Journal articles on the topic 'Cost-based appraising method'

The advancement in technology has enabled companies to generate and use accounting information system. Accounting information system (AIS) is a computer-based application which conveys a new inclination of change from the conservative method of accounting to a computerised method. These advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have reduced the time and cost of transactions by aiding increased and improved transactions and communication for business dealings. It has also improved and advanced the efficiency of businesses by computerising existing operations to improve the performance of their operations. Accounting Information Systems (AIS) can be used by the organizations as a device for achieving a stronger, reliable, and more corporate culture to survive in this competitive environment. Accounting information systems also assist companies to gauge the risk of some operations or predict future warnings using sophisticated statistical software applications. The main objective of this paper is to examine the usage of Accounting Information System for effective decision making and improvedinternal control system on firm performance in which the qualitative data was used reviewing various literatures and other secondary data. This study providesvalue added in accounting literature given the scarcity of works dealing with the relationship between the application and use of AIS and evaluating overall firm performances

The real estate has become an important pillar industry in our current, green ecological real brand is one of the most important intangible assets of the real estate enterprises. How to appraise the value of green ecological real value is the difficult problem of the real estate enterprises and theory horizon, and is also the problem of the real estate enterprises very concerned about and urgent need to solve. This article analyzed the traditional methods of assessing the brand value assets ，the new appraisal method of green ecological real estate brand value is proposed based on the economic added value and the weighted average cost of capital model and β coefficient , the economic added value more reflects the objective earning power of green ecological real estate brand , the weighted average cost of capital models and β coefficient reflects the actual performance of green ecological real estate, the evaluation results approach the objective and reasonable results, The method provides an important technical support and guarantee for appraising the value of green ecological real estate brand.

This Paper puts in propor perspoctivo tho role, which export promotion measures/system should play to ensure continuing �expansion and diversification of India's exports in the context of the highly competitivo, complex and fast changing international marketing environment. The entire export promotion system in India, according to the author, has to be overhauled and scientifically orientod to the oxport marketing promotion/development needs rather than just catering to the cost reduction/profitability enhancement objectives, which indeed have some, but very limited, contribution to tho export expansion and diversification efforts of the country. A popular method of appraising benefits from export promotion measures in India has been to compare the net foreign exchange realization from exports with the total cost of administering export promotion measures to national exchequer-a fiscalist approach. The benefit analysis of export promotion system in any country should, however, necessarily bo based on a comparison between Domestic Resource Cost of export promotion measures/system and the Domestic Resource Gain as well as Net Foreign Exchange Earning. The cost-benefit analysis in terms of cost of export promotion system and measures as compared with net foreign exchange earning resulting therefrom can, therefore, be treated only as a partial approach.

Purpose The UK Government construction strategy has a clear objective to maximise potential and value for construction and infrastructure projects. The purpose of this paper was to develop a performance outcome framework for the public-sector university client to identify the criteria for value against which construction consultants’ performance will be appraised for selection and monitoring purposes in outsourcing. Design/methodology/approach Multiple-case study method was used to examine the performance requirements of construction consultants, using three state universities having similar contexts in terms of organisation objectives and requirements on projects funded by the government. Findings Within the public-sector university environment, five performance outcomes are identified: time, cost, quality, innovations and working relationship with the client. These areas form a conceptual framework for measuring the performance of construction consultants. Research limitations/implications The performance outcome framework developed should be regarded as “conceptual”. University clients may have different organisation objectives and hence requirements for performance outcomes, which may further vary according to specific project situations. The framework should be adapted accordingly. Practical implications University clients and their professional advisors should specify the performance requirements under those five areas in tender documents for selection purposes and subsequently use them as key performance indicators to monitoring the consultant performance. Construction consultants should address these requirements in the tender proposals to add value to the project. Originality value There is a need to investigate what performance outcomes are required by the public-sector construction client. Based on the results of this research, frameworks and guidelines can be further developed for use by other public sectors, thus benefitting the wider public sector as a whole.

Multiple-choice questions are a gold-standard tool in medical school for assessment of knowledge and are the mainstay of licensing examinations. However, multiple-choice questions items can be criticized for lacking the ability to test higher-order learning or integrative thinking across multiple disciplines. Our objective was to develop a novel assessment that would address understanding of pathophysiology and pharmacology, evaluate learning at the levels of application, evaluation and synthesis, and allow students to demonstrate clinical reasoning. The rubric assesses student writeups of clinical case problems. The method is based on the physician's traditional postencounter Subjective, Objective, Assessment and Plan note. Students were required to correctly identify subjective and objective findings in authentic clinical case problems, to ascribe pathophysiological as well as pharmacological mechanisms to these findings, and to justify a list of differential diagnoses. A utility analysis was undertaken to evaluate the new assessment tool by appraising its reliability, validity, feasibility, cost effectiveness, acceptability, and educational impact using a mixed-method approach. The Subjective, Objective, Assessment and Plan assessment tool scored highly in terms of validity and educational impact and had acceptable levels of statistical reliability but was limited in terms of acceptance, feasibility, and cost effectiveness due to high time demands on expert graders and workload concerns from students. We conclude by making suggestions for improving the tool and recommend deployment of the instrument for low-stakes summative assessment or formative assessment.

