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“Industry 4.0” marks the advent of a new wave of industrial robotics designed to bring increased automation to “extreme” touch practices and enhance productivity. This article presents an ethnography of touch in two industrial settings using fourth generation industrial robots (a Glass Factory and a Waste Management Center) to critically explore the social and sensorial implications of such technologies for workers. We attend to manifestations of dirt and danger as encountered through describing workers’ sensory experiences and identity formation. The contribution of the article is two-fold. The first is analytical through the development of three “filters” to grasp the complexity of the social and sensorial dynamics of touch in situ while tracing dispersed mediating effects of the introduction of novel technologies. The second is empirical, teasing out themes embedded in the sociosensorial dynamics of touch that intersect with gender, ethnicity, and class and relate to the technological mediation of touch.

Formal education was used by the apartheid government to prepare black South Africans for manual labour, thus there was little curricular focus on the development of higher-order cognitive ...

There has been criticism of how Fair-Trade products represent workers in remote parts of the world where packaging offers an encounter with distant others which romanticizes and homogenizes them as a pre-modern form of ethnicity. Such workers are shown as always engaged in authentic, simple, honest decontextualized manual labor. And they are depicted as highly appreciative of, and empowered by, the act of ethical shopping. This paper shows that a close social semiotic analysis of Fair-Trade packaging reveals a different set of meanings which sit alongside the decontextualized ones. Designs integrate these workers into more contemporary kinds of modernist, rational, design chic, which communicates its own kind of honesty and authenticity. We consider how this, too, shapes how such consumers encounter distant others and its consequence for the meaning of the act of ethical shopping, where consumers can buy into moral alignment offered by products.

In a country that struggles on safety standards and relying heavily on manual labour, Malaysia over the decade had to be very objective in defining work- relatedness among musculoskeletal disorder cases especially chronic low back pain. The BACKS questionnaire was a proposed Back Apparatus; a Collaboration between National University of Malaysia Medical Centre (UKMMC) with Malaysian Social Security Organization (SOCSO) to assist in determining occupational chronic back pain. In the questionnaire, chronic back pain was defined as minimal cumulative back pain for more than 2 weeks in the past year, Pain Visual Analog Score above 2 cm and Oswestry Disability Index of above 20%. Based on the SOCSO registry from 2008 to 2010, 428 (56.3%) workers of 760 workers with back pain agreed and met the requirements of our study. According to the standards of the Medical Board, the BACKS Tool reported a sensitivity of 62.7%, specificity of 94.5%, positive- predictive value (PPV) of 92.9% and negative- predictive value (NPV) of 69.0% with moderate agreement as Kappa value was 0.56. The BACKS Tool served as a complementary assessment along with visits to the workplace that has its advantages when one would to conduct a self- administered assessment of their workplace by safety and health officers, organizations with limited funding.

A large body of research documents cross-cultural differences in manual and non-manual pointing. These findings have often been explained as being due to pragmatic, linguistic, cultural, and bodily constraints. The current study narrowed the plausible range of candidates for explaining the pointing preferences, focusing specifically on manual availability. We examined pointing preferences by administering a referential communication task in two types of communities which share a national identity, geographic environment, ethnicity, cultural background, and language and yet vary in their degree of hand availability: farming and herding communities in southwestern China. Our findings show that farmers, who emphasize the use of manual labour in intensive subsistence farming, were more likely to use non-manual pointing in the task than herders, who demonstrate a higher degree of manual availability in the rearing of animals. This research has implications for how the availability of the hands in economic activities may have lasting consequences on cultural pointing practices.

Human–robot interaction (HRI) is an extensive and diverse research topic that has been gaining importance in last years. Different fields of study have used HRI approaches for solving complicated problems, where humans and robots interact in some way to obtain advantages from their collaboration. Many industrial areas benefit by applying HRI strategies in their applications, and agriculture is one of the most challenging of them. Currently, field crops can reach highly autonomous levels whereas speciality crops do not. In particular, crops such as fruits and vegetables are still harvested manually, and also some tasks such as pruning and thinning have long been considered to be too complex to automate completely. In addition, several countries face the problem of farm labour shortages. As a consequence, the production process is affected. In this context, we survey HRI approaches and ap-plications focused on improving the working conditions, agility, efficiency, safety, productivity and profitability of agricultural processes, in cases where manual labour cannot be replaced by but can be complemented with robots.

This work reviews the current state of the art for pineapple production in Malaysia from the perspective of mechanization and automation. It examines the issues and challenges facing this industry. The review has led us to the conclusion that pineapple production still relies heavily on manual labour. The problems facing this industry is no different than other food crops in that low yield labour and high cost are the primary issues that need to be tackled. Although numerous engineering research work to overcome production issues has been done for crops such as rice and maize, engineering research for pineapples has been scarce. The lack of engineering research literature on this crop presents an opportunity for the scientific community to invest effort in this relatively untapped industry. This work further proposes areas where the use of Industry 4.0 technologies can be exploited in order to increase productivity and reduce input costs. Cyber-physical systems that could address issues in planting, crop maintenance and harvesting are put forth as a possible solution.

Modernising the way upper-limb prosthetic sockets are made has seen limited progress. The casting techniques that are employed in clinics today resemble those developed over 50 years ago and there is still a heavy reliance on manual labour. Modern manufacturing methods such as 3D scanning and printing are often presented as ready-to-use solutions for producing low-cost functional devices, with public perceptions being largely shaped by the superficial media representation and advertising. The promise is that modern socket manufacturing methods can improve patient satisfaction, decrease manufacturing times and reduce the workload in the clinic. However, the perception in the clinical community is that total conversion to digital methods in a clinical environment is not straightforward. Anecdotally, there is currently a disconnect between those developing technology to produce prosthetic devices and the actual needs of clinicians and people with limb difference. In this paper, we demonstrate strengths and drawbacks of a fully digitised, low-cost trans-radial diagnostic socket making process, informed by clinical expertise. We present volunteer feedback on the digitally created sockets and provide expert commentary on the use of digital tools in upper-limb socket manufacturing. We show that it is possible to utilise 3D scanning and printing, but only if the process is informed by expert knowledge. We bring examples to demonstrate how and why the process may go wrong. Finally, we provide discussion on why progress in modernising the manufacturing of upper-limb sockets has been slow yet it is still too early to rule out digital methods.

