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1

Al-Shayea, Tamara K., Constandinos X. Mavromoustakis, Jordi Mongay Batalla, and George Mastorakis. "A hybridized methodology of different wavelet transformations targeting medical images in IoT infrastructure." Measurement 148 (December 2019): 106813. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.measurement.2019.07.041.

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Strumberger, Ivana, Milan Tuba, Nebojsa Bacanin, and Eva Tuba. "Cloudlet Scheduling by Hybridized Monarch Butterfly Optimization Algorithm." Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks 8, no. 3 (August 11, 2019): 44. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jsan8030044.

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Cloud computing technology enables efficient utilization of available physical resources through the virtualization where different clients share the same underlying physical hardware infrastructure. By utilizing the cloud computing concept, distributed, scalable and elastic computing resources are provided to the end-users over high speed computer networks (the Internet). Cloudlet scheduling that has a significant impact on the overall cloud system performance represents one of the most important challenges in this domain. In this paper, we introduce implementations of the original and hybridized monarch butterfly optimization algorithm that belongs to the category of swarm intelligence metaheuristics, adapted for tackling the cloudlet scheduling problem. The hybridized monarch butterfly optimization approach, as well as adaptations of any monarch butterfly optimization version for the cloudlet scheduling problem, could not be found in the literature survey. Both algorithms were implemented within the environment of the CloudSim platform. The proposed hybridized version of the monarch butterfly optimization algorithm was first tested on standard benchmark functions and, after that, the simulations for the cloudlet scheduling problem were performed using artificial and real data sets. Based on the obtained simulation results and the comparative analysis with six other state-of-the-art metaheuristics and heuristics, under the same experimental conditions and tested on the same problem instances, a hybridized version of the monarch butterfly optimization algorithm proved its potential for tackling the cloudlet scheduling problem. It has been established that the proposed hybridized implementation is superior to the original one, and also that the task scheduling problem in cloud environments can be more efficiently solved by using such an algorithm with positive implications to the cloud management.
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Kim, Sung-Young. "Hybridized industrial ecosystems and the makings of a new developmental infrastructure in East Asia’s green energy sector." Review of International Political Economy 26, no. 1 (January 2, 2019): 158–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2018.1554540.

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Mallik, Avijit, and Arman Arefin. "Micro Hybridized Auto-rickshaw for Bangladesh: A Solution to Green Energy Vehicle." Open Mechanical Engineering Journal 12, no. 1 (May 23, 2018): 124–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.2174/1874155x01812010124.

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Background:Auto rickshaws are compact, three-wheeled vehicles which are normally used altogether in numerous Asian nations (i.e.China, Japan, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and so forth) for transportation of people and products. The vehicles are little and have simple transportability in occupied Asian cities. In Bangladesh, auto rickshaws/simple bicycles regularly offer their taxi services, as they are fantastically reasonable to work. Simultaneously, these three-wheelers running on fuel cause extreme air-pollution and create impressive measures of greenhouse gasses (i.e.Carbon dioxide).Objectives:This paper introduces a transportation system in view of auto rickshaws that work in an eco-accommodating way. Existing vehicles are to be substituted by a small scale-cross sort framework overhauled in a way which helps the productivity of the vehicle.Methods:A reviving foundation is suggested that will take into consideration the power-packs to be charged utilizing halfway energy, for example, solar energy. Necessary simulations had been done using MATLAB platform.Results:Results shows that the current vehicle and nature, in which it works, made a model of the vehicle and researched re-charging infrastructure prerequisites and plans. About 31% efficiency was observed.Conclusions:The objective of the research introduced in this paper is to build up a conservative, vigorous and feasible fuel utilization system and deplete auto-rickshaws. In this research, 23% of grid power savings has been found.
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Ameen, Ayesha, and Shahid Raza. "Green Revolution: A Review." International Journal of Advances in Scientific Research 3, no. 12 (January 9, 2018): 129. http://dx.doi.org/10.7439/ijasr.v3i12.4410.

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The Green Revolution refers to a series of research, development, and technology transfer initiatives, occurring between 1943 and the late 1970s in Mexico, which increased industrialized agriculture production in many developing nations. The initiatives involved the development of high-yielding cereal grains, expansion of irrigation infrastructure, and distribution of hybridized seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides to farmers. The term "Green Revolution" was first used in 1968 by former USAID director William Gaud. The goal of the Green revolution was to increase the efficiency of agricultural processes so that the productivity of the crops was increased and could help developing countries to face their growing population’s needs.
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Strumberger, Ivana, Nebojsa Bacanin , Milan Tuba, and Eva Tuba. "Resource Scheduling in Cloud Computing Based on a Hybridized Whale Optimization Algorithm." Applied Sciences 9, no. 22 (November 14, 2019): 4893. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/app9224893.

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The cloud computing paradigm, as a novel computing resources delivery platform, has significantly impacted society with the concept of on-demand resource utilization through virtualization technology. Virtualization enables the usage of available physical resources in a way that multiple end-users can share the same underlying hardware infrastructure. In cloud computing, due to the expectations of clients, as well as on the providers side, many challenges exist. One of the most important nondeterministic polynomial time (NP) hard challenges in cloud computing is resource scheduling, due to its critical impact on the cloud system performance. Previously conducted research from this domain has shown that metaheuristics can substantially improve cloud system performance if they are used as scheduling algorithms. This paper introduces a hybridized whale optimization algorithm, that falls into the category of swarm intelligence metaheuristics, adapted for tackling the resource scheduling problem in cloud environments. To more precisely evaluate performance of the proposed approach, original whale optimization was also adapted for resource scheduling. Considering the two most important mechanisms of any swarm intelligence algorithm (exploitation and exploration), where the efficiency of a swarm algorithm depends heavily on their adjusted balance, the original whale optimization algorithm was enhanced by addressing its weaknesses of inappropriate exploitation–exploration trade-off adjustments and the premature convergence. The proposed hybrid algorithm was first tested on a standard set of bound-constrained benchmarks with the goal to more accurately evaluate its performance. After, simulations were performed using two different resource scheduling models in cloud computing with real, as well as with artificial data sets. Simulations were performed on the robust CloudSim platform. A hybrid whale optimization algorithm was compared with other state-of-the-art metaheurisitcs and heuristics, as well as with the original whale optimization for all conducted experiments. Achieved results in all simulations indicate that the proposed hybrid whale optimization algorithm, on average, outperforms the original version, as well as other heuristics and metaheuristics. By using the proposed algorithm, improvements in tackling the resource scheduling issue in cloud computing have been established, as well enhancements to the original whale optimization implementation.
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McKelvey, Fenwick, and Jill Piebiak. "Porting the political campaign: The NationBuilder platform and the global flows of political technology." New Media & Society 20, no. 3 (December 1, 2016): 901–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675439.

