Telephone Operators Research Articles

Use of mobile phones by medical staff at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Barbados: evidence for both benefit and harm

All members of medical staff, including students, were asked to participate in a self-administered questionnaire concerning patterns of mobile phone use and care. Participants' phones were cultured for micro-organisms. Healthcare professionals working in close proximity to sensitive equipment were surveyed concerning adverse events associated with mobile phones. Telephone operators were asked to monitor time elapsed as they attempted to contact medical staff by various methods. Of 266 medical staff and students at the time of the study, 116 completed questionnaires (response rate=44%). Almost all (98%) used mobile phones: 67% used their mobile phones for hospital-related matters; 47% reported using their phone while attending patients. Only 3% reported washing their hands after use and 53% reported never cleaning their phone. In total, 101 mobile phones were cultured for micro-organisms; 45% were culture-positive and 15% grew Gram-negative pathogens. The survey of staff working in close proximity to sensitive equipment revealed only one report of minor interference with life-saving equipment. Telephone operators were able to contact medical staff within 2 min most easily by mobile phone. Mobile phones were used widely by staff and were considered by most participants as a more efficient means of communication. However, microbial contamination is a risk associated with the infrequent cleaning of phones. Hospitals should develop policies to address the hygiene of mobile phones.

History of Communications

The article following, written by one of the lead engineers in the project, describes the development of AMPS, the first cellular telephone system in the United States. As noted, the project ran for over 12 years and required the services of a vast number of engineers at AT&T's Bell Labs. The hundreds of millions of people currently using cellphones, smart phones, and all the other mobile wireless equipment available in the United States, as well as everywhere else in the world, often take these devices and the infrastructure behind them for granted. Until the cellular concept was recognized, it wasn 't clear that many mobile phones could simultaneously share the same channels in a local area. With the cellular concept agreed on, problems such as tracking of cell phones and handoff from cell to cell had to be resolved. Computerized base stations had to be designed and tested. A myriad other important development and design issues and problems had to be resolved. Dick Frenkiel very clearly describes the various engineering problems that had to be solved, step by step, sometimes quite painstakingly. He gives credit to the many teams of Bell engineers who worked on this project. He also points out policy issues involving the FCC that had to be resolved. Competition for scarce radio spectral space was fierce. Competing engineering companies and telephone operators had to be assuaged. In the meantime, I urge you to read on through this exciting description of the genesis of cellular telephony in the United States.

Antes de ser compañeras : Gibson Girls mexicanas, 1881-1911

<p>La historia de las operadoras telefónicas en la ciudad de México es la de un pequeño grupo de mujeres que operaban los equipos de conexión en las oficinas de la Compañía Telefónica Mexicana y la Empresa de Teléfonos Ericsson entre 1882 y 1915. Fueron contratadas por cuanto las empresas consideraban que ellas eran las trabajadoras adecuadas en razón a su sexo. Ello generó una experiencia laboral singular caracterizada por la relación con los hombres, lo mismo empleados y administradores que la clientela. Otra característica era que ellas fungiesen como operadoras de complejos aparatos eléctricos, lo cual desembocó en una convivencia con y una resistencia a condiciones de trabajo que incluían una férrea disciplina.</p>

An Asymptotic Analysis of a Queuing Model for a Call Center

This article deals with the simplest abandonment model in which the customer’s patience is exponentially distributed and the capacity of the system is unlimited. Sze (1984, 229-249) has designed a queuing model for the telephone operating system without abandonment. The most common model which supports the workforce management of the telephone centre is M/M/N/B and some special cases can be analyzed as M/M/N with Erlang distribution C’ which models out busy signals and M/M/N/N queuing model with Erlang B distribution disallow the waiting concept. Many queuing models lack the feature that impatient customers might decide to leave, before the service begins. In this article, the simplest abandonment model is considered is M/ M/N+M which includes abandonment and this model can be used to analyse, provide information which is important for the call center managers. Based on the numerical calculations and graphical representations this model can be considered as an appropriate queuing model to manage a large call center in heavy traffic with abandonment.