Farming is the backbone of agriculture, which makes a considerable contribution towards the GDP growth of a country. Owing to the disadvantages of traditional outdoor framine, Indoor Farming has been considered as a more sustainable method in recent times. This project aims to automate some of the processes of indoor agriculture by monitoring the parameters that contribute to a healthy crop growth such as temperature, humidity and machine temperature, Iight intensity and DB levels. and automating them to stay within the optimal range, where possible, or alert the owner of the estate to take necessary action immediately. The sensor data is simulated using IBMIoT sensors and is sent to the cloud through IBM Bluemix. The data is transmitted to the Node-RED platform by using MOTT protocol. A mobile application has been developed for the farm owner to access all details related to the statistics of parameters that are gathered by the sensor data and keep track of their farm from anywhere. In doing so, the indoor farm can facilitate agriculture without the need for excess manual labour.

Appropriate environmental circumstances are essential for supreme plant growth, improved yield, and resourceful consumption of water and diverse resources, and resourceful utilize of water and other assets. Automate the information attainment procedure of the soil situation and a variety of climatic parameter so as to overrun plant enlargement allow in sequence to be composed at high occurrence with fewer manual labour supplies. But maintain a greenhouse and its agricultural estate is tremendously the blue- collar and therefore the bulk of them achieve imperative operation instinctively. Also, agricultural researchers are facing a lack of high-quality data which is vital for crop growth. Thus we have studied the existing technologies and want to develop a automated greenhouse with gainful system for growing the crop to keep the system automate the greenhouse protection operation and observe the plant growth circumstances within the greenhouse personally from a remote location and send alert to the client if necessary.

Agriculture is the primary source of livelihood to many countries around the globe and contributes to about 6.9% of the world’s total economic production and worth about $5,084,800 million. Therefore, progressive growth in agriculture is very much needed for these countries. The production rate of crops in agriculture is affected by a number of factors such as temperature, humidity, rainfall, the onset of pests, etc. which are not under the direct control of the farmers. The management of diseases, pests and the fertility of the soil can be proclaimed by the application of different types of pesticides, insecticides, fertilizers, etc. through manual spraying by the crop scouts over the hectares of land, which affects the nervous system and most of the functionality of the human body parts. In this chapter, the concept of implementing drones for spraying pesticides, fertilizers, etc., has been proposed for intelligent agricultural management. It assures the deduction of negative effect on the farmers and helps to stimulate the idea of handling fertilizers and pesticides in the areas. The drone in the form of a quadcopter has been designed and implemented with the technology of spraying pesticides for instantaneous action as soon as the disease onset is confirmed either manually or technically. The practical implementation of this technology would help in covering large areas of agricultural land in a small quantum of time and also reduce the cost of spraying widely. A wide application is the use of the drone in precision agricultural management where with pre-defined trajectory and measurements, the farm productivity and management can be improved with least manual labour and most optimistic results.

In theory, ontology-based process modelling (OBPM) bares great potential to extend business process management. Many works have studied OBPM and are clear on the potential amenities, such as eliminating ambiguities or enabling advanced reasoning over company processes. However, despite this approval in academia, a widespread industry adoption is still nowhere to be seen. This can be mainly attributed to the fact, that it still requires high amounts of manual labour to initially create ontologies and annotations to process models. As long as these problems are not addressed, implementing OBPM seems unfeasible in practice. In this work, we therefore identify requirements needed for a successful implementation of OBPM and assess the current state of research w.r.t. these requirements. Our results indicate that the research progress for means to facilitate OBPM are still alarmingly low and there needs to be urgent work on extending existing approaches.

Farming is India's most important and fundamental occupation, meeting all of humanity's food needs. In recent years, due to increase in population, farming becomes important part of country’s economy. In present situation the use of IoT & ICT in farming is very limited, due to which many obstacles arise in the manual farming process. However, in today's digitised world, there is still manual labour in farming. Many challenges exist in traditional farming, such as lower productivity due to manual farming, high yield production costs, difficulty in predicting the crop to be grown, water irrigation problem, volatile weather conditions, incorrect fertiliser selection, difficulty in selecting a fertiliser for plant disease, and so on. The emerging technologies like IoT and machine leaning have a potential to solve such kind of problems in digitised way. So, these technologies can be used to address the above limitations with the concept of intelligent farming. The combination of IoT and Machine Learning would help farmers in making the production of organic crops of higher quality and good quantity than earlier. These technologies are having potential to reduce both labour and costs, improving crop production, making crops productive, and reducing the irrigation waste. The goal of this research paper is to suggest a system that have an integrated Machine learning and IoT solution which will be used to overcome the existing limitations of current farming practices along with many new opportunities. This research paper also discusses the different modules of proposed system along with the intended results.

Nowadays, autonomous vehicles are incorporated into farms to facilitate manual labour. Being connected vehicles, as IoT systems, they are susceptible to cyber security attacks that try to cause damage to hardware, software or even living beings. Therefore, it is important to provide sufficient security mechanisms to protect both the communications and the data, mitigating any possible risk or harm to farmers, livestock or crops. Technology providers are aware of the importance of ensuring security, and more and more secure solutions can be found on the market today. However, generally, these particular solutions are not sufficient when they are part of complex hybrid systems, since there is no single global solution proposal. In addition, as the number of technologies and protocols used increases, the number of security threats also increases. This article presents a cybersecurity architecture proposal for swarms of heterogeneous vehicles in smart farming, which covers all of the aspects recommended by the ISO 7798-2 specification in terms of security. As a result of this analysis, a detailed summary of the possible solutions and available technologies for each of the communication channels of the target system as well as some recommendations are presented. This research was partially funded by the ECSEL JU (H2020–EU.2.1.1.7.–ECSEL RIA) and the Spanish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, grant number 783221— AFarCloud: Aggregate Farming in the Cloud.

Innovation and invention in field mechanization for oil palm sector has created a variety of advancement in technology. The change in oil palm operation to mechanization will overcome the problem of labour shortage occurrence in oil palm sector. The problem occurs in harvesting tall oil palm is the height of oil palm that causes difficulty to cut the fresh fruit bunch by using manual labour. Moreover, the use of automated harvester also will make the harvesting operation easier without the requirement of skilled labour and ensuring labour safety. The automated harvester has advantages and disadvantages that need to be improved in meeting the oil palm requirement. This study overviews the mechanization that are used in harvesting tall oil palm. This research project has resulted in the development of high technology mechanization based on previously developed machine for harvesting fresh fruit bunches (FFB) at 10 meter and above of oil palm age tress. However, the previous developed machines cannot be accepted in the current and widely practiced Industrial revolution 4.0 (IR4.0). Mechanization approach makes harvesting tall oil palm a reality to overcome the problem that normally occur in oil palm sector due to height of oil palm.