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Political parties rely on digital technologies to manage volunteering, fundraising, fieldwork, and data collection. They also need tools to manage web, email, and social media outreach. Increasingly, new political engagement platforms integrate these tasks into one unified system. These platforms pose important questions about the flows of political practices from campaigns to platforms and vice versa as well as across campaigns globally. NationBuilder is a critical case in their study. It is a leading non-partisan platform used in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The case of NationBuilder in Canada analyzes how political engagement platforms coordinate the global flows of politics. Through interviews, we find reciprocal influence among developers, party activists, consultants, and the NationBuilder platform. We call this process porting. It results in NationBuilder becoming a more portable global platform in tandem with becoming an imported, hybridized part of a campaign’s digital infrastructure.
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Amoo, J. O., O. Osunade, O. E. Makinde, D. N. Ajobiewe, and E. O. Adebayo. "THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN ENHANCED WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK LIFESPAN USING HYBRIDIZED CLUSTER AND K-MEANS ALGORITHM." Journal of Mathematical Sciences & Computational Mathematics 2, no. 2 (January 1, 2021): 194–209. http://dx.doi.org/10.15864/jmscm.2201.

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Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are useful in situations where a low-cost network needs to be set up quickly and no fixed network infrastructure exists. Typically, its applications are for monitoring system such as (environmental, air and water quality etc), natural disaster prevention, forest fire prevention, military exercises and emergency rescue operations. Wireless sensor network consists of large number of a group of small sensor nodes which utilizes battery and are with limited energy and life span that makes these sensors node inefficient, non-scalable, in- mobile and non-load balance. The nodes close to each other have more overlap; they sense the same data from environment and cause a waste of energy by generating repetitive data. In this study, a hybridized clustering and k-means algorithm are introduced, in each round, a certain number of nodes are specified; the nodes which have at least one neighboring node at a distance less than the threshold. Then, the wireless sensor network nodes were partitioned into different clusters and one of the nodes elected from each cluster to act as a cluster head with the use of a hybridized cluster and k mean algorithm. Among them, the nodes with less energy and greater overlap with their neighbors have been chosen to go to sleep mode. Also, the energy imbalance among sensor nodes is reduced by integrating the distance of the nodes from the base station into clustering policies. A simulator was developed with python programming language to evaluate the performance of this system. On the basis of the simulation results, the proposed scheme elongates the network life span, then, balances the load among sensor nodes further.
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Uddin, Md Mahraj, Golam Sakaline, and Mohammad Muhshin Aziz Khan. "Enhancing OEE as a Key Metric of TPM Approach-A Practical Analysis in Garments Industries." European Journal of Engineering and Technology Research 6, no. 2 (February 23, 2021): 142–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.24018/ejers.2021.6.2.2376.

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Ready Made Garments (RMG) sector has been the biggest earner of foreign currency for Bangladesh since the last few decades. Garments industries have been playing a major role in redefining the infrastructure and economy as well. Todays’ world of competition brings both opportunities and challenges in this sector. Productivity, efficiency of these industries can be achieved through implementation of perfect maintenance strategy and design. This paper aims to enhance the existing Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) for the pitfall areas in the plant. After examining the current loophole, the research focused on improving OEE factors by adopting a hybridized Total Maintenance (TPM) scheme. To achieve a better outcome, the company agreed to implement the recommended plan appropriately. The OEE has been upgraded from about 57% to 69% due to the proper management and execution of the proposed TPM model. The result has provided an indication of maintaining sustainability to achieve the world class benchmark and founded a solid basis to implement the exploratory TPM model in the plant
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Akinyokun, Oluwole Charles, Emem Etok Akpan, and Udoinyang Godwin Inyang. "Design of a hybrid intelligent system for the management of flood disaster risks." Artificial Intelligence Research 8, no. 1 (March 6, 2019): 14. http://dx.doi.org/10.5430/air.v8n1p14.

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The frequency of occurrence and intensity of floods is a huge threat to environment, human existence, critical infrastructure and economy. Flood risk assessments depend on probabilistic approaches and suffer from non-existence of appropriate indices of acceptable risk, dearth of information and pieces of knowledge for explicit view and understanding of the characteristics and severity level of flood hazard. This paper proposes a hybridized intelligent framework comprising fuzzy logic (FL), neural network and genetic algorithm for clustering and visualization of flood data, prediction and classification of flood risks severity level. A multidimensional knowledge model of flood incidence using star, snowflake and facts constellation schemas was proposed for the knowledge warehouse. A six-layered adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system implementing mamdani’s inference mechanism was design to evaluate input features based on fuzzy rules held in the multidimensional data model. The system is aimed at predicticting and classifying flood risk severity levels. The perception of emergency risk management is very important in modern society. Therefore, this work provides a framework for the practical applications of data mining techniques and tools to emergency risk management. The work would assist to identify locations with significant flood risk.
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Banda, Dennis, and Mulenga Kapwepwe. "The influence of rurality and its indigenous knowledge on teaching methods in higher education – lessons from Ukulange Mbusa of the Bemba people of Zambia." Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South 4, no. 2 (September 28, 2020): 197. http://dx.doi.org/10.36615/sotls.v4i2.148.

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This study was on the influence of rurality and its Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) with reference to the Ukulange Mbusa (UM) ceremony of the Bemba people of the Northern Zambia. Rurality is a demographic and a social category and implies distance from urban centres, sparse population, lack of amenities, infrastructure and sometimes social deprivation. A lot of forms of indigenous knowledge are imparted on learners from rural areas before they join universities and meet other knowledge systems. The study tried to establish if some learning and teaching approaches, methods and techniques used in such traditional ceremonies and settings could influence the teaching and learning in higher learning institutions. Interviews, Focus Group Discussions (FGD), and documents analysis were used to collect data. The sample was drawn from traditional chiefs, women counsellors (alangizi) and university students initiated in the Ukulange Mbusa ceremony. Findings of the study are that the positive influences of rurality and their forms of indigenous knowledge are often minimised, misunderstood, ignored, viewed as backward, local, native, and therefore not suitable for use in higher learning institutions. However, this study argues that progressive indigenous forms of knowledge must be hybridized with the university ones, save negative ones such as those fuelling early marriages. Keywords: Indigenous knowledge, Rurality, Folklore, Culture, ZambiaHow to cite this article:Banda, D. & Kapwepwe, M. 2020. The influence of rurality and its indigenous knowledge on teaching methods in higher education – lessons from Ukulange Mbusa of the Bemba people of Zambia. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South. 4(2): 197-217. https://doi.org/10.36615/sotls.v4i2.148.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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Butcher, Matthew. "A lyrical architecture of the flood: Landscape, infrastructure, and symbiosis." Architectural Research Quarterly 19, no. 3 (September 2015): 224–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1359135515000482.

