Communication Code Research Articles

Separated by a Common Language: How the Nature of Code Differences Shapes Communication Success and Code Convergence

Coordinated action within and between organizations is easier when individuals share communication codes – mappings between stimuli and labels. Since codes are specific to the groups within which they arise as conventions, collaboration across organizational units that have developed their own distinctive codes is often difficult. However, not all code differences are equal in their implications for communication difficulty and the capacity of individuals starting out with different codes to develop a shared code. Using computational models, we develop a theory about the nature of differences in initial communication codes and how they impact convergence on a common code. Our results show that the difficulty of code convergence lies not as much in learning new codes as in unlearning existing ones. The most severe challenges to communication stem from “code clashes” where codes contain different mappings between the same labels and stimuli. Further, clashes that arise when agents have developed their individual codes in different task environments but draw on a common set of labels are likely to be the hardest to recover from, reflecting the perils of being “separated by a common language”.

Estimating the impact of co-investment on Fiber to the Home adoption and competition

The demand for faster broadband access is a key driver of FTTH adoption and fixed broadband competition, and therefore of co-investment. This paper assesses the effects on FTTH adoption and competition of FTTH co-investment. Co-investment had indeed been endorsed in the European Electronic Communication Code as a relevant option for conciliating investment and competition. This paper contributes to evaluating this policy option by providing detailed empirical estimates of the influence of co-investment on Fiber to the Home (FTTH) adoption and competition in the French fixed broadband market. We combine several French municipality level datasets and use a two-stage control-function approach to correct for the endogeneity of investor entry. We show that the presence of co-investment leads to an increase of 7.9% in FTTH adoption in 2018. Co-investment offers also enhance competition. Co-investment by competitors causes a decrease in Orange, French incumbent operator, total retail broadband market penetration by 5.9% whereas no co-investment by competitors lets Orange’s total retail broadband market penetration unchanged. Our findings confirm that co-investment supports the policy objectives of adoption and competition and should be supported by regulation.

Vitality of the Krk Venetian (Veian) dialect

Throughout history, the town of Krk was the only Romance enclave on the namesake island, first as a town where the Dalmatic (Vegliot) dialect was spoken, and then a town where the Krk Venetian dialect (Veian) was used. Today only a small number of (mostly elderly) people in the town of Krk still speak the Venetian dialect (Veian), while others use a kind of a Chakavian koiné that manifests general Chakavian features of the island of Krk. This paper aims to evaluate the vitality of this dialect according to nine UNESCO evaluative factors of language endangerment via a sociolinguistic questionnaire. The results show that once a prestigious dialect and symbol of urbanity of the town of Krk, this dialect is nowadays a communication code of mostly elderly, bilingual Krk residents. The dialect appears to still be part of their identity and tradition, although its status decreases from generation to generation. The participants in our study are aware that their dialect is disappearing but, with few exceptions, they generally do not insist on its preservation. This research aimed to show the vitality of the Krk Venetian dialect (Veian) in the 21st century.

Luhmann's theory of psychic systems and communication in social work practice

Summary The aim of the article is to increase interest in the social systems theory of Niklas Luhmann among practicing social workers. The enigmatic statement from Luhmann that only ‘communication can communicate’ is explained with reference to his autopoietic systems theory which identifies three distinct types of systems: systems of communication, systems of life and systems of consciousness. The article proceeds to describe the meaning and nature of autopoietic systems before discussing the place of the individual in Luhmann’s theory and how it is relevant for practicing social workers. The concepts of psychic systems, structural coupling and communicative codes are described and discussed. Findings The conceptual framework derived from Luhmann’s systems theory is applied to a description of the social worker/client encounter. Communication in social work practice is polyphonic: it is structured by a hybrid of communicative codes which the practitioner must draw on depending on the auspices of the communicative context. The key conclusion of the article is that Luhmann retains a conception of the individual as an active agent in systems theory aiming ‘noise’ at the function systems with which the individual interacts. Applications The article suggests that the systems perspective presented provides social workers with a useful and nuanced framework for reflective practice because it makes the components of the practice system explicit and visible.

