Communications Revolution Research Articles

Self-Proficiency of Essential Technology Skills of Undergraduate Students at a Coastal University in Ghana

One of the numerous challenges facing education today is that of preparing students and staff for globalization and the information and communication revolution. Policymakers, educationists, non-governmental organizations, academics, and ordinary citizens are increasingly concerned with the necessity to make their societies competitive in the evolving information economy. Globalization and advancements in technology have led to an increased utilization of ICTs in all sectors, and education is no exception. Uses of ICTs in education are widespread and are repeatedly growing worldwide. Thus, this study investigated undergraduate students’ self-proficiency of essential technology skills in the University of Cape Coast, Ghana on the use of technology for various educational purposes. The study adopted the descriptive survey design using 318 randomly selected respondents from three different programmes in the university. The quantitative data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The study found that students possessed technical abilities needed to perform some specific tasks such as changing the default settings of tech tools to meet specific needs and also make configurations to connect computers to a network. However, respondents were unable to perform advanced formatting functions such as customized tabs, insert page breaks, query databases and sort the results, and using styles as well as unable to create and manage classroom webpages.

STATE, NEOLIBERALISM AND FINANCIALIZATION

As liberalism took roots during the 18-th and 19-th centuries, and as United States closed to such an overwhelming position which has made it a political actor with outmost importance at global level especially after the 1-st World War, there was another activity which accompanied this evolution, which is connected to financial activities and their speculative character; one important effect of these actions was the Great Depression in 1929-1939, which threw waves of shocks in America, and all over the world with unforeseen consequences. After the experiences brought upon by the Second World War, doubled by fresh memories of Great Depression, Keynesianism and its system torsed around Bretton Woods negotiations imagined a greater role for the state in relation with the market, especially the international financial market. As this gave birth to what can be seen as the Golden Age of capitalism, it is important to mark the role of state versus market during this period. But as the British Empire was closing to its end, London found a way to reinvent itself, as heir of the dying empire. In order to hold a central position in world affairs, it has looked at money, and the power they could provide: to save its system, London help inventing Eurodollar, circumventing the key-aspects of Bretton Woods and what it stood for. Slowly but surely, the market – especially the financial market – has gained more central position in face of state, and with it, the financialization of the economy. Between 1956 and 1980 there were identifiable clashes in state-market nexus, the most important being triggered by the oil shock in the 70’s; but as world entered the 80’s, it became clear that the market would gain the upper hand. The Reagen-Teacher understanding was the visible point of the picture regarding the shift of importance from state to market. The 90’s will only bring new and fresh markets ready to embrace globalization, sustained by the revolution in communications, which was already in full development. And now we see a minimal state put in a marginal position by the forces of economic globalization and the philosophy of free-market, while the market is seen as a “know and fix everything”; its invisible hand can overcome any temporary disequilibrium. A recurrent question needs to be addressed: where is the state, with its main attributes, in order to protect the people from selfish market forces?

Special Issue on Signal Processing for the Integrated Sensing and Communications Revolution

Special Issue on Signal Processing for the Integrated Sensing and Communications Revolution

(Re)imagining Ndau indigenous religion of Zimbabwe in the digital age

ABSTRACT The twenty-first century has been characterized by various digital communication technologies that are a major agent of globalization. Today Africans find themselves in new geo-cultural contexts within their countries and in the diaspora through migration triggered by many factors. These geographical dislocations disrupt the traditional clan settlement patterns and in turn challenge indigenous media of communication in indigenous African societies. Digitalization becomes a lifestyle in this globalizing world. African Indigenous Religions (AIRs) practitioners are embracing digital communication facilities. However, there are fears within some sections of African indigenous communities whether African Indigenous Religions could utilize the emergent communication technologies and remain unscathed. These sections hold the view that digital communication technologies are incompatible with the African indigenous worldview. There has been scanty literature on AIRs in general and Ndau religio-culture in particular to respond to these fears. Mindful of the variations that characterize AIRs, this article uses Ndau religio-culture of Zimbabwe to contend that AIRs are dynamic and have long been digital. In this regard, digitalization is neither new nor opposed to African indigenous religions. Rather, it is the amplification of the old as it fuses with the new. This empirical article employs the theological ethnography design to access the meaning embedded in the indigenous Ndau’s interaction with the digital communication services. Afro-centricity provides the lens to glean phenomena from the standpoint of the Ndau as key players in their life-worlds. The research findings were that the Ndau have a penchant for innovation and creativity in ways of thinking and doing things in order to survive in new circumstances. The article concludes that the Ndau religio-culture is an enduring heritage that has responded to the digital communication revolution by finding ways of reimagining and revitalizing its communication repertoire to be compliant with the dictates of the digital era.