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This paper presents, through text and the design project ‘The Silt House’, an alternative architecture for flood landscapes.The investigation sets out the context for current forms of infrastructure and architecture planned in response to the increased threat of flooding in and around the Thames Estuary. In particular, it looks to certain experimental flood defence systems, suggesting, that instead of building bigger and bigger sea walls, we should look to use the landscape as a hybrid landscape infrastructure where salt marshes can act as a storage point for excess water and the flora can dispel energy from flood tides. Within this context, the text and design work seek to address the questions: what formal and spatial logics might be appropriate for architecture if sited in such a hybridised landscape like the tidal marsh; and, how might these logics mirror the particular conditions of this new model of infrastructure?To help answer this question, the work looks to the architect and poet Raimund Abraham and, in particular, his 10 Houses projects developed between 1970 and 1973 for an alternative architectural model that uses natural processes to create enclosure and define architectural space. The design project seeks to explore how the direct use of such a historical reference can itself be seen as a means to not only develop an architecture that demonstrates a symbiotic relationship between nature and architecture, but also between the social and the political.
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Bennett, Mia M. "Hong Kong as special cultural zone: Confucian geopolitics in practice." Dialogues in Human Geography 11, no. 2 (July 2021): 236–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20438206211017740.

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Responding to An, Sharp, and Shaw’s article, ‘Towards Confucian Geopolitics’, I consider how strategies and interpretations of Chinese geopolitics are playing out in Hong Kong with attention to their cultural dimensions. First, I reflect upon the reactions of individuals and the media in the West—specifically Britain—to the protests and street violence that rocked its former colony in the summer of 2019. Second, to reckon with An, Sharp, and Shaw’s contention that the hybridized nature of Chinese geopolitics emerges from its ‘strategic adaptability’, thereby enabling the integration of foreign ideas into Chinese cultural traditions, I offer a brief critique of cultural and infrastructural developments in Hong Kong relating to the West Kowloon Cultural District. Initially intended to showcase local culture and link it into the art world’s global circuits, the megaproject is increasingly being made in China’s image. Third, as a counterpoint to the supposed flexibility of the Chinese geopolitical imagination, I address the ossification of Western geopolitical thought and practice. In order for geographers to build more pluralistic critical geopolitics, engaging with a diversity of geopolitical approaches and their cultural underpinnings is key. For Western nation-states, failing to practice a more hybridized geopolitics may represent a more existential risk.
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Stark, Luke, and Karen Levy. "The surveillant consumer." Media, Culture & Society 40, no. 8 (July 25, 2018): 1202–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443718781985.

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We argue that modern technical and social infrastructures of surveillance have brought a novel subject position to prominence: the surveillant consumer. Surveillance has become a normalized mode of interpersonal relation that urges the person as consumer to manage others around her using surveillant products and services. We explore two configurations of this model: the consumer as observer, effectuated through products for use in the supervision of intimate relations as a component of a normalized duty of care; and the consumer as manager, effectuated through capacities for the customer to manage the labor of workers providing services to her. These models frequently intersect and hybridize as market logics overlap with intimate spheres: the surveillant consumer thus acts as an emotional manager of the experience of everyday surveillance. In turn, this managerial role reifies the equation of financial wealth with moral weight in a hierarchy of oversight, giving the wealthiest the most control and least accountability.
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Bradley, Kevin M., and Steven A. Benner. "OligArch: A software tool to allow artificially expanded genetic information systems (AEGIS) to guide the autonomous self-assembly of long DNA constructs from multiple DNA single strands." Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry 10 (August 11, 2014): 1826–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.3762/bjoc.10.192.

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Synthetic biologists wishing to self-assemble large DNA (L-DNA) constructs from small DNA fragments made by automated synthesis need fragments that hybridize predictably. Such predictability is difficult to obtain with nucleotides built from just the four standard nucleotides. Natural DNA's peculiar combination of strong and weak G:C and A:T pairs, the context-dependence of the strengths of those pairs, unimolecular strand folding that competes with desired interstrand hybridization, and non-Watson–Crick interactions available to standard DNA, all contribute to this unpredictability. In principle, adding extra nucleotides to the genetic alphabet can improve the predictability and reliability of autonomous DNA self-assembly, simply by increasing the information density of oligonucleotide sequences. These extra nucleotides are now available as parts of artificially expanded genetic information systems (AEGIS), and tools are now available to generate entirely standard DNA from AEGIS DNA during PCR amplification. Here, we describe the OligArch (for "oligonucleotide architecting") software, an application that permits synthetic biologists to engineer optimally self-assembling DNA constructs from both six- and eight-letter AEGIS alphabets. This software has been used to design oligonucleotides that self-assemble to form complete genes from 20 or more single-stranded synthetic oligonucleotides. OligArch is therefore a key element of a scalable and integrated infrastructure for the rapid and designed engineering of biology.
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Dickson, Dane J., Jennifer Maria Johnson, Raymond C. Bergan, Rebecca Owens, Vivek Subbiah, and Razelle Kurzrock. "The master observational trial–a novel method to unify precision oncology data collection." Journal of Clinical Oncology 38, no. 15_suppl (May 20, 2020): e19313-e19313. http://dx.doi.org/10.1200/jco.2020.38.15_suppl.e19313.

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e19313 Background: The Master Observational Trial (MOT) was recently created as a new master protocol that hybridizes the power of master interventional trials with the richness of real-world data (Cell, 2020). The MOT can be described as a series of prospective observational studies that are tied together through a common protocol, infrastructure, and organization. The MOT has broad application in many disease states but is particularly powerful in oncology. We herein expand our prior work to describe key details regarding how the MOT concept can fill multiple unmet needs in oncology. Methods: Through published information, white papers, and expert opinions we identified key unmet needs of oncology stakeholders. We reviewed the publicly available information of structure, organization, and data availability of the five largest genomic-outcome real-world data efforts. Common concerns included variability and reliability of biomarkers, the scientific rigor in real-world data, data silos, patient consent, and duplicated or disparate activities. We then determined how a specific application of the MOT in oncology could answer stakeholder concerns, integrate with current efforts, and also how to provide a model that would be equally valuable to academic and community clinics. Results: We identified significant scientific challenges with many of the current oncology real-world datasets in answering key concerns of stakeholders. We developed the Master Registry of Oncology Outcomes Associated with Testing and Treatment (ROOT) as the first national implementation of an oncology-centric MOT. We modeled how ROOT could fill scientific gaps in current data efforts and integrate with interventional and real-world efforts and help answer key concerns of stakeholders. We also identified solutions that would allow community and academic groups to participate in the same effort. Conclusions: An oncology-centric MOT has the potential to improve the quality of RWD in oncology and advance precision oncology in ways that are not fully addressed by current retrospective efforts. Reference Dickson DJ, Johnson J, Owens R, Bergan R, Subbiah V, Kurzrock R. (2020). The Master Observational Trial: A New Class of Master Protocol to Advance Precision Medicine. Cell 180, 9-14. Clinical trial information: NCT04028479 .
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Pereda, Luis de, José Fernández, Hugo Lanao, and Marta Durango. "Use of the energy of the urban Wastewater network for the thermal conditioning of the swimming pool of the Moratalaz Sports Centre. Madrid = Aprovechamiento de la energía de la red urbana de aguas residuales para el acondicionamiento térmico de la piscina del Polideportivo de Moratalaz. Madrid." Building & Management 2, no. 2 (September 10, 2018): 66. http://dx.doi.org/10.20868/bma.2018.2.3766.

