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Abstract: It has been argued that semantic systems reflect pressure for efficiency, and a current debate concerns the cultural evolutionary process that produces this pattern. We consider efficiency as instantiated in the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle, and a model of cultural evolution that combines iterated learning and communication. We show that this model, instantiated in neural networks, converges to color naming systems that are efficient in the IB sense and similar to human color naming systems. We also show that some other proposals such as iterated learning alone, communication alone, or the greater learnability of convex categories, do not yield the same outcome as clearly. We conclude that the combination of iterated learning and communication provides a plausible means by which human semantic systems become efficient.

Introduction: Effective communication is the heart of any organization. It is associated with employees' job satisfaction and productivity and therefore, is responsible for the institution's continuity and prosperity. In educational institutions, communication has been undergoing swift and significant changes that affected not only instructional strategies, but also administrative dimensions. The need for instant and precise information made digital mediums indispensable for school administration that helps in planning, following up, executing, and evaluating short-term and long-term goals. Since the start of the 21st century, a multitude of smartphone applications have surfaced, all designed to enhance communication. WhatsApp is one of the applications that stands as the most popular medium, which is widely spread and used on personal as well as professional basis. The question at hand is whether employing WhatsApp as a communication tool within educational institutions can effectively contribute to the development of communication competence, encompassing aspects such as communication motivation, communication knowledge, and communication skills. Methods: Based on the indicators used to measure communication competence in institutions, this qualitative study elicited relevant information through semistructured interviews from 14 different government secondary school principals in Jerusalem and the West Bank about the approach principals employ WhatsApp to achieve competence. Results: The results of the study show that indicators of communication competence are achieved through the use of WhatsApp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: It has been proposed that semantic systems evolve under pressure for efficiency. This hypothesis has so far been supported largely indirectly, by synchronic cross-language comparison, rather than directly by diachronic data. Here, we directly test this hypothesis in the domain of color naming, by analyzing recent diachronic data from Nafaanra, a language of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and comparing it with quantitative predictions derived from the mathematical theory of efficient data compression. We show that color naming in Nafaanra has changed over the past four decades while remaining near-optimally efficient, and that this outcome would be unlikely under a random drift process that maintains structured color categories without pressure for efficiency. To our knowledge, this finding provides the first direct evidence that color naming evolves under pressure for efficiency, supporting the hypothesis that efficiency shapes the evolution of the lexicon.

IntroductionEffective communication is the heart of any organization. It is associated with employees’ job satisfaction and productivity and therefore, is responsible for the institution’s continuity and prosperity. In educational institutions, communication has been undergoing swift and significant changes that affected not only instructional strategies, but also administrative dimensions. The need for instant and precise information made digital mediums indispensable for school administration that helps in planning, following up, executing, and evaluating short-term and long-term goals. Since the start of the 21st century, a multitude of smartphone applications have surfaced, all designed to enhance communication. WhatsApp is one of the applications that stands as the most popular medium, which is widely spread and used on personal as well as professional basis. The question at hand is whether employing WhatsApp as a communication tool within educational institutions can effectively contribute to the development of communication competence, encompassing aspects such as communication motivation, communication knowledge, and communication skills.MethodsBased on the indicators used to measure communication competence in institutions, this qualitative study elicited relevant information through semi-structured interviews from 14 different government secondary school principals in Jerusalem and the West Bank about the approach principals employ WhatsApp to achieve competence.ResultsThe results of the study show that indicators of communication competence are achieved through the use of WhatsApp.