Road is an infrastructure that built to support the movement of the vehicle from one place to another for different purposes. Today, it is often found damage to road infrastructure, both local roads, and arterial roads. Therefore, to keep the pavement condition to remain reliable, in Indonesia has a periodic program by conducting an objective functional inspection of roads regulated by Bina Marga using the International Roughness Index (IRI). However, the IRI examination is not sufficient to represent the actual field condition; it is necessary to perform subjective functional examination by appraising the road one of them is Pavement Condition Index (PCI, ASTM D 6433). This method has been widely applied in some countries because it has many advantages. However, to do this inspection requires considerable cost, then there needs to be a model to get the relationship between these two parameters of the road. The selected case study was arterial road segment in Medan City, that is in Medan inner ring road. Based on the results of the analysis, there is a difference between the functional conditions of PCI and IRI. The equation derived from these two parameters is by exponential regression equation, with equation IRI = 16.07exp-0.26PCI. with R2 of 59% with correlation coefficient value (r) of -0.768. The value of R2 indicates that PCI gives a strong influence on IRI value.

IntroductionHealth Technology Assessment (HTA) and regulatory decisions involve value judgements. As patient groups, industry, and regulatory agencies conduct more preference studies to quantify these judgements, a better understanding of the methods and practices is needed. Currently, there is no systematic mapping of the use of preference data in Europe. This study aimed to identify (i) the use of quantitative preference data by all relevant HTA bodies and regulatory authorities of the European Union (EU) member states, and (ii) key standards and guidelines.MethodsThis study used a mixed method approach based on a systematic literature review, survey and subsequent interviews with decision makers and experts.ResultsA total of 62 survey responses were received. Many respondents reported that their agencies were responsible for supporting more than one type of decision, with 69.0 percent supporting approval decisions, 64.3 percent supporting reimbursement decisions, 61.9 percent supporting pricing decisions, and 64.2 percent supporting guideline development. Respondents reported that their agencies supported these decisions in multiple ways: 78.6 percent by assessing health technologies; 54.8 percent by appraising health technologies; 45.2 percent by compiling an HTA report; 7.1 percent by conducting primary research; 9.5 percent by conducting secondary research. More than 40 percent (42.9 percent) of agencies had the final say on one of the decisions of interest – approval, reimbursement, or pricing. Of the 31 countries studied, 71 percent (n = 22) used quantitative preference data in their reimbursement and pricing decisions. Of those, 86 percent (n = 19) used general population preferences to inform the estimation of quality-adjusted life years (QALY) as part of cost utility analysis.ConclusionsMuch of this use of preference data can be understood within the standard framework of economic analysis adopted by many HTA agencies; either in in the form of: standard ways to estimate QALYs; ways to broaden the impacts of technologies captured in the QALY; or ways to weigh health gain with other decision-making criteria, such as disease severity or innovativeness.

The aim of this article is to select the optimum green energy sources for sustainable planning from a given set of energy alternatives. This study examines the combined behavior of multi-criteria decision-making approaches-TOPSIS, MOOSRA and COPRAS are used to evaluate the green energy sources–solar, hydro, biogas and biomass and to identify the optimum source by appraising its functioning features based on entropy probability technique. An illustrative case study is presented in order to demonstrate the application feasibility of the combined approaches for the ranking of optimum green energy sources. The analyzed results show that biogas is the optimum green energy source having the highest score value obtained by combined approaches. The sensitivity analysis shows the robustness of the combined approaches with the highest effectiveness. The study not only considers the various cost criteria but other actors like power generation, implementation period and useful life are also considered to select the optimum green energy sources for future project investment.

Background: Nursing practice should be evidence-based. As such, nurses should be able to rank sources according to a hierarchy of evidence and critically appraise the validity of studies. This is especially important in stoma care, where high-quality evidence is limited. Methods: Evidence appraisal is made easier by tools, such as the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) for Randomised Controlled Trials (RCT). CASP was used to critique the ADVOCATE Trial, ( Colwell et al 2018 ), A Randomised Controlled Trial Determining Variance in Ostomy Skin Condition and the Economic Impact (ADVOCATE Trial), which had an adaptive design and compared the cost efficiency and efficacy of a ceramide-infused two-piece skin barrier with a comparator. The participants were randomised, and the trial was double blinded. Results: The trial addressed clearly focused issues. The improvement in cost efficacy for the trial group was statistically significant (p=0.017); in addition, three of six tertiary objectives were also statistically significant. Improvement in peristomal skin health was noticeable but not statistically significant. The results can be applied to other ostomy patient populations, and all clinically important outcomes were considered. Conclusion: CASP provided a staged and structured approach to review an RCT. It can help specialist nurses to find and apply relevant study findings to practice. CASP assessment found the ADVOCATE trial to be a reliable evidence base on which stoma care nurse could adjust their practice to optimise costs and peristomal skin health.