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Abstract Underground networks of urban infrastructures channel fluids, water, sewage, air, mechanical and thermal vehicles, store resources of all kinds, and interact with the underground mean, which allows to preserve a moderate rate of intensity and temperature of the thermal energy that they store and transport, all of it very close to the potential users that these resources could serve as primary resources. It is the case of the Municipal Sports Center, CDM, of Moratalaz, an installation that gives sporting services to about 600,000 users per year and has equipment voraciously consumer of energy resources as it is, in our case, the indoor swimming-pool. The heating of the swimming water, the dehumidifying of the air, the heating of the space and the heating of water of the pool are solved with the production of heat by means of gas boilers. The close existence of a municipal waste-water collector, which runs alongside the CDM, has allowed the existing heat production installation to be hybridized with a new one based on a thermal exchanger, directly installed in the collector's gallery. The monitoring of the operation and consumption of the system has allowed to verify a percentage reduction of emissions of 37.5% and a percentage reduction of energy costs of 39.2%, in the first stage of operation. Resumen Las redes subterráneas de las infraestructuras urbanas canalizan fluidos, agua, agua residual, aire, vehículos de todo tipo, almacenan recursos de todo tipo, e interaccionan con el terreno lo que permite preservar una tasa moderada de intensidad y temperatura a la energía térmica que almacenan y transportan , muy cerca de los potenciales usuarios a los que estos recursos podrían servir como recursos primarios. Es el caso del Centro Deportivo Municipal, CDM, de Moratalaz, una instalación que da servicios deportivos a cerca de 600.000 usuarios al año y cuenta con equipamientos vorazmente consumidores de recursos como es, en nuestro caso, la piscina cubierta. El calentamiento del agua de nado, la deshumectación del aire, la calefacción del espacio y el calentamiento de agua caliente sanitaria de la piscina se resuelven con la producción de calor mediante calderas de gas. La existencia de un colector municipal de aguas residuales, que discurre junto al CDM ha permitido hibridar la instalación existente con otra de intercambio instalada en la galería del colector. La monitorización del funcionamiento y consumos del sistema ha permitido verificar una reducción porcentual de las emisiones de un 37,5% y una reducción porcentual de los costes de energía de un 39,2%.
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Zhu, Lingling, Jie Fangi Shi, Yi Hai Shi, Hai Peng Xu, A. Shanthini, and Tamizharasi G. Seetharam. "Renewable Green Energy Resources for Next-Generation Smart Cities using Big Data Analytics." Journal of Interconnection Networks, July 16, 2021, 2141004. http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/s0219265921410048.

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Energy is now seen as a significant resource that develops abundant on the world economy, with short supply and development. A study found that renewable energy systems are needed to prevent shortages. Hence, all the focus in this study to decrease electricity consumption and reduce the overall completion times for a regular console in green technology networks was an efficient and scalable production genomic solution. A Renewable green energy resources smart city (RGER-SC) framework is proposed that used a multi-target evolutionary algorithm was hybridized to be effective and calculated arithmetically in this study. This work deals with fostering renewable energy incorporation by adjusting federal charges to increase the energy accounting practitioners. Besides, this report analyses the timely generation of delay-tolerant demands and the maintenance of district heating at network infrastructure. In comparison, capacity differentials between consumers and information centres are considered and evaluated using the Renewable green energy resources smart city (RGER-SC) framework for energy conservation and controlled task management at an industrial level.
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"Fructifying the Network Performance of iVANET thru a Rectified Associative Service Mechanism: An Algorithmic Proposal." International Journal of Innovative Technology and Exploring Engineering 8, no. 11 (September 10, 2019): 4291–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.35940/ijitee.k2064.0981119.

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Internet based Vehicular (iVANET) ad-hoc networks are meticulously especial case of normal VANET. It is basically made of a combined wired Internet as well as vehicular ad hoc network for developing a new baby-boom of omnipresent and ubiquitous computing. The Internet connectivity is usually extended to V2I (vehicle to infrastructure) communication whilst ad-hoc networks are used in vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication. The latency is one of the main matters of concern in VANET. By minimizing distance between data source and the remote vehicle through rectified caching technique along with redefined cache lookup mechanism, the latency can be shortened by a significant factor in iVANET environment. In this paper various cache invalidation schemes are studied and analyzed. Exploring the possibilities of caching schemes which can be hybridized or mutated, paper introduces an algorithmic proposal along with redefined services mechanism for cache lookup and invalidation, which strives for achieving low latency with reduced negative acknowledgement (NACK) in the network. This paper introduces a rectified algorithm for guaranteed delivery of the queried data and efficiently invalidating cache contents at different levels of hierarchy. The proposed work is anticipated to fructify the network performance minimizing the cost and bandwidth utilization during cache invalidation and hence guarantees improved quality of service (QoS).
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Bennet, Adam J., and Shakib Daryanoosh. "Energy-Efficient Mining on a Quantum-Enabled Blockchain Using Light." Ledger 4 (July 22, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/ledger.2019.143.

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We outline a quantum-enabled blockchain architecture based on a consortium of quantum servers. The network is hybridised, utilising digital systems for sharing and processing classical information combined with a fibre-optic infrastructure and quantum devices for transmitting and processing quantum information. We deliver an energy efficient interactive mining protocol enacted between clients and servers which uses quantum information encoded in light and removes the need for trust in network infrastructure. Instead, clients on the network need only trust the transparent network code, and that their devices adhere to the rules of quantum physics. To demonstrate the energy efficiency of the mining protocol, we elaborate upon the results of two previous experiments (one performed over 1km of optical fibre) as applied to this work. Finally, we address some key vulnerabilities, explore open questions, and observe forward-compatibility with the quantum internet and quantum computing technologies.
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Amankwaa, Ebenezer F., and Katherine V. Gough. "Everyday contours and politics of infrastructure: Informal governance of electricity access in urban Ghana." Urban Studies, July 29, 2021, 004209802110301. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00420980211030155.

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This article contributes to shaping the discourse on unequal geographies of infrastructure and governance in the global South, opening up new ways of thinking through politics, practices and modalities of power. Conceptually, informality, governance and everyday urbanism are drawn on to unpack how the formal encounters the informal in ways that (re)configure infrastructure geographies and governance practices. This conceptual framing is empirically employed through an analysis of electricity access in Accra, Ghana, highlighting how residents navigate unequal electricity topographies, engage in self-help initiatives, and negotiate informal networks and formal governance practices. The spatiality of the electricity infrastructure has created inequity and opportunities for exploitation by ‘power-owners’ and ‘power-agents’ who control and manage the electricity distribution network and, in turn, privately supply power. Electricity connections are negotiated, access is monetised and illegality excused on grounds of good-neighbourliness, thereby producing and perpetuating everyday politics of ‘making do’. Community movements, everyday acts of improvisation, and incremental modifications are shown to influence the workings of formal institutions of government and shape uneven power relations and experiences of inequality. Such an understanding of how marginalised residents navigate the electricity topographies of Accra reveals a more nuanced politics of infrastructure access, which reflects the complex realities of hybridised modalities of governance and the multiple everyday dimensions of power that shape urban space. The article concludes that informality should not be recognised as failure but as a sphere of opportunity, innovation and transition.
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22

Mazel-Cabasse, Charlotte Julie. "Modes and Existences in Citizen Science." Science & Technology Studies, December 19, 2018, 34–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.23987/sts.60496.

