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Earlier this year, France passed a labor reform law that banned checking emails on weekends. New research—to be presented next week at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management—suggests other countries might do well to follow suit, for the sake of employee health and productivity.
[...] Using data collected from 365 working adults, [Liuba] Belkin [of Lehigh University], and her colleagues [William Becker of Virginia Tech and Samantha A. Conroy of Colorado State University] look at the role of organizational expectation regarding "off" hour emailing and find it negatively impacts employee emotional states, leading to "burnout" and diminished work-family balance, which is essential for individual health and well-being. The study—described in an article entitled "Exhausted, but unable to disconnect: the impact of email-related organizational expectations on work-family balance"—is the first to identify email-related expectations as a job stressor along with already established factors such as high workload, interpersonal conflicts, physical environment or time pressure.
[...] Interestingly, they found that it is not the amount of time spent on work emails, but the expectation which drives the resulting sense of exhaustion. Due to anticipatory stress—defined as a constant state of anxiety and uncertainty as a result of perceived or anticipated threats, according to research cited in the article—employees are unable to detach and [therefore] feel exhausted regardless of the time spent on after-hours emails.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday July 28 2016, @09:04AM
I often run into this kind of thinking. With you, its games, with me its microcontrollers, such as Arduino-compatibles ( I roll my own on the fly ), sometimes coupled with propeller chips.
The main thing I like about these is I trust them. If I design this into something, I know full good and well I won't be called back next year because a midnight upgrade broke it. Or have to sign some onerous EULA giving someone else a backdoor, while holding them harmless for anything they do.
However, many higher-ups see these as toys.
Since when has a thingie that's supposed to do something like weld a wire needed a fullbore high performance computer? It used to be done with a bunch of timers and relays. Now, I have ways of doing it simply with a microcontroller chip, using software that kids learn in high school, so finding some kid to turn the whole shebang over to isn't all that hard.
Highly paid guys often really think big.... and expensive!
I hate to call in a backhoe to plant a shrub.
Now, some of the hobbyist implementations leave a little to be desired as far as noise immunity and packaging go... so that's why I roll my own to order. Its not all that expensive to send PCB out for fab anymore. Then I get a board that precisely fits the requirement. Usually saves quite a ratsnest of wiring when all level translation is taken care of. There is a lot of new PCB connector technology coming from China that I use to make really neat wiring harnesses.
If they need it "on the wire", I can always put an RS-485 link onto the board and make it look like a MODBUS SCADA, so I can use off-the-shelf software on the "big iron" end to talk to these... multidrop... so I do not have a mess of cabling or diagnostic problems. Talk to it with the big iron or a laptop.
The main problem with my way of doing it is I do have significant front-end implementation time. But I know once its in, it will run until its deliberately decommissioned. And I know if its some little thing that needs to be changed in the program, the kid I leave in charge of it will most likely implement a good fix, as most of my stuff except the Propeller stuff is really beginner-level stuff.
I would really like to grow the Propeller side of my stuff, and hopefully get enough paid work to be able to take on someone to work with me - and him take on Propeller code full time. My strengths are mostly in the hardware/interface design.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1) by evil_aaronm on Thursday July 28 2016, @04:19PM
I'm a big fan of the Propeller, too. I don't care for the native language, Spin, but that's a fun little chip. Like anything else, it's limited in its range of applications, but in those areas where it would be useful, it fits well.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Sunday July 31 2016, @07:55AM
Yup - quite limited, but also what it does - it does very well.
My favorite tasks for it has been CRT image generation, serial protocol ( UART, DMX, Manchester, custom ), stepper motor controller, and other things I used to have to use a lot of glue logic to implement. This baby handles seven time critical operations simultaneously, while I normally reserve the eighth cog for myself for debug and an I2C link to the Arduino.
One of the things I am toying with is programming one to correlate battery voltage to the position of the engine crank, so as to give me a running display of each cylinder's contribution to the engine's torque output. I have a magnetic pickoff from a gear on the engine to derive the crankshaft position from, as well as a piezoelectric transducer on one of the fuel injector lines to get a keying signal for which cylinder I want to consider number 1. Being its a Diesel engine, I do not have all that many electrical signals or controls available, but the engine does have that one crankcase magnetic reluctance signal that normally drives the engine tach.
This is why I would love to know more about the financial side, i.e. how to get paid, so I could hire on more people. I think this would make a fine product for the farming community that use these old engines on the farm, and would like to know with minimal installation effort how well their engine's health is. If a problem is brewing, which cylinder, and maybe give them a heads-up before catastrophic failure. At least they it might give them a few month's warning of a valve failure, head gasket leak, injector problem, or some other problem that gradually gets worse before *bam*!
I am free to experiment on my old van that uses one of those old farm engines as a development testbed.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]