The paper studies changes in methodology for appraisal activity that pursues effective management of sustainable and breakthrough growth in economy and social sector through ensuring priorities of the National projects and resource efficiency when evaluating cost of life cycles as a result of value-centered management. Gravity to tackle economic problems of need to kick-start innovative high-tech investment cycles for the development of industries, enterprises and investment projects, built upon updated methodological framework for appraisal activity, defines the relevance of this study. In addition, a model to formalize processes of appraisal and management of costs and expenses in economic systems on the basis of life cycles of goods, products and services is proposed to be used as a bedrock of appraising concept. The goal of the study is to develop a set of sound methodological solutions for design of concepts of value appraisal of life cycles in appraisal activity in Russia. It should be done to make its reformation sufficient for cost management of sustainable and breakthrough growth of the country in social and economic fields through effective implementation of the National projects and resource efficiency. The objects of this study are processes of theoretical elaborations and concept-based approaches to the modeling of methodological grounds for value appraisal and management of life cycles of goods within the implementation of national projects by minimizing the cost of their cycles, lifecycle contract, total expenditures and ownership cost of life cycles based on the energy efficient and high-technology products. The applied methods dwell on a comprehensive approach which comprises analysis and synthesis, logical analysis, expert-based approach, methods of economic and mathematical modeling and forecasting.

BackgroundSafety netting is an important diagnostic strategy for patients presenting to primary care with potential (low-risk) cancer symptoms. Typically, this involves asking patients to return if symptoms persist. However, this relies on patients re-appraising their symptoms and making follow-up appointments, which could contribute to delays in diagnosis. Text messaging is increasingly used in primary care to communicate with patients, and could be used to improve safety netting.AimTo explore the acceptability and feasibility of using text messages to safety net patients presenting with low-risk cancer symptoms in GP primary care (txt-netting).Design and settingQualitative focus group and interview study with London-based GPs.MethodParticipants were identified using convenience sampling methods. Five focus groups and two interviews were conducted with 22 GPs between August and December 2016. Sessions were audiorecorded, transcribed verbatim, and analysed using thematic analysis.ResultsGPs were amenable to the concept of using text messages in cancer safety netting, identifying it as an additional tool that could help manage patients and promote symptom awareness. There was wide variation in GP preferences for text message content, and a number of important potential barriers to txt-netting were identified. Concerns were raised about the difficulties of conveying complex safety netting advice within the constraints of a text message, and about confidentiality, widening inequalities, and workload implications.ConclusionText messages were perceived to be an acceptable potential strategy for safety netting patients with low-risk cancer symptoms. Further work is needed to ensure it is cost-effective, user friendly, confidential, and acceptable to patients.

Abstract Objective – This paper analyzes the design process for a toolkit for appraising emerging and established bibliographic reference generators and managers for a particular student population. Others looking to adapt or draw from the toolkit to meet the needs of users at their own institutions will benefit from this exploration of how one team developed and streamlined the process of assessment. Methods – The authors implemented an extensive initial evaluation using a checklist and comprehensive rubric to review and select reference tools. This work was guided by a matrix of categories from Marino (2012), Bates (2015), and other literature. As the tools were assessed using the toolkit, the components of the toolkit were evaluated and revised. Toolkit revisions were based on evaluators’ feedback and lessons learned during the testing process. Results – Fifty-three tools were screened using a checklist that reviewed features, including cost and referencing styles. Eighteen tools were thoroughly evaluated using the comprehensive rubric by multiple researchers to minimize bias. From this secondary testing, tools were recommended for use within this environment. Ultimately the process of creating an assessment toolkit allowed the researchers to develop a streamlined process for further testing. The toolkit includes a checklist to reduce the list of potential tools, a rubric for features, a rubric to evaluate qualitative criteria, and an instrument for scoring. Conclusion – User needs and the campus environment are critical considerations for the selection of reference tools. For this project, researchers developed a comprehensive rubric and testing procedure to ensure consistency and validity of data. The streamlined process in turn enabled library staff to provide evidence based recommendations for the most suitable manager or generator to meet the needs of individual programs.

Background: Little is known about physical therapists’ experiences using research evidence to improve the delivery of stroke rehabilitation. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to explore how physical therapists use research evidence to update the clinical management of walking rehabilitation after stroke. Specific objectives were to identify physical therapists’ clinical questions related to walking rehabilitation, sources of information sought to address these questions, and factors influencing the incorporation of research evidence into practice. Design and Methods: Two authors conducted in-depth telephone interviews with 23 physical therapists who treat people with stroke and who had participated in a previous survey on evidence-based practice. Data were analyzed with a constant comparative approach to identify emerging themes. Results: Therapists commonly raised questions about the selection of treatments or outcome measures. Therapists relied foremost on peers for information because of their availability, ease of access, and minimal cost. Participants sought information from research literature themselves or with the help of librarians or students. Research syntheses (eg, systematic reviews) enabled access to a body of research. Older therapists described insufficient computer and search skills. Most participants considered appraisal and application of research findings challenging and identified insufficient time and peer isolation as organizational barriers to the use of research. Conclusions: Physical therapists require efficient access to research syntheses primarily to inform the measurement and treatment of walking limitation after stroke. Continuing education is needed to enhance skills in appraising research findings and applying them to practice. Older therapists require additional training to develop computer and search skills. Peer networks and student internships may optimize the exchange of new knowledge for therapists working in isolation.