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In the Bay Area of San Francisco, the earthquake contours are not easy to define: seismology is still a relatively recent science, and controversies around methods to evaluate the earthquake risk are constant. In this context, the invitation to think about the modes of citizen science is an opportunity to reflect on the modality of hybridized scientific practices as well as the process by which the plurality and complexity of the earthquake characteristics can be articulated, and sometime reconciled. Looking at different existences of the earthquake risk, the paper investigates different assemblages that question the clear-cut distinction between citizen science and science. I’ll situate the question of the mode of citizen science within the larger framework of interdisciplinarity knowledge infrastructures and the work on ‘mode of existence’ initiated by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers (2009). Expanding our understanding with regard to how CS is performed opens the possibility of reconsidering the specific types of assemblages and infrastructures from which these modes emerge and on their distinct trajectories. It is also an invitation to make visible the integration processes, the communities, and the imaginations that “make” science.
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23

Maybury, Terrence. "The Literacy Control Complex." M/C Journal 7, no. 2 (March 1, 2004). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2337.

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Usually, a literature search is a benign phase of the research regime. It was, however, during this phase on my current project where a semi-conscious pique I’d been feeling developed into an obvious rancour. Because I’ve been involved in both electronic production and consumption, and the pedagogy surrounding it, I was interested in how the literate domain was coping with the transformations coming out of the new media communications r/evolution. This concern became clearer with the reading and re-reading of Kathleen Tyner’s book, Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information. Sometimes, irritation is a camouflage for an emerging and hybridised form of knowledge, so it was necessary to unearth this masquerade of discord that welled-up in the most unexpected of places. Literacy in a Digital World makes all the right noises: it discusses technology; Walter Ong; media literacy; primary, secondary, and tertiary schooling; Plato’s Phaedrus; psychoanalysis; storytelling; networks; aesthetics; even numeracy and multiliteracies, along with a host of other highly appropriate subject matter vis-à-vis its object of analysis. On one reading, it’s a highly illuminating overview. There is, however, a differing interpretation of Literacy in a Digital World, and it’s of a more sombre hue. This other more doleful reading makes Literacy in a Digital World a superior representative of a sometimes largely under-theorised control-complex, and an un.conscious authoritarianism, implicit in the production of any type of knowledge. Of course, in this instance the type of production referenced is literate in orientation. The literate domain, then, is not merely an angel of enlightened debate; under the influence and direction of particular human configurations, literacy has its power struggles with other forms of representation. If the PR machine encourages a more seraphical view of the culture industry, it comes at the expense of the latter’s sometimes-tyrannical underbelly. It is vital, then, to question and investigate these un.conscious forces, specifically in relation to the production of literate forms of culture and the ‘discourse’ it carries on regarding electronic forms of knowledge, a paradigm for which is slowly emerging electracy and a subject I will return to. This assertion is no overstatement. Literacy in a Digital World has concealed within its discourse the assumption that the dominant modes of teaching and learning are literate and will continue to be so. That is, all knowledge is mediated via either typographic or chirographic words on a page, or even on a screen. This is strange given that Tyner admits in the Introduction that “I am an itinerant teacher, reluctant writer, and sometimes media producer” (1, my emphasis). The orientation in Literacy in a Digital World, it seems to me, is a mask for the authoritarianism at the heart of the literate establishment trying to contain and corral the intensifying global flows of electronic information. Ironically, it also seems to be a peculiarly electronic way to present information: that is, the sifting, analysis, and categorisation, along with the representation of phenomena, through the force of one’s un.conscious biases, with the latter making all knowledge production laden with emotional causation. This awkwardness in using the term “literacy” in relation to electronic forms of knowledge surfaces once more in Paul Messaris’s Visual “Literacy”. Again, this is peculiar given that this highly developed and informative text might be a fine introduction to electracy as a possible alternative paradigm to literacy, if only, for instance, it made some mention of sound as a counterpoint to textual and visual symbolisation. The point where Messaris passes over this former contradiction is worth quoting: Strictly speaking, of course, the term “literacy” should be applied only to reading and writing. But it would probably be too pedantic and, in any case, it would surely be futile to resist the increasingly common tendency to apply this term to other kinds of communication skills (mathematical “literacy,” computer “literacy”) as well as to the substantive knowledge that communication rests on (historical, geographic, cultural “literacy”). (2-3) While Messaris might use the term “visual literacy” reluctantly, the assumption that literacy will take over the conceptual reins of electronic communication and remain the pre-eminent form of knowledge production is widespread. This assumption might be happening in the literature on the subject but in the wider population there is a rising electrate sensibility. It is in the work of Gregory Ulmer that electracy is most extensively articulated, and the following brief outline has been heavily influenced by his speculation on the subject. Electracy is a paradigm that requires, in the production and consumption of electronic material, highly developed competencies in both oracy and literacy, and if necessary comes on top of any knowledge of the subject or content of any given work, program, or project. The conceptual frame of electracy is herein tentatively defined as both a well-developed range and depth of communicative competency in oral, literate, and electronic forms, biased from the latter’s point of view. A crucial addition, one sometimes overlooked in earlier communicative forms, is that of the technate, or technacy, a working knowledge of the technological infrastructure underpinning all communication and its in-built ideological assumptions. It is in this context of the various communicative competencies required for electronic production and consumption that the term ‘literacy’ (or for that matter ‘oracy’) is questionable. Furthermore, electracy can spread out to mean the following: it is that domain of knowledge formation whose arrangement, transference, and interpretation rely primarily on electronic networks, systems, codes and apparatuses, for either its production, circulation, or consumption. It could be analogue, in the sense of videotape; digital, in the case of the computer; aurally centred, as in the examples of music, radio or sound-scapes; mathematically configured, in relation to programming code for instance; visually fixated, as in broadcast television; ‘amateur’, as in the home-video or home-studio realm; politically sensitive, in the case of surveillance footage; medically fixated, as in the orbit of