Telephone Exchange Research Articles

Politics, Economic Provisioning, and Suffrage in St. Louis: What Women Said, What Men Heard

Introduction In February of 1919, State Representative Charles P. Comer, a 39-yearold unmarried lawyer from a St. Louis brewery ward, voted against granting presidential suffrage to women. Despite the defiant gesture, expected of a man identified by national suffrage leaders as an especially vehement opponent of woman suffrage (Catt and Shuler 1923: 349), presidential suffrage passed that day in the Missouri House by 123 votes to eight.(1) Only four months later, Missouri joined the rush of state legislatures called to ratify the 19th Amendment, granting women equal suffrage on all electoral levels. On July 2, Representative Comer voted aye, explaining to his fellow (male) legislators that, I've played poker long enough to know when to lay down my hand (Catt and Shuler 1923: 349). The St. Louis women, upper class and progressive, who cheered from the galleries, had been battling the likes of Charles Comer for nine years.(2) One of the enduring questions in history is why any group would choose to share political power with another group, thus diluting its own power. The granting of suffrage to American women in 1919 is one of those events in which we seek answers. I focus here on the diversity of women's visible economic provisioning functions, arguing that the granting of suffrage had political benefits to the men in power; at the same time, the political risks were being lessened because women were starting to look like men economically. Charles Comer decided to join the majority. One would like to ask why he thought the game was lost. Was he suddenly convinced, as some historians have suggested, by the role of women in World War I? (for example, Barck and Blake 1947: 264-266). Was he impressed by the support finally voiced by President Woodrow Wilson or former President Roosevelt? (Catt and Shuler 1923: 258, 177). Did increasing awareness of the consequences of prohibition dry up opposition to suffrage along with the St. Louis breweries? Some states refused the pressure to call sessions to consider ratification. Why not Missouri, which had defeated suffrage in the 1913, 1915, and 1917 General Assemblies and in a 1914 referenda, and that had been considered a black state--nearly hopeless in its opposition--by suffrage leaders only months earlier? (Victory Map 1918). The Missouri case and, in particular, events in St. Louis help illuminate the reasons men in power were willing to grant the vote to women. By looking at a specific locale, we can see more clearly the economic and political workings that led even a black state's legislators to join the band-wagon. Papers and books over the years have often focused on what women said, on their changing strategies, related to the vote. This article uses the matter of economic provisioning to get at what men heard: what they took from women's strategies and what they saw women doing, politically and economically, to back up the talk. I will present background on what women were indeed doing, politically and economically, in St. Louis, as well as look at the political climate in which men operated. I will assess the reasons men might have been willing to grant suffrage in light of what they heard in St. Louis. Charles Comer might have had second thoughts about--or been wary of--denying the growing economic power he would have seen in the women of St. Louis. From his law office near the Old Courthouse, he would note the businesses that depended on their female typists, stenographers, and other clerical help. For that matter, he knew first-hand the inconvenience of the current strike by the girls on both St. Louis telephone companies: the Kinloch telephone exchange was barely working on July 2, 1919, and the Bell exchange was slow. (3) From his bachelor rooms at the Missouri Athletic Club on the northwest corner of Fourth and Washington Avenues, he might have seen a steady stream of immigrant and native women heading to the shirtwaist, shoe, and cigar factories each morning. …

Determinants of Fruits and Vegetables Consumption Among Persons With Doctor-Diagnosed Chronic Diseases

The objective of this study was to examine the factors associated with fruits and vegetables consumption pattern among persons with doctor-diagnosed chronic diseases. The authors examined cross-sectional, random-digit-dialed health survey data collected in 2008 in Houston, Texas, a city with a diverse ethnic population. The survey sample, which was designed to represent all households with telephones, was drawn using standard list-assisted random-digit-dialing methodology from telephone exchanges that serve the study area. A total of 1001 households were interviewed, and data obtained were subjected to both bivariate and multivariate analyses. Findings from this study indicate that fruits and vegetables consumption for persons with single chronic disease was significantly predicted (R (2) = 0.83) by the participants' age, educational level, and insurance status. None of the covariates considered in the study were significant predictors of fruits and vegetables consumption pattern among persons who had multiple chronic diseases. But when the subpopulation with any number of chronic diseases was considered, only gender (P < .05) and marital status (P < .001) were noted as the significant predictors of fruits and vegetables (R (2) = 0.34). More public health efforts are needed to make individuals with chronic diseases aware of the importance of consumption of fruits and vegetables. Clinicians and health care professionals should be encouraged to emphasize the importance of consumption of fruits and vegetables in their routine practice to the patients with chronic disease(s), especially to those who are unmarried and male.