The two-month nationwide lockdown implemented in Australia in response to COVID-19 involved restrictions on social gatherings and non-essential services, resulting in marked changes to the distribution of time spent at home and in the workplace. Given the likelihood of future lockdowns, this study aimed to investigate whether the lockdown was associated with an alteration in the pattern of acute hand injuries admitted to Sydney Hospital Hand Unit relative to the same period in 2019, and whether target areas for preventative strategies could be identified. During the lockdown period in 2020, 332 acute presentations were noted, and in the same period in 2019, 310 cases were noted. The mean patient age was higher in 2020, largely due to a 327% increase in do-it-yourself (DIY) injuries. Workplace injuries increased in 2020 despite a 9.5% reduction in hours-worked, reflecting a redistribution of workers into manual labour jobs with a higher risk for hand injuries. Patients who suffered low-energy injuries at work were also significantly younger in 2020, suggesting this effect was most pronounced in younger age-groups, probably due to the shutdown of hospitality-based industries. Domestic violence-related injuries increased in 2020, highlighting the need to maintain resources to provide support in such cases at subspecialty hand units, which are often largely outpatient-centred. This study, therefore, identified a number of key areas that could be targeted in the event of future lockdowns, including messages regarding safe DIY activities, and more stringent requirements regarding worksite briefing and safety for people commencing labour-based jobs, especially if transferring from another industry.

Background Leg pain, especially of the knees and hips, is common among senior workers and may limit the ability to perform physically demanding work. In light of the aging workforce, this study determined the joint association of physical work demands and leg pain intensity for work-limiting pain in senior workers. Methods Currently employed senior workers (≥50 years) participated in the SeniorWorkingLife study in 2018 (n = 12,879). Associations between the combination of physical work demands and leg pain intensity (interaction) with work-limiting pain (outcome) were modeled using binary logistic regression analyses while controlling for potential covariates. Results We found a significant interaction (P Conclusions The combination of high physical work demands and high leg pain intensity are associated with limited ability to perform work among senior workers. These findings highlight the importance of prioritizing the physical work environment in physically demanding occupations, particularly among senior workers, for prolonging working life. Thus, adjusting the work demands, e.g. through use of assistive devices, and lowering the pain, e.g. through physical rehabilitation, may be necessary to sustain work ability to a high age in this group of workers. Trial registration This was registered as a cohort study in ClinicalTrials.gov (Identifier: NCT03634410) on the 18th of August 2018 (Retrospectively registered).

Background: Water is essential for life and accounts for about 70 percent of the human body fat-free mass. Daily loss of 2.5 L in temperate climate occurs on least minimal activity while exercises, rises in temperature, illnesses raise the fluid loss. Adequate intake of water is necessary for optimal body functions, development and health. Estimates of water intake shows wide variations depending on factors such as temperature, activity level, availability and accessibility of fluid, fluid type, packaging, and socio-cultural factors. Context and purpose of study: Residents in the tropics are exposed to high temperatures and loss of excess fluid from perspiration and would expectedly require high fluid intake for normal body function. A cross sectional study was conducted in Aanmbra State, southeast Nigeria to assess the fluid intake of subjects. Two hundred and fifty people were selected by multi-stage sampling technique. They were drawn from employees in government secretariats, banks and artisans engaged in motor mechanic worksites. Using a semi-structured questionnaire, calibrated plastic cups, weighing scale and standiometer, the socio-demographic data, the 24-hour fluid intake, weight and height of the subjects were obtained. Results: The mean age of the respondents was 36.6±11.5 years. 60.1% (146) were males while 39.9% (97) were females. There were 130 (53.5%) civil servants and 113 (46.5%) artisans. The median 24-hour fluid intake was 3.5 litres with artisans having higher intake than the civil servants. (χ2 =16.57, df=2, p

The future of work is speculated to undergo profound change with increased automation. Predictable jobs are projected to face high susceptibility to technological developments. Many economies in Global South are built around outsourcing and manual labour, facing a risk of job insecurity. In this paper, we examine the perceptions and practices around automated futures of work among a population that is highly vulnerable to algorithms and robots entering rule-based and manual domains: vocational technicians. We present results from participatory action research with 38 vocational technician students of low socio-economic status in Bangalore, India. Our findings show that technicians were unfamiliar with the growth of automation, but upon learning about it, articulated an emic vision for a future of work in-line with their value systems. Participants felt excluded by current technological platforms for skilling and job-seeking. We present opportunities for technology industry and policy makers to build a future of work for vulnerable communities.

Purpose: Understand the emergence of new potential career trajectories in the liberalised Irish dairy farming sector through analysis of the narratives of students of a Professional Diploma in Dairy Farm Management Design/methodology/approach: A review of the literature highlights that entry to a working life in agriculture has been characterised by protracted farm succession processes; a strong association between being a farmer and owning land in the family name; lingering male identities esteeming manual labour; and a pragmatic need at farm level for manual work. The abolition of milk quota in 2015 was predicted to catalyse expansion of production on dairy farms with an increase in milk production; accompanied by a demand for qualified personnel. The BNIM method was employed. Findings: Results confirm that agricultural education is perceived and experienced as offering new pathways for young farmers to enter the occupational category of ‘farmer’, helping to manoeuvre around the constraints of non-inheritance. The students’ narratives evidenced managerial identities, being strongly influenced by encountering management approaches through their agricultural education. All students desired to eventually own a farm someday and to be to employed as a professional dairy farm manager was a perceived as an intermediary goal. Practical implication: Discontinuation of the traditional family farming model based on family farm/land ownership is not imminent even among a cohort qualified to become employed dairy farm managers. Theoretical implication: This paper contributes to theoretical framework which highlights the shift in farmer masculine identity and the career trajectory of graduates of specialised agricultural education programmes.

Pests in crops produce important economic loses all around the world. To deal with them without damaging people or the environment, governments have established strict legislation and norms describing the products and procedures of use. However, since these norms frequently change to reflect scientific and technological advances, it is needed to perform a frequent review of affected norms in order to update pest related information systems. This is not an easy task because they are usually human-oriented, so intensive manual labour is required. To facilitate the use of this information, this work proposes the construction of a recommendation system that facilitates the identification of pests and the selection of suitable treatments. The core of this system is an ontology that models the interactions between crops, pests and treatments.