The Economic Pay-Offs to Informal Training: Evidence from Routine Service Work

This study examines the relationship between informal training and job performance among 2,803 telephone operators in a large unionized U.S. telecommunications company. The authors analyze individual-level data on monthly training hours and job performance over a five-month period in 2001 as provided by the company's electronic monitoring system. The results indicate that the receipt of informal training was associated with higher productivity over time, when unobserved individual heterogeneity is taken into account. Workers with lower pre-training proficiency showed greater improvements over time than did those with higher pre-training proficiency. Finally, whether the trainer was a supervisor or a peer also mattered: workers with below-average pre-training proficiency achieved greater productivity gains through supervisor training, while workers with average pre-training proficiency achieved greater productivity gains through peer training.

Occupational female breast and reproductive cancer mortality in British Columbia, Canada, 1950-94

It has been postulated that recent increases in female breast and reproductive cancers may be, in part, attributable to occupational exposures. We aimed to identify occupational associations with female breast and reproductive cancer mortality among women living in British Columbia (BC), Canada. Case-control methods were used to calculate mortality odds ratios for occupation and cause of death information obtained from the provincial death registry. Cases included women 20 years of age or older who died from breast or reproductive cancer between 1950 and 1994 and resident in BC, Canada. Controls were randomly selected from non-cancer deaths, matched according to age at death and year of death. In a subsequent, stratified analysis, we also identified changes over time to breast and reproductive cancer mortality among each worker group. There was excess mortality from breast and ovarian cancer among teachers, nurses, secretaries, librarians, retail sales clerks and religious workers. An elevated risk of breast cancer mortality was also found among professionals employed as owners, managers and government officials, financial saleswomen, scientists, physicians, medical and dental technicians and accountants. Secretaries, telephone operators and musicians were at increased risk of death from endometrial cancer. Cervical cancer mortality was not significantly increased for any occupational classification. Our study was aimed primarily at hypothesis generation. More systematic reviews, including cancer registry studies, will prove useful for confirming the relationships we have observed, including a possible increase in the risk of breast and ovarian cancer mortality among women employed in professional occupations.

Гігієнічна оцінка шумового навантаження на орган слуху телефоністів сучасного цифрового зв'язку

Гігієнічна оцінка шумового навантаження на орган слуху телефоністів сучасного цифрового зв'язку

The Use of Biodata for the Recruitment of Call Center Operators in the Asian Leisure/Gaming Industry

ABSTRACT A sample of telephone operators (both past and present) at a “telebetting” facility in Asia, were asked to complete a questionnaire containing a range of biodata items. “Stayers” were significantly different from “Leavers” on 16 items. After omitting those items that might lead to employment discrimination, recruiters were left with 11 items, the most important being surrogates for maturity. The results may prove useful, not only in Asia, but in any culture where large numbers of individuals are employed in routine tasks. Despite this evidence, however, it is suggested that current authoritarian management practices in Asia, may have some influence on the results.

Why Companies Fail

This article is about management of a business and how aware they must be in order to serve the consumer. Management must be aware of not only the external customer but the internal customer: the employee. By having a tightly-knit workforce which feels valued and rewarded by the management, having an effective and efficient infrastructure in place, and paying attention to clear and attainable goals and objectives, the external customer usually will be well served. In the final analysis, it is management who must be constantly aware of the innermost workings of the company - from the telephone operators and/or the automated answering system which is the first introduction of the consumer to the company - right through each department and, finally, to the topmost layer. And it's that top layer that leads the company by example as well as words. Without constant vigilance to even what might be considered minutiae and a consistently carried out method of surveillance, yesterday's award winning company could be tomorrow's failure.

Weimar Psychotechnics between Americanism and Fascism

In the aftermath of the Great War, the new science of psychotechnics was enlisted in the construction of the democratic social order that emerged from the ruins of German authoritarianism, a key component of the fragile social compromise between capital and labor that was a foundation of the Weimar Republic. During the 1920s, representatives of this branch of social engineering promised to use science to conjure away the workplace conflicts that had wracked Wilhelmine Germany and to usher in a new era of social harmony and productivity. Advertised as modern, rational, and humane, psychotechnics became a cornerstone of the rationalization movement that, originating in America, swept Germany in the 1920s. This article, focusing on interactions between psychotechnicians and female switchboard operators, places the objectives and contradictions of this new science of the working self within the context of wider debates about Germany’s postwar economic and political restructuring as well as the process of personal restructuring associated with the so‐called new woman. Ultimately, the article shows that the psychotechnicians’ failure to realize their aims within the Weimar system led them to reposition their science as handmaiden to the new National Socialist order, which they embraced as the best means of bringing about this process of restructuring.

