Long-distance Calls Research Articles

Meerkat close calls encode group-specific signatures, but receivers fail to discriminate

A great deal of variation is known to underlie the vocalizations of animals. Calls can for example vary between individuals or between social and behavioural contexts. Calls also have the potential to vary between groups. Many group-living animals are known to produce stereotyped group-specific calls and such group signatures are thought to play a role in territory defence or indeed mate choice. Group signatures are generally found in long-distance call variants that work to maintain contact between group members, sometimes referred to as ‘contact calls’. Cooperatively breeding, territorial meerkats, Suricata suricatta , also use contact calls, potentially to maintain social organization during foraging. However, these contact calls are generally quieter than long-distance calls in other species, and better described as ‘close calls’. We investigated whether these similar call types also possess group-specific signatures and whether any such variation is used by receivers. We recorded close calls from 71 individuals belonging to 10 meerkat groups. We found that such close calls indeed possessed group signatures, but that this underlying variation did not appear to be used by receivers, possibly because meerkats use other sensory systems to identify nongroup members. We stress the importance of conducting playback experiments when investigating group-specific vocal signatures and use our results as a basis for predicting which animals may rely on group information encoded within close calls.

Differences in self-reported academically dishonest and nondishonest pharmacy students when rating professional dishonesty scenarios

Objectives To determine whether academically dishonest student pharmacists are less likely to recognize the dishonest nature of academic activities and workplace scenarios compared with nondishonest students. Methods Students were surveyed to assess factors associated with academic dishonesty and the relation of these variables to ethical ratings of professional scenarios. Results Thirty-one percent admitted cheating in pharmacy school. Most students did so by cheating on lab assignments (80%) or presenting group work as an individual effort (84%). Only 16% admitted to cheating on exams and 7% to plagiarizing. Self-reported academic dishonest students were statistically ( p < 0.05) less likely to consider certain workplace scenarios (e.g., taking over-the-counter analgesics without paying, self-treating with an antibiotic, making personal long-distance calls from the company phone) as dishonest. Conclusions The absolute level of and factors associated with cheating among student pharmacists is similar to that among other professional students. Dishonesty appears to be restricted to (what students believe to be) minor transgressions. In regard to professional dishonesty, differences exist between those that self-reported dishonest academic activities.

社会の学としての霊長類学：『他者』としての他個体と『社会的な複雑さ』チンパンジーの長距離音声を介した行為接続のやり方と視界外に拡がる場の様態

Chimpanzees form a multi-male/multi-female unit-group and the members of the group usually split into temporary parties. They sometimes exchange long-distance calls, pant-hoots (PH) between parties and utter PH in chorus within a party. Although most studies on PH have focused on the sociobiological functions for vocalizers or the referential functions, such studies based on individualistic or anthropocentric viewpoint do not tell us how chimpanzees interact with others by using PH. This study aims to analyze how the chimpanzees of Mahale connect their actions through PH and how they organize their social fields beyond visual contact with involvement of others in sight, by applying ethnomethodology and focusing on hearers’ actions. Case analyses based on the result of their usual interval for exchanging PH (10 sec.) revealed that both vocalizers and hearers practiced the same “call-answer” form. Utilizing this form, not only vocalizers could construct an auditory social field between parties but also non-answering hearers could observe the field. Even if PH hearers headed to the place from which they heard the PH, they sometimes restrained themselves from answering to hear whether or not the answer was uttered by other parties, and anew uttered PH to elicit the voluntary answer from the party with whom they tried to interact. Meanwhile, PH hearers sometimes answered immediately regardless of the contexts in which the PH was uttered. Employing these two hands, they would organize their auditory social fields. Once two parties constructed their auditory social field by exchanging PH, one could wait for next call from another or they could get to meet visually with repeating PH exchanges. On the other hand, PH hearers sometimes terminated or deferred those interactions, which hearers’ attitudes were supposed to generate the society in which the members could stay apart from each other even beyond PH distance. In conclusion, these hearers’ various actions show the sociality related to their dynamic fission-fusion society and engaging in non-referential interactions. When we say that chimpanzees’ society is complex, we may be often thinking of the process of interactions resulted from such their unique sociality.

