Communication Chain Research Articles

A Proposed Information System for Communicating Foot-and-Mouth Disease Events among Livestock Stakeholders in Gairo District, Morogoro Region, Tanzania

Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) is present in many countries globally, including Tanzania, especially Gairo district. The data shows that 78% of livestock keepers in Gairo district had already observed FMD infection in their cattle, and the pastoral communities were mostly affected. Currently, vaccination is the main tool for controlling FMD because there are no therapeutic intervention tools. Therefore, effective communication among livestock stakeholders can be used as an essential tool of preparedness for the disease’s impact. This study had two specific objectives: (i) to explore the challenges of communicating FMD events among livestock keepers and other livestock stakeholders in Gairo district and (ii) to propose an information system for sharing FMD events among the livestock stakeholders in Gairo district. The study found that there was a delay when communicating FMD events in Gairo district due to the long chain of information flow. Therefore, the system aims to reduce the communication chain by allowing livestock keepers to report disease outbreaks directly to the system. Livestock keepers may also access FMD precaution measures, negative impacts, clinical signs transmission ways, and current outbreaks directly from the system using Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), Short Message Services (SMS), robocalls, and feature phones. The system also provides a common platform for sharing FMD outbreaks data and events to other stakeholders based on the system’s privileges. In this study, a closed-ended interview using a questionnaire was used for data collection. The PHP hypertext processor, jQuery, HTML, JSON, JavaScript, Apache web server, and MySQL database were used for developing the system.

Nombres de ficción, archivos mentales y actos de habla declarativos

In this paper I defend the claim that fictional names refer to individual concepts, understood as mental files. Those concepts constitute the set of thoughts that are in turn constitutive, together with the corresponding sentences, of what I call ‘the conceptual world of a fictional narrative’. In defending this thesis, I offer a novel interpretation of the distinction between fictive, parafictive and metafictive uses of the sentences containing fictional names. Fictive uses are analysed as declarative speech acts of different kinds: they encompass both the original uses, by means of which an author introduces a name in the context of the creation of a fictional narrative, and the replicating uses depending on the insertion in a communication chain leading to that narrative. Parafictive uses, conceived of as mixed acts, partly assertive and partly declarative, are those speech acts in which the narrative is reformulated: the output is the creation of an interpretative extension of the original conceptual world. Finally, metafictive uses are understood as assertive speech acts, constitutive of another extension of the conceptual world of the narrative, whose purpose is to interpret it critically.

Social Interaction and the Experience Of The Other

The dialectics of relation Me - Other as the first relationship of the community speaks, above all, about communication. The communication chain that every human existence enters into by its birth, points to the complex cycle of interactivity. The mosaic of experiences acquired in the entire spectrum of relations is always framed by certain social contexts. Through existence with the Other, we discover the complex network of interdependent relations. Having been influenced by innovative technologies, society creates a brand new culture, that transforms social interactions and it is an invitation for creating some new types of interactions.

Influencers as socio-technical actors: mapping the paths of influence and the traces of the digital influencers’ system in Italy

In recent years, digital influencers or digital opinion leaders have emerged as a global phenomenon, one providing a rich field of investigation for several disciplines from sociology to marketing. The goal of the paper is to study this phenomenon by adopting an ecological approach, not focusing only on a single dimension but observing the influencer system as an environment with its own rules and subjects, examining the other components of the system and tracing the relationships between them. The original contribution of this paper is to conceptualize influencers as socio-technical actors, i.e. as social subjects that operate within technological platforms, and to adopt an interdisciplinary approach, starting from sociological and marketing studies on the influencer phenomenon and then moving on to STS studies that have focused on the social shaping of technology to shed light on how the influencers are transforming the (social) media system in which they are inserted and then the chain of communication industry. The argument will therefore start by reviewing the theories that address this phenomenon and by sketching a genealogy, tracing its roots in the cultural and social context of the participatory web and web 2.0. It will move, then, to investigate the dynamics of shaping social media platforms, reviewing the studies that have investigated them, from the Social Shaping of Technology approach to platform studies. The paper will apply the analysis to the Italian context, unfolding the dynamics of influence with the support of the case study of ClioMakeUp (the leading beauty creator in Italy), examples, and grey literature from the Italian context. In the final part, the paper will map the traces of the influencer system in Italy and the communication chain, focusing on the processes of mutual shaping between brands, communication agencies, influencer enterprises, regulatory bodies, media, and of course platforms. The STS approach proved to be useful in disentangling the several actors of the system, but as platforms evolved the opportunities for mutual shaping have gradually diminished as the balance of power seems to be tending in favor of the platforms. More research is needed to further understand the concepts of closure, script, and relevant social groups within social media platforms.