Investigation of Sulfur Corrosion Inside Telephone Exchange Center by Metal Plate Exposure Method

Investigation of Sulfur Corrosion Inside Telephone Exchange Center by Metal Plate Exposure Method

Building better backhaul

Cellular networks have always relied on connections between each basestation and a mobile telephone exchange or switching centre (MtX/MsC) to 'backhaul' phonecalls and mobile data to the rest of the network. Backhaul has for years been taken for granted by all but a relatively small group of technicians and engineers who manage, maintain, and develop the time-divisionmultiplexing (TDM) systems that provide this vital connectivity.

System and Method for Supporting Conferencing Capabilities Over Packet-Switched Networks

An IP telephone which supports a voice conference call with a plurality of other IP telephones over a packet-switched network is disclosed. The IP telephone exchanges audio and signaling messages with the other IP devices during the conference call, and thereby allows three or more conference call participants to talk together over the packet-switched network. The IP telephone includes a memory, which stores a conferencing module and a channel establishment module, and a mixing module for mixing input signals received at the IP telephone to produce a combined signal output. When played back, the combined signal output to allows the user to hear what was said by the other conference call participants.

A Devilish Device: Attitudes to Telephony 1876–1920

On 15 January 1881 the International Bell Telephone Company opened the first public telephone exchange to twenty-two connected subscribers in Denmark's capital Copenhagen. In 1920 the capital's sole telephone company was Danish, the Copenhagen Telephone Company. It had more than 100,000 subscribers, but growth had been far from smooth since the beginning. In 1918 the leading Danish author of books on etiquette, Emma Gad, could still call the telephone 'newfangled' and decide to assign the appropriate handling of this 'tyrannical, but indispensable' tool. This paper aims to uncover the attitudes of the Danish population towards telephony reflected in directories, fiction, newspapers, satirical magazines, revue shows, and films. The frequency of telephone subscribers in Emma Gad's own circle is revealed as well as the subscribers in a number of known personal networks appearing in the paintings of the epoch's most famous Danish artist, Peder Severin Krøyer. The telephone was initially marketed and accepted as a business investment, while it had much more difficulty in finding its way into private homes, even when the price was not an obstacle. By analysing these kinds of sources we are discovering trends that no telephone directory or statistic could expose single-handedly: that the private telephone was either reluctantly accepted or rejected completely by the cultural as well as the economic elite of the epoch. To the upper class the telephone threatened to destroy a number of core values. It threatened the need for regular personal meetings maintained by personal correspondence with all the related social graces, protocols and etiquette associated with good manners.

Heuristic algorithms for the multi-depot ring-star problem

In this paper, we consider the problem of designing urban optical networks. In particular, given a set of telephone exchanges, we must design a collection of ring-stars, where each ring-star is a cycle composed of a telephone exchange, some customers, some transition points used to save routing costs and customers not on the cycle connected to the cycle by a single edge. The ring topology is chosen in many fiber optic communication networks since it allows to prevent the loss of connection due to a single edge or even a single node failure. The objective is to minimize the total cost of the optical network which is mainly due to the excavation costs. We call this problem Multi-Depot Ring-Star Problem (MDRSP) and we formulate it as an optimization problem in Graph Theory. We present lower bounds and heuristic algorithms for the MDRSP. Computational results on randomly generated instances and real-life datasets are also presented.

Racial differences in the perception of lung cancer

Racial disparities in lung cancer have been described well in the literature; however, little is known about perceptions of lung cancer in the general population and whether these perceptions differ by race. Data were obtained from the 2005 Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) survey. The authors used a sample design of random digit dialing of listed telephone exchanges in the United States. Complete interviews were conducted with 5491 adults, including 1872 respondents who were assigned to receive questions pertaining to lung cancer. All analyses were conducted on this subset of respondents. A statistical software program was used to calculate chi-square tests and to perform logistic regression analyses that would model racial differences in perceptions of lung cancer. All estimates were weighted to be nationally representative of the US population; a jack-knife weighting method was used for parameter estimation. Black patients and white patients shared many of the same beliefs about lung cancer mortality, and etiology. African Americans were more likely than whites 1) to agree that it is hard to follow recommendations about preventing lung cancer (odds ratio [OR], 2.05; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.19-3.53), 2) to avoid an evaluation for lung cancer for fear that they have the disease (OR, 3.32; 95% CI, 1.84-5.98), and 3) to believe that patients with lung cancer would have pain or other symptoms before diagnosis (OR, 2.20; 95% CI, 1.27-3.79). African Americans were more likely to hold beliefs about lung cancer that could interfere with prevention and treatment.

