Hierarchical Communication Research Articles

Political Monologue vs. Political Dialogue in Graphic Novels

Can a comic book communicate support to political status quo and strive to educate a society of obedient citizens who share common conservative values? Can it, in other cases, encourage tough questions and sound rebellious? And why are graphic novels so efficient as means of propaganda and ideological impact? Selected stories from “Commando” and “Battle” war comic series are discussed along with Alan Moore’s and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta in order to look at hierarchical versus anarchistic political communication in British graphic novels. Special attention is paid to uniqueness of comic books as a medium.

Information-Theoretic Approach to Strategic Communication as a Hierarchical Game

This paper analyzes the information disclosure problems originated in economics through the lens of information theory. Such problems are radically different from the conventional communication paradigms in information theory since they involve different objectives for the encoder and the decoder, which are aware of this mismatch and act accordingly. This leads, in our setting, to a hierarchical communication game, where the transmitter announces an encoding strategy with full commitment, and its distortion measure depends on a private information sequence whose realization is available at the transmitter. The receiver decides on its decoding strategy that minimizes its own distortion based on the announced encoding map and the statistics. Three problem settings are considered, focusing on the quadratic distortion measures, and jointly Gaussian source and private information: compression, communication, and the simple equilibrium conditions without any compression or communication. The equilibrium strategies and associated costs are characterized. The analysis is then extended to the receiver side information setting and the major changes in structure of optimal strategies are identified. Finally, an extension of the results to the broader context of decentralized stochastic control is presented.

Two Sun over One Firmament Culture: A Political-Communication Analysis on the Contestation of Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur over “Indonesian Malay Communities”

This paper tries to extent a personal experience on an interesting discussion concerning the communication issues in Medan, North Sumatra. There is the inclination of the North Sumatrans to the news broadcasted by Kuala Lumpur and Medan’s tends to identify with its cultural similarities. For Jakarta is officially the center of political authority over the ‘Indonesian Malay Communities’, this dual cultural loyalty creates an imaginary phenomenon: ‘Two Suns’ in term of authoritative news resources that applies upon ‘One Firmament Culture’. This means that there is a divided news orientation among the Indonesian Malay Communities’ that put Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur in a tacit contestation. While until today this kind of contestation is still going on, the same features have brought me to the phenomenon of hierarchical communication structure. This vividly seen when we realize how lopsided is in nature the communication relations between the global authorities who have controlled the strategic means of communications as well as their contents with the rest of the world. For, in exception to technological matters, the Kuala Lumpurinclined of ‘the Indonesian Malay Communities’ in communication practices is based more on cultural aspects than their technical and political necessities words.

Design and Implementation of Remote Wireless Monitoring and Control of Smart Power System Using Personal Area Network

The most essential requirement of empowerment is energy. Smart grid technology is a significant leap towards reliable and consistent electricity. Integration of information and communication technologies is a vital part of smart grid progress. Smart grid communication infrastructure is a hierarchical network integrating heterogeneous set of communication standards and technologies. Microgrid plays an important role as a strategic component of smart grid as it enables the use of renewable energy resources. It can resolve the issues like unelectrified villages, electricity theft, depletion of fossil fuels, Green House Gas (GHG) emissions and greenhouse effect. Smart microgrid can operate on both is land as well as grid connected mode. It also contains various hierarchical communication networks for monitoring and control of complete system. This paper describes an experimental investigation of wireless monitoring and control of smart microgrid prototype using IEEE 802.15.1 based low power Personal Area Network.

Knowledge management implementation in the school context: case studies on knowledge leadership, storytelling, and taxonomy

Teachers and school administrators in Hong Kong have had to cope with more work and performance pressure as they strive to implement educational reforms aimed at deepening students’ life-long learning skills. Management systems, which save time and transfer ideas, experiences, and knowledge more efficiently could help schools meet reform goals and relieve the occupational stress that inevitably accompanies change and progress. This paper explores the effect of knowledge management (KM) for school development by reviewing three cases selected from a school improvement project entitled “Knowledge Management and Primary School Development”. The project was launched specifically to determine if KM practices can assist educators to cope with added pressures and rise to the challenges of education reforms. The case studies illustrate three separate approaches to incorporating KM systems. Problems faced by these case-schools included declining school competitiveness, time-consuming data storage and retrieval practices, and hierarchical communication structures that stunted feedback from the teachers who are on the front line of educational reform. Interviews were conducted with school principals, middle managers, and teachers. The results show that the core KM strategies of personalization and codification can be adopted to improve school development. Knowledge leadership, knowledge sharing culture, and knowledge management system support were identified as success factors for schools to implement KM.