Federated Learning (FL) can train models in an edge environment without sending raw data. However, the performance is still constrained by data heterogeneity. To address the problems of data heterogeneity and resource scarcity in edge devices, we propose Federal Learning via Dynamic Aggregation (FedDA), which eliminates the influence of data heterogeneity and improves model accuracy. FedDA updates the impact of individual local models on the global model in real-time at different stages. It adjusts the local epoch in each round to prevent the device from dropping out while obtaining a more accurate local model. The core module is the model impact factor (MIF) that inscribes the aggregation weights to solve the impact of fixed weights on the aggregation model with improper extraction of local information. We conducted several experiments to evaluate the convergence speed using different algorithms on the MINIST. FedDA consistently outperforms the other six SOTA algorithms on MNIST, Cifar10, and Cifar100 datasets. In significant data heterogeneity, FedDA improves accuracy by up to 6% over the different algorithms and at least about 3%, especially in resource-scarce environments. To reach the specified accuracy, FedDA is 3 times faster than SCAFFOLD and at least 50% faster than other algorithms.

This paper considers the decentralized optimization problem, where agents in a network cooperate to minimize the sum of their local objective functions by communication and local computation. We propose a decentralized second-order communication-efficient algorithm called communication-censored and communication-compressed quadratically approximated alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), termed as CC-DQM, by combining event-triggered communication with compressed communication. In CC-DQM, agents are allowed to transmit the compressed message only when the current primal variables have changed greatly compared to its last estimate. Moreover, to relieve the computation cost, the update of Hessian is also scheduled by the trigger condition. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed algorithm can still maintain an exact linear convergence, despite the existence of compression error and intermittent communication, if the local objective functions are strongly convex and smooth. Finally, numerical experiments demonstrate its satisfactory communication efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the time of technology and globalization, effective organizational communication is critical for a company success. In a continuous changing world, companies must take a strategic and effective approach to communicate with the employees, customers and third-party stakeholders. The objective of this paper focuses on the study of organizational communication in an international company, one of the largest providers of communication services in Romania, with office in Bucharest. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and evaluate the way the company manages internal organizational communication and to identify ways in which it can be improved, with the ultimate goal to contribute to increase the company performance and competitiveness in the market. The case study carried out within the analyzed company had as objective the evaluation of organizational communication from the employee perspective, for which purpose, we elaborated and applied a questionnaire with 10 questions, on a sample of 100 people, in which we captured both their perception of the relevance, the frequency or transparency of information received from managers, as well as their opinion regarding the level of communication within the company, respectively, the employees involvement in the communication process and in the improvement of the organizational communication. The satisfaction regarding organizational communication was evaluated positively by a majority of respondents (64%). The quality of information received regarding projects and changes in the company was positively assessed by the majority of employees (66%). Communication between departments was generally considered positively (59%), and communication between management and employees was considered adequate by most respondents (69%). Regarding the employees involvement in the process of improving the organizational communication, the majority of respondents (67%) stated that they were not actively involved in this process. The results of the study also provided a perspective of how internal communication may affect the employee performance and satisfaction, as well as potential problems or constraints that could be resolved to improve the effectiveness of organizational communication within the company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Functionalist accounts of language suggest that formsare paired with meanings in ways that support efficientcommunication. Previous work on grammatical markingsuggests that word forms have lengths that enable efficientproduction, and previous work on the semantic typologyof the lexicon suggests that word meanings representefficient partitions of semantic space. Here we consider anintegrated information-theoretic framework that captures howcommunicative pressures influence both form and meaning.We take tense systems as a case study, and show how theframework explains both which tense systems are attestedacross languages and the length asymmetries of the forms inthose systems.