Purpose – The key aspects that built environment professionals need to consider when evaluating roofs for the purpose of green roof retrofit and also when assessing green roofs for technical due diligence purposes are outlined. Although green or sod roofs have been built over many centuries, contemporary roofs adopt new approaches and technologies. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – A mixed methods design based on a systematic review of relevant literature from parallel disciplines was used to identify and quantify the social, economic and environmental benefits of retrofitted green roofs in commercial districts. The technical issues of concern were drawn from a desk-top survey of literature and from stakeholder focus groups undertaken in Sydney in 2012. Findings – There are perceptions amongst built environmental practitioners that may act as artificial barriers to uptake. There is little direct experience within built environment professionals and practitioners, along with a fear of the unknown and a risk averse attitude towards perceived innovation which predicates against green roof retrofit. Furthermore projects with green roofs at inception and early design stage are often “value engineered” out of the design as time progresses. There is a need for best practice guidance notes for practitioners to follow when appraising roofs for retrofit and also for technical due diligence purposes. Research limitations/implications – The focus groups are limited to Sydney-based practitioners. Although many of these practitioners have international experience, few had experience of green roofs. A limited number of roof typologies were considered in this research and some regions and countries may adopt different construction practices. Practical implications – In central business districts the installation of green roof technology is seen as one of the main contributors to water sensitive urban design (WSUD). It is likely that more green roofs will be constructed over time and practitioners need knowledge of the technology as well as the ability to provide best advice to clients. Originality/value – The benefits of green roofs as part of WSUD are increasingly being recognised in terms of reduced flood risk, reduced cost of drainage, improved water quality and lower energy use, as well as other less tangible aspects such as aesthetics and amenity. This research highlights the lack of understanding of the short- and long-term benefits, a poor appreciation and awareness of these benefits; a lack of technical knowledge and issues to be considered with regard to green roofs on behalf of practitioners. The study has highlighted the need for specific training and up-skilling in these areas to provide surveyors with the technical expertise needed. There is also a need to consider how the emerging retrofit and adaptation themes are best designed into the curriculum at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Clearly, if the potential benefits of green roofs are to be realised in the future, building professionals need to be fully conversant with the technology and be able to provide reliable and accurate advice.

PURPOSE Standard practice in protecting against chemotherapy-associated infection has been chemotherapy dose modification or dose delay, administration of progenitor-cell support, or selective use of prophylactic antibiotics. Therapy of chemotherapy-associated neutropenic fever or infection has customarily involved treatment with intravenous antibiotics, usually accompanied by hospitalization. The hematopoietic colony-stimulating factors (CSFs) have been introduced into clinical practice as additional supportive measures that can reduce the likelihood of neutropenic complications due to chemotherapy. Clinical benefit has been shown, but the high cost of CSFs has led to concern about their appropriate use. The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) wishes to establish evidence-based, clinical practice guidelines for the use of CSFs in patients who are not enrolled on clinical trials. METHODS An expert multidisciplinary panel reviewed the clinical data documenting the activity of CSFs. For each common clinical situation, the Panel formulated a guideline to encourage reasonable use of CSFs to preserve effectiveness but discourage excess use when little marginal benefit is anticipated. Consensus was reached after critically appraising the available evidence. Guidelines were validated by comparing them with recommendations for CSF use developed in other countries and by several academic institutions. Outcomes considered in evaluating CSF benefit included duration of neutropenia, incidence of febrile neutropenia, incidence and duration of antibiotic use, frequency and duration of hospitalization, infectious mortality, chemotherapy dose-intensity, chemotherapy efficacy, quality of life, CSF toxicity, and economic impact. To the extent that these data were available, the Panel placed greatest value on survival benefit, reduction in rates of febrile neutropenia, decreased hospitalization, and reduced costs. Lesser value was placed on alterations in absolute neutrophil counts (ANC). CONCLUSIONS CSFs are recommended in some situations, eg, to reduce the likelihood of febrile neutropenia when the expected incidence is > or = 40%; after documented febrile neutropenia in a prior chemotherapy cycle to avoid infectious complications and maintain dose-intensity in subsequent treatment cycles when chemotherapy dose-reduction is not appropriate; and after high-dose chemotherapy with autologous progenitor-cell transplantation. CSFs are also effective in the mobilization of peripheral-blood progenitor cells. Therapeutic initiation of CSFs in addition to antibiotics at the onset of febrile neutropenia should be reserved for patients at high risk for septic complications. CSF use in patients with myelodysplastic syndromes may be reasonable if they are experiencing neutropenic infections. Administration of CSFs after initial chemotherapy for acute myeloid leukemia does not appear to be detrimental, but clinical benefit has been variable and caution is advised. Available data support use of CSFs in pediatric cancer patients similar to that recommended for adult patients. Outside of clinical trials, CSFs should not be used concurrently with chemotherapy and radiation, or to support increasing chemotherapy dose-intensity. Further research is warranted as a means to improve the cost-effective administration of the CSFs and identify clinical predictors of infectious complications that may direct their use.