Sparse telephone gateway for internet telephony

Internet telephony is promising for long-distance calls. To serve the general public, a service provider can operate a telephone gateway in each servicing city to bridge the local telephone network and the Internet, so that users can use telephones or mobile phones to access these telephone gateways for long-distance calls. The service provider should serve many cities to attain good service coverage but it is costly to operate telephone gateways in all of these cities. In this paper, we propose a sparse telephone gateway configuration to serve many cities cost-effectively. Using this configuration, if the service provider serves N cities, it operates telephone gateways in only M cities where M

Horse (Equus caballus) whinnies: a source of social information

Many animal species that rely mainly on calls to communicate produce individual acoustic structures, but we wondered whether individuals of species better known as visual communicants, with small vocal repertoires, would also exhibit individual distinctiveness in calls. Moreover, theoretical advances concerning the evolution of social intelligence are usually based on primate species data, but relatively little is known about the social cognitive capacities of non-primate mammals. However, some non-primate species demonstrate auditory recognition of social categories and possess mental representation of their social network. Horses (Equus caballus) form stable social networks and although they display a large range of visual signals, they also use long-distance whinny calls to maintain contact. Here, we investigated the potential existence of individual acoustic signatures in whinny calls and the ability of horses to discriminate by ear individuals varying in their degree of familiarity. Our analysis of the acoustic structure of whinnies of 30 adult domestic horses (ten stallions, ten geldings, ten mares) revealed that some of the frequency and temporal parameters carried reliable information about the caller's sex, body size and identity. However, no correlations with age were found. Playback experiments evaluated the behavioural significance of this variability. Twelve horses heard either control white noise or whinnies emitted by group members, familiar neighbours or unfamiliar horses. While control sounds did not induce any particular response, horses discriminated the social category of the callers and reacted with a sound-specific behaviour (vigilance and attraction varied with familiarity). Our results support the existence of social knowledge in horses and suggest a process of vocal coding/decoding of information.

Hub dependence in constrained economies: the case of North Korea

While the geographical and economic factors concerning the development of hub ports are widely described by a variety of scholars and professionals, there is no recognized methodology measuring the hub dependence of a given port, region, or country. Based on a 20-year database of vessel movements, this paper proposes a methodology measuring hub dependence. North Korea offers a good case of a constrained economy facing dramatic internal and external pressures. Notably, the weight and geographical extent of its maritime connections are worth analysing because of its contrasted evolution from Soviet influence, geopolitical isolation, and growing trade due to economic reforms and increased foreign investments. The main results of this study show the spatial shift from long-distance calls to feeder calls: global foreland contraction, regionalization within Northeast Asia, and traffic concentration upon closest hubs of which South Korean ports. We conclude that hub dependence is a combination of local constraints and trade growth. The political implications of this phenomenon are explored, and a spatial model of hub dependence is proposed.

Orangutan Long Call Degradation and Individuality Over Distance: A Playback Approach

Researchers have documented individual vocal recognition in several primate species but do not know whether the changes in acoustical parameters that might occur over distance influence the informational content of a call that relates to individuality. Accordingly, we performed playback experiments using male orangutan long-distance calls (long calls) and rerecorded them at increasing distances from the source. We aimed to determine 1) which acoustical parameters changed over distance and 2) whether the percentage of calls that a discriminant analyses would assign to the correct individual would change over distance. High-frequency harmonics were attenuated and lost with increasing distance, but other parameters did not change. The percentage of calls assigned to the correct individual did not change over distance, indicating that even though there are some acoustical changes over distance the opportunity for other individuals to recognize the caller remains similar until ≤300 m, which was the maximum distance at which we rerecorded calls. Extending similar experiments to other primate species and other taxa, while subsequently conducting experiments to assess whether individual discrimination by receivers is indeed based on relatively stable acoustical parameters, would forward our understanding of acoustic communication.