Two-Layered Blockchain Architecture for Federated Learning Over the Mobile Edge Network

Federated learning (FL) is seen as a road toward privacy-preserving distributed artificial intelligence while keeping raw training data on local devices. By leveraging blockchain, this article puts forward a blockchain and FL fusioned framework to manage the security and trust issues when applying FL over mobile edge networks. First, a two-layered architecture is proposed that consists of two types of blockchains: local model update chain (LMUC) assisted by device-to-device (D2D) communication and global model update chain (GMUC) supporting task sharding. The D2D-assisted LMUC is designed to chronologically and efficiently record all of the local model training results, which can help to form long-term reputations of local devices. The GMUC is proposed to provide both security and efficiency by preventing mobile edge computing nodes from malfunctioning and dividing them into logically isolated FL task-specific chains. Then a reputation-learning-based incentive mechanism is introduced to make participating local devices more trustful with a reward implemented by a smart contract. Finally, a case study is given to show that the proposed framework performs well in terms of FL learning accuracy and blockchain time delay.

"This Book": The Rhetoric of John's Apocalypse

The aim of apocalyptic texts is to influence both the understanding and the behaviour of the audience by means of divine authority. This article explores how this rhetorical aspect of the apocalyptic genre is verified in John's Apocalypse. John identifies himself as the final link in the chain of communication from God to the churches, and in this way he highlights the divine authority of "this book." Furthermore, although the book does not explicitly call on the authority of the Scriptures, it is itself the fruit of an inspired or prophetic reading of the Scriptures focused on the concrete situation of his hearers. The book influences the hearers by drawing them into John's vision; reading the book is meant to lead the readers into a symbolic universe in which God is seen as the creator of all and ὁ παντοκράτωρ. The book is meant to stimulate them to share in John's experience of God's royal rule. In the light of this fresh way of looking, they are expected to be empowered to face the trials of life with endurance (Rev 1:9). The specific nature of this book's rhetoric is articulated in terms of mystagogia, lectio divina and ekphrasis.

Quantization Games on Social Networks and Language Evolution

We consider a strategic network quantizer design setting where agents must balance fidelity in representing their local source distributions against their ability to successfully communicate with other connected agents. We study the problem as a network game and show existence of Nash equilibrium quantizers. For any agent, under Nash equilibrium, the word representing a given partition region is the conditional expectation of the mixture of local and social source probability distributions within the region. Since having knowledge of the original source of information in the network may not be realistic, we show that under certain conditions, the agents need not know the source origin and yet still settle on a Nash equilibrium using only the observed sources. Further, the network may converge to equilibrium through a distributed version of the Lloyd-Max algorithm. In contrast to traditional results in the evolution of language, we find several vocabularies may coexist in the Nash equilibrium, with each individual having exactly one of these vocabularies. The overlap between vocabularies is high for individuals that communicate frequently and have similar local sources. Finally, we argue that error in translation along a chain of communication does not grow if and only if the chain consists of agents with shared vocabulary. Numerical results are given.

Distributed Path Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Communication Chain Based on Dual Decomposition

Limited by the insufficiency of single UAV’s load and flight time capabilities, the multi‐UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) collaboration to improve mission efficiency and expand mission functions has become the focus of current UAV theory and application research. In this paper, the research on UAV global path planning is carried out using the ant colony algorithm, and an indoor UAV path planning model based on the ant colony algorithm is constructed. In order to improve the efficiency of the algorithm, enhance the adaptability and robustness of the algorithm, a distributed path planning algorithm based on the dual decomposition UAV communication chain is proposed. This algorithm improves the basic ant colony algorithm from the aspects of path selection, pheromone update, and rollback strategy in view of the inherent shortcomings of the ant colony algorithm. In order to achieve the best performance of the algorithm, this paper analyzes each parameter in the ant colony algorithm in depth and obtains the optimal combination of parameters. The construction method of the Voronoi diagram was improved, and the method was simulated to verify that the method can obtain a Voronoi diagram path that is safer than the original method under certain time conditions. Through the principle analysis and simulation verification of the Dijkstra algorithm and the dual decomposition ant colony algorithm, it is concluded that the dual decomposition ant colony algorithm is more efficient in pathfinding. Finally, through simulation, it was verified that the dual decomposition ant colony algorithm can plan a safe and reasonable flight path for multiple UAV formation flights in an offline state and achieve offline global obstacle avoidance for multiple UAVs.

