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Communications is one of three strands of research under the Congruence Engine project, and will follow the other two, Textiles and Energy, in trialling the application of digital methods to better connect and understand collections held in partner institutions. This paper begins with a discussion of definitions of 'communications' and an overview of historiography. Interviews conducted by the author with collaborators (in the Science Museum Group, National Museums of Scotland, BT Archives and Historic England) elicit insights into what the Communications strand of Congruence Engine might achieve, obstacles that might be encountered, research directions to pursue and historical questions to ask. Finally, six possible projects are described and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is pervasive in our lives, influencing social interaction including human courtship. To connect with potential partners via CMC, modern relationship-seekers must master faster and shorter methods of communicating self-disclosure and affect. Although CMC can lack crucial sensory information in this context, emojis may provide useful aid. Across two studies, we assessed attitudes toward and frequency of emoji use, and whether signaling affect via emoji use relates to more romantic and sexual opportunities. Our findings suggest that emoji use with potential partners is associated with maintaining connection beyond the first date, and more romantic and sexual interactions over the previous year. This research provides evidence that emojis convey important affective information to potential partners, and are potentially associated with more successful intimate connection. Implications for multiple theoretical models and methodologies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Social sensing” is a form of crowd-sourcing that involves systematic analysis of digital communications to detect real-world events. Here we consider the use of social sensing for observing natural hazards. In particular, we present a case study that uses data from a popular social media platform (Twitter) to detect and locate flood events in the UK. In order to improve data quality we apply a number of filters (timezone, simple text filters and a naive Bayes ‘relevance’ filter) to the data. We then use place names in the user profile and message text to infer the location of the tweets. These two steps remove most of the irrelevant tweets and yield orders of magnitude more located tweets than we have by relying on geo-tagged data. We demonstrate that high resolution social sensing of floods is feasible and we can produce high-quality historical and real-time maps of floods using Twitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital exhaust left by flows of physical and digital commodities provides a rich measure of the nature, strength and significance of relationships between countries in the global network. With this work, we examine how these traces and the network structure can reveal the socioeconomic profile of different countries. We take into account multiple international networks of physical and digital flows, including the previously unexplored international postal network. By measuring the position of each country in the Trade, Postal, Migration, International Flights, IP and Digital Communications networks, we are able to build proxies for a number of crucial socioeconomic indicators such as GDP per capita and the Human Development Index ranking along with twelve other indicators used as benchmarks of national well-being by the United Nations and other international organisations. In this context, we have also proposed and evaluated a global connectivity degree measure applying multiplex theory across the six networks that accounts for the strength of relationships between countries. We conclude by showing how countries with shared community membership over multiple networks have similar socioeconomic profiles. Combining multiple flow data sources can help understand the forces which drive economic activity on a global level. Such an ability to infer proxy indicators in a context of incomplete information is extremely timely in light of recent discussions on measurement of indicators relevant to the Sustainable Development Goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantifying regularities in behavioral dynamics is of crucial interest for understanding collective social events such as panics or political revolutions. With the widespread use of digital communication media it has become possible to study massive data streams of user-created content in which individuals express their sentiments, often towards a specific topic. Here we investigate messages from various online media created in response to major, collectively followed events such as sport tournaments, presidential elections, or a large snow storm. We relate content length and message rate, and find a systematic correlation during events which can be described by a power law relation—the higher the excitation, the shorter the messages. We show that on the one hand this effect can be observed in the behavior of most regular users, and on the other hand is accentuated by the engagement of additional user demographics who only post during phases of high collective activity. Further, we identify the distributions of content lengths as lognormals in line with statistical linguistics, and suggest a phenomenological law for the systematic dependence of the message rate to the lognormal mean parameter. Our measurements have practical implications for the design of micro-blogging and messaging services. In the case of the existing service Twitter, we show that the imposed limit of 140 characters per message currently leads to a substantial fraction of possibly dissatisfying to compose tweets that need to be truncated by their users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the temporal evolution of digital