Voice over Internet protocol for the orthodontic practice: A sensible switch from plain old telephone service

Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) is a revolutionary new technology that is causing a stir in the telecommunications industry and threatening the existence of traditional telephone service providers. Based on a simple method of converting analog audio signals into digital data before being transmitted over the Internet, VoIP has gained immense popularity among consumers. The technology is now regarded as an alternative to traditional telephone service for the orthodontic office. When the economics are considered, it is cost-effective, especially for a busy orthodontic practice where the call volumes both in and out are always high. VoIP has the potential to reduce costs, break the barriers between local vs long-distance calling, and make life easier for the office staff. However, deploying VoIP requires a cautious and thought-out process. Users should fully understand the risks and benefits before switching from the public switched telephone network. VoIP customers and service providers are vulnerable to many of the same impersonation-based attacks by those who attempt toll fraud, and identity and information theft. In this article, VoIP is introduced to orthodontic practitioners, who might be unfamiliar with this technology. Internet protocol based private branch exchange systems that are currently marketed as open-source technologies are also reviewed. Additionally, VoIP is compared with the traditional public switched telephone network technology and evaluated for its potential applications in an orthodontic office for both increased efficiency and cost savings.

Will We Ring the Bell? Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) with the Salvation Army

This article describes an "experimental" Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program, designed for eight Salvation Army Officers [Ministers] who were located in cities from Washington, DC to Antonio, Texas. The four Consecutive Units were accomplished over a two year span, with most of the work taking place by e-mail and long-distance telephone conference calls. One of the important questions to be answered is, "Can CPE be done mostly long-distance"?

It's all about you: my resolutions for 2007.

AT THE END OF 2006, TIME MAGAZINE announced its Person of the Year: You. The editors explained that instead of selecting a great person for this honor, they chose to view the world through a different lens. What they discovered was "a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network You Tube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes" (1). * Last July, this column focused on the arrival of Web 2.0 and its various software tools (2). Web 2.0 is not just the next version of web software. It is what TIME calls a revolution. It is, in fact, all about you. It is you who write a daily blog. It is you who have entered the world of FaceBook. It is you podcasting your lectures. It is you who have your classes add to the knowledge base on Wikipedia. It is you, as Grossman says in TIME, who are part of "a massive social experiment" (1). So, for my new year's resolutions, I have decided to create my own technology goals for participating in this social experiment and helping my students understand the positive, negative, and unintended consequences that this revolution can have on health care and nursing. Here are four of my resolutions for 2007: 1 I WILL ESTABLISH A SKYPE[TM] ACCOUNT AND BEGIN TO DIALOGUE WITH MY INTERNATIONAL COLLEAGUES AND STUDENTS. For the last year or so, colleagues have been urging me to get an account so that we can chat. I tried to install the software about a year ago but it did not work properly on my Macintosh computer. Recently, I bought a new Mac laptop with a built-in camera, so now I am ready to go. My greatest incentive for tackling the Skype installation happened this summer while I was traveling to an international conference in Korea. I went the conference armed with 1,000 minutes on my AT&T calling card, only to learn that one call to the United States equals 800 minutes. Like many Americans whose cell phones did not work, I spent a fortune making long-distance calls home while European colleagues were calling home on their Skype accounts. So what is Skype? According to Wikipedia, it is a peer-to-peer voice-over IP (VoIP) communications network, founded by entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis and acquired by eBay[R] in October 2005. According to Wikipedia, "the Skype communications system is notable for its broad range of features, including free voice and video conferencing, and its ability to use peer-to-peer (decentralized) technology to overcome common firewall and NAT (Network address translation)." (See http://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype.) Skype uses downloadable software that works both in the PC and Mac world. Download the software from www.skype.com and watch a short video that serves as an introduction to the whole notion of using Skype to make free calls to other members. A host of other features can be configured for your Skype account. You can use SkypeOut, which allows you to use your computer to call any phone in the United States and in the world. As of January 31, the yearly rate for this service for unlimited calls within the US and Canada is $29.95. Requirements are a SkypeOut account and a headset with a microphone. SkypeIn allows you to have a regular phone number that friends and family can use to call you no matter where you physically may be. Suppose you are on sabbatical in Paris and want your friends and family in Denver to call you frequently. They will pay only for a call to Denver--not to France. You can also get Skype voicemail with this service. Skype has features for videoconferences, group audioconferences, group chats, public chats, and more, including Skypecasts that are live, moderated discussions with 100 different users. …