tomography; ambiguous, as in the instance of The Sydney Morning Herald made available on the WWW, or of Hollywood blockbusters broadcast on television, or hired/bought in a DVD/video format; this is not to mention Brad Pitt reading a classic novel on audio-tape. Electracy is a strikingly simple, yet highly complex and heterogeneous communicative paradigm. Electracy is also a generic term, one whose very comprehensiveness and dynamic mutability is its defining hallmark, and one in which a whole host of communicative codes and symbolic systems reside. Moreover, almost anyone can comprehend meaning in electronic media because “electric epistemology cannot remain confined to small groups of users, as oral epistemologies have, and cannot remain the property of an educated elite, as literate epistemologies have” (Gozzi and Haynes 224). Furthermore, as Ulmer writes: “To speak of computer literacy or media literacy may be an attempt to remain within the apparatus of alphabetic writing that has organized the Western tradition for nearly the past three millennia” (“Foreword” xii). The catch is that the knowledge forms thus produced through electracy are the abstract epistemological vectors on which the diverse markets of global capitalism thrive. The dynamic nature of these “multimodal” forms of electronic knowledge (Kress, “Visual” 73), then, is increasingly applicable to all of us in the local/global, human/world conglomerate in which any polity is now framed. To continue to emphasise literacy and alphabetic consciousness might then be blinding us to this emerging relationship between electracy and globalisation, possibly even to localisation and regionalisation. It may be possible to trace the dichotomy outlined above between literate and electrate forms of knowledge to larger political/economic and cultural forces. As Saskia Sassen illustrates, sovereignty and territoriality are central aspects in the operation of the still important nation-state, especially in an era of encroaching globalisation. In the past, sovereignty referred to the absolute power of monarchs to control their dominions and is an idea that has been transferred to the nation-state in the long transition to representative democracy. Territoriality refers to the specific physical space that sovereignty is seen as guaranteeing. As Sassen writes, “In the main … rule in the modern world flows from the absolute sovereignty of the state over its national territory” (3). Quite clearly, in the shifting regimes of geo-political power that characterise the global era, sovereign control over territory, and, equally, control over the ideas that might reconfigure our interpretation of concepts such as sovereignty and territoriality, nationalism and literacy, are all in a state of change. Today’s climate of geo-political uncertainty has undoubtedly produced a control complex in relation to these shifting power bases, a condition that arises when psychic, epistemological and political certainties move to a state of unpredictable flux. In Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities another important examination of nationalism there is an emphasis on how literacy was an essential ingredient in its development as a political structure. Operational levels of literacy also came to be a key component in the development of the idea of the autonomous self that arose with democracy and its use as an organising principle in citizenship rituals like voting in some nation-states. Eric Leed puts it this way: “By the sixteenth century, literacy had become one of the definitive signs — along with the possession of property and a permanent residence — of an independent social status” (53). Clearly, any conception of sovereignty and territoriality has to be read, after being written constitutionally, by those people who form the basis of a national polity and over whom these two categories operate. The “fundamental anxiety” over literacy that Kress speaks of (Before Writing 1) is a sub-component of this larger control complex in that a quantum increase in the volume and diversity of electronic communication is contributing to declining levels of literacy in the body politic. In the current moment there is a control complex of almost plague proportions in our selves, our systems of knowledge, and our institutions and polities, because it is undoubtedly a key factor at the epicentre of any turf war. Even my own strident anxieties over the dominance of literacy in debates over electronic communication deserve to be laid out on the analyst’s couch, in part because any manifestation of the control complex in a turf war is aimed squarely at the repression of alternative ways of being and becoming. The endgame: it might be wiser to more closely examine this literacy control complex, possible alternative paradigms of knowledge production and consumption such as electracy, and their broader relationship to patterns of political/economic/cultural organisation and control. Acknowledgements I am indebted to Patrice Braun and Ros Mills, respectively, for editorial advice and technical assistance in the preparation of this essay. Note on reading “The Literacy Control Complex” The dot configuration in ‘un.conscious’ is used deliberately as an electronic marker to implicitly indicate the omni-directional nature of the power surges that dif.fuse the conscious and the unconscious in the field of political action where any turf war is conducted. While this justification is not obvious, I do want to create a sense of intrigue in the reader as to why this dot configuration might be used. One of the many things that fascinates me about electronic communication is its considerable ability for condensation; the sound-bite is one epistemological example of this idea, the dot, as an electronic form of conceptual elision, is another. If you are interested in this field, I highly recommend perusal of the MEZ posts that crop up periodically on a number of media related lists. MEZ’s posts have made me more cognisant of electronic forms of written expression. These experiments in electronic writing deserve to be tested. Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. rev. ed. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Gozzi Jr., Raymond, and W. Lance Haynes. “Electric Media and Electric Epistemology: Empathy at a Distance.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 9.3 (1992): 217-28. Messaris, Paul. Visual “Literacy”: Image, Mind, and Reality. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994. Kress, Gunther. “Visual and Verbal Modes of Representation in Electronically Mediated Communication: The Potentials of New Forms of Text.” Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. Ed. Ilana Snyder. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997. 53-79. ---. Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy. London: Routledge, 1997. Leed, Eric. “‘Voice’ and ‘Print’: Master Symbols in the History of Communication.” The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. Madison, Wisconsin: Coda Press, 1980. 41-61. Sassen, Saskia. Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Tyner, Kathleen. Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998. Ulmer, Gregory. Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video. New York: Routledge, 1989. ---. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. New York: Johns Hopkins U P, 1994. ---. “Foreword/Forward (Into Electracy).” Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet. Ed. Todd Taylor and Irene Ward. New York: Columbia U P, 1998. ix-xiii. ---. Internet Invention: Literacy into Electracy. Boston: Longman, 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Maybury, Terrence. "The Literacy Control Complex" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/05-literacy.php>. APA Style Maybury, T. (2004, Mar17). The Literacy Control Complex. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/05-literacy.php>
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24