Performance Evaluation of Different QoS Models for Connecting Telephone Exchange Centers over Metro Ethernet Networks

Recent large deployment of high-speed metro Ethernet networks creates opportunity to connect legacy telephone exchange centers and cellular telephone base stations to the core telephony network. The success of data and legacy voice services convergence shall depend on whether it can provide the customer with the required QoS or not. Packet-base telephony service requires stringent bounds on end-to-end packet delay, jitter, and loss. New protocols such as MPLS and Diffserv are realized due to the major advantages associated with them such as QoS. This paper studies the performance of connecting telephone exchange centers over a metro Ethernet network using MPLS and DiffServ QoS model. We will implement some simulations to evaluate the performance in terms of delay, jitter and loss.

Topology of the Landline Telephone Sampling Frame

Based on a series of studies conducted by the authors during the past two years, it has been reported that the landline telephone sampling frame may no longer hold some of the properties based on which list-assisted Random Digit Dial (RDD) sampling methodology was developed. Among other fundamental changes, the digital transition of the telephone network infrastructure has undermined the relevance of the 100-series telephone number banks for construction of RDD sampling frames. Today, local telephone exchanges are not servo-mechanical in nature anymore and hence such banks no longer serve as physical building blocks for telephone number assignments. Consequently, telephone companies are now less systematic in their assignment of numbers to new customers, Tucker and Lepkowski (2008). With departure from the above AT&T-dominated structure and emergence of various innovations in the telecommunication industry, the landline telephone sampling frame has become subject to unfolding new realities. On the one hand, the residential density of the 100-series telephone banks has been changing, which is a manifestation of a series of interrelated factors. On the other hand, with the growing number of alternative providers of voice services there are emerging issues that have confounded the operational definitions that the RDD methodology has relied upon for frame construction and identification of residential landlines.

Back to the future

In the 1970s - before dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM), Google, Facebook, iPhone, and Skype - we had a telephone network based on circuit-switching technology for primarily real-time services (voice) and also for a very small traffic volume of data. This network provided reasonable voice quality, reliability, availability, and accessibility to customers. telephone exchanges of the '70s somehow could maintain call state information, which is considered unscalable by many in the 21st century despite the tremendous technological advances in chip technology of the last 40 years. Furthermore, according to the recent Cisco White Paper [1], The sum of all forms of video (TV, VoD, Internet, and P2P) will account for close to 90 percent of consumer traffic by 2012. This immediately leads to the question: if we are going to have fundamentally similar services, why shouldn't we consider increasing the use of networking concepts and solutions we had in the '70s?

Experimental Multiparticle Entanglement Swapping for Quantum Networking

This Letter reports the first experimental demonstration of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) entanglement swapping. We start with three pairs of entangled photons. Upon projection of three single photons, each from an entangled pair, into a GHZ state, the other three originally independent photons are entangled in a GHZ state-creation of multiparticle entanglement without any direct interaction. This scheme may facilitate networks for quantum telephone exchange, multiparty quantum communication and distributed quantum computation.