NORTH AMERICAN ELK BUGLE VOCALIZATIONS: MALE AND FEMALE BUGLE CALL STRUCTURE AND CONTEXT

Bugle calls of male North American elk (Cervus elaphus) are common sounds during fall in the Canadian and United States Rocky Mountains. In contrast, bugle calls of female elk are rarely heard. We quantified the acoustic structure of elk bugle calls, which is an essential 1st step to understanding of the function of the call. We also investigated whether motivation‐structural rules apply to these long-distance calls. We measured male elk bugle calls in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, during autumn of 1998 and 1999 and we measured female elk bugle calls on 2 Colorado elk ranches (private establishments that raise elk for commercial purposes) during spring of 2001 and 2002. All bugle calls had 3 segments: on-glide, whistle, and off-glide. Male bugle calls were longer in duration than female bugle calls (P , 0.01). Bugle calls emitted in aggressive interactions had 4 or 5 low-frequency formants, resulting in harsher, wider bandwidth bugles (P , 0.001) compared to the tonal calls emitted in nonaggressive contexts, which lacked formants. Thus, elk bugle calls appear to conform to motivation‐structural rules.

Dynamic bandwidth allocation for Internet telephony

Internet telephony is promising for long-distance calls because of its low service charge and value-added functions. To provide Internet telephony to the general public, a service provider can operate a telephone gateway in each servicing city to bridge the local telephone network and the Internet, so that users can use telephones or fax machines to access this gateway for services. In this paper, we propose a dynamic bandwidth allocation scheme for two purposes: (1) each telephone gateway can fully utilize the available bandwidth to serve more telephone and fax sessions and (2) it can respond to the changing environments. We exploit three properties for dynamic bandwidth allocation. First, in a telephone session, each user usually alternates between speaking and listening. When a user is not speaking, she does not send any voice stream and hence the bandwidth can be dynamically released from this session for the other sessions. Second, voice traffic is elastic because it can be further compressed at the cost of a lower quality. Third, fax traffic is flexible because it can be temporarily delayed. We exploit these three properties to allocate bandwidth to telephone and fax sessions dynamically. When a telephone gateway adopts dynamic bandwidth allocation, it can serve more telephone and fax sessions while providing acceptably good quality-of-service (QoS), and it can give more stable QoS when the available bandwidth varies.

Disability Protests: Contentious Politics, 1970-1999 (review)

Disability Protests: Contentious Politics, 1970-1999 by Sharon Barnartt and Richard Scotch (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2002, 272 pp., casebound, $69.95) IN THE 1970s, deaf people protested outside of telephone companies around the country because they were angry at having to pay for special equipment and spend three times more than hearing people to make long-distance telephone calls containing the same information. To me, these protests seemed to be a demonstration of the shattered hope that the years of massive volunteer effort to achieve telecommunications access would be successful. Emotion can perhaps be a useful form of information to awaken minds and start the gears of litigation and legislation rolling. In 1988, I was living in northern England for six months when the Deaf President Now occurred. I followed it as well as I could from that distance, wishing I could have been there at that historic event. Unknown to many people, stacks of the Blue Book telephone directories, which lists TTY numbers around the country, were provided to the protestors by Telecommunications for the Deaf, Inc. (TDl) to facilitate rapid communication about the unfolding Week the World Heard Gallaudet. In effect, one political movement seemed to build upon the results of another. Deaf people learned to see farther with demands for social change because we stood on the shoulders of former protesters. I have also often wondered what our world would be like today in terms of both education and employment had the Deaf community a century ago protested the lack of access to the telephone. Visual forms of telephone technologies, including the Telautograph, were known by the Deaf communities in England and the United States in the late-nineteenth century. Indeed, initial excitement about them was evident in these countries' respective Deaf periodicals. Later, deaf people missed a golden opportunity to bring the Electrowriter out of train stations and hotels into their homes and offices until something better came along-the TTY modem. Instead, we waited about ninety years for basic access to long-distance communication, something taken for granted by the hearing society. How our world has changed-or not changed-because of protests in their many forms is a question worthy of research. With these general thoughts in mind, I looked to Disability Protests: Contentious Politics, 1970-1999 by Sharon Barnartt and Richard Scotch as a resource for my home library. The writers used event history analysis to focus on political actions that occurred within the Deaf and disabled communities between 1970 and 1999. The expression protest implies a collective behavior that has been organized in an attempt to change society. Disability Protests provides a good historical introduction. The terminology and concepts associated with disability are well defined, and the authors briefly examine the span from the Colonial period through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, giving the reader a context for the emergence of contentious action among people with disabilities. …