Distributed access control framework for IPv6-based hierarchical internet of things

IPv6 is considered as the most promising approach to enable the interoperability of the future Internet of Things due to its ability to provide sufficient public addresses. At the same time, hierarchical machine-to-machine communications have been identified as the key driver to integrate various IoT applications. This article focuses on wrapping up these technologies to provide seamless and interoperable IoT communications. We first introduce the background and standard supports for IPv6-based hierarchical M2M communications. Then the challenges and existing solutions are investigated for the massive access of IPv6- based hierarchical M2M networks with heterogeneous IoT applications. To this end, a systematic distributed access control framework is proposed with the aim of improving the overall network performance, achieving fairness, and dealing with dynamic network conditions. In addition, the optimal control and potential algorithms for the proposed control framework are developed. The performance evaluation shows significant performance gains in terms of utility maximization, network fairness, and application differentiation.

Corporate acculturation neglect in cross-border acquisitions: the case of Denmark and the United States

ABSTRACTThis study examines the impact of national culture on employee perceptions of internal communication during at Danish–American corporate cross-border acquisition. Twenty interviews were collected comprised of employees, managers, and chief executive officer whose organisations were directly involved in a cross-border acquisition. A modified constant comparative analysis of the data revealed that the three following identifiers were prominent as invaders to a successful Danish–American cultural integration: awareness of hierarchical communication differences; communication as misdirection; and reflection on consequences. The ways in which the acquisitions were mishandled led to the identification of a process we have labelled corporate acculturation neglect (CAN). CAN in acquisitions occurs when the acquired party feels that their familiar corporate culture has been neglected in favour of the communicative preferences of the acquiring company, resulting in feelings of frustration, uncertainty, and mistrust. This study concludes with recommendations for avoiding problems associated with CAN in cross-border acquisitions.

Optimizing Data Access for Wind Farm Control over Hierarchical Communication Networks

We investigate a centralized wind farm controller which runs periodically. The controller attempts to reduce the damage a wind turbine sustains during operation by estimating fatigue based on the wind turbine state. The investigation focuses on the impact of information access and communication networks on the controller performance. We start by investigating the effects of a communication network that introduces delays in the information access for the central controller. The control performance as measured by accumulated fatigue is shown to be significantly impacted by communication delays and also by the choice of the time instances at which sensor information is accessed. In order to optimize the latter, we introduce an information quality metric and a mathematical model based on Markov chains, which are compared performance-wise to a heuristic approach for finding this parameter. This information quality metric is called mismatch probability, mmPr, and is used to express quantitatively the information accuracy in a given scenario. Lastly, measurements of different communication technologies have been performed in order to carry out the analysis in a practically relevant scenario with respect to the communication network delays. These measurements are done in regard to packet loss and communication delays, and the simulations are rerun using either the traces from the measurements or scenarios constructed from the delay parameters.

Cooperative Co‐evolutionary Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm Based on Hierarchical Communication Model

Canonical Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm with a single species is insufficient to extend the diversity of solutions and may be trapped into the local optimal solution. This paper proposes a new co-evolutionary ABC algorithm (HABC) based on Hierarchical communication model (HCM). HCM combines advantages of global and local communication pattern. With adjustment strategies on species and groups, HCM can reduce the computational complexity dynamically. Performance tests show that the HABC algorithm exhibit good performance on accuracy, robustness and convergence speed. Compared with ABC and Integrated co-evolution algorithm (IABC), HABC performs better in solving complex multimodal functions.

SPARK: Sparsity-based analysis of reliable k-hubness and overlapping network structure in brain functional connectivity