The 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami disaster heavily affected Indonesia, particularly Aceh Province, leaving devastating impacts to people and their livelihoods. The tsunami wiped out coastal areas, causing permanent land loss and destroying aquaculture ponds and mangrove forests. This resulted in disruption in the community's sources of income, especially to those who rely on aquaculture activities as well as on gathering resources from the sea. This paper analyses households’ livelihood changes in Pande Village, Banda Aceh City by assessing livelihood assets before, immediately after, and 12 years after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami disaster in Indonesia. Data from 77 households were collected in a survey conducted in September 2016. This study tracked the changes in the human, financial, physical, natural, and social assets of the households to understand how these changes led to livelihood outcomes and eventually to disaster recovery. One of the findings is that the destruction of aquaculture ponds and mangroves significantly reduced the potential of reviving livelihoods that were mainly relying on coastal resources. As a consequence, households took up non-aquaculture livelihood activities, such as going into business, driving rickshaws, and providing manual labour, to support their family.

Although it hasn’t much been considered as such, the Digital Humanities movements (or at least the most theoretically informed parts of it) offers a critique “from within” of the recent mutation of the higher education and research systems. This paper offers an analysis, from a Critical Theory perspective, of a key element of this critique: the theory vs. practice debate, which, in the Digital Humanities, is translated into the famous “hack” versus “yack” motto, where DHers usually call for the pre-eminence of the former over the latter. I show how this debate aims to criticize the social situation of employment in academia in the digital age and can further be interpreted with the Cultural industry theoretical concept, as a continuance of the domination of the intellectual labour (ie. yack in this case) over the manual labour (hack). Nevertheless, I argue that, pushing this debate to its very dialectical limit in the post-industrial academic labour situation, one realizes that the two terms aren’t in opposition anymore: the actual theory as well as the actual practice are below their very critical concepts in the academic labour. Therefore, I call for a reconfiguration of this debate, aiming at the rediscovering of an actual theory in the academic production, as well as a rediscovering of a praxis, the latter being outside of the scientific realm and rules: it is political.

Background Rhizarthrosis, or osteoarthritis of the base of the thumb, is a common condition affecting 10-30% of the population over the age of 60. Whether it is an occupational disease has been the subject of debate as epidemiological studies on the correlation between physical stress and the presence of rhizarthrosis have shown conflicting results. Aims To study the correlation between the prevalence of rhizarthrosis and the time spent by employees manually processing banknotes at the National Bank of Belgium (NBB). Methods We followed NBB employees currently or previously holding job titles involving the manual or automated processing of banknotes. Each participant's job history was carefully reconstructed and the number of months holding certain job titles determined. Each participant was clinically and radiologically examined for the presence of rhizarthrosis in both hands. Its presence was scored by a combination of clinical and radiological criteria. Results There were 195 participants. The prevalence of rhizarthrosis was 27% in women (mean age: 52.3 ± 4.4 years) and 17% in men (mean age: 53.2). The odds ratio (OR) for rhizarthrosis after 10 years' full-time overall exposure was significantly higher [OR 10 years: 1.53 (1.03-2.28)]. However, one particular job, 'manual counting', described by participants as highly straining and severely taxing on the thumbs, did not show a significantly higher prevalence of rhizarthrosis. Conclusions Our study confirmed the correlation between the presence of rhizarthrosis and age, gender and general manual labour, in particular banknote processing, but found no link with one specific job-manual counting.

A key strand in the Western literature on working-class masculinities focuses on whether young men are capable of the feminized performances apparently required of them in new service economies. However, the wider literature on processes of neoliberalization - emphasizing the 'hollowing out' of labour markets, the cultural devaluation of lower-skilled forms of employment, and the pathologization of working-class lives - would suggest that it is as much a classed as a gendered transformation that is demanded of young men leaving school with few qualifications. This dimension of neoliberalization is highlighted by ethnographic data exploring the experiences and subjectivities of young workers in St Petersburg, Russia, where traditional forms of manual labour have not given way to 'feminized' work, but have become materially and symbolically impoverished, and are perceived as incapable of supporting the wider transition into adult independence. In this context, young workers attempt to emulate new forms of 'successful masculinity' connected with novel service sector professions and the emergent higher education system, despite the unlikelihood of overcoming a range of structural and cultural barriers. These acquiescent, individualized responses indicate that, while ways of being a man are apparently being liberated from old constraints amongst the more privileged, neoliberalization narrows the range of subject positions available to working-class young men.

Europe is besieged from within and without by anti-liberal threats. The rise within Europe of populist-nationalist parties and renewed jihadist attacks interact with pressure from Putin's Russia, Erdogan's Turkey, and actual and aspiring despotisms in Muslim-majority countries. To varying degrees these threats are reactions to the effects of 21st-century liberalism on societies. Liberalism always has been chiefly concerned to safeguard individual autonomy or self-legislation, but the content of autonomy has shifted over two centuries. First-stage liberalism saw the chief threat to autonomy as the state; second-stage, as capital; the third-stage version now ascendant sees traditional norms and institutions as the main menace. Third-stage liberalism in Europe (and elsewhere) distributes power towards ‘symbolic analysts’ and away from those adept at services or manual labour. Thus the anti-liberal backlash: within Europe large numbers of people find themselves less autonomous, in the older senses of the word, and ambivalent about the newer notion of autonomy; while on Europe's periphery many find certain features of liberal societies unappealing and threatening. Defending liberalism will require not only devoting more resources to national security and mitigating the disruptions of economic openness, but revisiting what individual autonomy ought to mean in the 21st-century world.

Botanical gardens play an important role in saving and enriching biological diversity of urban areas in Lviv, The Botanical Garden of Danylo Halytsky Lviv National Medical University with its narrow specialization in medicinal plants in particular. But there are still some figures and facts that require thorough study. Therefore the study aims at examining of the background and history of foundation and also describing the features of operation of the Botanical Garden of Danylo Halytsky Lviv National Medical University. The authors' purpose was also to study the figure of Professor T.F. Wilchynskyi and his contribution to the development of science and Botanical Garden; identify the reasons of creating the "garden of medicinal plants", changes and amendments of modern botanical garden, especially of its territorial location and the uniqueness of the facility; explain the difficulties in the work. The study has got certain results. Firstly, the figure of Professor Tadeusz Wilchynskyi and his contribution to the creation and development of the Botanical Garden of Danylo Halytsky Lviv National Medical University as a whole are described. Modern tasks of botanical garden activity are also described. On the base of the cartographic method of research scheme of regressive dynamics area "garden of medicinal plants" are presented, its territorial location is characterized. The basic elements of uniqueness object are described; difficulties in his work are clarified and the ways of their solution are presented. These difficulties are considered to be as follows. First of all, the absence in the staff of scientific employers makes it impossible to fully organize the conduct of research work. Secondly, the use of grown medicinal plants in the botanical garden and harvesting of medicinal plants in the experiments prevents the use of herbicides and crop protection chemicals. Thirdly, complete absence of mechanized equipment requires significant manual labour and reduces the efficiency of working time. Thus, the authors have concluded that despite the certain difficulties in the work the staff of the Botanical Garden, we should continue the work of T.F. Wilchynskyi on the preservation and enrichment of his collections. In comparing with the initial objectives that were treated to the "garden of medicinal plants" modern tasks enable an introduction of new medicinal species and develop agricultural techniques of cultivation. The Botanical Garden is an example of creating collections of medicinal plant species.

