monitoring hate speech against immigrants in the Italian Twittersphere. We explored the temporal robustness of a BERT model for Italian (AlBERTo), the current benchmark on non-diachronic detection settings. We tested different training strategies to evaluate how the classification performance is affected by adding more data temporally distant from the test set and hence potentially different in terms of topic and language use. Our analysis points out the limits that a supervised classification model encounters on data that are heavily influenced by events. Our results show how AlBERTo is highly sensitive to the temporal distance of the fine-tuning set. However, with an adequate time window, the performance increases, while requiring less annotated data than a traditional classifier

Chiral Lagrangian and spectral sum rules for dense two-color QCD

We analytically study two-color QCD with an even number of flavors at high baryon density. This theory is free from the fermion sign problem. Chiral symmetry is broken spontaneously by the diquark condensate. Based on the symmetry breaking pattern we construct the low-energy effective Lagrangian for the Nambu-Goldstone bosons. We identify a new epsilon-regime at high baryon density in which the quark mass dependence of the partition function can be determined exactly. We also derive Leutwyler-Smilga-type spectral sum rules for the complex eigenvalues of the Dirac operator in terms of the fermion gap. Our results can in principle be tested in lattice QCD simulations.Comment: 24 pages, 1 table, no figur

« We have to start sounding the trumpet for things that are working » : An interview with Dr. Marlene Brant-Castellano on concrete ways to decolonize research

In 2004, Dr. Marlene Brant-Castellano published a well-received, and now widely cited article entitled "Ethics of Aboriginal research" in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Aboriginal Health. About a decade after this inspirational publication, we asked her to reflect on (1) the progress made in terms of ethics of research with Aboriginal people; (2) her views on concrete ways to decolonize research; and (3) challenges yet to overcome in terms of ethical conduct of research with Aboriginal people

Destabilizing Taylor-Couette flow with suction

We consider the effect of radial fluid injection and suction on Taylor-Couette flow. Injection at the outer cylinder and suction at the inner cylinder generally results in a linearly unstable steady spiralling flow, even for cylindrical shears that are linearly stable in the absence of a radial flux. We study nonlinear aspects of the unstable motions with the energy stability method. Our results, though specialized, may have implications for drag reduction by suction, accretion in astrophysical disks, and perhaps even in the flow in the earth's polar vortex.Comment: 34 pages, 9 figure

Dual Pair Correspondence in Physics: Oscillator Realizations and Representations

We study general aspects of the reductive dual pair correspondence, also known as Howe duality. We make an explicit and systematic treatment, where we first derive the oscillator realizations of all irreducible dual pairs: $(GL(M,\mathbb R), GL(N,\mathbb R))$, $(GL(M,\mathbb C), GL(N,\mathbb C))$, $(U^*(2M), U^*(2N))$, $(U(M_+,M_-), U(N_+,N_-))$, $(O(N_+,N_-),Sp(2M,\mathbb R))$, $(O(N,\mathbb C), Sp(2M,\mathbb C))$ and $(O^*(2N), Sp(M_+,M_-))$. Then, we decompose the Fock space into irreducible representations of each group in the dual pairs for the cases where one member of the pair is compact as well as the first non-trivial cases of where it is non-compact. We discuss the relevance of these representations in several physical applications throughout this analysis. In particular, we discuss peculiarities of their branching properties. Finally, closed-form expressions relating all Casimir operators of two groups in a pair are established

Connecting Weirdness and Wonder to Mathematics

Middle school students are weird and wonderful. Why not bring some of that weirdness and wonder into the mathematics classroom? Effective teachers of mathematics can create a culture of engagement, curiosity, and collaboration in mathematics instruction by presenting “weird” problems (as opposed to word problems) and giving students opportunities to explore their wonderings. Inspired by “the bizarreness effect,” the problems presented here are infused with humor and designed to intrigue young adolescents