НЛО НАД ПЛАНЕТАРИЕМ:ЭПИСТЕМОЛОГИЧЕСКАЯ ПРОПАГАНДА И АЛЬТЕРНАТИВНЫЕ ФОРМЫ ЗНАНИЙО КОСМОСЕ В СССР В 1940–1960-Е ГОДЫ

The article examines the origins and development of narratives about historical and present-day contacts with al-ien civilizations (ufology) in the USSR after World War II. The current research literature usually interprets ufology as a form of quasi-religious and mythological thinking, yet my study of the genealogy of Soviet ufology demon-strates that the development of alternative knowledge about the outer space was a by-product of the state-sponsored propaganda of scientific knowledge. This relationship suggests that the common understanding of the public com-munication of science as a mere tool for the transfer of knowledge from experts (scholars) to the public is simplistic and misleading. By bringing together science popularizers and broad audiences in a communication chain, the postWWII Soviet mass scientific literacy campaign required the former to mater new narrative forms to appeal to the latter. The narrativization of science for its public communication means that popular science genres exist in a rhetor-ical and literary context, rather than belonging to the domain of the production and verification of scientific knowledge. This makes stories and their structural elements (plot development, internal conflict, and the hierarchy of characters) a key aspect of science communication. Consequently, a history of ufology in the post-World War II USSR serves as an illustrative case revealing how the epistemological polyphony and diversity emerged in late Sovi-et society

The analysis of problems, causes, and efforts to resolve problems in the service of covid-19 patients at the army hospital in Padang City

During the adaptation period to new habits, every hospital needs to make some changes to prevent the transmission of covid infections in the hospitals. The Ministry of Health has issued a technical guide that should be a guide for every hospital. The Army Hospital in Padang City has a different communication flow and chain of command from hospitals owned by health institutions. This study aims to analyze efforts to optimize services for COVID-19 patients during the adaptation period for new habits. The research design is qualitative. The study was conducted in October-December 2020. The unit of analysis is an emergency department for the Covid and non-covid services. Data were collected by interview, observation, and document review. The results showed that emergency room services were not following the technical guidelines for hospital services during the adaptation period for new habits. Some of the causes are seen in terms of input, ie. personnel, room and equipment, funding, and patient behavior as well as from the screening process. Steps that can be taken to optimize services are to create a service flow, install zone barriers, move screening rooms and improve patient education and carry out periodic monitoring and evaluation.

Research on laser Link performance of UAV-based platform based on reverse modulation

In order to solve the problem of UAV-based optical communication under the constraints of low load, high transmission rate and low bit error rate, this paper studies the alternative scheme and the possibility of optical communication system based on reverse modulation. Based on the study of atmospheric effect, alignment error, and reverse modulator performance, the light intensity propagation model is constructed. Through MATLAB simulation, it is found that under weak turbulence, the link communication distance can reach 7-12km.Good communication effect when turbulence intensity is below 0.4; Increasing the receiver size can improve the communication chain performance effectively.

MUSA Grant-Free Access Framework and Blind Detection Receiver

Recently, a non-orthogonal multiple access scheme called multi-user shared access (MUSA) was proposed to provide massive connection capability of low-complexity devices in the 5G networks. MUSA achieves higher spectral efficiency allowing independent devices to transmit data on the same physical layer time-frequency resources. Furthermore, MUSA introduces a grant-free transmission and a blind multi-user detection at the receiver, reducing the complexity on the transmit side. This approach is interesting for Internet of Things applications over mobile communication networks, where the devices have limited power and processing capacity. The references available in the literature about this multiple access scheme do not bring sufficient details about the MUSA multi-user detector. This limitation makes it difficult to evaluate the MUSA performance and to propose improvements for this new technique. The main goal of this paper is to provide a framework describing the entire communication chain using MUSA as multiple access. This paper also brings a proposal for a blind multi-user detection, where the information about the MUSA parameters and the channel state information are unknown at the receiver side. The performance of the MUSA multi-user detector is improved by a deep learning based processing that improves the quality of the channel estimation provided by a initial minimum mean square error estimator. The proposed deep neural network architecture employed to improve the channel estimation allows more users to share the same time-frequency resources for a given target block error rate, increasing the overall spectrum efficiency of the system.