Playing the telecommunications game in New Zealand

New Zealand’s first telecommunication service arrived in 1862, when an electric telegraph line was established between Christchurch and Lyttelton, over a distance of 20km. After this event, the number and variety of both private and military transmission facilities expanded rapidly across New Zealand. The first telegraph service with Australia was launched in 1876 and this was followed by the first manual telephone exchange in 1881, with 30 customers connected. At this time, the New Zealand Post and Telegraph Department (NZPTD) was established to train and employ the country’s first public telecommunication operators. By 1930 the NZPTD had successfully connected all the main centres in New Zealand with a toll and telegraph network serving some 125,000 customers. Automatic telephone exchanges were introduced into the emerging network in the early 1900s, based on electro-mechanical switch technologies. This type of exchange evolved through until the late 1970s. A limited form of subscriber toll dialling (STD) service was introduced in 1953, but the real advances in long distance calls came with the provision of a national backbone of microwave radio technology installed in 1959. Throughout this period, various submarine cables were deployed to link New Zealand with Australia, North America, Europe and the South Pacific. The international capacity and route diversity was greatly enhanced with the introduction of a satellite earth station at Warkworth, North of Auckland in 1971, using the INTELSAT satellite network (Newman 2008). The pace of change of technology and the take-up of service accelerated through the 1960s and 1970s. Crossbar switching technology was introduced in the early 1970s to cope with the growth and by the late 1970s this technology was being replaced by the first generation of electronic switches. By the early 1980s the New Zealand Post Office provided services to over 95% of homes and businesses in New Zealand, and most of these homes had access to automated telephone service to anywhere in New Zealand and throughout the world. Furthermore, businesses could access a variety of sophisticated data services to meet their special needs for communication.

Mercurial switching [Microwave Bytes

On an interest scale of one to ten, I suspect electrical relays would barely score a one for most radio frequency (RF) designers. The relay in electrical language is an electromagnetically controlled switch and, as such, has little direct use for the average microwave engineer, and, indeed, some may not even be familiar with the term. But it turns out that I have had some experiences with certain types of relays that did actually once get me quite excited. Basically, a relay is a switch that can easily handle many amps and hundreds of volts, and that can be actuated by a control current that flows in an electromagnet. The control current is thus completely isolated from the circuit containing the main switch. Until maybe the late 1960s, most telephone exchanges were almost totally dependent on this device, along with a more extroverted cousin, the uniselector. But trouble lay ahead in the form of the transistor. Someone had the crazy notion that a transistor can be made to perform the same function as a relay, inasmuch as the current flowing between two of its three terminals could be used to control a much larger current flowing between a different pairing of terminals. I will not attempt to trace the ensuing history of electronic telephone exchanges, since I can't say I know much about it and it's probably rather boring. The main user benefit of replacing the electromechanical exchanges was faster call routing, but there were plenty of downsides that took quite a long time to sort out.

THE THEORY OF THE DAO AND TAIJI: A CHINESE MODEL OF THE MIND

I. Is There a Model of the Mind in Ancient China? The Greek adage “Know thyself” typifies humanity’s will to selfintrospection. In reflexive explorations of the self, humans became aware of the necessity to inquire into the nature and function of the mind and its thinking process. In the West since ancient times, there have appeared different models of the mind: the metaphysical, mathematical, semiotic, psychoanalytic, biophysical, neurophysical, digital, and cognitive, etc. These models display an interesting array of ideas about the mind. They range from a miniature plumbing system with reservoirs of memory, reason, and imagination in medieval common sense, a complex totality of functions in the spatiotemporal processing of knowledge-generating activities in eighteenth-century philosophical discourses, a telephone exchange with “wires” connecting the “exchange” in the brain to “subscribers” at the nerve ends in modern times, to a complicated information processing machine like the computer in the present age of information technology. In ancient China, a self-conscious concern with the human mind started, according to D. C. Lau, in the fourth century BCE, when Chinese thinkers discovered the complexities of the thinking process and became fascinated by them. 1 But the human organ responsible for thinking in ancient China was believed to be the heart rather than the brain. Mencius, one of the thinkers who started the initial inquiries into the human mind, articulates a remark that was taken to be a definitive conception: “Xin zhi guan ze si (The function of the heart/mind is to think).” 2 This conception prevailed until the coming of modern science from the West. Although Mencius proposed a fairly detailed model for the relationship between the human heart and the universe including the human body, he did not construct a model for the human mind itself. Given this condition, we may wonder: Is there a model of the mind in traditional Chinese intellectual thought? And if there is one, how does it relate to Western models of the mind?