Humphry, Justine. "Making an Impact: Cultural Studies, Media and Contemporary Work." M/C Journal 14, no. 6 (November 18, 2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.440.

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Cultural Studies has tended to prioritise the domain of leisure and consumption over work as an area for meaning making, in many ways defining everyday life in opposition to work. Greg Noble, a cultural researcher who examined work in the context of the early computerisation of Australian universities made the point that "discussions of everyday life often make the mistake of assuming that everyday life equates with home and family life, or leisure" (87). This article argues for the need within Cultural Studies to focus on work and media as a research area of everyday life. With the growth of flexible and creative labour and the widespread uptake of an array of new media technologies used for work, traditional ways to identify and measure the space and time of work have become increasingly flawed, with implications for how we account for work and negotiate its boundaries. New approaches are needed to address the complex media environments and technological practices that are an increasing part of contemporary working life. Cultural Studies can make a significant impact towards this research agenda by offering new ways to analyse the complex interrelations of space, time and technology in everyday work practice. To further this goal, a new material practices account of work termed Officing is introduced, developed through my doctoral research on professionals' daily use of information and communication technology (ICT). This approach builds on the key cultural concepts of "bricolage" and "appropriation" combined with the idea of "articulation work" proposed by Anselm Strauss, to support the analysis of the office workplace as a contingent and provisional arrangement or process. Officing has a number of benefits as a framework for analysing the nature of work in a highly mediated world. Highlighting the labour that goes into stabilising work platforms makes it possible to assess the claims of productivity and improved work-life balance brought about by new mobile media technologies; to identify previously unidentified sources of time pressure, overwork and intensification and ultimately, to contribute to the design of more sustainable work environments. The Turn Away from Work Work held a central position in social and cultural analysis in the first half of the twentieth century but as Strangleman observed, there was a marked shift away from the study of work from the mid 1970s (3.1). Much of the impulse for this shift came from critiques of the over-emphasis on relations of production and the workplace as the main source of meaning and value (5.1). In line with this position, feminist researchers challenged the traditional division of labour into paid and unpaid work, arguing that this division sustained the false perception of domestic work as non-productive (cf. Delphy; Folbre). Accompanying these critiques were significant changes in work itself, as traditional jobs literally began to disappear with the decline of manufacturing in industrialised countries (6.1). With the turn away from work in academia and the changes in the nature of work, attention shifted to the realm of the market and consumption. One of the important contributions of Cultural Studies has been the focus on the role of the consumer in driving social and technological change and processes of identity formation. Yet, it is a major problem that work is largely marginalised in cultural research of everyday life, especially since, in most industrialised nations, we are working in new ways, in rapidly changing conditions and more than ever before. Research shows that in Australia there has been a steady increase in the average hours of paid work and Australians are working harder (cf. Watson, Buchanan, Campbell and Briggs; Edwards and Wajcman). In the 2008 Australian Work and Life Index (AWALI) Skinner and Pocock found around 55 per cent of employees frequently felt rushed or pressed for time and this was associated with long working hours, work overload and an overall poor work–life interaction (8). These trends have coincided with long-term changes in the type and location of work. In Australia, like many other developed countries, information-based occupations have taken over manufacturing jobs and there has been an increase in part-time and casual work (cf. Watson et al.). Many employees now conduct work outside of the traditional workplace, with the ABS reporting that in 2008, 24 per cent of employees worked at least some hours at home. Many social analysts have explained the rise of casual and flexible labour as related to the transition to global capitalism driven by the expansion of networked information processes (cf. Castells; Van Dijk). This shift is not simply that more workers are producing ideas and information but that the previously separated spheres of production and consumption have blurred (cf. Ritzer and Jurgenson). With this, entirely new industries have sprung up, predicated on the often unpaid for creative labour of individuals, including users of media technologies. A growing chorus of writers are now pointing out that a fragmented, polarised and complex picture is emerging of this so-called "new economy", with significant implications for the quality of work (cf. Edwards and Wajcman; Fudge and Owens; Huws). Indeed, some claim that new conditions of insecure and poor quality employment or "precarious work" are fast becoming the norm. Moreover, this longer-term pattern runs parallel to the production of a multitude of new mobile media technologies, first taken up by professionals and then by the mainstream, challenging the notion that activities are bound to any particular place or time. Reinvigorating Work in Social and Cultural Analysis There are moves to reposition social and cultural analysis to respond to these various trends. Work-life balance is an example of a research and policy area that has emerged since the 1990s. The boundary between the household and the outside world has also been subject to scrutiny by cultural researchers, and these critically examine the intersection between work and consumption, gender and care (cf. Nippert-Eng; Sorenson and Lie; Noble and Lupton, "Consuming" and "Mine"; Lally). These responses are examples of a shift away from what Urry has dubbed "structures and stable organisations" to a concern with flows, movements and the blurring of boundaries between life spheres (5). In a similar vein, researchers recently have proposed alternative ways to describe the changing times and places of employment. In their study of UK professionals, Felstead, Jewson and Walters proposed a model of "plural workscapes" to explain a major shift in the spatial organisation of work (23). Mobility theorists Sheller and Urry have called for the need to "develop a more dynamic conceptualisation of the fluidities and mobilities that have increasingly hybridised the public and private" (113). All of this literature has reinforced a growing concern that in the face of new patterns of production and consumption and with the rise of complex media environments, traditional models and measures of space and time are inadequate to account for contemporary work. Analyses that rely on conventional measures of work based on hourly units clearly point to an increase in the volume of work, the speed of work and to the collision (cf. Pocock) of work and life but fall down in accounting for the complex and often contradictory role of technology. Media technologies are "Janus-faced" as Michael Arnold has suggested, referring to the two-faced Roman god to foreground the contradictory effects at the centre of all technologies (232). Wajcman notes this paradox in her research on mobile media and time, pointing out that mobile phones are just as likely to "save" time as to "consume" it (15). It was precisely this problematic of the complex interactions of the space, time and technology of work that was at stake in my research on the daily use of ICT by professional workers. In the context of changes to the location, activity and meaning of work, and with the multiplying array of old and new media technologies used by workers, how can the boundary and scope of work be determined? What are the implications of these shifting grounds for the experience and quality of work? Officing: A Material Practices Account of Office Work In the remaining article I introduce some of the key ideas and principles of a material practices account developed in my PhD, Officing: Professionals' Daily ICT Use and the Changing Space and Time of Work. This research took place between 2006 and 2007 focusing in-depth on the daily technology practices of twenty professional workers in a municipal council in Sydney and a unit of a global telecommunication company taking part in a trial of a new smart phone. Officing builds on efforts to develop a more accurate account of the space and time of work bringing into play the complex and highly mediated environment in which work takes place. It extends more recent practice-based, actor-network and cultural approaches that have, for some time, been moving towards a more co-constitutive and process-oriented approach to media and technology in society. Turning first to "bricolage" from the French bricole meaning something small and handmade, bricolage refers to the ways that individuals and groups borrow from existing cultural forms and meanings to create new uses, meanings and identities. Initially proposed by Levi-Strauss and then taken up by de Certeau, bricolage has been a useful concept within subculture and lifestyle studies to reveal the creative work performed on signs and meaning systems in forming cultural identities (cf. O'Sullivan et al.). Bricolage is also an important concept for understanding how meanings and uses are inscribed into forms in use rather than being read or activated off their design. This is the process of appropriation, through which both the object and the person are mutually shaped and users gain a sense of control and ownership (cf. Noble and Lupton; Lally; Silverstone and Haddon). The concept of bricolage highlights the improvisational qualities of appropriation and its status as work. A bricoleur is thus a person who constructs new meanings and forms by drawing on and assembling a wide range of resources at hand, sourced from multiple spheres of life. One of the problems with how bricolage and appropriation has been applied to date, notwithstanding the priority given to the domestic sphere, is the tendency to grant individuals and collectives too much control to stabilise the meanings and purposes of technologies. This