Experimental Research in Synthetic Molecular Communications – Part I

Since its emergence from the communication engineering community around one and a half decades ago, the field of Synthetic Molecular Communication (SMC) has experienced continued growth, both in the number of technical contributions from a vibrant community and in terms of research funding. Throughout this process, the vision of SMC as a novel, revolutionary communication paradigm has constantly evolved, driven by feedback from theoretical and experimental studies, respectively. It is believed that especially the latter ones will be crucial for the transition of SMC towards a higher technology readiness level in the near future. In this spirit, we present here a comprehensive survey of experimental research in SMC. In particular, this survey focuses on highlighting the major drivers behind different lines of experimental research in terms of the respective envisioned applications. This approach allows us to categorize existing works and identify current research gaps that still hinder the development of practical SMC-based applications. Our survey consists of two parts; this paper and a companion paper. While the companion paper focuses on SMC with relatively long communication ranges, this paper covers SMC over short distances of typically not more than a few millimeters.

States, Modes, Fields, and Photons in Quantum Optics

The quantum nature of light enables potentially revolutionary communication technologies. A key to advancing this area of research is a clear understanding of the concepts of states, modes, fields, and photons. The concept of field modes carries over from classical optics, while the concept of state has to be considered carefully when treating light quantum mechanically. The term "photon" is an overloaded identifier in the sense that it is often used to refer to either a quantum particle or the state of a field. This overloading, often used without placing it in context, has the potential to obfuscate the physical processes that describe the reality we measure. We review the uses and relationships between these concepts using modern quantum optics theory, including the concept of a photon wave function, the modern history of which was moved forward in a groundbreaking paper in this journal by Iwo Białynicki-Birula, to whom this article is dedicated.

Legality of Electronic Evidence in Criminal Evidence

With the great and accelerated development witnessed by various aspects of life, and the use of technological techniques in all areas of work from the use of computers and the Internet, the crime is no longer committed in its traditional form, but has gone beyond the use of the information network using computers and information systems as a tool in committing the crime, which necessitated the provision of legal protection and the creation of a punitive system for the perpetrator of computer crimes and the information network that accompanied the emergence, growth and development of computer systems and networks and the information technology revolution because of its many risks and Great losses to institutions and individuals as they target the attack on data and information that affect the private lives of individuals, as well as threatening national security and national sovereignty. The study found that there is a clear deficiency in many arab substantive and procedural criminal legislations in confronting the phenomenon of crimes that occur by electronic means or on these means, for the seriousness of this crime recommended this study need for Arab legislation to speed up the pace of amending its punitive laws in order to keep pace with the revolution in remote communications, so that there is no separation between reality and law in a way that harms society and its individuals.

Механизмы формирования девиантного поведения в современных социокультуральных условиях

Introduction. The article is devoted to the description and analysis of deviant behavior of young people in conditions of intensive development of information and communication technologies that facilitate and simplify the interaction of young people. The relevance is determined by the need to comprehend the importance of new socio-cultural factors in the formation of deviant behavior in order to improve the measures of its prevention and correction.
 The aim of the research is to characterise the role of the supervalue idea in the development of destructive forms of deviant behavior and to illustrate its manifestations in the contemporary socio-cultural context.
 Methodology and methods of the research. The methodological basis of the study is a combination of theories and concepts of deviant behavior that form the subject area of deviantology. General scientific methods used for generalisation and systematisation of information on deviant behavior, its forms and their manifestations are applied. The research material covers cases of deviant behavior of adolescents and young people.
 The result of the research is a description and characterisation of the contemporary socio-cultural context associated with changes in norms of behavior. The main reasons are identified as the current growing anomie, the consequences of the information and communication revolution and the subsequent generation gap. The authors emphasise the high level of basal anxiety, currently leading to emotional tension, which contributes to the formation of supervalues. Various forms and manifestations of these ideational and affective abnormalities are described, including the emergence of ideas with signs of extremism, and the rise of auto- and heterogression. Understanding the mechanisms of these tendencies is of theoretical and practical importance for the prevention of deviant behavior, as well as for counselling, psycho-corrective and psychotherapeutic work.