Structural organization and cohesiveness of foraging groups in Camponotus sericeus (Fabricius) (Hymenoptera: Formicidae): locally regulated or self-organized?

BackgroundIn Camponotus sericeus (Fabricius), foraging ants are recruited mostly as individuals but occasionally as small groups that move in a single file. We studied the structure and organization of these small foraging groups and attempted to understand the process through which the cohesiveness of the moving file is maintained.ResultsThe recruited group moves in a single file as if steered by a leader at the moving tip. Ants in the group were found to exhibit certain fidelity to their respective positions in the file, despite the occasional breakdown of the cohesiveness due to disturbance and or obstructions on their path. This fidelity decreases from both ends towards the middle part of the file. Accordingly, three segments could be recognized in the moving file: (a) the leading ant that almost always maintains its position and steers the group, (b) a short tail part with a few ants that always trail the file and, (c) the mid part that binds the group; ants in this segment always tend to follow the leader through a cascading chain of tactile communication. If the leader ant is removed, entire group loses its orientation and enters into a chaotic search state. But removing any other ant does not affect the cohesiveness; rather it’s position is occupied by the member preceding it and thus maintains the link in the group.ConclusionsThe cohesiveness of the moving group appeared to result from (a) regulation of the movement of the group by the leading ant, and, (b) an interactive process among the rest of the ants. Based on these two elements, a simple automated model of the group’s movement was developed that could effectively mimic the observed pattern. We also provide evidence to suggest that recruitment of groups occurs in the direction of, and in response to, the information received by the colony on, the resource rich patches.

Citizens as Complicits: Distrust in Politicians and Biased Social Dissemination of Political Information

Widespread distrust in politicians is often attributed to the way elites portray politics to citizens: the media, competing candidates, and foreign governments are largely considered responsible for portraying politicians as self-interested actors pursuing personal electoral and economic interests. This article turns to the mass level and considers the active role of citizens in disseminating such information. We build on psychological research on human cooperation, holding that people exhibit an interpersonal transmission bias in favor of information on the self-interested, antisocial behavior of others to maintain group cooperation. We posit that this transmission bias extends to politics, causing citizens to disproportionally disseminate information on self-interested politicians through interpersonal communication and, in turn, contributes to distrust in politicians and policy disapproval. We support these predictions using novel experimental studies, allowing us to observe transmission rates and opinion effects in actual communication chains. The findings have implications for understanding and accommodating political distrust.

Know Your Channel First, then Calibrate Your mmWave Phased Array

This article proposes a new method for calibration of high-speed phased array antennas that includes all the system components and spans the full chain of communication. Online calibration is possible without pausing or interrupting the communication processing in any way.-Vivek Chickermane, Cadence Design Systems.

Eigendecomposition of a digital iterative decentralised interleaving for multicellular converters

The decentralised control of multicellular converters is an alternative to the usual control techniques. Multicellular converters use interleaved carriers to reduce filtering elements and potentially improve transient response. Decentralised interleaving techniques are scalable, avoid a complex interleaving controller for a high number of cells, and simplify reconfiguration cases like phase shading. Circular chain of communication (ring, or daisy chain) approaches have been proposed in the literature and implemented in concrete applications. However, the analytical study of the stability and dynamic response of this system involving several identical phase-delay local controllers connected in a dedicated communication chain with their close neighbours has not been conducted yet. This paper presents a behavioural discrete model for a digitally implemented decentralised interleaving device. The eigenvalue study gives the stability criterion and convergence speed to choose the appropriate parameters of the controllers. A modal decomposition technique dissociates the various types of differential interactions to observe their respective time response. Simulation results demonstrate that the system is unconditionally stable when all differential modes are properly damped. An analytical expression for the final disposition of the carriers in steady state depending on the start-up condition is established. Lastly, a more precise operator to overcome the singular discontinuity of the model is presented and discussed. Experimental validation by FPGA implementation have been done for reconfiguration and start-up cases.