Setting the Mood Weirdly, everything feels the same. There’s absolutely no distinction for me between news, work, walking, gaming, Netflix, rock collecting, scrolling, messaging. I don’t know how this happened, but everything has simply blurred together. There’s a dreadful and yet soothing sameness to it, scrolling through images on Instagram, scrolling Netflix, walking the dog, scrolling the news, time scrolling by as I watch face after face appear or disappear on my screen, all saying something, yet saying nothing. Is this the rhythm of crisis in a slow apocalypse? Really, would it be possible for humans to just bore themselves into oblivion? Because in the middle of a pandemic, boredom feels in my body the same as doom ... just another swell that passes, like my chest as it rises and falls with my breath. This opening anecdote comes from combining narratives in two studies we conducted online during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020: a global study, Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking: Autoethnographic Accounts of Lived Experience in Times of Global Trauma; and an Australian project, The Shut-In Worker: Working from Home and Digitally-Enabled Labour Practices. The Shut-In Worker project aimed to investigate the thoughts, beliefs, and experiences of Australian knowledge workers working from home during lockdown. From June to October 2020, we recruited twelve households across two Australian states. While the sample included households with diverse incomes and living arrangements—from metropolitan single person apartment dwellers to regional families in free standing households—the majority were relatively privileged. The households included in this study were predominantly Anglo-Australian and highly educated. Critically, unlike many during COVID-19, these householders had maintained their salaried work. Participating households took part in an initial interview via Zoom or Microsoft Teams during which they took us on workplace tours, showing us where and how the domestic had been requisitioned for salaried labour. Householders subsequently kept digital diaries of their working days ahead of follow up interviews in which we got them to reflect on their past few weeks working from home with reference to the textual and photographic diaries they had shared with us. In contrast to the tight geographic focus of The Shut-In Worker project and its fairly conventional methodology, the Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking project was envisaged as a global project and driven by an experimental participant-led approach. Involving more than 150 people from 26 countries during 2020, the project was grounded in autoethnography practice and critical pedagogy. Over 21 days, we offered self-guided prompts for ourselves and the other participants—a wide range of creative practitioners, scholar activists, and researchers—to explore their own lived experience. Participants with varying degrees of experience with qualitative methods and/or autoethnography started working with the research questions we had posed in our call; some independently, some in collaboration. The autoethnographic lens used in our study encouraged contributors to document their experience from and through their bodies, their situated daily routines, and their relations with embedded, embodied, and ubiquitous digital technologies. The lens enabled deep exploration and evocation of many of the complexities, profound paradoxes, fears, and hopes that characterise the human and machinic entanglements that bring us together and separate the planetary “us” in this moment (Markham et al. 2020). In this essay we draw on anecdotes and narratives from both studies that speak to the “Zoom experience” during COVID-19. That is, we use Zoom as a socio-technical pivot point to think about how the experience of liminality—of being on/off screen and ambiently in between—is operating to shift both our micro practices and macro structures as we experience and struggle within the rupture, “event”, and conjuncture that marks the global pandemic. What we will see is that many of those narratives depict disjointed, blurry, or confusing experiences, atmospheres, and affects. These liminal experiences are entangled in complex ways with the distinctive forms of commercial infrastructure and software that scaffold video conferencing platforms such as Zoom. Part of what is both enabling and troubling about the key proprietary platforms that increasingly host “public” participation and conversation online (and that came to play a dominant role during COVID19) in the context of what Tarleton Gillespie calls “the internet of platforms” is a sense of the hidden logics behind such platforms. The constant sense of potential dis/connection—with home computers becoming ambient portals to external others—also saw a wider experience of boundarylessness evoked by participants. Across our studies there was a sense of a complete breakdown between many pre-existing boundaries (or at least dotted lines) around work, school, play, leisure and fitness, public and media engagement, and home life. At the same time, the vocabulary of confinement and lockdown emerged from the imposition of physical boundaries or distancing between the self and others, between home and the outside world. During the “connected confinement” of COVID-19, study participants commonly expressed an affective sensation of dysphoria, with this new state of in betweenness or disorientation on and off screen, in and out of Zoom meetings, that characterises the COVID-19 experience seen by many as a temporary, unpleasant disruption to sociality as usual. Our contention is that, as disturbing as many of our experiences are and have been during lockdown, there is an important, ethically and politically generative dimension to our global experiences of liminality, and we should hold on to this state of de-normalisation. Much ink has been spilled on the generalised, global experience of videoconferencing during the COVID-19 pandemic. A line of argument within this commentary speaks to the mental challenge and exhaustion—or zoom fatigue as it is now popularly termed—that many have been experiencing in attempting to work, learn, and live collectively via interactive screen technologies. We suggest zoom fatigue stands in for a much larger set of global social challenges—a complex conjuncture of microscopic ruptures, decisions within many critical junctures or turning points, and slow shifts in how we see and make sense of the world around us. If culture is habit writ large, what should we make of the new habits we are building, or the revelations that our prior ways of being in the world might not suit our