Copyright of Logos: A Journal, of Religion, Philosophy Comparative Cultural Studies & Art (08687692) is the property of Logos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Recently, the industrial revolution has led to the emergence of a new generation of robotics called as modular robotic system (MRS). However, such new technology faces technical and practical challenges, in particular the self-reconfiguration. Subsequently, converting from one morphology to another is a complicated task for MRS that may take a long time because of the huge number of communications needed among the modules. In this paper, we propose an efficient and robust cluster-based planning, called RUN, for fast self-reconfigurable modular robots. RUN works on two stages and aims to group the modules into clusters in order to reduce the communication overhead between them and offers a fast reconfiguration process for the MRS. The first stage selects a set of modules, called cliques, and then, it divides the modules into clusters based on the shortest paths between modules and cliques. The second stage introduces two communication algorithms: the inter-module algorithm that allows an efficient communication between the cliques of the clusters, and the intra-module algorithm that reduces the communication number between the modules of the same clusters. We show the efficiency of RUN in terms of communication reduction and fast reconfiguration process, through simulations on Roombots compared to other exiting techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ambiguity has often been viewed as a hindrance to communi-cation. In contrast, Piantadosi et al. (2012) argued that ambi-guity may be useful in that it allows communication to be ef-ficient, and they found support for this argument in the spokenforms of modern English, Dutch, and German. The historicalorigins of this phenomenon cannot be probed in the case of spo-ken language, but they can for written language, as it leaves anenduring trace. Here, we explore ambiguity and efficiency inone of the earliest known written forms of language: Sumeriancuneiform. Sumerian cuneiform exhibits extensive ambiguity,and for that reason it has been considered to be poorly suited forcommunication. We find, however, that ambiguity in Sumeriancuneiform supports efficient communication, mirroring the ear-lier findings for spoken English, Dutch, and German. Thus, theearly stages of human writing exhibit evidence suggesting pres-sure for communicative efficiency.

Seasonal patterns vary dramatically around the world, andwe explore the extent to which systems of season categoriessupport efficient communication about the local environment.Our analyses build on a domain-general information-theoreticmodel of categorization across languages, and we identify sev-eral qualitative predictions that emerge when this model is ap-plied to season naming, including the prediction that systemswith even numbers of categories should be more common thansystems with odd sizes. We test the model quantitatively usinga collection of season systems drawn from the linguistic andanthropological literature and data specifying temperature andprecipitation in locations associated with these systems. Ourresults support the predicted even-odd asymmetry, and we alsofind that the model makes a number of successful predictionsabout the locations of boundaries between seasons.