A atividade do trabalho nas centrais de atendimento: um trabalho de linguagem

As evoluções do trabalho contemporâneo se traduzem, também, pelo crescimento da dimensão do uso da linguagem nas atividades produtivas. No setor de serviços, uma parte considerável do trabalho realiza-se por meio de diálogos e de comunicação entre cliente e trabalhador. Trata-se, nesse caso, de um verdadeiro trabalho de linguagem que nos leva a conceber esses trabalhadores como "trabalhadores da linguagem". Analisaremos alguns diálogos profissionais em uma central de atendimento a fim de evidenciar a natureza do trabalho dos teleoperadores: um trabalho de verbalização, um trabalho enunciativo.

Berlin electropolis: shock, nerves, and German modernity

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Berlin Electropolis 2. Electrotherapy and the Nervous Self in Nineteenth-Century Germany 3. Railway Accidents, Social Insurance, and the Pathogenesis of Mass Nervousness, 1889--1914 4. Electrotherapy and the Nervous Self during Wartime 5. Psychiatrists, Telephone Operators, and Traumatic Neurosis, 1900--1926 Conclusion Notes Selected Bibliography Index

Optimal key systems

A key system is represented by an ordered rooted tree. We construct trees minimizing relevant cost functions. Our application concerns interactive voice response (IVR), or automated telephone operators, for navigation purposes.

Data Bodies and the Awesome Apparatus of Technology

company motiroti. Alladeen also included a stage performance, produced at BAM 2004, and, as a whole, investigated the outsourcing of telephone operator jobs to India [see PAJ 77, 2004— eds.]. One hopes, one is even invited to expect, that the experience of this travel into and through the Alladeen Website will be one of estrangement, a defamiliarization, a collision, a discomfort great enough to make me move : aside, ahead, behind, over, below, anywhere, but not here, where I am. Here, I am obeying, like routine, like it’s the given world, the new dynamics of virtual circulation: of capital, and of me. But computerdriven technology, even in the hands of director Marianne Weems, who is intent on raising provoking, critical questions about it, seems to resist tampering with its structures and its effects.

Advanced Signal Processing for Digital Subscriber Lines

The recent deployment of digital subscriber line (DSL) technology around the world is rapidly making broadband access for the mass consumer market a reality. The ever-growing customer demand for higher data rates has been fueled by the popularity of applications like peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing networks and video-streaming and high-definition television (HDTV). DSL technology allows telephone operators to getmaximum leverage out of their existing infrastructure by delivering broadband access over existing twisted-pair telephone lines. At the heart of DSL lies a plethora of signal processing techniques which enable such high-speed transmission to be achieved over a medium originally designed with only voice-band transmission in mind. These advanced signal processing techniques address many challenges that exist in DSL networks today, such as the near-end and far-end crosstalk (NEXT/FEXT), impulse noise, peak-toaverage-power ratio (PAR), intersymbol and intercarrier interference (ISI/ICI), radio-frequency interference (RFI), and so forth. The goal of this special issue is to discuss the state-of-the-art and recent advances in signal processing techniques for DSL.

Woman as Machine: Representation of Secretaries in Interwar Magazines

Magazine representation of secretaries and telephone operators during the 1920s and 1930s depicted expectations about technology, sexuality, and domesticity. Using semiotic analysis, this article examines editorial copy and advertisements in Forbes, Ladies' Home Journal, and The American Magazine. In the dominant media image, the secretary was a sexualized machine whose individuality was nullified and whose domestic role was emphasized. Operators were subjected to sexism as well, but had more autonomy.

Telephone and Data Systems, Inc.

AbstractCommunications (MIC: 10.1 SIC: 4812 NAIC: 517212)Telephone and Data Systems is a diversified telecommunications service company with wireless telephone and wireline telephone operations. At Dec 31 2004, Co. served approximately 6.1 million customers in 36 states, including 4.9 million wireless customers and 1.2 million wireline telephone equivalent access lines. Co. conducts substantially all of its wireless operations through its 82.0%‐owned subsidiary, United States Cellular Corporation. Co. conducts its wireline telephone operations through its wholly owned subsidiary, TDS Telecommunications Corporation.