Long-Distance Calls Between Cells Connected by Tunneling Nanotubules

Long membrane tethers between cells, known as membrane nantotubes or tunneling nanotubules, create supracellular structures that allow multiple cell bodies to act in a synchronized manner. Calcium fluxes, vesicles, and cell-surface components can all traffic between cells connected by nanotubes. Thus, complex and specific messages can be transmitted between multiple cells, and the strength of signal will suffer relatively little with the distance traveled, as compared to the use of soluble factors to transmit messages. Connecting multiple antigen-presenting cells, for example, can help amplify and coordinate immune responses that are distal to an antigenic site. Conversely, because the ability of a pathogen to spread between cells is a key determinant of its capacity to multiply, pathogens may exploit nanotubes for their own transmission.

Cooperative Information Sharing to Improve Distributed Learning in Multi-Agent Systems

Effective coordination of agents' actions in partially-observable domains is a major challenge of multi-agent systems research. To address this, many researchers have developed techniques that allow the agents to make decisions based on estimates of the states and actions of other agents that are typically learnt using some form of machine learning algorithm. Nevertheless, many of these approaches fail to provide an actual means by which the necessary information is made available so that the estimates can be learnt. To this end, we argue that cooperative communication of state information between agents is one such mechanism. However, in a dynamically changing environment, the accuracy and timeliness of this communicated information determine the fidelity of the learned estimates and the usefulness of the actions taken based on these. Given this, we propose a novel information-sharing protocol, post-task-completion sharing, for the distribution of state information. We then show, through a formal analysis, the improvement in the quality of estimates produced using our strategy over the widely used protocol of sharing information between nearest neighbours. Moreover, communication heuristics designed around our information-sharing principle are subjected to empirical evaluation along with other benchmark strategies (including Littman's Q-routing and Stone's TPOT-RL) in a simulated call-routing application. These studies, conducted across a range of environmental settings, show that, compared to the different benchmarks used, our strategy generates an improvement of up to 60% in the call connection rate; of more than 1000% in the ability to connect long-distance calls; and incurs as low as 0.25 of the message overhead.

Long-distance calls in Neotropical primates.

Long-distance calls are widespread among primates. Several studies concentrate on such calls in just one or in few species, while few studies have treated more general trends within the order. The common features that usually characterize these vocalizations are related to long-distance propagation of sounds. The proposed functions of primate long-distance calls can be divided into extragroup and intragroup ones. Extragroup functions relate to mate defense, mate attraction or resource defense, while intragroup functions involve group coordination or alarm. Among Neotropical primates, several species perform long-distance calls that seem more related to intragroup coordination, markedly in atelines. Callitrichids present long-distance calls that are employed both in intragroup coordination and intergroup contests or spacing. Examples of extragroup directed long-distance calls are the duets of titi monkeys and the roars and barks of howler monkeys. Considerable complexity and gradation exist in the long-distance call repertoires of some Neotropical primates, and female long-distance calls are probably more important in non-duetting species than usually thought. Future research must focus on larger trends in the evolution of primate long-distance calls, including the phylogeny of calling repertoires and the relationships between form and function in these signals.

Why Do the Poor and the Less-Educated Pay More for Long-Distance Calls?