Do speakers use less redundant language with more proficient interlocutors? Both the communicative efficiency framework and the language development literature predict that speech directed to younger infants should be more redundant than speech directed to older infants. Here, we test this by quantifying redundancy in infant-directed speech using entropy rate – an information-theoretic measure reflecting average degree of repetitiveness. While IDS is often described as repetitive, entropy rate provides a novel holistic measure of redundancy in this speech genre. Using two developmental corpora, we compare entropy rates of samples taken from different ages. We find that parents use less redundant speech when talking to older children, illustrating an effect of perceived interlocutor proficiency on redundancy. The developmental decrease in redundancy reflects a decrease in lexical repetition, but also a decrease in repetitions of multi-word sequences, highlighting the importance of larger sequences in early language learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: As the organization grows, attention begins to be paid to the growing potential and role of communication. Communication, which so far played mainly the role of providing information in the course of the current rapid evolution, is beginning to be noticeable in every aspect of business operations. Currently, managers must be aware that communication affects the entire organization, while it is their role to influence communication in order to obtain the best benefits. The purpose of this article is to present comments or problems that were noticed by the authors of the reviewed articles during the communication process. Design/methodology/approach: This review is based on studies conducted in case to understand communication problems, published between 2017 and 2022. Findings: The analysis highlight that the communication problems in organizations are increasingly encountered and, what is most important, almost always very easy to solve. Practical implications: In the case that almost all the publications discussed are focused on the most common problems in enterprises, it can be assumed that with a high probability such problems will appear or have already appeared in every organization. Thanks to this review, as well as a deeper analysis of the aforementioned literature, readers of this article can very quickly identify similar communication problems in their environment and its exemplary solution. Originality/value: This review emphasizes that communication should be considered on many levels since it affects both people and organizations in different respects. In addition, in this research work, it can be indicated that communication allows us to better understand human needs and act on them appropriately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across languages. However, the existing approaches are not able to explain coherently the frequency distribution and evolution of word order in individual languages. We propose that variation in word order reflects different ways of balancing competing pressures of dependency locality and information locality, whereby languages favor placing elements together when they are syntactically related or contextually informative about each other. Using data from 80 languages in 17 language families and phylogenetic modeling, we demonstrate that languages evolve to balance these pressures, such that word order change is accompanied by change in the frequency distribution of the syntactic structures that speakers communicate to maintain overall efficiency. Variability in word order thus reflects different ways in which languages resolve these evolutionary pressures. We identify relevant characteristics that result from this joint optimization, particularly the frequency with which subjects and objects are expressed together for the same verb. Our findings suggest that syntactic structure and usage across languages coadapt to support efficient communication under limited cognitive resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sign languages use multiple articulators and iconicity in the visual modality which allow linguistic units to be organized not only linearly but also simultaneously. Recent research has shown that users of an established sign language such as LIS (Italian Sign Language) use simultaneous and iconic constructions as a modality‐specific resource to achieve communicative efficiency when they are required to encode informationally rich events. However, it remains to be explored whether the use of such simultaneous and iconic constructions recruited for communicative efficiency can be employed even without a linguistic system (i.e., in silent gesture) or whether they are specific to linguistic patterning (i.e., in LIS). In the present study, we conducted the same experiment as in Slonimska et al. with 23 Italian speakers using silent gesture and compared the results of the two studies. The findings showed that while simultaneity was afforded by the visual modality to some extent, its use in silent gesture was nevertheless less frequent and qualitatively different than when used within a linguistic system. Thus, the use of simultaneous and iconic constructions for communicative efficiency constitutes an emergent property of sign languages. The present study highlights the importance of studying modality‐specific resources and their use for linguistic expression in order to promote a more thorough understanding of the language faculty and its modality‐specific adaptive capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zipf (1935) observed that word length is inversely proportionalto word frequency in the lexicon. He hypothesised that thiscross-linguistically universal feature was due to the Principleof Least Effort: language-users align form-meaning mappingsin such a way that the lexicon is optimally coded for efficientinformation transfer. However, word frequency is not the onlyreliable predictor of word length: Piantadosi, Tily, and Gib-son (2011) show that a word’s predictability in context is infact more strongly correlated with word length than word fre-quency. Here, we present an artificial language learning studyaimed at investigating the mechanisms that could give rise tosuch a distribution at the level of the lexicon. We find thatparticipants are more likely to use an ambiguous short form inpredictive contexts, and distinct long forms in surprising con-texts, only when they are subject to the competing pressures tocommunicate accurately and efficiently. These results supportthe hypothesis that language-users are driven by a least-effortprinciple to restructure their input in order to align word lengthwith information content, and this mechanism could thereforeexplain the global pattern observed at the level of the lexicon.

Semantic categories in the world's languages often reflect a historical process of chaining: A name for one referent is extended to a conceptually related referent, and from there on to other referents, producing a chain of exemplars that all bear the same name. The beginning and end points of such a chain might in principle be rather dissimilar. There is also evidence supporting a contrasting picture: Languages tend to support efficient, informative communication, often through semantic categories in which all exemplars are similar. Here, we explore this tension through computational analyses of existing cross-language naming and sorting data from the domain of household containers. We find (a) formal evidence for historical semantic chaining, and (b) evidence that systems of categories in this domain nonetheless support near-optimally efficient communication. Our results demonstrate that semantic chaining is compatible with efficient communication, and they suggest that chaining may be constrained by the functional need for efficient communication.

The world we live in has become increasingly globalized, and freedom of labor is a feature of the society in which we live. All businesses are influenced by this phenomenon of globalization and those who manage them must take into account the opportunities and disadvantages of this phenomenon. As professional sport has recently become a real industry, it is also strongly influenced by the socio-economic changes in the contemporary world. Like all businesses, sports organizations are guided by the principles of management, but still having more differences from other areas of the industry. In addition, sports organizations have become increasingly culturally diversified, being a benchmark for what multiculturalism means. Thus, for the good development of their activity, the staff that is part of them must be able to communicate effectively so that the organization can achieve its objectives. This study presents the role of communication in the management of multicultural teams in Belgium and Romania and proposes several solutions to improve communication within culturally diversified organizations.