communication activity relating to the American anti-capitalist movement Occupy Wall Street. Using a high-volume sample from the microblogging site Twitter, we investigate changes in Occupy participant engagement, interests, and social connectivity over a fifteen month period starting three months prior to the movement's first protest action. The results of this analysis indicate that, on Twitter, the Occupy movement tended to elicit participation from a set of highly interconnected users with pre-existing interests in domestic politics and foreign social movements. These users, while highly vocal in the months immediately following the birth of the movement, appear to have lost interest in Occupy related communication over the remainder of the study period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The design of an end-to-end digital interstellar communication system at radio frequencies is discussed, drawing on the disciplines of digital communication engineering and computer network engineering in terrestrial and near-space applications. One goal is a roadmap to the design of such systems, aimed at future designers of either receivers (SETI) or transmitters (METI). In particular we emphasize the implications arising from the impossibility of coordination between transmitter and receiver prior to a receiver''s search for a signal. A system architecture based on layering, as commonly used in network and software design, assists in organizing and categorizing the various design issues and identifying dependencies. Implications of impairments introduced in the interstellar medium, such as dispersion, scattering, Doppler, noise, and signal attenuation are discussed. Less fundamental (but nevertheless influential) design issues are the motivations of the transmitter designers and associated resource requirements at both transmitter and receiver. Unreliability is inevitably imposed by non-idealities in the physical communication channel, and this unreliability will have substantial implications for those seeking to convey interstellar messages. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A master–slave concept of chaotic system synchronization is examined and applied in secure data transmission. In most situations when examining this type of synchronization one considers the asymptotic stability of the particular system via Lyapunov’s direct method, or conditional Lyapunov exponents are considered. In this paper Lyapunov’s direct method is employed to show the asymptotic stability within the simplest piecewise linear master–slave chaotic flow. Also, however, in this paper, primarily the master–slave synchronization properties of the simplest quadratic chaotic flow and Ueda chaotic system are examined directly by means of mathematical manipulation of their dynamics equations, where possible, as well as via numerical simulations. In order to achieve this, in conjunction, numerical simulations and theoretical analysis are made use of. In this way it is shown that the synchronization error of the two aforementioned chaotic master–slave systems can indeed be predicted for certain driving signals, without the need for either analytical or numerical evaluation of the conditional Lyapunov exponents or employment of Lyapunov’s direct method. Finally, a digital communication system based on the initial condition modulation of the chaotic carrier by the binary message to be transmitted, in the presence of noise, is proposed and evaluated for the three chaotic systems investigated. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The authors propose a MPEG video quality control method for mobile streaming environment, in which the network agent called “RTP monitoring agent” is used. The RTP monitoring agent is placed at the border between the wired core network and the radio link. It feeds back QoS information, which contains the packet loss or delay fluctuation (jitter) observed by the agent itself, to the streaming server. Based on the feedback information sent from the monitoring agent and the feedback information sent from the streaming terminal, the streaming server decides whether the QoS degradation is due to network congestion or an error in the radio link. It then adjusts the transmission rate in the case of network congestion, and the packet loss immunity in the case of an error in the radio link. This paper also discusses a quality control method in MPEG video streaming that involves controlling file switching as well as the I-picture insertion interval and the FEC packet transmission rate. A computer simulation shows that the MPEG video receiving quality is improved more in the quality control method using RTP monitoring agent than in the conventional rate control method. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 1, 87(4): 54–64, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecja.10106 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A web-based on-line framework has been created to augment an undergraduate course in communication theory aimed at Spanish telecommunication engineering students. Its aim is to enrich the students' understanding on basic topics such as analogue and digital communication systems, information theory, random signals and noise, as well as to provide remote support, additional information and interactive tools. As an ultimate goal, it tries to contribute to a redefinition of the role of the student as the principal actor of his or her own learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The final Digital Britain report was published in June as to set out the Government''s final proposals and updating an interim version that has been published in January this year. This article builds upon an earlier article in [2009] 25 CLSR 263, which analysed the interim report in depth. The intention is not to repeat that earlier analysis, but rather update it and draw the reader''s attention to those key areas of change. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]