The impersonal company: a paradox

While technology is great and offers many remarkable ways to streamline a business, one must not let it overtake the human factor. Productivity takes many forms not the least of which is company-consumer interface. Factors like caring and concern about employees; employee morale which is so vital to productivity and responds to the communication the company sends in so many subtle and not so subtle ways; coming down on the human side of the equation rather than the technology side. First impressions are lasting ones and the role of receptionists and telephone operators are very important as their impression can determine business transactions of a company's culture

Gloria Naylor on Black Spirituality: An Interview

Gloria Naylor is a novelist, editor, screenwriter, teacher, and essayist who was born on January 25, 1950, in New York City. Her parents, Roosevelt Naylor, a transit worker, and Alberta McAlpin Naylor, a telephone operator, moved to New York shortly before Naylor's birth to ensure that their child would not endure the hardships of southern (black) life, namely cotton sharecropping and Jim Crow segregation, as they had in their hometown of Robinsonville, Mississippi. Naylor graduated from high school in 1968 and joined the Jehovah's Witness faith that same year. Over the next few years, she would continue to work as a missionary for the Jehovah's Witnesses, eventually traveling throughout the southeast as a fulltime minister. But, in 1975, Naylor left the sect because she no longer wished to take part in organized religion. In search of her life's purpose, Naylor returned to New York and enrolled in Medgar Evers College to study nursing. She soon realized that she had a stronger love of literature (a passion her mother encouraged through her own love for reading) and transferred to Brooklyn College to major in English. While at Brooklyn College, she read Toni Morrison's inaugural novel The Bluest Eye, an experience that both introduced her to the world of African American literature and provided possibilities for her own writing. Inspired now to develop her own artistic talent, Naylor completed her formal education and began her career as a writer. She graduated from Brooklyn College with a BA in English in 1981; she earned an MA in African American Studies from Yale University in 1983; the prior year, she had also published her first novel The Women of Brewster Place (1982). Quickly becoming a prolific fiction-writer, Naylor has authored five other novels to date: Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1988), Bailey's Cafe (1992), The Men of Brewster Place (1998), and 1996 (2004). She is currently at work on a seventh novel, Sapphira Wade, a prequel to Mama Day. All of her novels use time, space, and place to capture various African American experiences. Included among her numerous professional and artistic accolades are the American Book Award for first fiction for The Women of Brewster Place in 1983 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988. Naylor reveals in this interview the issues that matter most to her: slavery, history, the current plight of the black community, politics and art, healing, literary criticism, human creativity and resilience, the power of truth-telling, self help, and spirituality. It is the last topic, spirituality, that has interested me the most over the years as an avid Naylor scholar. As this interview demonstrates, I am fascinated by the way in which Naylor has organized two of her novels, Mama Day and Bailey's Cafe, around tropes of spiritual power and Biblical revision. I believe that her thematic overtures in these texts (themes that are also found in most of her other works) provide strategies for addressing certain social ills and even posit ways in which societies can be re-organized to better benefit their citizens. But, as Naylor points out, works of imagination cannot enact change. Such change really requires that we use more overarching and systematic means to alter policies. Still, her works reflect her general concerns for society and offer viable ideological starting points. This conversation occurred as apart of Naylor's visit to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Black Cultural Center in March of 1999. Tomeiko Ashford: Black women writers in the last few decades have offered mechanisms of spiritual healing through their texts. Do you feel that there's a need for healing among your black audience specifically? Gloria Naylor: Definitely. I think we're still struggling under the scars of slavery, and I think that the Civil Rights Movement did not work. The country is almost as divided as it was before. Okay, there are a few things that have changed and certain blacks have gained ascendancy. …

Commission consults on revision of the European electronic money regime

Background to the European Commission consultation on the electronic money directive (2000/46/EC) with particular reference to the definition of ‘electronic money’, the impact on mobile telephone operators, different structures for payment of goods and services under schemes for the issue of prepaid electronic value, the regulatory requirements on banks and e‐money institutions and the application of anti‐money laundering requirements.