The objective of this paper is to design, development and the fabrication of the Agribot which is a multipurpose bot can perform all the farming operations including ploughing the soil of the field, sowing seeds in the ploughing area, making the field in plain by using leveler, watering the crops, fertilizing them and monitor the agribot by using camera. The traditional farming methods consume a lot of manual labour. Some of the operations are manual, while others are operated using manually operated machines. Therefore, there are no such robots, which can perform all these operations autonomously. In addition with this when the major fieldwork is done, the farmer has to keep a check on the field for various reasons. This is achieved by the monitoring system. Various parameters such as drip irrigation, fertilizing, maintaining temperature (for green house farming), removal of extra water (during floods) and keeping track of crop growth by camera will be taken care by using monitoring system.

Nowadays, more and more tractor and farm machines have been introduced in all sectors of agriculture. However, manual labour as a source of power continues to dominate, primarily among the small landholdings. This chapter focuses on describing two significant types of work stressors in manual labour, namely, those related to the cardiovascular and respiratory system, and the musculoskeletal system. Traditional farming activities are high energy demanding as an integral part of human behaviour. Stresses of overwork culminate in multiple health risks among the farm workers. The chapter briefly describes the physiological mechanism of energy production, liberation, and utilization. For the benefit of readers of other branches of agricultural sciences, some necessary definitions related to the energy cost of work are elucidated herewith. The description covers the accounting of energy intake, anaerobic glycogenolysis, and kinetics of oxygen demand of the body during physical activities and recovery. The energy expenditure data have utility from the epidemiological, physiological, and pathophysiological viewpoints. The description covers measurement and conventions of expressing energy expenditure and the determination of maximal working capacity in terms of a person's aerobic capacity. The literature evidence on the heart rates as a predictor of energy expenditure and indicator of work severity are included. Particular emphasis has been given about the energy cost of work in farming, gender differences and effects of ageing, and work severity classification of different farming activities. It emphasizes the relationship of body status and working capacities of the farming population to improvement in work performance and productivity. Since the severity of many farm activities is predominantly heavy, severe health problems may result from the slightest epidemic and endemic outbursts, which are common in rural sectors in Asia and Africa.

BACKGROUND: Previously of work-related chronic low back pain has been established. With development of new understanding of medical science, better and improved requirements were needed in defining occupational spine disease. OBJECTIVES: To identify the variables that would be associated with occupational spine diseases. To develop an objective measurement in determining occupational spine diseases using the relationships of these variables. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. SETTING: Workers registered for low back pain claims for chronic work-related compensation in Malaysia from 2017 to 2018. PARTICIPANTS: Workers who were between 20 to 60 years old that had previously submitted claims for chronic low back pain. MEASUREMENTS: Workers who applied for employment injury scheme, based on history of chronic low and had their applications reviewed by the Social Security Medical Board. Subjected were then interviewed at their workplace using the BACKS prototype questionnaire that had incorporated the Oswestry Disability Index (ODI). RESULTS: 200 workers were interviewed (mean age 41.7, SD: 8.12 years old). Linear regression analysis identified that chronic occupational back pain was associated with absence of disc bulge, history of accident or fall, smoking behaviour and individuals with non-communicable diseases (p < 0.05). Increasing age in the form of increased exposure to manual labour over years was also associated to occupational low back pain. These variables explained 78.5% of their relationship in determining chronic occupational low back pain. LIMITATIONS: The interview relied on workers recollection of their workplace. The recall bias was reduced using the aids of the BACKS questionnaire to illustrate their previous working conditions. CONCLUSIONS: Manual labour workers that were involved with significant chronic back disabilities, lifting and twisting objects along with colleagues whom had similar past spinal injuries at work were criteria for occupational spinal disease.

Wartegg Drawing Completion Test (WDCT) is one of the most commonly used personality analysis tools of graphology, which is the mapping from the inside world to personal qualities. It helps institutes or individuals to have a better knowledge of intrinsic personality characters. However, the WDCT evaluation of the applicants was manually performed by human experts, thus the accessibility and outcome of WDCT are heavily restricted by the availability and experience of the expert. To overcome such issues, this paper proposes the computer-aided WDCT (CA-WDCT) system, a fully-automatic WDCT system based on Digital Image Processing (DIP) and Machine Learning techniques. The CA-WDCT system extracts multimodal features and analyzes them under the Big-Five traits automatically. This CA-WDCT system can mitigate the heavy manual labour of psychologists and provide clients with flexible access.

Online reviews are an important source of feedback for understanding customers. In this study, we follow novel approaches that target the absence of actionable insights by classifying reviews as defect reports and requests for improvement. Unlike traditional classification methods based on expert rules, we reduce the manual labour by employing a supervised system that is capable of learning lexico-semantic patterns through genetic programming. Additionally, we experiment with a distantly-supervised SVM that makes use of the noisy labels generated by patterns. Using a real-world dataset of app reviews, we show that the automatically learned patterns outperform the manually created ones. Also the distantly-supervised SVM models are not far behind the pattern-based solutions, showing the usefulness of this approach when the amount of annotated data is limited.