Poe in Cyberspace: The Pleasure Principle Revisited

Poe in Cyberspace: The Pleasure Principle Revisited

A.V. Polyakov’s Communicative Theory of Law in the Conditions of the Medial Turn: Structural Points of Growth

This article concerns the points of growth of A.V. Polyakov's communicative theory of law in the conditions of a medial turn. The main purpose of the A.V. Polyakov theory was to integrate various types of legal understanding, reconciling the confrontation of natural law, positivism, and sociological theories of law. The semantic core of this theory is the concept of legal communication as an interaction between legal subjects who are aware of each other's rights and recognize them. The medial turn associated with total digitalization is becoming a new challenge for the communicative theory of law. The author analyzes its nodal moments, in which it is possible to expand the heuristic potential of the theory. The starting point of the analysis is the structure of communication, the treatment of which allows one to concretize, expand, and supplement the initial provisions of the theory of A.V. Polyakov. In the part of the theory related to the consideration of communicants, A.V. Polyakov introduces the intersubjective figure of the Other, thanks to which legal communication is focused on the counterparty. However, a different figurativeness of the Other is possible here, based on the typification of polysubject communication and the combinatorics of classical forms of communication in intermediate models. The examination of the communication channel reveals the possibility of calibrating A.V. Polyakov's chosen broad understanding of the text as any set of signs included in semiosis through a narrow understanding of the text as a form of communication based on M. McLuhan's idea of communication revolutions. In this case, the prospects for research on the role of media text in the legal communication of digital society open up. The message is the material basis for transporting the meaning of legal communication. It is possible to expand the theory by analyzing the processes of interference of meaning within a single message based on the methodology of N. Luhmann's autopoiesis. The effects of legal communication can be considered more panoramically when detailing the system of communication blocks of various natures, which is conceptualized on the basis of R. Dahrendorf's theory of social conflict. Structural analysis of communication is both a strategy for detailing its features and a methodological technique for expanding theory through new projects of methodological syntheses with social theories.

The Ethics of Psychological Warfare – Lessons from Israel

ABSTRACT The start of the twenty-first century saw many changes in the way war was being conducted. Alongside war at sea, in the air, and on land, there is now psychological warfare (referred to as psywar), which has proven to be an extremely powerful military dimension. The power of psychological warfare is a result of the revolution in information and communication in the first years of the current century: the Internet, instant global communications, smartphones, and social media. All these channels have become arenas for warfare and powerful influencers on leaders, militaries, and entire populations. Historically, democracies have been reticent about employing psychological warfare for a number of reasons, but in recent years, they have been unable to ignore its existence and have increasingly been making use of it. However, in contrast with other forms of warfare for which there are international ethical rules, there is no ethical regulation of psychological warfare. This article assesses the challenges and dilemmas facing democratic countries in their use of psychological warfare and for the first time offers proposals for ethical rules toward that end by way of an Israeli test case: the long-term use of psychological warfare by the Israel Defense Forces.

The Edwardian Picture Postcard as a Communications Revolution: A Literacy Studies Perspective by Julia Gillen (review)

The Edwardian Picture Postcard as a Communications Revolution: A Literacy Studies Perspective by Julia Gillen (review)

Deep Network-Enabled Haze Visibility Enhancement for Visual IoT-Driven Intelligent Transportation Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently emerged as a revolutionary communication paradigm where a large number of objects and devices are closely interconnected to enable smart industrial environments. The tremendous growth of visual sensors can significantly promote the traffic situational awareness, traffic safety management, and intelligent vehicle navigation in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). However, due to the absorption and scattering of light by the turbid medium in atmosphere, the visual IoT inevitably suffers from imaging quality degradation, e.g., contrast reduction, color distortion, etc. This negative impact can not only reduce the imaging quality, but also bring challenges for the deployment of several high-level vision tasks (e.g., object detection, tracking, recognition, etc.) in the ITS. To improve imaging quality under the hazy environment, we propose a deep network-enabled three-stage dehazing network (termed TSDNet) for promoting the visual IoT-driven ITS. In particular, the proposed TSDNet mainly contains three parts, i.e., multiscale attention module for estimating the hazy distribution in the RGB image domain, two-branch extraction module for learning the hazy features, and multifeature fusion module for integrating all characteristic information and reconstructing the haze-free image. Numerous experiments have been implemented on synthetic and real-world imaging scenarios. Dehazing results illustrated that our TSDNet remarkably outperformed several state-of-the-art methods in terms of both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. The high-accuracy object detection results have also demonstrated the superior dehazing performance of the TSDNet under hazy atmosphere conditions. The source code is available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/gy65896/TSDNet</uri> .