Capacity-Achieving Spatially Coupled Sparse Superposition Codes With AMP Decoding

Sparse superposition codes, also called sparse regression codes (SPARCs), are a class of codes for efficient communication over the AWGN channel at rates approaching the channel capacity. In a standard SPARC, codewords are sparse linear combinations of columns of an i.i.d. Gaussian design matrix, while in a spatially coupled SPARC the design matrix has a block-wise structure, where the variance of the Gaussian entries can be varied across blocks. A well-designed spatial coupling structure can significantly enhance the error performance of iterative decoding algorithms such as Approximate Message Passing (AMP). In this paper, we obtain a non-asymptotic bound on the probability of error of spatially coupled SPARCs with AMP decoding. Applying this bound to a simple band-diagonal design matrix, we prove that spatially coupled SPARCs with AMP decoding achieve the capacity of the AWGN channel. The bound also highlights how the decay of error probability depends on each design parameter of the spatially coupled SPARC. An attractive feature of AMP decoding is that its asymptotic mean squared error (MSE) can be predicted via a deterministic recursion called state evolution. Our result provides the first proof that the MSE concentrates on the state evolution prediction for spatially coupled designs. Combined with the state evolution prediction, this result implies that spatially coupled SPARCs with the proposed band-diagonal design are capacity-achieving. Using the proof technique used to establish the main result, we also obtain a concentration inequality for the MSE of AMP applied to compressed sensing with spatially coupled design matrices. Finally we provide numerical simulation results that demonstrate the finite length error performance of spatially coupled SPARCs. The performance is compared with coded modulation schemes that use LDPC codes from the DVB-S2 standard.

Fake reviews on online platforms: perspectives from the US, UK and EU legislations.

User-generated online reviews have become essential sources of information for potential consumers. Given the increasing importance of online reviews on consumer purchases, some traders try to publish or promote fake reviews on online platforms to improve the reputation of their goods or services, or to damage the reputation of their competitors. This paper aims (1) to analyse whether and how fake reviews violate the main legal and ethical principles of advertising, according to the legislations of the US, UK and EU as well as the International Advertising and Marketing Communications Code; (2) to assess how the EU, the UK and the US are dealing with them, and find out which approaches and actions are working best; and (3) to offer normative recommendations for effective prosecution of fake reviews. The paper uses a combination of theoretical and sociological approaches (section 1), black letter analysis of law (sections 2 and 3) and a comparative approach (sections 2 and 3). Among others, the article observes (1) that fake reviews are a form of illegal advertising and (2) that the European regulatory instruments provide more protection against fake reviews than the US and argues (3) that an effective fight against fake reviews requires strong administrative bodies, endowed with sufficient resources.

CODE-SWITCHING AS MEDIA SPEECH: AN EVIDENCE IN INDONESIAN PODCAST

<p class="Keywords">A communicative code plays a main role in every conversation. The aim is to make a communicative goal in every situation. In this digital era, people tend to make something interesting to attract people’s attention. Namely Podcast, is one of the programs in digital platform that been used as the media to share everything in audio output. In Podcast, the host uses code-switching to make the communication livelier and sometimes to emphasize the statements or questions. Therefore, the host and the guest will have a very communicative interaction along the interview. This study aims to analysed the situational goal in a Podcast which host uses English as his switching code. The situational goal can be seen from the type of code-switching that the host used connected to the type of illocutionary forces at the speech act level. The data are recorded and transcribed from several episodes of the Podcast. The result shows that code-switching as the media speech is deliberately use as a very functional code to reach the situational goal.</p>

Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects of Silence: A Structural Model of Communication