During educational life students, teachers, parents, and school principals often face different ways of communication. During the educational process, we have teachers that achieve interactivity during the class, which influences breaking monotony as an important factor in improving the students' success. But, on the other side, some teachers fail to achieve effective classes where a negative atmosphere prevails, and students are indifferent to learning while making noises and disrespecting class rules. Communication between students and teachers plays an important role during the learning process. Communication occurs in every process of daily life in which people share information, ideas, and feelings with others. It includes not only spoken or written sentences but also body language and style, that is, anything that adds to the meaning of a message. Teachers, as lesson managers, must have communication skills to create a positive and motivating atmosphere for learning during a class. They're lesson planners who, by planning lessons' contents, according to Kosovo's Curriculum Framework, adapt to educational levels. In addition to managing skills, he/she should create positive relations with educational partners, starting with students, parents, and school principals and they should possess interpersonal intelligence to succeed during the learning process. Modern teaching is very different from traditional one in terms of methods of communication, as well as that teaching and learning methodology. In primary schools, communication should be carried out effectively while creating mutual dialogue and support in education. The purpose of this research is to analyze and describe the applicability of effective types of communication by teachers in rural and urban schools of Prizren. Respondents of this research are 120 students in the 5 grade of Prizren primary schools; "Motrat Qiriazi" - Prizren, "Fadil Hisari" - Prizren, "Lekë Dukagjini" - Prizren, "Gjevat Berisha" - Prizren, and also 86 parents. During the theoretical elaboration of the research, I relied on the literature related to the content of the topic, while for data collection I surveyed parents and students to define different opinions on how to communicate in primary schools. As for the used means for this research, I have used standardized questionnaires. Expected results from the research on the development of communication among primary school teachers will enable a new approach to achieving effective parent-student-teacher communication as an important criterion to increase the quality of teaching. Results will also serve in giving recommendations, respectively in giving instructions to teachers and as well other institutions dealing with the development of educational policy capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, second-order distributed optimization algorithms have been becoming a research hot in distributed learning, due to their faster convergence rate than the first-order algorithms. However, second-order algorithms always suffer from serious communication bottleneck. To conquer such challenge, we propose communication-efficient second-order distributed optimization algorithms in the parameter-server framework, by incorporating cubic Newton methods with compressed lazy Hessian. Specifically, our algorithms require each worker communicate compressed Hessians with the server only at some particular iterations, which can save both communication bits and communication rounds. For non-convex problems, we theoretically prove that our algorithms can reduce the communication cost comparing to the state-of-the-art second-order algorithms, while maintaining the same iteration complexity order O (ϵ − 3 / 2) as the centralized cubic Newton methods. By further using gradient regularization technique, our algorithms can achieve global convergence for convex problems. Moreover, for strongly convex problems, our algorithms can achieve local superlinear convergence rate without any requirement on initial conditions. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to show the high efficiency of the proposed algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion that, to facilitate processing, as semantic complexity increases, syntactic complexity decreases, follows from various linguistic theories. This brief report presents the results of testing that notion, by analysing synchronic data from 38languages and correlating canonical measures of semantic and syntactic difficulty. We expected an overall positive tendency. However, the results came out mixed to negative. There is a notable degree of variation and there are no clear tendencies within language families. After detailing the theoretic and cognitive reasons that support the original hypothesis, we conclude with a short discussion about the potential causes and implications of our findings. A possible interpretation is that the interaction we are looking for is more subtle than one might have assumed.