present planetary needs, and maybe never did? Thus, we counter the current dominant narrative that people, regions, and countries should move on, pivot, or do whatever else it takes to transition to a “new normal”. Instead, drawing on the work of Haraway and others interested in more than human, post-anthropocenic thinking about the future, this essay contends that—on a dying planet facing major global challenges—we need to be embracing liminality and “staying with the trouble” if we are to hope to work together to imagine and create better worlds. This is not necessarily an easy step but we explore liminality and the affective components of Zoom fatigue here to challenge the assumption that stability and certainty is what we now need as a global community. If the comfort experienced by a chosen few in pre-COVID-19 times was bought at the cost of many “others” (human and more than human), how can we use the discomfort of liminality to imagine global futures that have radically transformative possibilities? On Liminality Because liminality is deeply affective and experienced both individually and collectively, it is a difficult feeling or state to put into words, much less generalised terms. It marks the uncanny or unstable experience of existing between. Being in a liminal state is marked by a profound disruption of one’s sense of self, one’s phenomenological being in the world, and in relation to others. Zoom, in and of itself, provokes a liminal experience. As this participant says: Zoom is so disorienting. I mean this literally; in that I cannot find a solid orientation toward other people. What’s worse is that I realize everyone has a different view, so we can’t even be sure of what other people might be seeing on their screen. In a real room this would not be an issue at all. The concept of liminality originally came out of attempts to capture the sense of flux and transition, rather than stasis, that shapes culture and community, exemplified during rites of passage. First developed in the early twentieth century by ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep, it was later taken up and expanded upon by British anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner, best known for his work on cultural rituals and rites of passage, describes liminality as the sense of “in betweenness” experienced as one moves from one status (say that of a child) to another (formal recognition of adulthood). For Turner, community life and the formation of societies more broadly involves periods of transition, threshold moments in which both structures and anti-structures become apparent. Bringing liminality into the contemporary digital moment, Zizi Papacharissi discusses the concept in collective terms as pertaining to the affective states of networked publics, particularly visible in the development of new social and political formations through wide scale social media responses to the Arab Spring. Liminality in this context describes the “not yet”, a state of “pre-emergence” or “emergence” of unformed potentiality. In this usage, Papacharissi builds on Turner’s description of liminality as “a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (97). The pandemic has sparked another moment of liminality. Here, we conceptualise liminality as a continuous dialectical process of being pushed and pulled in various directions, which does not necessarily resolve into a stable state or position. Shifting one’s entire lifeworld into and onto computer screens and the micro screens of Zoom, as experienced by many around the world, collapses the usual functioning norms that maintain some degree of distinction between the social, intimate, political, and work spheres of everyday life. But this shift also creates new boundaries and new rules of engagement. As a result, people in our studies often talked about experiencing competing realities about “where” they are, and/or a feeling of being tugged by contradictory or competing forces that, because they cannot be easily resolved, keep us in an unsettled, uncomfortable state of being in the world. Here the dysphoric experiences associated not just with digital liminality but with the broader COVID-19 epidemiological-socio-political conjuncture are illustrated by Sianne Ngai’s work on the politics of affect and “ugly feelings” in the context of capitalism’s relentlessly affirmative culture. Rather than dismissing the vague feelings of unease that, for many of us, go hand in hand with late modern life, Ngai suggests that such generalised and dispersed affective states are important markers of and guides to the big social and cultural problems of our time—the injustices, inequalities, and alienating effects of late capitalism. While critical attention tends to be paid to more powerful emotions such as anger and fear, Ngai argues that softer and more nebulous forms of negative affect—from envy and anxiety to paranoia—can tell us much about the structures, institutions, and practices that frame social action. These enabling and constraining processes occur at different and intersecting levels. At the micro level of the screen interface, jarring experiences can set us to wondering about where we are (on or off screen, in place and space), how we appear to others, and whether or not we should showcase and highlight our “presence”. We have been struck by how people in our studies expressed the sense of being handled or managed by the interfaces of Zoom or Microsoft Teams, which frame people in grid layouts, yet can shift and alter these frames in unanticipated ways. I hate Zoom. Everything about it. Sometimes I see a giant person, shoved to the front of the meeting in “speaker view” to appear larger than anyone else on the screen. People constantly appear and disappear, popping in and out. Sometimes, Zoom just rearranges people seemingly randomly. People commonly experience themselves or others being resized, frozen, or “glitched”, muted, accidentally unmuted, suddenly disconnected, or relegated to the second or third “page” of attendees. Those of us who attend many meetings as a part of work or education may enjoy the anonymity of appearing at a meeting without our faces or bodies, only appearing to others as a nearly blank square or circle, perhaps with a notation of our name and whether or not we are muted. Being on the third page of participants means we are out of sight, for better or worse. For some, being less visible is a choice, even a tactic. For others, it is not a choice, but based on lack of access to a fast or stable Internet connection. The experience and impact of these micro elements of presence within the digital moment differs, depending on where you appear to others in the interface, how