Introduction. This work examines the role of silence along the lines of the theoretical considerations suggested by L. Wittgenstein and M. Heidegger. It also focuses on the role of communicative silence in each of the six functions of language in the structural model of communication put forward by Roman Jacobson. Other important types of functions are considered.Methodology and sources. Firstly, various philosophical and linguistic approaches towards the definition of silence are studied. Non-communicative silence, being outside the language domain, is differentiated from silence as part of communication, which is treated as a zero speech act in its own right. Finally, the paper analyzes the roles of communicative silence in the communicative model developed by Jacobson. Aesthetic function of silence is given special attention to. The poststructuralist view of silence is discussed.Results and discussion. Silence, acting as a linguistic sign, could convey information in the referential function; it could express emotions and personal experiences while performing the emotive function. As far as the conative function is concerned, silence serves to exert direct pressure on the addressee. Regarding the phatic function, silence acts as a means of establishing or discontinuing communication. Poetic silence focuses on the message for its own sake and manifests itself in repeating elements, such as syntactic pauses of various lengths and in differing contexts. Aesthetic function of silence is studied in a broader sense and involves the implementation of the motif of silence or “quietness” in a work of art. Silence becomes an important tool to study the acoustic, rhythmical potential of prosaic and poetic texts. With regard to silence in the metalinguistic function, it focuses primarily on the code of communication, i. e. on the language and its structure. The view of silence in psychoanalytical practice is also taken into account.Conclusion. The study of the phenomenon of silence allows to see a different number of functions it performs in situations when the speaker is either in a particular opposition to the speaker; or the situation is associated with a sense of respect, grief, humility. Silence could also accompany a number of emotive states, and perform a major role in prosaic and poetic texts when it stands out against the sounds that the main character hears around him allowing texts to bring out its acoustic properties. Psycho-analytical perspective allows to reveal more functions of silence.

Siega Verde and the open-air rock art of the northern Iberian Peninsula (Spain)

Siega Verde was the third open-air rock art site to be discovered in the Iberian Peninsula, even before Côa and the controversy that followed that discovery. Its practicable size and the study carried out without any publicity allowed the analysis of a new reality that would change the interpretation of Palaeolithic art. From the start of the research, stylistic criteria were used to date the art in the absence of archaeological excavations. Although this has often been criticized, it meant that Siega Verde and Côa could be dated from Leroi-Gourhan’s Style II onwards. Excavations at Fariseu, a site belonging to Côa in Portugal, have proved that hypothesis archaeologically, as well as supporting the applicability of Leroi-Gourhan’s styles. Siega Verde is a good representative of Palaeolithic art in the open, on rocks by a river-bank or on prominent hills, but it is not the only form that can be catalogued as open-air rock art, because there are intermediate forms. These are found in cave entrances and in rock-shelters all over the Iberian Peninsula, especially in areas where little evidence of Palaeolithic art used to be known, such as on the southern Mediterranean coast and in Andalusia. This site possesses an exterior Upper Palaeolithic art ensemble, similar to the art found inside caves and of the same age, but in a different location. Formal relationships are usual inside and outside the caves and in both cases they represent a communicative code that did not need the dark and mystery to be expressed.

Dataflow Model–based Software Synthesis Framework for Parallel and Distributed Embedded Systems

Existing software development methodologies mostly assume that an application runs on a single device without concern about the non-functional requirements of an embedded system such as latency and resource consumption. Besides, embedded software is usually developed after the hardware platform is determined, since a non-negligible portion of the code depends on the hardware platform. In this article, we present a novel model-based software synthesis framework for parallel and distributed embedded systems. An application is specified as a set of tasks with the given rules for execution and communication. Having such rules enables us to perform static analysis to check some software errors at compile-time to reduce the verification difficulty. Platform-specific programs are synthesized automatically after the mapping of tasks onto processing elements is determined. The proposed framework is expandable to support new hardware platforms easily. The proposed communication code synthesis method is extensible and flexible to support various communication methods between devices. In addition, the fault-tolerant feature can be added by modifying the task graph automatically according to the selected fault-tolerance configurations by the user. The viability of the proposed software development methodology is evaluated with a real-life surveillance application that runs on six processing elements.

