The fundamental premise of this chapter is that technology-mediated remote work in and of itself is not necessarily a panacea for disability inclusion. This necessitates a focus on what technologies enables individuals to do (and not do). This chapter draws on a mixed-methods (a survey and qualitative interviews) study of disabled workers in Belgium and the United Kingdom guided by the overarching question of which affordances and constraints are experienced by disabled workers when interacting with remote work technology during the initial two lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Poor work-life balance (WLB) has been linked to negative outcomes such as increased stress, anxiety, depression, and a perceived reduction in the overall quality of life. At an institutional level, these may include lowered employee commitment and decreased productivity at work. The advent of COVID-19 has necessitated fundamental alterations to work experience and the ways in which WLB may be perceived. This phenomenological study employed qualitative, in-depth interviews to explore higher education academics’ lived experiences of remote working and how they perceived this had impacted their well-being (WB) and WLB. Using purposive samplings, respondents were drawn from HE sectors in the Netherlands, and the UK. The findings offered an understanding of how remote and hybrid teaching delivery during the pandemic affected academics’ actual experiences of WB and WLB. These findings serve to enhance policymakers’ understandings of significant occupational health and WB issues within a post-pandemic education service paradigm.
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At present, COVID-19 has caused a possible paradigm shift in education, especially in education delivery for higher educational and learning institutions. To align with the national government and relevant national/international authorities’ policies and to avoid the spread of the virus, educational institutions in many nations have decided to temporarily suspend the traditional classroom-based education and replace it with online-based education. This studyaims at exploring the impact of COVID-19 pandemic and obligatory remote working on work-life balance, mental health and productivity of faculty members working in higher education institutions (HEI). The study is exploratory and uses a qualitative approach using an online survey strategy to include voices of faculty members from different countries. While the results of this study indicate both positive and negative effects of obligatory remote working on faculty members’ work-life balance, well-being and productivity at the same time our findings indicate that university administration must pay heed to address concerns presented in the results.
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The integration of renewable energy resources, controllable devices and energy storage into electricity distribution grids requires Decentralized Energy Management to ensure a stable distribution process. This demands the full integration of information and communication technology into the control of distribution grids. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) is used to communicate measurements and commands between individual components and the control server. In the future this control is especially needed at medium voltage and probably also at the low voltage. This leads to an increased connectivity and thereby makes the system more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. According to the research agenda NCSRA III, the energy domain is becoming a prime target for cyber-attacks, e.g., abusing control protocol vulnerabilities. Detection of such attacks in SCADA networks is challenging when only relying on existing network Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). Although these systems were designed specifically for SCADA, they do not necessarily detect malicious control commands sent in legitimate format. However, analyzing each command in the context of the physical system has the potential to reveal certain inconsistencies. We propose to use dedicated intrusion detection mechanisms, which are fundamentally different from existing techniques used in the Internet. Up to now distribution grids are monitored and controlled centrally, whereby measurements are taken at field stations and send to the control room, which then issues commands back to actuators. In future smart grids, communication with and remote control of field stations is required. Attackers, who gain access to the corresponding communication links to substations can intercept and even exchange commands, which would not be detected by central security mechanisms. We argue that centralized SCADA systems should be enhanced by a distributed intrusion-detection approach to meet the new security challenges. Recently, as a first step a process-aware monitoring approach has been proposed as an additional layer that can be applied directly at Remote Terminal Units (RTUs). However, this allows purely local consistency checks. Instead, we propose a distributed and integrated approach for process-aware monitoring, which includes knowledge about the grid topology and measurements from neighboring RTUs to detect malicious incoming commands. The proposed approach requires a near real-time model of the relevant physical process, direct and secure communication between adjacent RTUs, and synchronized sensor measurements in trustable real-time, labeled with accurate global time-stamps. We investigate, to which extend the grid topology can be integrated into the IDS, while maintaining near real-time performance. Based on topology information and efficient solving of power flow equation we aim to detect e.g. non-consistent voltage drops or the occurrence of over/under-voltage and -current. By this, centrally requested switching commands and transformer tap change commands can be checked on consistency and safety based on the current state of the physical system. The developed concepts are not only relevant to increase the security of the distribution grids but are also crucial to deal with future developments like e.g. the safe integration of microgrids in the distribution networks or the operation of decentralized heat or biogas networks.
Brandweermensen lopen het meeste gevaar als ze onder tijdsdruk een gebouw moeten verkennen, of een brand moeten blussen terwijl de situatie nog niet goed kan worden overzien. Omvallende muren, instortende plafonds of gewoon gestruikeld over door de rook onzichtbare brokstukken leiden tot vermijdbare letsels of zelfs slachtoffers. Met name de inzet bij branden in stedelijke parkeergarages onder woontorens vormen een enorm risico. Het inzetten van onbemande, op afstand bestuurbare voertuigen voor verkenning en bluswerk is een oplossing die binnen de brandweer breed wordt gedragen. De brandweer moet deze innovatieve technologie echter zien te omarmen. Zij werken nu vanuit hun intuïtie en weten direct hoe te acteren op basis van wat zij waarnemen. Praktijkgericht onderzoek heeft echter uitgewezen dat scepsis over de inzet van blusplatforms bij incidenten plaats heeft gemaakt voor zeker vertrouwen. Een blusplatform, voorzien van juiste sensoren kan de Officier van Dienst (OVD) ondersteunen bij het nemen van een beslissing om al dan niet tot een ‘aanval’ over te gaan. Praktijktesten hebben echter laten zien dat de huidige blusplatforms nog niet optimaal functioneren om als volwaardig ‘teamlid’ te kunnen worden ingezet. Dit heeft enerzijds met technologische ontwikkelingen (sensoren en communicatieverbindingen) te maken, maar anderzijds moet de informatievoorziening (human-machine interfacing) naar de brandweer beter worden afgestemd. In dit project gaan Saxion, het instituut fysieke veiligheid, de universiteit Twente, het bedrijfsleven en vijf veiligheidsregio’s onderzoeken hoe en wanneer innovatieve blusplatforms op een intuïtieve manier kunnen worden ingezet door training én (kleine) productaanpassing zodat deze een volwaardig onderdeel kunnen zijn van het brandweerkorps. Een blusplatform kan letselschade en slachtoffers voorkomen, mits goed ingezet en vertrouwd door de mensen die daarvan afhankelijk zijn. Het vak van brandweer, als beroeps of vrijwilliger, is een van de gevaarlijkste die er is. Laten we er samen voor zorgen dat het iets veiliger kan worden.
Electrohydrodynamic Atomization (EHDA), also known as Electrospray (ES), is a technology which uses strong electric fields to manipulate liquid atomization. Among many other areas, electrospray is used as an important tool for biomedical application (droplet encapsulation), water technology (thermal desalination and metal recovery) and material sciences (nanofibers and nano spheres fabrication, metal recovery, selective membranes and batteries). A complete review about the particularities of this tool and its application was recently published (2018), as an especial edition of the Journal of Aerosol Sciences. One of the main known bottlenecks of this technique, it is the fact that the necessary strong electric fields create a risk for electric discharges. Such discharges destabilize the process but can also be an explosion risk depending on the application. The goal of this project is to develop a reliable tool to prevent discharges in electrospray applications.