much power you have over the shape or flow of the interaction or interface settings, or what your role is. Moving beyond the experience of the interface and turning to the middle range between micro and macro worlds, participants speak of attempting to manage blurred or completely collapsed boundaries between “here” and “there”. Being neither completely at work or school nor completely at home means finding new ways of negotiating the intimate and the formal, the domestic and the public. This delineation is for many not a matter of carving out specific times or spaces for each, but rather a process of shifting back and forth between makeshift boundaries that may be temporal or spatial, depending on various aspects of one’s situation. Many of us most likely could see the traces of this continuous shifting back and forth via what Susan Leigh Star called “boundary objects”. While she may not have intended this concept in such concrete terms, we could see these literally, in the often humorous but significantly disruptive introduction of various domestic actants during school or work, such as pets, children, partners, laundry baskets, beds, distinctive home decor, ambient noise, etc. Other trends highlight the difficulty of maintaining zones of work and school when these overlap with the rest of the physical household. One might place Post-it Notes on the kitchen wall saying “I’m in a Zoom meeting so don’t come into the living room” or blur one’s screen background to obscure one’s domestic location. These are all strategies of maintaining ontological security in an otherwise chaotic process of being both here and there, and neither here nor there. Yet even with these strategies, there is a constant dialectical liminality at play. In none of these examples do participants feel like they are either at home or at work; instead, they are constantly shifting in between, trying to balance, or straddling physical and virtual, public and private, in terms of social “roles” and “locations”. These negotiations highlight the “ongoingness” of and the labour involved in maintaining some semblance of balance within what is inherently an unbalanced dialectical process. Participants talked about and showed in their diaries and pictures developed for the research projects the ways they act through, work with, or sometimes just try to ignore these opposing states. The rise of home-based videoconferencing and associated boundary management practices have also highlighted what has been marginalised or forgotten and conversely, prioritised or valorised in prior sociotechnical assemblages that were simply taken for granted. Take for example the everyday practices of being in a work versus domestic lifeworld; deciding how to handle the labor of cleaning cups and dishes used by the “employees” and “students” in the family throughout the day, the tasks of enforcing school attendance by children attending classes in the family home etc. This increased consciousness—at both a household and more public level—of a previously often invisible and feminised care economy speaks to larger questions raised by the lockdown experience. At the same time as people in our studies were negotiating the glitches of screen presence and the weird boundarylessness of home-leisure-domestic-school-work life, many expressed an awareness of a troubling bigger picture. First, we had just the COVID lockdowns, you know, that time where many of us were seemingly “all together” in this, at home watching Tiger King, putting neighborly messages in our windows, or sharing sourdough recipes on social media. Then Black Lives Matters movements happened. Suddenly attention is shifted to the fact that we’re not all in this together. In Melbourne, people in social housing towers got abruptly locked down without even the chance to go to the store for food first, and yet somehow the wealthy or celebrity types are not under this heavy surveillance; they can just skip the mandatory quarantine. ... We can’t just go on with things as usual ... there are so many considerations now. Narratives like these suggest that while 2020 might have begun with the pandemic, the year raised multiple other issues. As many things have been destabilised, the nature or practice of everyday life is shifting under our feet. Around the world, people are learning how to remain more distanced from each other, and the rhythms of temporal and geographic movement are adapting to an era of the pandemic. Simultaneously, many people talk about an endlessly arriving (but never quite here) moment when things will be back to normal, implying not only that this feeling of uncertainty will fade, but also that the zone of comfort is in what was known and experienced previously, rather than in a state of something radically different. This sentiment is strong despite the general agreement that “we will never [be able to] go back to how it was, but [must] proceed to some ‘new normal’”. Still, as the participant above suggests, the pandemic has also offered a much broader challenge to wider, taken-for-granted social, political, and economic structures that underpin late capitalist nations in particular. The question then becomes: How do we imagine “moving on” from the pandemic, while learning from the disruptive yet critical moment it has offered us as a global community? Learning from Liminality I don’t want us to go back to “normal”, if that means we are just all commuting in our carbon spitting cars to work and back or traveling endlessly and without a care for the planet. COVID has made my life better. Not having to drive an hour each way to work every day—that’s a massive benefit. While it’s been a struggle, the tradeoff is spending more time with loved ones—it’s a better quality of life, we have to rethink the place of work. I can’t believe how much more I’ve been involved in huge discussions about politics and society and the planet. None of this would have been on my radar pre-COVID. What would it mean then to live with as well as learn from the reflexive sense of being and experience associated with the dis-comforts of living on and off screen, a Zoom liminality, if you will? These statements from participants speak precisely to the budding consciousness of new potential ways of being in a post-COVID-19 world. They come from a place of discomfort and represent dialectic tensions that perhaps should not be shrugged off or too easily resolved. Indeed, how might we consider this as the preferred state, rather than being simply a “rite of passage” that implies some pathway toward more stable identities and structured ways of being? The varied concepts of “becoming”, “not quite yet”, “boundary work”, or “staying with the trouble”, elaborated