Energy Efficiency Hybrid Precoding for UAV Inspection Communication System

In order to reduce the communication power consumption during UAV power line inspection, a energy efficiency hybrid recoding scheme based on one phase shifter is proposed in its communication subsystem. The solution is realized by using a partially connected hybrid precoder architecture in the UAV communication terminal, and using a beam combiner at the wireless network access point. At the same time, in order to reduce the complexity of hybrid precoding and combiner beam optimization design, convolutional neural networks are used to dynamically design and select the optimized beam required for UAV inspection and communication. Under the premise of efficiency, the communication energy efficiency can be improved as high as possible, thereby effectively improving the battery life cycle and cruise time of the UAV. The simulation results show that, compared with the manifold optimization and orthogonal matching pursuit algorithms, the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the energy efficiency of communication coding and battery life cycle.

Study of Mobile City Application in Indonesia

The Implementation of e-government has been established with the Instruction of President. Application of e-government is a research topic that has received a lot attention because of its improve the function and management of the city by utilizing Information and Communication Technology to improve the quality of public services. In this research focused on one application of e-government that called Mobile City. This study observe 22 application that has been implemented in 22 regencies/cities. This study have goals to identify and compare all 22 Mobile City Applocation to get the rank of the regency/city based on the quality of its application and research city with the best application . The results of the study to show the Mobile City application applies a Location Based Services (LBS) system so the main features of this application showed tourism locations or public facilities. The difference of application features between regencies/cities is depends on how the regency/city developed their application. The city that has the most complete features on its mobile city is Surakarta that called Solo Destination. This application is managed by the Office of Infromation Communication Statistics and Coding of Surakarta City with the most frequently used feature is community complaints.

Scouting Interactive Games for Scouts Based on Embodied Interaction Using Embedded System

Scouts is the scouting level after the cub scout aged 11-15 years old. In their age range, they can use logical thinking in the form of physical objects to solve a problem. The development of the Scout Movement has had ups and downs, and recently the number of children interest in scouting activities decreases. The impact is the scouting insight they get isn't optimal. One strategy to solve this problem is by developed forms, tools, and learning media of scouting. Game is one of the learning media that can be used to create effective learning. The educational game is a popular learning media and widely developed by experts, as well as in Indonesia. Unfortunately, in the field of scouting, educational games are less developed. In this research, the author will build an educational scouting game for scouts. In the scouts level, they began to be introduced about communication code, skills, natural recognition, and others. Games created using Embodied Interaction technology. This technology allows users to control the game using body movement. The purpose of this game is to increase the interest and insight of children on Scout activities. From the results of research that has been done, it can be seen that after playing the game, 95,7% of children thought it is exciting, and 87% of them became enthusiastic join scouting activity. Based on the results of the pre-test and post-test, scouting insight increased after playing the game with an average percentage of increased insight being 18.7%.

Wireless Image Transmission Using Deep Source Channel Coding With Attention Modules

Recent research on joint source channel coding (JSCC) for wireless communications has achieved great success owing to the employment of deep learning (DL). However, the existing work on DL based JSCC usually trains the designed network to operate under a specific signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, without taking into account that the SNR level during the deployment stage may differ from that during the training stage. A number of networks are required to cover the scenario with a broad range of SNRs, which is computational inefficiency (in the training stage) and requires large storage. To overcome these drawbacks our paper proposes a novel method called Attention DL based JSCC (ADJSCC) that can successfully operate with different SNR levels during transmission. This design is inspired by the resource assignment strategy in traditional JSCC, which dynamically adjusts the compression ratio in source coding and the channel coding rate according to the channel SNR. This is achieved by resorting to attention mechanisms because these are able to allocate computing resources to more critical tasks. Instead of applying the resource allocation strategy in traditional JSCC, the ADJSCC uses the channel-wise soft attention to scaling features according to SNR conditions. We compare the ADJSCC method with the state-of-the-art DL based JSCC method through extensive experiments to demonstrate its adaptability, robustness and versatility. Compared with the existing methods, the proposed method takes less storage and is more robust in the presence of channel mismatch.