Functional hubs are defined as the specific brain regions with dense connections to other regions in a functional brain network. Among them, connector hubs are of great interests, as they are assumed to promote global and hierarchical communications between functionally specialized networks. Damage to connector hubs may have a more crucial effect on the system than does damage to other hubs. Hubs in graph theory are often identified from a correlation matrix, and classified as connector hubs when the hubs are more connected to regions in other networks than within the networks to which they belong. However, the identification of hubs from functional data is more complex than that from structural data, notably because of the inherent problem of multicollinearity between temporal dynamics within a functional network. In this context, we developed and validated a method to reliably identify connectors and corresponding overlapping network structure from resting-state fMRI. This new method is actually handling the multicollinearity issue, since it does not rely on counting the number of connections from a thresholded correlation matrix. The novelty of the proposed method is that besides counting the number of networks involved in each voxel, it allows us to identify which networks are actually involved in each voxel, using a data-driven sparse general linear model in order to identify brain regions involved in more than one network. Moreover, we added a bootstrap resampling strategy to assess statistically the reproducibility of our results at the single subject level. The unified framework is called SPARK, i.e. SParsity-based Analysis of Reliable k-hubness, where k-hubness denotes the number of networks overlapping in each voxel. The accuracy and robustness of SPARK were evaluated using two dimensional box simulations and realistic simulations that examined detection of artificial hubs generated on real data. Then, test/retest reliability of the method was assessed using the 1000 Functional Connectome Project database, which includes data obtained from 25 healthy subjects at three different occasions with long and short intervals between sessions. We demonstrated that SPARK provides an accurate and reliable estimation of k-hubness, suggesting a promising tool for understanding hub organization in resting-state fMRI.

Компьютерное моделирование иерархической структуры коммуникационной сети с дискретными многопродуктовыми потоками

Компьютерное моделирование иерархической структуры коммуникационной сети с дискретными многопродуктовыми потоками

Towards Monitoring the Water Quality Using Hierarchal Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Water is a limited resource and essential for agriculture, industry and creatures existence on earth including human beings. Water quality monitoring is essential to control physical, chemical and biological characteristics of water. In addition, water quality monitoring can help with water pollution detection and discharge of toxic chemicals and contamination in water. A large number of inexpensive sensor nodes using hierarchical communication structure can be deployed to cover a large monitoring area with enough density. The paper provides a hierarchical routing protocol to reduce the communication overhead and increase the life time of wireless sensor network (WSN) suitable for river/lake water quality monitoring. The proposed routing protocol is compared with its predecessor LEACH. Experiments conducted using our custom simulator shows that the proposed routing protocol, power by genetic algorithm, create an energy balance in the network, save the node energy and thus increase the lifetime of the network by 25% in comparison to LEACH.

MOOC “Innovación Educativa y Desarrollo Profesional. Posibilidades y Límites de las TIC”. Una Experiencia desde la Educomunicación en el Proyecto Europeo ECO

The European Project (E-learning, Communication, includes) ECO is potentializing an educational model that seeks to avoid all kinds of hierarchical and one-way communication, since the new reality of the MOOC. Based on the principles of equity, social inclusion, accessibility, autonomy and openness, the empowerment of students becomes reality with this proposal for an innovative training, breaking the barriers of the digital space of the course MOOC to affect the social layer from the interaction in social networks. Taking as a reference a MOOC of ECO, the results presented in this study have been analyzed from a qualitative methodology opting for analysis, such as intentional sample, virtual learning community that develops in the course. It is intended to achieve with the research aims to analyze the written speech that keep teachers and participants of the MOOC "Educational innovation and professional development. The possibilities and limitations of ICT", within the forums and groups. It is opted for this type of analysis to identify the advantages and disadvantages that the members of the learning community value around the course object of study. According to figure in the project itself, this proposal is presented as an invitation to reflect on the role that the massive formation, online and open plays today, in any learning process, a perspective in educational communication.

Interprofessional experiences of recent healthcare graduates: A social psychology perspective on the barriers to effective communication, teamwork, and patient-centred care

Achieving safe, quality health care is highly dependent on effective communication between all members of the healthcare team. This study explored the attitudes and experiences of recent healthcare graduates regarding interprofessional teamwork and communication within a clinical setting. A total of 68 pharmacy, nursing, and medicine graduates participated in 12 semi-structured focus group discussions in clinical workplaces across three Australian states. Discussion focussed on graduates’ experiences of interprofessional education and its impact on their capacity for interprofessional teamwork and communication. The Social Identity and Realistic Conflict theories were used as a framework for qualitative data analysis. A consistent pattern of profession-focussed, rather than patient- or team-focussed goals was revealed along with reports of negative stereotyping, hierarchical communication, and competition for time with the patient. Graduates acknowledged the importance of communication, teamwork, and patient-centred care and felt a better understanding of the roles of other health professionals would assist them to work together for patients’ wellbeing. Identifying workplace identities and differential goals has uncovered possible motivations underlying health professionals’ behaviour. These insights may help improve interprofessional collaboration by focusing attention on common team goals, increasing feelings of worth and being valued among different professionals, and decreasing the need for competition.