Individual, social, environmental, and physical environmental correlates with physical activity among Canadians: a cross-sectional study

BackgroundThe identification of various individual, social and physical environmental factors affecting physical activity (PA) behavior in Canada can help in the development of more tailored intervention strategies for promoting higher PA levels in Canada. This study examined the influences of various individual, social and physical environmental factors on PA participation by gender, age and socioeconomic status, using data from the 2002 nationwide survey of the Physical Activity Monitor.MethodsIn 2002, 5,167 Canadians aged 15–79 years, selected by random-digit dialling from household-based telephone exchanges, completed a telephone survey. The short version of the International Physical Activity Questionnaire was used to collect information on total physical activity. The effects of socio-economical status, self-rated health, self-efficacy, intention, perceived barriers to PA, health benefits of PA, social support, and facility availability on PA level were examined by multiple logistic regression analyses.ResultsSelf-efficacy and intention were the strongest correlates and had the greatest effect on PA. Family income, self-rated health and perceived barriers were also consistently associated with PA. The effects of the perceived health benefits, education and family income were more salient to older people, whereas the influence of education was more important to women and the influence of perceived barriers was more salient to women and younger people. Facility availability was more strongly associated with PA among people with a university degree than among people with a lower education level. However, social support was not significantly related to PA in any subgroup.ConclusionThis study suggests that PA promotion strategies should be tailored to enhance people's confidence to engage in PA, motivate people to be more active, educate people on PA's health benefits and reduce barriers, as well as target different factors for men and women and for differing socio-economic and demographic groups.

A Location-Aware Call Forwarding Manager System For A Smart Telephony Network Of The Smart Space

Abstract A smart space, such as smart sensor rooms, an office, or simply an area, requires a smart telephony network for an effective voice communication between users. Nowadays, modern Private Branch Exchange (PBX) system does not only provide telephone exchange, but also supports many heterogeneous telephony networks and provides many other useful functions as well. Despite its powerfulness, PBX still cannot achieve a basic requirement for a smart space: It cannot adapt its surroundings automatically, i.e. people still need to make the call forwarding setting manually. In this paper, we propose a system with an algorithm named “2D location-aware” for tracking a person in a smart space. According to the ever-changing environment, the system performs an on-the-fly configuration to provide a dynamic telephony network. In other words, we aim to make all the telephones in the network available to every user in the smart space for receiving his phone calls without any manual call forwarding settings.

A Reassessment of List-Assisted Rdd Methodology

Random digit dial (RDD) sampling methodology was devel- oped over two decades ago when local telephone exchanges used 100- series telephone banks as physical building blocks for telephone number assignment. During the intervening decades the telecommunication in- dustry has undergone a number of fundamental changes that have had drastic effects on the efficiency and coverage of RDD samples. Based on a new study of landline telephone numbers, which was conducted during the second quarter of 2008, this paper reexamines the assumptions that are relied upon for construction of list-assisted RDD samples; quantifies the extent of undercoverage in the corresponding sampling frames; in- vestigates alternative methods of frame construction for RDD samples; and evaluates other sample design options that can offer greater coverage with varying degrees of efficiency.

Bias in List-Assisted 100-Series RDD Sampling

List-assisted Random Digit Dial (RDD) sampling methodology was developed decades ago when local telephone exchanges relied on 100-series telephone banks as physical building blocks. In recent years, however, the telecommunication industry has undergone a number of fundamental changes including a complete transition from analog to digital call routing and departure from an AT&Tdominated infrastructure to what is provided by regional independent operating companies as well as a growing number of alternative landline service providers. Combined with the decline in the proportion of directory-listed households and dilution of the residential landline assignment density due to a sharp increase in the number of residential exchanges, these changes have all but eliminated the utility of 100-series banks for frame construction and sampling purposes. In spite of the above drastic changes, the sampling frame construction methodology for RDD samples has changed very little (if any) over the years. This note provides an overview of a research conducted to reexamine the underlying assumptions that were conducive to list-assisted RDD sampling against the ground realities of today. Specifically, the extent of undercoverage bias in traditional RDD samples is quantified while alternative methods of frame construction are introduced that aim to restore some of the lost coverage. Proposed alternatives are evaluated in light of cost implications that can result from adoption of more inclusive sampling frames, since such expansions will inevitably require additional resources for sample designs and survey administrations.

CenturyTel, Inc.

AbstractCommunications (MIC: SIC: 4813 NAIC: 517110)CenturyTel is an integrated communications company engaged primarily in providing a variety of communications services, including local and long distance voice, Internet access and broadband services. Co. also provides fiber transport, local exchange carrier, security monitoring, and other communications and business information services. Co. conducts its operations in 25 states located in the continental U.S. As of Dec 31 2007, Co.'s local exchange telephone subsidiaries operated approximately 2.1 million telephone access lines, primarily in rural areas and small to mid‐size cities in 24 states, with over 68.0% of these lines located in Missouri, Wisconsin, Alabama, Arkansas and Washington.