Probiotics, Photobiomodulation, and Disease Management: Controversies and Challenges.

In recent decades, researchers around the world have been studying intensively how micro-organisms that are present inside living organisms could affect the main processes of life, namely health and pathological conditions of mind or body. They discovered a relationship between the whole microbial colonization and the initiation and development of different medical disorders. Besides already known probiotics, novel products such as postbiotics and paraprobiotics have been developed in recent years to create new non-viable micro-organisms or bacterial-free extracts, which can provide benefits to the host with additional bioactivity to probiotics, but without the risk of side effects. The best alternatives in the use of probiotics and postbiotics to maintain the health of the intestinal microbiota and to prevent the attachment of pathogens to children and adults are highlighted and discussed as controversies and challenges. Updated knowledge of the molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in the balance between microbiota and immune system for the introspection on the gut–lung–brain axis could reveal the latest benefits and perspectives of applied photobiomics for health. Multiple interconditioning between photobiomodulation (PBM), probiotics, and the human microbiota, their effects on the human body, and their implications for the management of viral infectious diseases is essential. Coupled complex PBM and probiotic interventions can control the microbiome, improve the activity of the immune system, and save the lives of people with immune imbalances. There is an urgent need to seek and develop innovative treatments to successfully interact with the microbiota and the human immune system in the coronavirus crisis. In the near future, photobiomics and metabolomics should be applied innovatively in the SARS-CoV-2 crisis (to study and design new therapies for COVID-19 immediately), to discover how bacteria can help us through adequate energy biostimulation to combat this pandemic, so that we can find the key to the hidden code of communication between RNA viruses, bacteria, and our body.

Dimming Level Improvement Method Through Simple Mapping Error Correction Code in Visible Light Communication

Since the visible light communication (VLC) has to perform the functions of communication and illumination at the same time, a method for communication as well as lighting is needed. In this paper, when text data is transmitted through visible light communication, the level of illumination dimming according to the frequency of occurrence of alphabets in sentences is analyzed, and a method of improving the dimming level and Bit Error Rate (BER) performance through error correction codes generated during data transmission is studied. Visible light communication systems must perform both communication and lighting functions, so not only communication but also a method for the lighting role is needed. When transferring data (transfer text), the frequency of occurrence of alphabets in sentences is different. Depending on the frequency of occurrence of these alphabetic characters, if there are many ‘0’s in the code to be transmitted, the dimming level will be lowered and flicker will occur. Also, when a 1-bit error occurs, the alphabet code itself is changed. To solve this problem, an error correction code using parity bits has been added. Through this, it was confirmed that the overall dimming level and Bit Error Rate (BER) performance were improved. Also, in visible light communication, the function of lighting is closely related to the performance of the overall system. As we have seen above, when there is a continuous zero period, the function of the lighting is severely degraded. This reduces the performance of the entire system, not just the lighting. Therefore, the dimming level and BER performance were improved by improving the performance through the algorithm and error correction code to improve the overall dimming level.

Modulated Sparse Superposition Codes for the Complex AWGN Channel

This paper studies a generalization of sparse superposition codes (SPARCs) for communication over the complex additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. In a SPARC, the codebook is defined in terms of a design matrix, and each codeword is a generated by multiplying the design matrix with a sparse message vector. In the standard SPARC construction, information is encoded in the locations of the non-zero entries of the message vector. In this paper we generalize the construction and consider modulated SPARCs, where information in encoded in both the locations and the values of the non-zero entries of the message vector. We focus on the case where the non-zero entries take values from a phase-shift keying (PSK) constellation. We propose a computationally efficient approximate message passing (AMP) decoder, and obtain analytical bounds on the state evolution parameters which predict the error performance of the decoder. Using these bounds we show that PSK-modulated SPARCs are asymptotically capacity achieving for the complex AWGN channel, with either spatial coupling or power allocation. We also provide numerical simulation results to demonstrate the error performance at finite code lengths. These results show that introducing modulation to the SPARC design can significantly reduce decoding complexity without sacrificing error performance.