Jamin Wells. Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach.

In Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach, Jamin Wells argues that shipwrecks were essential to the transformation of the American shoreline from an isolated, largely unoccupied, and repulsive space in the late eighteenth century to a well-regulated and beloved playground at the end of the nineteenth century. In doing so, Wells brings a fresh perspective to the history of the seaside by connecting it with frontier historiography and the environmental history of disasters. According to a well-trodden narrative, most famously associated with historian Alain Corbin’s Lure of the Sea (1994), Europeans long turned their back to the coast, which they associated with the biblical deluge, marine monsters, pirates, and invaders. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, these fears had dissipated, and Europeans from all walks of life aspired to stroll, and even live, on the seaside. Where Corbin and others highlighted the cultural forces behind this momentous change—romantic sensibilities, medical discourses, and scientific discoveries—“materialists” saw the transportation and communication revolutions at work, connecting shorelines ever more closely to cities. Building on both arguments, Wells shows that there is a unique and specifically American version to this narrative and that shipwrecks are essential to it. On the shores of the early republic—more specifically the coastal communities situated between Boston and Philadelphia—shipwrecks were “common, almost daily occurrences” (5). In an economy dominated by maritime commerce, they represented major loss for the federal government and vessel owners, as well as tragic events. Over the course of the century, efforts by private groups and the government to prevent shipwrecks, save lives, and regulate salvage work “domesticated” the shore. In parallel, journalistic and fictional shipwreck narratives introduced Americans to the coast and its people. In the process, the unruly, frightening shoreline of yesteryear morphed into the “modern beach, a thoroughly commercialized, contested, and engineered space that is at the heart of the American experience” (2).

Changes in communication and language thinking of Ukrainians in the era of the coronavirus pandemic

Under the influence of the coronavirus pandemic, the modern world is expe-riencing a communicative revolution. Internet communication and the phenomenon of virtuality are globalizing, and behavioural and communicative models are being modified. In this reality, a person rebuilds and acquires new knowledge, the perception of the world changes, new language thinking appears, a kind of neologization of the Ukrainian language takes place, linguistic terminology develops and the linguistic creativity is being actualized.

تأثير وسائل الإعلام في السياسات الدولية بالمنطقة العربية

The study aims to study the influence of the media on international politics, and to support the axes of the thesis with case studies from various platforms and media outlets that lived through the phases of the democratic Arab Spring series in all the Arab countries that the thesis will address to talk about. The studies included in the content of the thesis reveal the available conceptual and theoretical links. Between the information and communication revolution on the one hand, and the democratic transition on the other. From these basic concepts and relationships, there are many objectives that are based on the influence exerted by the most prominent manifestations of the communications and information revolution, such as satellite television channels and the Internet, in their relationship to the process of forming public opinion, institutions, bodies and parties in the Arab region. The study also aims to democratize and build systems and institutions in the region. Al-Arabiya operates according to a forward-looking vision for political and social relations.

Information and communication trends of the modern world

Internet infographics is examined in the article and such basic parameters of communications as speed and volume, which caused the “information explosion” in the 2000s are revealed. The concept of infodemic is characterized, its main features such as fakes, lies and mainly negative news in mass media are determined. Requirements for communications in the conditions of the infodemic are formed, which include the speed of strategy development and implementation, bright content. It is determined that today’s communications are a “mix” of newsmaking, useful and interesting content, and social responsibility. The reloading of network revolutions is described. It includes revolutions in education, communication, parent-child relationships, mass media, technologies and communications. It is noted that the main trend in education nowadays is a lifelong learning. The speed of information dissemination and its volume forces people to compensate for their lack of knowledge by constant self-education. It is stated that communication is moving to social networks and messengers, the communication protocol is changing, and these will change the format of human relations in the future. It has been investigated that the format of interaction between parents and children, which has been formed for thousands of years, is collapsing. Today’s children are the generation of the Internet and digital technologies. They are surrounded by a large amount of available information, they are able to acquire any kind of knowledge, which significantly expands their worldview and allows them to move not in the format of vertical career growth, but to gain new interesting experience every time. As for the media revolution, mass media no longer have exclusive access to news, because any influencer (opinion leader) reaches an audience that is more qualitative and can spread information quickly. The development of technologies takes place in the following areas: artificial intelligence, the Internet of Everything, the augmented and virtual reality. All these network revolutions affect the development of communication technologies, which forces advertisers and marketers to approach the formation of advertising campaigns in a new way.