The Hidden Chain of Branded Telecommunication Services Delivery: Value, Trust, Brand, Price Tolerance and Word of Mouth Communication Chain

Due to high customer switching behavior from one mobile service provider to another and high competition within the market, scholars, and marketers are trying to find and formulate the most appropriate consumer-driven business strategy to stay competitive. Grounded in means-end, value, and brand equity theories, this study proposes an integrative model in the telecom context to establish value → trust→ brand → price tolerance→ word of mouth communication (WOMC) chain. As a primary approach, the survey method is used through which 437 online responses were collected. Applying Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), the findings of this study show that the empirical outcomes tally with the proposed relationships (the chain) and the importance-performance map analysis indicates that both perceived value and brand trust have the highest influence on price tolerance. Brand image and perceived value also demonstrate to be of highest importance in building positive WOMC in the context of the telecoms industry. In addition, this study found that brand equity components have strong mediating effects, while the moderating roles of gender and age across groups varies. Overall, this study contributes to the service marketing, branding, and consumer behavior literature, particularly in the context of telecommunications.

An optimal policy for joint compression and transmission control in delay-constrained energy harvesting IoT devices

Energy-efficient communication remains one of the key requirements of the Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. The concern on energy consumption can be mitigated by exploiting technical ploys to reduce the volume of data for transmission (e.g., via sensing data compression) as well as by resorting to technological advancements (e.g., energy harvesting). However, these mitigating measures carry their own cost, which is the additional complexity of control and optimization in the digital communication chain. In particular, compression ratio is another control knob that needs adjusting besides the usual transmission parameters. Also, with the random and sporadic nature of the harvested energy, the goal shifts from mere energy conservation to judicious consumption of the renewable energy in a foresighted manner. In this paper, we assume an energy-harvesting IoT device that is tasked with (loss-lessly) compressing and reporting delay-constrained sensing events to an IoT gateway over a time-varying wireless channel. We are interested in computing an optimal policy for joint compression and transmission control adaptive to the node’s energy availability, transmission buffer length, as well as its wireless channel conditions. We cast the problem as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP), and propose a two-timescale model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that is able to shape the optimal control policy in the absence of the statistical knowledge of the underlying system dynamics. Exhaustive simulation experiments are conducted to investigate the convergence of the learning algorithm, to explore the impacts of different system parameters (such as: the rate of sensing events, the energy arrival rate, and battery capacity) on the performance of the proposed policy, as well as to compare against some baseline schemes.

Paradigmatic reflections on media, culture and public relations

The paper reports on some of the research results and achievements on international scientific projects: "Croatian media communication in a convergent environment" (Faculty of Graphic Arts, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia) and "Strategic Communication Management" (Alma Mater Europaea - EASA, Maribor, Slovenia). The aim of this research work is a paradigmatic presentation and publication of separately selected thematic media research paradigms in a systematic paradigmatic communication chain that affirms culture, media and public relations (Case study: "Media, Culture and Public Relations" (2012-2020)). The paper uses qualitative and quantitative paradigmatic ontological, epistemological, axiological, rhetorical and communication research methodology. Project paradigmatic research was conducted in the time limits from 2012 to 2020. The obtained research results and conducted communication analysis of the essence and form of media communication culture and public relations is a new paradigmatic scientific contribution to the culture of media communication and the advancement of the role and function of public relations in the new inclusive information society.

From fear to fortitude: Using the power within the nursing profession to fight COVID-19

Communicating is essential. The communication chain within units and facilities must be kept strong. Good communication will help staff take responsibility for one another; knowing your work family is looking out for you can offer strength. Respecting each other encourages speaking up to create a platform for shared decision-making and problem-solving. Such shared responsibility will yield the best solutions because the whole is stronger together than individuals alone. Speaking up also is a way to offer immediate feedback if mistakes are observed so that errors are corrected. And when, not if, mistakes are made, staff need to be able to communicate these without fear of retribution.