Performance enhancement of optical camera communication system using optical camera communication coding and region‐of‐interest detection

Optical camera communication (OCC) is considered an important transmission scheme in implementing indoor navigation, beacons, and other Internet of Things applications. One of the disadvantages of OCC, however, is that transmission is successful only if the line-of-sight requirement is satisfied between transmitting LED lamps and receiving image sensors. Any obstacle between them or movement of the receiver direction causes a reduction in the light signal and leads to a burst error, and its compensation is not easy. A low-density parity check (LDPC) code is employed in the OCC to overcome burst error. To improve the performance further, a region of interest area detection is proposed that utilizes only the centre part of an image frame for LDPC decoding rather than using the whole area measurement. The LDPC codes are tested using an appropriate OCC packet structure, and its performance is compared with that of polar codes. The experimental results indicate that LDPC coding is more suitable in OCC systems. It is found that the proposed LDPC coding scheme not only recovers the data from burst errors but also enhances the transmission distance. In particular, soft-decision LDPC decoding shows more resistance to burst errors and bit loss.

Information hiding using matroid theory

Inspired by problems in Private Information Retrieval, we consider the setting where two users need to establish a communication protocol to transmit a secret without revealing it to external observers. This is a question of how large a linear code can be, when it is required to agree with a prescribed code on a collection of coordinate sets. We show how the efficiency of such a protocol is determined by the derived matroid of the underlying linear communication code. Furthermore, we provide several sufficient combinatorial conditions for when no secret transmission is possible.

Systems-theoretical observations of moral media panic debates

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine and analyse the fierce debate regarding children and young people’s use of digital social media, going on in Denmark (and in many other countries) in both mass media and social media. The overall question is what this panic is about and why the mass media and the public do not listen to the media sociologists than to self-appointed experts?Design/methodology/approachUsing a systems-theoretical angle, this paper analyses the debate and answers the following questions: Why are researchers not taken more seriously, and why are their views neglected and criticised? What part does morality play in such debates? How and why do the mass media act as they do, for instance, listening more to debaters than to the researchers? 4) What is the role of the so-called social media? And are these debates best understood as conflicts?FindingsThe scientific code is only one among several other codes. The mass media also communicates about truth but only as a result of their own code and programs, which also counts for other functional systems such as the juridical and the political system. In the code and programmes of a given mass medium, it has information value that different actors has different truths, to which comes that conflicts between different opinions of truth is a direct selection criterium. This is the function of the mass media, and nobody would like to live in a society without (except for dictators and their henchmen). Finally, science is very programmatic and communicates only through its own code and programs why research results seldom reach the public in its own form (scientific books and articles) but through the lens of mass media organisations and the debaters. When science is observed from other systems, it happens through their codes and programs why science often does not count more than ordinary people’s meanings.Research limitations/implicationsThe debate is polarised: on the one hand, there are debaters (self-appointed experts), whereas on the other hand, there are media researchers especially media sociologists. It turns out that the debaters have better communication possibilities than the researchers, as the scientific code does not trigger the news criteria as good as the often alarming statements from the debaters, who also use the moral code of communication that the researchers do not, as they are obligated to communicate solely in the scientific code.Originality/valueThere is no other systems-theoretical analysis of the moral media panic debates. The application of Luhmann’s systems theory is well suited, as it is both a communication theory and a sociological theory, whereas it is including both the relevant functional systems, such as the mass media, and the relevant communication codes, such as the news criteria of the mass media.