Communication is vital to informing and understanding. It is clear that communication is one of the basic functions of management in any organization and its importance cannot be disputed. In project management, it is often mentioned that a good project manager is a good communicator and a person who has developed listening skills. Thus, 80% of a project manager's time is dedicated to communication: meetings, reports, phone calls, emails, presentations, project meetings, etc. This article aims to identify the role of communication in the "SolidarNet project - a network of socially responsible entrepreneurs", implemented by the George Bacovia University of Bacau in partnership. The research method applied is the open-ended interview. The interview was applied to the project manager and a number of 4 experts from the project team. The results of the research highlight the importance of communication as a decisive factor in managing the expectations of all stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, distributed estimation of high-dimensional sparse precision matrix is proposed based on the debiased D-trace loss penalized lasso and the hard threshold method when samples are distributed into different machines for transelliptical graphical models. At a certain level of sparseness, this method not only achieves the correct selection of non-zero elements of sparse precision matrix, but the error rate can be comparable to the estimator in a non-distributed setting. The numerical results further prove that the proposed distributed method is more effective than the usual average method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The companies’ modernization is felt especially in the private sector, thus the employees, fundamental resources in the operating process of the company, are offered a favorable organizational climate. Emphasis is placed on a formal but familiar style of communication, as they are encouraged to participate with ideas and suggestions in the decision-making process. The private sector emphasizes the communication of the whole system; hence team buildings and events are regularly organized and the members of the families of the whole team are expected. In public companies there is a less familiar climate, in which things are difficult, as many public companies are not yet adapted to today’s systems. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the importance of communication in private and public companies, drawing a delimitation between how it is approached in both the private and public systems.

Since sending explicit messages can be costly, people often utilize "what is not said," i.e., informative silence, to economize communication. This paper studies the efficient communication rule, which is fully informative while minimizing the use of explicit messages, in cooperative environments. It is shown that when the notion of context is defined as the finest mutually self-evident event that contains the current state, the efficient use of informative silence exhibits the defining property of indexicals in natural languages. While the efficient use of silence could be complex, it is also found that the efficient use of silence can be as "simple" as the use of indexicals in natural languages if and only if the information structure satisfies some centrality and dominance properties. • People often utilize "what is not said," i.e., informative silence, to economize communication. • This paper studies the efficient communication rule that utilizes informative silence in cooperative environments. • It is shown that when the notion of context is defined as the finest mutually self-evident event that contains the current state, informative silence in any efficient rule exhibits the defining property of indexicals in natural languages. • The set of information structures in which indexical silence functions analogously to indexicals in natural languages is characterized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world we live in has become increasingly globalized, and freedom of labor is a feature of the society in which we live. All businesses are influenced by this phenomenon of globalization and those who manage them must take into account the opportunities and disadvantages of this phenomenon. As professional sport has recently become a real industry, it is also strongly influenced by the socio-economic changes in the contemporary world. Like all businesses, sports organizations are guided by the principles of management, but still having more differences from other areas of the industry. In addition, sports organizations have become increasingly culturally diversified, being a benchmark for what multiculturalism means. Thus, for the good development of their activity, the staff that is part of them must be able to communicate effectively so that the organization can achieve its objectives. This study presents the role of communication in the management of multicultural teams in Belgium and Romania and proposes several solutions to improve communication within culturally diversified organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its inception, Shannon's information theory has attracted interest for the study of language and music. Recently, a wide range of converging studies have shown how efficient communication pervades language, from phonetics to syntax. Efficient principles imply that more resources should be assigned to highly informative items. For instance, average information content was shown to be a better predictor of word length than frequency, revisiting the famous Zipf's law. However, in spite of the success of the efficient communication framework in the study of language and speech, very little work has investigated its relevance in the analysis of music. Here, we examine the organization of harmonic information in two large corpora of Western music, one made of MIDI files directly sequenced from scores, and the other made of MIDI recordings of live performances of highly skilled piano players. We show that there is a clear positive relationship between (contextual) information content of harmonic sequences and two essential musical properties, namely duration and loudness: the more unexpected a harmonic event is, the longer and the louder it is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Mediterranean Journal of Communication / Revista Mediterránea de Comunicación is the property of Revista Mediterranea de Comunicacion / Mediterranean Journal of Communication and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