Biotechnology versus agroecology: Entrenchments and surprise at a 2030 forecast scenario workshop

A scenario workshop methodology was used to obtain various assessments of the prospects of multi-stress resistant plants. As biotechnological breakthroughs they are supposed to counter climate change and food shortages. In Europe, however, green biotechnology is highly controversial and positions have become rather entrenched. In our results, the scenario method showed itself to be highly suited to easing the grip of cognitive entrenchments and hierarchical communication structures. At least within the arena of the workshop, technologies as well as participants are on equal footing and can be grouped into various arrangements. This exposes participants to novel perspectives and engages them in deliberations on alternative science policy options, thus taking existing problems and needs into account rather than adapting society to the solutions and requirements of the envisioned technologies.

A multi-level hierarchical communication network architecture for distributed generators

Power systems have been dramatically changing with cutting-edge information technologies. The new power system infrastructure has evolved and has been studied by many institutes and companies. Future power systems are bound up quietly with customer-side activities such as real-time pricing and distributed generators (DGs). To deploy those services on the power system, independent and hierarchical communication network architecture is proposed by information hiding and suppressing data exchange in this paper. The function of self-healing and resist attack will be easily implemented by this proposed network. This paper especially focuses on communication bandwidth and topology for power distribution areas as a backbone network for DGs.

Towards reinforcement learning for holonic multi-agent systems

Holonic multi-agent system HMAS offers a promising approach to model complex systems. HMAS is based on self-similar entities defined in a holarchical organization. Although some models and frameworks have been proposed for holonic systems, there is no general reinforcement learning method that can be easily implemented in HMAS. This paper presents a reinforcement learning method for HMAS. The holons in different levels have direct effect on learning process of each other through communication. For hierarchical communications between holons, abstract data flows are defined that are used for state estimation, action selection and reward calculation. The proposed learning method includes a self-similar structure in which the learning processes of the holons are independent of their actual positions in the holarchy. A real-world application is also used to show that how the holons can be implemented in practice. Experimental results show that the proposed holonic reinforcement learning method improves the performance.

Target Assignment in Robotic Networks: Distance Optimality Guarantees and Hierarchical Strategies

We study the problem of multi-robot target assignment to minimize the total distance traveled by the robots until they all reach an equal number of static targets. In the first half of the paper, we present a necessary and sufficient condition under which true distance optimality can be achieved for robots with limited communication and target-sensing ranges. Moreover, we provide an explicit, non-asymptotic formula for computing the number of robots needed to achieve distance optimality in terms of the robots' communication and target-sensing ranges with arbitrary guaranteed probabilities. The same bounds are also shown to be asymptotically tight. In the second half of the paper, we present suboptimal strategies for use when the number of robots cannot be chosen freely. Assuming first that all targets are known to all robots, we employ a hierarchical communication model in which robots communicate only with other robots in the same partitioned region. This hierarchical communication model leads to constant approximations of true distance-optimal solutions under mild assumptions. We then revisit the limited communication and sensing models. By combining simple rendezvous-based strategies with a hierarchical communication model, we obtain decentralized hierarchical strategies that achieve constant approximation ratios with respect to true distance optimality. Results of simulation show that the approximation ratio is as low as 1.4.

Zealous leadership paradigms

Leadership is the activity of influencing people to strive willingly for domain objectives. Leader is characterised by his vision, ability to inspire his subordinates, effective communication skills, personality characteristics such as charisma, high energy levels, positive attitude, high resilience, strong, adaptability, enthusiasm, self-confidence, initiative, dynamic, logical thinking, thinking out of box, problem solving capability, ego-less behaviour, giving back good things to society and strong capacity to convert unfavourable situations to favourable situations for the benefit of organisation/domain. Four leadership paradigms namely master/slave, server/client, followers/members and culture driven paradigms are defined. Zealous leadership paradigms model helps to execute given problem definition/task in a systematic way, with minimum number of control messages and delay. Complexity of given problem defines which communication model to use among centralised, hierarchical, linear and distributed communication which enhances the performance of the domain. This paper presents zealous leadership paradigms which help to choose critical path with less number of human resources/tools. It helps in performing accomplished tasks within minimum amount of time and delay. It aids in reduction of control message generation.

Dynamic Risk Reporting Practices: A Longitudinal Analysis of Hierarchical Risk Communication

This study investigates the risk reporting between central administration and different operating units performed on major project investments supervised by the Danish Ministry of Defense. The stud...