Understanding the nature of rural landscape change during the urbanization process is vital to formulate rural management plans for sustainable development. However, there is little information on how rural landscapes changes and limited evidence as to how it can be improved. There were 244.9 million households in India of which 179.7 million households or 833 million people were in rural areas (SECC Survey 2011). Survey revealed that 87.2 million rural households reported one of more criteria of deprivation, while 92 million households were engaged in casual manual labour and agricultural activities. In agriculture, the role of women cannot be denied. They contribute in every operation of agricultural activities and are also active in allied sectors like cattle management, dairying, beekeeping, goat rearing mushroom production and poultry farming etc. Women participation in total workforce was assessed 27.44% as against 72.56% by male workforce in 2011. Share of women agricultural workforce in total workforce was computed to be 16.57% in 2001 which declined to 6.23% in 2011. Causes of decline may be their participation other sectors with improvement in their literacy rate which rose to 51.50% in 2011 as compared to 33.57% in 2001. The male-female sex ratio has registered a decline of 0.11% as compared to 2001 census. Women holding land account for only 13.31% as against 87.27% by men in Bihar. Share of women agricultural workforce in total agricultural workforce was estimated to be 19.32% as per census 2011. Analysis of CACP unit level data of Bihar for the year 2013-14, revealed that the contribution of women in agricultural activities was assessed to be 35.94%. Women’s contribution in agriculture is significant and plays diverse role, still their wages were found 7.04% less than their male counterparts during 2015-16. To strengthen women’s participation in agriculture and allied sectors and to improve their access to land, loan and other facilities, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare has policy provisions like joint leasing for both domestic and agricultural land under National policy for farmers. Under credit facility provisions government has framed policy for issuing Kisan Credit Cards to women for creating livelihood through livestock practices and agricultural processing. Beside all efforts, there is still a wide gender gap in the state which may be addressed properly for overall development of women and enhancing the rural landscape of the state in particular and nation in general. The paper tries to analyze the role women in agricultural development of Bihar and the issues confronting them.

Threats to global food security from multiple sources, such as population growth, ageing farming populations, meat consumption trends, climate-change effects on abiotic and biotic stresses, the environmental impacts of agriculture are well publicised. In addition, with ever increasing tolerance of pest, diseases and weeds there is growing pressure on traditional crop genetic and protective chemistry technologies of the ‘Green Revolution’. To ease the burden of these challenges, there has been a move to automate and robotise aspects of the farming process. This drive has focussed typically on higher value sectors, such as horticulture and viticulture, that have relied on seasonal manual labour to maintain produce supply. In developed economies, and increasingly developing nations, pressure on labour supply has become unsustainable and forced the need for greater mechanisation and higher labour productivity. This paper creates the case that for broadacre crops, such as cereals, a wholly new approach is necessary, requiring the establishment of an integrated biology & physical engineering infrastructure, which can work in harmony with current breeding, chemistry and agronomic solutions. For broadacre crops the driving pressure is to sustainably intensify production; increase yields and/or productivity whilst reducing environmental impact. Additionally, our limited understanding of the complex interactions between the variations in pests, weeds, pathogens, soils, water, environment and crops is inhibiting growth in resource productivity and creating yield gaps. We argue that for agriculture to deliver knowledge based sustainable intensification requires a new generation of Smart Technologies, which combine sensors and robotics with localised and/or cloud based Artificial Intelligence (AI).

With thousands of books across hundreds of disciplines present in a library, manual allocation of books is both time consuming, human intensive, as well as inefficient in terms of monetary costs. The presence of manual labour while providing employment to a section of society tends to slow down the process of lending in addition to increasing the probability of errors. The proposed research work attempts at automating the library book management system there by reducing latency and long queues as well as the potential of making mistakes in the distribution of books. Recent advancements of deep neural networks have improved textual recognition in natural scenes. The system proposed employs a neural network model for text detection and recognition, having the potential to reduce and even eliminate manual labour performed by the staff. This paper attempts to investigate neural networks for the application of library management by proposing our own Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and text matching algorithms. This task further introduces challenges such as getting the exact name of the book as well as dealing with distorted images and varied backgrounds. The system thus developed performs very well with book covers producing results over 60% in accuracy against current models that provide about 40% thereby making the system achieve state of the art performance on book cover information retrieval.

Technologies and methods to speed up the production of systematic reviews by reducing the manual labour involved have recently emerged. Automation has been proposed or used to expedite most steps of the systematic review process, including search, screening, and data extraction. However, how these technologies work in practice and when (and when not) to use them is often not clear to practitioners. In this practical guide, we provide an overview of current machine learning methods that have been proposed to expedite evidence synthesis. We also offer guidance on which of these are ready for use, their strengths and weaknesses, and how a systematic review team might go about using them in practice.

Worldwide air traffic has been increasing through the last years, and recent researches indicate that the demand for new aircraft will continue to rise over next few decades. Even today, aeronautical manufacturing involves a large proportion of manual labour which directly affects the production capacity of the industry. Thus, in order to meet the market demand and reach the dynamism that the industry must have to compensate the changes that are driven by customers, the automation of the production lines has become increasingly necessary to guarantee the competitiveness of the aircraft manufacturing companies. On this context, this work presents the development of a Design for Automation designing tool—DFAut—that aims at clarifying the automation requirements of a product at the conceptual design phase. Through this study, it has been verified that the use of the DFAut method has yielded automation requirements that were not feasible to be accomplished by a competitive product to the market. However, within the Integrated Product Design concept, the DFAut results could be adjusted to render the product automation configuration feasible. The DFAut tool has been successfully applied to the design of a wing box, and the results are fully discussed herein.

The sharing economy has generated controversy for its effects on labour conditions, wages and the distributions of income and wealth. In this article, we present evidence for a previously unrecognized effect: increased income inequality among the bottom 80% of the distribution. On the basis of interviews with US providers on three for-profit platforms (Airbnb, RelayRides and TaskRabbit), we find that providers are highly educated and many have well-paying full-time jobs. They use the platforms to augment their incomes. Furthermore, many are engaging in manual labour, including cleaning, moving and other tasks that are traditionally done by workers with low educational attainment, suggesting a crowding-out effect.

Artisanal mining is basic mining characterized by manually intensive work methods utilizing primitive or simple equipment and conducted by individuals or small groups exploiting deposits. Artisanal mining in Rwanda and Burundi is further complicated in that the techniques applied are often inadequate, resulting in low productivity and poor recoveries, and workers are paid low wages with owners reluctant to reinvest in the mining operations. A consequence of this vicious circle is often poor working conditions, with miners operating under unsafe and/or unhealthy working conditions. An additional problem is that mining is conducted in a manner that is detrimental to the environment. Artisanal mining is commonly more dangerous than large-scale modern mining operations. Artisanal operations are generally subsistence activities with the miners focusing more on immediate concerns than the long-term consequences of their activities. When miners have no other source of income, they will usually find ways to evade controls and carry on working. Machinery tends to be expensive and often far beyond the reach of most artisanal miners, and therefore there is a general tendency for workers to focus on labour intensive and riskier mining methods. This paper proposes the introduction of small-scale mechanization with labour-intensive manual mining utilizing a bench mining approach in artisanal mines operating in Central Africa. From the 1950s to the 1980s bench mining was successfully conducted in Burundi utilizing manual labour. In order to achieve a balance between job creation and project economics, the combination of manual and mechanized mining is proposed. Manual mining offers the benefit of local job creation while ensuring good mining techniques, such as minimizing mining loses and dilution. Through the introduction of mechanized loading and hauling activities, areas of high stripping ratios can be viably mined, thus increasing the amount of resources that can be exploited. The use of a loader and tractor-trailer arrangement is proposed, thereby improving throughput, productivity, and worker safety and, reducing the impact on the environment.