A Study of the Accuracy of Positioning in a Network of Wireless Underwater Sensors Depending on the Genetic Algorithm

Wireless Sensors Networks (WSNs) are a scientific revolution in wireless communications and embedded systems. WSN is based on the idea of abandoning the human factor, which was often an obstacle because it was not possible to be in the places where these networks are placed, especially if the collection of information required a long time, Underwater wireless sensor nodes can be deployed for monitoring, exploration, and for disaster protection, and this is what is called Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs). nIn this paper, we will study how the parameters of the genetic algorithm change when locating sensors under water, Including the error rate, the number of nodes in the network and the time taken to implement.

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT): A Game Changer for MNEs in Emerging Markets

Global trade determines how we live. Technology determines the extent of the market and the ease of trade. The transportation revolution reduced costs and cut travel times. The communication revolution (ICT) improved the quality and quantity of information in the global market and cut the cost of global trade in goods and services, including labor. Global trade has become a B2B market wherein multinational enterprises (MNEs) are major players. While MNEs began as major companies in developed countries, their success in importing labor from the emerging market through production of consumer goods in the developed countries led to emerging MNE markets. In an earlier paper on MNEs in emerging markets, Agmon suggested that blockchains reduce the cost of using the global price mechanism, and both production and consumption decisions can be made by individuals in a global market. In this paper, we discuss the case of the multinational industry of venture capital-supported small start-ups, wherein individuals with ideas for better goods, production processes, and services approach capital markets in major countries for financing their ideas. The accompanying distributed ledger technology (DLT) takes global trade a step further by opening up the possibility of global trade among individuals and loosely organized, task-oriented groups of individuals located in both developed and emerging economies. In a DLT world with decentralized markets, no transaction costs, and perfect information, the key to global trade will lie in the capabilities of the individual, or a specific task-oriented, loosely organized group of individuals. Small countries are finding it increasingly difficult to compete in international markets. We seek to examine whether the conceptual framework of DLT, when implemented in a small country that chooses to export ideas rather than products, thereby eliminating the need for a complex supply chain, can be the first empirical example of the DLT concept as a “game changer”. The experience of the Israeli VC industry points to exciting potential through the application of the mindset and the unique legal and financial structures of the “start-up nation”, wherein an economy was created that relies on small and frequently changing high-tech firms. In a country where VC investment capital is entirely imported, there is more room for investment in DLT technologies. Such an economy is compatible with the DLT concept and provides a unique empirical example of the DLT technological change’s effect on the economy of a small country.

Cross-Modal Semantic Communications

It is well known that multi-modal services, including video, audio, and haptic signals, aim to provide immersive experience with low latency and high reliability. Although multi-modal signals have differences in structure, transmission delay, and jitter, there are potential cross-modal relations among these multi-modal signals that can be explored to realize multi-modal signal processing and streaming. As a revolutionary communication paradigm, semantic communications can not only provide human-oriented services by delivering the intended meanings, but also break the modality barriers through compact semantic information extracted from multi-modal signals, which can help to achieve cross-modal applications. However, due to the polysemy and ambiguity issues, how to guarantee high reliability for semantic communications is a tremendous challenge. To overcome this dilemma, this article designs a cross-modal semantic communication paradigm that involves three modules: The cross-modal knowledge graph (CKG) provides essential background knowledge and signal patches for encoding and decoding respectively; the cross-modal semantic encoder infers potential implicit semantics to reduce encoding polysemy; and the cross-modal semantic decoder ensures consistency between source signals and recovered signals in terms of bit level and semantic level in order to reduce decoding ambiguity. They collaboratively improve the reliability of the communication system, which is verified by the simulation result.