by Karen Barad, Andrew Pickering, Susan Leigh Star, and Donna Haraway respectively, all point to ways of being, acting, and thinking through and with liminality. All these thinkers are linked by their championing of murky and mangled conceptions of experience and more than human relations. Challenging notions of the bounded individual of rational humanism, these post-human scholars offer an often-uncomfortable picture of being in and through multiplicity, of modes of agency born out of a slippage between the one and the many. While, as we noted above, this experience of in betweenness and entanglement is often linked to emotions we perceive as negative, “ugly feelings”, for Barad et al., such liminal moments offer fundamentally productive and experimental modalities that enable possibilities for new configurations of being and doing the social in the anthropocene. Further, liminality as a concept potentially becomes radically progressive when it is seen as both critically appraising the constructed and conventional nature of prior patterns of living and offering a range of reflexive alternatives. People in our studies spoke of the pandemic moment as offering tantalizing glimpses of what kinder, more caring, and egalitarian futures might look like. At the same time, many were also surprised by (and skeptical of) the banality and randomness of the rise of commercial platforms like Zoom as a “choice” for being with others in this current lifeworld, emerging as it did as an ad hoc, quick solution that met the demands of the moment. Zoom fatigue then also suggests a discomfort about somehow being expected to fully incorporate proprietary platforms like Zoom and their algorithmic logics as a core way of living and being in the post-COVID-19 world. In this sense the fact that a specific platform has become a branded eponym for the experience of online public communicative fatigue is telling indeed. The unease around the centrality of video conferencing to everyday life during COVID-19 can in part be seen as a marker of anxieties about the growing role of decentralized, private platforms in “replacing or merging with public infrastructure, [thereby] creating new social effects” (Lee). Further, jokes and off-hand comments by study participants about their messy domestic interiors being publicized via social media or their boss monitoring when they are on and offline speak to larger concerns around surveillance and privacy in online spaces, particularly communicative environments where unregulated private platforms rather than public infrastructures are becoming the default norm. But just as people are both accepting of and troubled by a growing sense of inevitability about Zoom, we also saw them experimenting with a range of other ways of being with others, from online cocktail parties to experimenting with more playful and creative apps and platforms. What these participants have shown us is the need to “stay with the trouble” or remain in this liminal space as long as possible. While we do not have the space to discuss this possibility in this short provocation, Haraway sees this experimental mode of being as involving multiple actants, human and nonhuman, and as constituting important work in terms of speculating and figuring with various “what if” scenarios to generate new possible futures. As Haraway puts it, this process of speculative figuring is one of giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads, and so mostly failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe even beautiful, that wasn’t there before, of relaying connections that matter, of telling stories in hand upon hand, digit upon digit, attachment site upon attachment site, to craft conditions for flourishing in terran worlding. This struggle of course takes us far beyond decisions about Zoom, specifically. This deliberately troubling liminality is a process of recognizing old habits, building new ones, doing the hard work of reconsidering broader social formations in a future that promises more trouble. Governments, institutions, corporate entities, and even social movements like Transition Towns or #BuildBackBetter all seem to be calling for getting out of this liminal zone, whether this is to “bounce back” by returning to hyper-consumerist, wasteful, profit-driven modes of life or the opposite, to “bounce forward” to radically rethink globalization and build intensely localized personal and social formations. Perhaps a third alternative is to embrace this very transitional experience itself and consider whether life on a troubled, perhaps dying planet might require our discomfort, unease, and in-betweenness, including acknowledging and sometimes embracing “glitches” and failures (Nunes). Transitionality, or more broadly liminality, has the potential to enhance our understanding of who and what “we” are, or perhaps more crucially who “we” might become, by encompassing a kind of dialectic in relation to the experiences of others, both intimate and distant. As many critical commentators before us have suggested, this necessarily involves working in conjunction with a rich ecology of planetary agents from First People’s actors and knowledge systems--a range of social agents who already know what it is to be liminal to landscapes and other species--through and with the enabling affordances of digital technologies. This is an important, and exhausting, process of change. And perhaps this trouble is something to hang on to as long as possible, as it preoccupies us with wondering about what is happening in the lines between our faces, the lines of the technologies underpinning our interactions, the taken for granted structures on and off screen that have been visibilized. We are fatigued, not by the time we spend online, although there is that, too, but by the recognition that the world is changing. References Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2006. Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. Yale UP 2018. Haraway, Donna J. “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far.” Ada New Media 3 (2013). <http://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-haraway>. Lee, Ashlin. “In the Shadow of Platforms: Challenges and Opportunities for the Shadow of Hierarchy in the Age of Platforms and Datafication.” M/C Journal 24.2 (2021). <http://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2750>. Markham, Annette N., et al. “Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking during COVID-19 Times.” Qualitative Inquiry Oct. 2020. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420962477>. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard UP, 2005. Nunes, Mark. 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