Automation of processes is becoming increasingly popular within manufacturing. However, in third world countries such as South Africa, automation could lead to the loss of jobs and even higher unemployment. In order to remain globally and locally competitive, companies need to invest in new technologies of which automation is a highly influential aspect. Thus a study is deployed to determine when a company should automate a process and when a semi-automated process is sufficient in the process chain. To ensure a close to optimum operation, a balance between workforce skill development and profit needs to be determined. In this study, the effects of automating process chains were evaluated. A semi-automated process chain that included a manual labor aspect was used to manufacture small aluminium automotive components and was compared to an automated process with regards to machine effectiveness and labor resources. The automated process derived a higher profit margin due to the high availability of the machine and the lower labour costs. Suggestions were given to increase the profit margin without the loss of labour.

An assessment of rice production and processing in South-Eastern Nigeria was carried out by investigative survey approach. The survey was basically to ascertain the extent of mechanization applicable in the area to enable the agricultural policy makers device the modalities for improving rice production and processing in the area. According to the results obtained from the study, the planting period of rice in the area was mostly between May and August. Virtually 77% of the farmers raise the rice seedlings in the nursery bed before transplanting to the permanent seed bed while 23% sow the seeds directly to the seed bed where they germinate and grow to maturity. Results revealed that 75% of the farmers in the South-Eastern Nigeria use manual labour in the seed bed preparation while 25% use tractors. It was observable from the results that 15-15-15 NPK and urea fertilizers were predominantly used by the farmers in the area for rice production and the application method was mostly by manual broad casting over the planted area. Results also recorded that rice harvesting mostly took place from October – December; and about 69% of the farmers harvest their rice manually while 31% use mechanical means. More so, average of 49.6% of the farmers thresh their harvested rice manually while 50.4% of them use mechanized means. It was also observed that 93% of the farmers use both steam heating and total drenching method in parboiling the paddy rice while 3.4% and 3.6% use steam heating and total drenching respectively in parboiling the paddy rice. The milling method applicable in the area was mainly by mechanical means with 73.6% of the farmers who use the method while 10.4% of the farmers use manual method. The farmers generally use sacks in bagging and/or storing both the paddy and milled rice. Finally results showed that mechanization of rice production and processing has not received much attention as most of the farmers still use manual labour and traditional approach in the production and processing of rice. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/njt.v36i1.27

Environmental health hazards faced by farmers, such as exposure to extreme heat stress, are a growing concern due to global climate change, particularly in tropical developing countries. In such environments, farmers are considered to be a population at risk of environmental heat exposure. The situation is exacerbated due to their farming methods that involve the use of primitive equipment and hard manual labour conducted in full sunshine under hot and humid conditions. However, there is inadequate information about the extent of heat exposure to such farmers, both at the household and farm levels. This paper presents results from a study assessing environmental heat exposure on rural smallholder farmers in Bawku East, Northern Ghana. From January to December 2013, Lascar USB temperature and humidity sensors and a calibrated Questemp heat stress monitor were deployed to farms and homes of rural farmers at Pusiga in Bawku East to capture farmers' exposure to heat stress in both their living and working environments as they executed regular farming routines. The Lascar sensors have the capability to frequently, accurately and securely measure temperature and humidity over long periods. The Questemp heat stress monitor was placed in the same vicinity and showed strong correlations to Lascar sensors in terms of derived values of wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT). The WBGT in the working environment of farmers peaked at 33.0 to 38.1 °C during the middle of the day in the rainy season from March to October and dropped to 14.0-23.7 °C in the early morning during this season. A maximum hourly WBGT of 28.9-37.5 °C (March-October) was recorded in the living environment of farmers, demonstrating little relief from heat exposure during the day. With these levels of heat stress, exposed farmers conducting physically demanding outdoor work risk suffering serious health consequences. The sustainability of manual farming practices is also under threat by such high levels of heat exposure.

Labour is the single largest cost contributor and main limiting factor to development of the agricultural industry. Manual labour remains a major, essential factor for greenhouse-grown specialty crops. Furthermore, musculoskeletal injuries are prevalent during manual work processes performed in agricultural environments. This study aims to improve work efficiency and productivity and to identify tasks that can cause musculoskeletal injury. Working procedures were characterised using a work-study method, environmental conditions were recorded and a biomechanical analysis of the inspected task was conducted. An innovative measuring system was developed that enables synchronisation and analysis of the manufacturing, biomechanics, workload and environmental data. The study focused on the trellising and harvesting stages of pepper and tomato in greenhouses on two farms located in southwest Israel. We further conducted several experiments in which we changed the working method and assessed the effect on productivity. Another experiment was conducted to test the effect of three different trellising angles (30°, 60°, 90°) on labour and yield in tomato. The results revealed that in tomato, in comparison to current methods, picking 4 fruit per cycle will increase production rate by 17%, leaf removal from the fruit area will increase production rate by 14.4%—up to 40.2%—and the best trellising angle with respect to yield and labour will be 30°. Analysis of biomechanical risk showed that the maximum weight of lifted boxes should not exceed 12 kg, and when picking fruit growing low to the ground, the workers are exposed to medium to high risk of injury.

Recent research into the cost performance of various additive manufacturing (AM) processes indicates that one important barrier is the extent of manual labour inputs required by the process. To exp...

Meritocracy refers to a governmental or other administrative system wherein appointments and responsibilities are assigned to individuals based on their merits, which are determined through objective evaluations or examinations. Merit can be earned by either intellectual or manual labour, as each person has his or her own talents. Nevertheless, there is no absolute definition of merit because both intelligence and skill are relative. In our current society, individuals can, theoretically, reach any goal in a meritocratic system. Indeed, merit should be the basis on which resources are allocated. This said, personal beliefs, bureaucratic complications, national regulations, and other human characteristics obscure the obvious superiority of this approach. Members of groups, including societies, often support and follow an individual who adheres to the group’s norms rather than one who may be more deserving of such loyalty but who does not adhere to the shared rules. Individuals in a meritocratic system feel valued, believe their abilities are recognised, and have incentives to improve their professional performance. In such a context, individuals experience their environment as fair and feel more confident about themselves, others, and their work. Individuals working under such conditions are very likely to have higher levels of motivation, engage in more collaborative behaviour, show greater flexibility and experience enhanced well being compared with those operating in a system that is perceived as not based on merit. This paper presents an integrated discussion of meritocracy and poses seven questions that may improve our understanding of this concept.