problem is evident in the research drawing on the framework of "domestication" (cf. Silverstone and Haddon). In practice, the sheer volume of technologically-related issues encountered on a daily basis and the accompanying sense of frustration indicates there is no inevitable drift towards stability, nor are problems merely aberrational or trivial. Instead, daily limits to agency and attempts to overcome these are points at which meanings as well as uses are re-articulated and potentially re-invented. This is where "articulation work" comes in. Initially put forward by Anselm Strauss in 1985, articulation work has become an established analytical tool for informing technology design processes in such fields as Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Workplace Studies. In these, articulation work is narrowly defined to refer to the real time activities of cooperative work. It includes dealing with contingencies, keeping technologies and systems working and making adjustments to accommodate for problems (Suchman "Supporting", 407). In combination with naturalistic investigations, this concept has facilitated engagement with the increasingly complex technological and media environments of work. It has been a powerful tool for highlighting practices deemed unimportant but which are nevertheless crucial for getting work done. Articulation work, however, has the potential to be applied in a broader sense to explain the significance of the instability of technologies and the efforts to overcome these as transformative in themselves, part of the ongoing process of appropriation that goes well beyond individual tasks or technologies. With clear correspondences to actor-network theory, this expanded definition provides the basis for a new understanding of the office as a temporary and provisional condition of stability achieved through the daily creative and improvisational activities of workers. The office, then, is dependent on and inextricably bound up in its ongoing articulation and crucially, is not bound to a particular place or time. In the context of the large-scale transformations in work already discussed, this expanded definition of articulation work helps to; firstly, address how work is re-organised and re-rationalised through changes to the material conditions of work; secondly, identify the ongoing articulations that this entails and thirdly; understand the role of these articulations in the construction of the space and time of work. This expanded definition is achieved in the newly developed concept of officing. Officing describes a form of labour directed towards the production of a stable office platform. Significantly, one of the main characteristics of this work is that it often goes undetected by organisations as well as by the workers that perform it. As explained later, its "invisibility" is in part a function of its embodiment but also relates to the boundless nature of officing, taking place both inside and outside the workplace, in or out of work time. Officing is made up of a set of interwoven activities of three main types: connecting, synchronising and configuring. Connecting can be understood as aligning technical and social relations for the performance of work at a set time. Synchronising brings together and coordinates different times and temporal demands, for example, the time of "work" with "life" or the time "out in the field" with time "in the workplace". Configuring prepares the space of work, making a single technology or media environment work to some planned action or existing pattern of activity. To give an example of connecting: in the Citizens' Service Centre of the Council, Danielle's morning rituals involved a series of connections even before her work of advising customers begins: My day: get in, sit down, turn on the computer and then slowly open each software program that I will need to use…turn on the phone, key in my password, turn on the headphones and sit there and wait for the calls! (Humphry Officing, 123) These connections not only set up and initiate the performance of work but also mark Danielle's presence in her office. Through these activities, which in practice overlap and blur, the space and time of the office comes to appear as a somewhat separate and mostly invisible structure or infrastructure. The work that goes into making the office stable takes place around the boundary of work with implications for how this boundary is constituted. These efforts do not cluster around boundaries in any simple sense but become part of the process of boundary making, contributing to the construction of categories such as "work" and "life". So, for example, for staff in the smart phone trial, the phone had become their main source of information and communication. Turning their smart phone off, or losing connectivity had ramifications that cascaded throughout their lifeworld. On the one hand, this lead to the breakdown of the distinction between "work" and "life" and a sense of "ever-presence", requiring constant and vigilant "boundary work" (cf. Nippert-Eng). On the other hand, this same state also enabled workers to respond to demands in their own time and across multiple boundaries, giving workers a sense of flexibility, control and of being "in sync". Connecting, configuring and synchronising are activities performed by bodies, producing an embodied transformation. In the tradition of phenomenology, most notably in the works of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and more recently Ihde, embodiment is used to explain the relationship between subjects and objects. This concept has since been developed to be understood as not residing in the body but as spread through social, material and discursive arrangements (cf. Haraway, "Situated" and Simians; Henke; Suchman, "Figuring"). Tracing efforts towards making the office stable is thus a way of uncovering how the body, as a constitutive part of a larger arrangement or network, is formed through embodiment, how it gains its competencies, social meanings and ultimately, how workers gain a sense of what it means to be a professional. So, in the smart phone trial, staff managed their connections by replying immediately to their voice, text and data messages. This immediacy not only acted as proof of their presence in the office. It also signalled their commitment to their office: their active participation and value to the organisation and their readiness to perform when called on. Importantly, this embodied transformation also helps to explain how officing becomes an example of "invisible work" (cf. Star and Strauss). Acts of connecting, synchronising and configuring become constituted and forgotten in and through bodies, spaces and times. Through their repeated performance these acts become habits, a transparent means through which the environment of work is navigated in the form of skills and techniques, configurations and routines. In conclusion, researching work in contemporary societies means confronting its marginalisation within cultural research and developing ways to comprehend and measure the interaction of space, time and the ever-multiplying array of media technologies. Officing provides a way to do this by shifting to an understanding of the workplace as a contingent product of work itself. The strength of this approach is that it highlights the creative and ongoing work of individuals on their media infrastructures. It also helps to identify and describe work activities that are not neatly contained in a workplace, thus adding to their invisibility. The invisibility of these practices can have significant impacts on workers: magnifying feelings of time pressure and a need to work faster, longer and harder even as discrete technologies are utilised to save time. In this way, officing exposes some of the additional contributions to the changing experience and quality of work as well as to the construction of everyday domains. Officing supports an evaluation of claims of productivity and work-life balance in relation to new media technologies. In the smart phone trial, contrary to an assumed increase in productivity, mobility of work was achieved at the expense of productivity. Making the mobile office stable—getting it up and running, keeping it working in changing environments and meeting expectations of speed and connectivity—took up time, resulting in an overall productivity loss and demanding more "boundary work". In spite of their adaptability and flexibility, staff tended to overwork to counteract this loss. This represented a major shift in the burden of effort in the production of office forms away from the organisation and towards the individual. Finally, though not addressed here in any detail, officing could conceivably have practical uses for designing more sustainable office environments that better support the work process and the balance of work and life. Thus, by accounting more accurately for the resource requirements of work, organisations can reduce the daily effort, space and time taken up by employees on their work environments. In any case, what is clear, is the ongoing need to continue a cultural research agenda on work—to address the connections between transformations in work and the myriad material practices that individuals perform in going about their daily work. References Arnold, Michael. "On the Phenomenology of Technology: The 'Janus-Faces' of Mobile Phones." Information and Organization 13.4 (2003): 231–56. Australian Bureau of Statistics. "6275.0 - Locations of Work, Nov 2008." Australian Bureau of Statistics, 8 May 2009. 20 May 2009 ‹http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/6275.0›. Bauman, Zygmunt. Freedom. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1996. Chesters, Jennifer, Janeen Baxter, and Mark Western. "Paid and Unpaid Work in Australian Households: Towards an Understanding of the New Gender Division of Labour." Familes through Life - 10th Australian Institute of Families Studies Conference, 9-11th July 2008, Melbourne: AIFS, 2008. Delphy, Christine. Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women's Oppression. Amherst MA: U of Massachusetts, 1984. Edwards, Paul, and Judy Wajcman. The Politics of Working Life. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Felstead, Alan, Nick Jewson, and Sally Walters. Changing Places of Work. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Folbre, Nancy. "Exploitation Comes Home: A Critique of the Marxian Theory of Family Labor." 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The British Journal of Sociology 59.1 (2008): 59-77.Watson, Ian, John Buchanan, Iain Campbell, and Chris Briggs. Fragmented Futures: New Challenges in Working Life. Sydney: Federation P, 2003.
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