The benefits of competition among the long-distance interexchange carriers (IXCs) are not realized equally by all their customers. Despite the declines in rates under the discount plans, we document that basic message toll service (MTS) rates have been rising for several years. We show that poorer and less educated customers pay more than better educated and more affluent customers. We suspect that the reason for this correlation is that they are more apt to pay the MTS rates or other high rates, and we present some preliminary evidence that this tendency explains the correlation that we find. We also present evidence that the payment differences exist even after controlling for usage. These findings are significant because it seems likely to us that these two patterns (rising MTS rates and higher payments by the poor and the less educated) will each be ameliorated by the entry of the regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs) into long-distance markets—a state-by-state regulatory process that was nearly complete as of the beginning of 2004.

The Nature of Cyber-attacks in the Future: A Position Paper

Given society's increasing dependence on networked systems, it is clear from their past occurrences that cybercrimes pose a serious threat to our long-term welfare. This article focuses on the current relationship between networked systems and cybercrimes, analyzes the nature of the relationship from a fundamental engineering perspective, and systematically explores where and how future advances in networked systems might influence the evolution of cyber-attacks, even inadvertently giving rise to new forms of cybercrimes. Historical data reveals that technological advances in engineering systems design, including communications and transportation, were often accompanied by lack of foresight, thereby inadvertently opening doors to new forms of vulnerabilities following deployment. The greater the extent of the advancement, the deeper the potential chasm and more severe the damage incurred when a clever perpetrator successfully exploits the weaknesses. For example, when the Bell Telephone System employed human operators to switch telephone calls in the early 1900s, anonymous and unauthorized long-distance calls were a rarity. As soon as automatic switching equipment replaced human operators, “phone phreaks”1 discovered a serious flaw in the system. First by simply whistling or using a toy whistle and later through utilizing a tone-generating bluebox, one could break into the signaling control and make unauthorized long-distance calls.

Emergence of individual recognition in young macaques

Few studies have addressed the development of nonhuman primate infants' responses to conspecific vocalizations. Previous studies showed that the appropriate response to alarm, intergroup and long-distance contact calls emerged at about 6 months of age. It remained unclear whether this age constitutes a watershed in terms of infants' sociocognitive development or whether it was due to the types of stimuli used in the experiments. I therefore examined the development of infant Barbary macaque, Macaca sylvanus, responses to maternal calls, under the assumption that recognition of the mother is one of the tasks that infants should master as early as possible. I presented infants of different age categories with short bouts of screams recorded from their mothers or another female of the same social group. Experiments on yearlings confirmed the suitability of the experimental approach: yearlings responded significantly more strongly to maternal calls than to calls from unrelated females. Infants were tested at 4, 10 and 16 weeks of age. In the youngest age group, they failed to respond to the playbacks, whereas from 10 weeks of age on they responded significantly more strongly to maternal calls, suggesting that by this age they recognized their mothers by voice. These results suggest that the developmental trajectories in the domain of comprehension learning may be flexible, in the sense that infant responses may depend on the salience of, and the exposure to, the call type under study. The experiments also show that screams may transmit individual-specific characteristics that are perceptually salient to the listeners.

Romantic and Parent-Child Relationships at a Distance

Cultural expectations in U.S. society dictate that communication should be frequent and face-to-face in order to sustain close relationships, romantic partners should live in geographic proximity, and married individuals and parents and young children should share a residence. Such conceptions about communication in and residential structures of close relationships immediately call into question how geographically separated individuals can maintain close relational ties. Numerous types of long-distance relationships are reviewed, including dating relationships, dual-career couples, and spouses separated due to military deployments or incarceration. Parents and young children may also encounter separations because of divorce, military deployment, or imprisonment The variety of long-distance relationships (LDRs) and families calls us to reconsider traditional views of the role of communication in close relationships and family structures. Research must go beyond frequency, amount, or mode of interaction. Vague, positive communication may help sustain LDRs as it fosters idealized images. The usual criterion of relational stability as success is simplistic, as success may be defined in numerous ways. Relational dissolution or lessened contact may be considered a success in certain circumstances. The proximal community plays a significant, albeit not always helpful role for individuals in longdistance relationships.