The brick industry in India is highly labour-intensive employing about 15 million workers, and is characterized by the use of manual labour, primitive and age-old technology. Mud transfer is a sub-activity among the brick-moulding activity. During mud transfer, workers handled 7000 kg (350 kg*20 trip) load every day beside their main brick-moulding activity. During the unloading of the mud, they put both the hands above shoulder level and at the same time they need to pull the trolley to back and make an aisle of mud. This unloading method accumulates high-level postural stress on the shoulder and arms. This awkward posture creates musculoskeletal disorders in associated muscle and pain in different body joints. The aim of the study is to change the work posture (unloading mud) ergonomically. One conceptual model of the mud-transfer trolley was made by using SolidWorks CAD software based on anthropometric data of brick kiln workers. The CAD drawing was then converted to a full-scale prototype for simulation study. The newly developed concepts were applied in the actual field which increase the productivity by delaying the physiological fatigue.

3rd World Conference on Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, WOCTINE 2019 -- 21 June 2019 through 23 June 2019 -- -- 141488 In the 18th century, when industrial production began, the use of steam and mechanized production caused serious changes in the economy. As a result, production costs have decreased alongside increase in product quantity and product quality. In this period, production has undergone a revolutionary transformation from manual labour to mechanization. In the following decades, the mass production with the help of electricity have resulted with the Industry 2.0 Era, and then, the emergence of digital revolution, the use of electronics and the use of information technologies in the production processes has triggered the Industry 3.0 Era. Today, the internet of objects, the industrial networks, the cyber-physical systems and the incorporation of robotic technologies into the production has brought the Industry 4.0 Age into the stage. Industry 4.0 has created a new production model where robots are effectively used in production, this new production model has begun to change the daily life, production and working relations as deeply as the first industrial revolution. However, the potential impacts of Industry 4.0 over the labour markets still remains as an understudied scholarly area. It is being evaluated that Industry 4.0 will lead to technological unemployment via changing the structure of employment and bring new structural problems in terms of unemployment and labour relations. Likewise, it is expected that automation and robotic production will deeply affect the unskilled labour force, and will cause a critical decrease in the workforce of vulnerable sections of society, i.e., women, migrants, youth and elderly. This study evaluates the probable effects of the 4th Industrial Revolution over the labour markets. Via the literature review and analysis of the emerging trends with Industry 4.0, the risks, opportunities and challenges of the process is being investigated within a comparative perspective. © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

This research provides a case study of how experiential learning opportunities provided by a Master of Science program in Sustainable Energy Development (SEDV) helped to achieve four Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in a developing country via the partnering goal. It illustrates how drawing on the complementary characteristics of existing educational principles led to the development of a framework that built competent leaders in sustainability. Concurrently, the related experiential learning project realized economic growth, improved the quality of life and minimized the impact to the environment. We analyze the achievement of sustainability leadership and learning competencies of the students involved in a project that incorporates the SDGs under the umbrella of experiential learning theory and the four different knowledge domains necessary to achieve sustainability: declarative, procedural, effectiveness, and social. To effect change, the University of Calgary partnered with community organizations in both developed and developing countries to provide a solar Power Hub in a remote area of Burkina Faso, Africa, called Pâ Village. The Hub’s clean energy allowed a women’s cooperative to move from manual labour to the mechanical grinding of shea nuts in the manufacture of cosmetics and toiletries. Using a qualitative storytelling and theory-seeking approach coupled with semi-structured interviews of the student researchers (focus group discussion), this case study demonstrates how a framework of experiential learning coupled with the different knowledge domains produced change agents in a group of SEDV students. Several general principles are derived from the case study for other educators to use in similar educational applications.

Bundelkhand region of central India, a major drought affected area of the country is associated to high level of rural to urban migration. The present study was conducted to analyze the socio-economic characteristics of the migrants and to examine the key factors triggering migration decision of agriculture practicing households. The region was facing drought for the fourth consecutive period which had left the population, mainly dependent on agricultural income, out of option than migration. The analysis of socio-economic profile of migrants showed that majority of the migrants were between the age group of 20–39 (70.1%) and the education level was secondary (54.8%). The population of female migrants was comparatively low, as many of them followed their family to the migrating place after marriage. Majority of the migrants (81.73%) were engaged in unskilled manual labour activities like construction works in destination cities. The various factors identified triggering migration decision were associated to livelihood security, climatic, agricultural, institutional and socio-cultural factors.

We live today in a society characterised by quick technological develop - ments and rapid processes of change. Technological developments have automated processes that used to be carried out by manual labour, whilst new professions and work tasks have emerged. Earlier generations were accustomed to lifelong positions in the same company. Nowadays people search for work opportunities in a global market, experience more frequent career changes, must learn new skills throughout their careers and manage the increasingly fluid boundaries between work life and home life. Even our work environments have changed: as Alvin Toffler's (1980) vision of the ‘paperless offices’ from 50 years ago is now being realised, we are starting to move into the state of ‘peopleless offices’ in which work is conducted in digital rather than physical spaces. In the peopleless offices, an organization's workforce collectively carry out their work in digital, rather than physical workplaces. Many workplaces are already now hybrids where the work activities addressed, tools utilised and information con - sumed are the same no matter whether engaged in at the office or at home. The role of information is essential in all these processes, as a resource for learning, managing change, developing and running processes and creating professional networks. One of the most significant changes in work is the incorporation of information technology into almost every area of work life, changing how we work, where we work and what work we do. This information revolution within our workplaces calls for a new examination of information, information technology and information practices within the modern workplace and this is what this book seeks to do: provide a comprehensive account of information in the modern workplace. It includes a set of chapters examining and reviewing the major concepts within workplace information, from overarching themes of information cultures and information ecologies to strategic concerns of information management and governance, and detailed accounts of the nature of information artefacts themselves. The topic is international and the text reflects this; whilst there are many cultural, geographical and organizational factors that can influence information work environments, there are also strong commonalities that cut across these boundaries.