While the languages of the world vary greatly, they exhibit systematic patterns, as well. Semantic universals are restrictions on the variation in meaning exhibit cross-linguistically (e.g., that, in all languages, expressions of a certain type can only denote meanings with a certain special property). This paper pursues an efficient communication analysis to explain the presence of semantic universals in a domain of function words: quantifiers. Two experiments measure how well languages do in optimally trading off between competing pressures of simplicity and informativeness. First, we show that artificial languages which more closely resemble natural languages are more optimal. Then, we introduce information-theoretic measures of degrees of semantic universals and show that these are not correlated with optimality in a random sample of artificial languages. These results suggest both that efficient communication shapes semantic typology in both content and function word domains, as well as that semantic universals may not stand in need of independent explanation.

Educational process requires an analysis and investigation of communication components, and in deep investigation of the communication in the classroom including interaction between students and teacher, sources of bottlenecks, the manner of expressing them and ways to optimize educational communication. Teaching communication efficiency is improved by several factors, of which, if they occur, may reduce differences what the teacher intends to provide to students and what they eventually capture or understand. These factors depend on the personality of the teacher, student personality, psychosocial and environmental context. Assuming that stronger influence of the teacher on students can be achieved by identifying and removing barriers to communication, the article aims to emphasize the origin of communication bottlenecks and propose a plan to improve communication in classroom.

The companies' modernization is felt especially in the private sector, thus the employees, fundamental resources in the operating process of the company, are offered a favorable organizational climate. Emphasis is placed on a formal but familiar style of communication, as they are encouraged to participate with ideas and suggestions in the decision-making process. The private sector emphasizes the communication of the whole system; hence team buildings and events are regularly organized and the members of the families of the whole team are expected. In public companies there is a less familiar climate, in which things are difficult, as many public companies are not yet adapted to today's systems. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the importance of communication in private and public companies, drawing a delimitation between how it is approached in both the private and public systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federated Learning (FL) can train models in an edge environment without sending raw data. However, the performance is still constrained by data heterogeneity. To address the problems of data heterogeneity and resource scarcity in edge devices, we propose Federal Learning via Dynamic Aggregation (FedDA), which eliminates the influence of data heterogeneity and improves model accuracy. FedDA updates the impact of individual local models on the global model in real-time at different stages. It adjusts the local epoch in each round to prevent the device from dropping out while obtaining a more accurate local model. The core module is the model impact factor (MIF) that inscribes the aggregation weights to solve the impact of fixed weights on the aggregation model with improper extraction of local information. We conducted several experiments to evaluate the convergence speed using different algorithms on the MINIST. FedDA consistently outperforms the other six SOTA algorithms on MNIST, Cifar10, and Cifar100 datasets. In significant data heterogeneity, FedDA improves accuracy by up to 6% over the different algorithms and at least about 3%, especially in resource-scarce environments. To reach the specified accuracy, FedDA is 3 times faster than SCAFFOLD and at least 50% faster than other algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The linguist George Kingsley Zipf made a now classic observation about the relationship between a word's length and its frequency; the more frequent a word is, the shorter it tends to be. He claimed that this "Law of Abbreviation" is a universal structural property of language. The Law of Abbreviation has since been documented in a wide range of human languages, and extended to animal communication systems and even computer programming languages. Zipf hypothesised that this universal design feature arises as a result of individuals optimising form-meaning mappings under competing pressures to communicate accurately but also efficiently-his famous Principle of Least Effort. In this study, we use a miniature artificial language learning paradigm to provide direct experimental evidence for this explanatory hypothesis. We show that language users optimise form-meaning mappings only when pressures for accuracy and efficiency both operate during a communicative task, supporting Zipf's conjecture that the Principle of Least Effort can explain this universal feature of word length distributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Without ignoring the importance of effective transmission of information for each management process, this research has its aim to describe the appraisal of the managers` communication at work dependent on their personal demographic and professional characteristics. It was found, on sample of 281 Serbian managers that the educational level, age and years of professional experience are of importance for the assessment of the quality of communication. Also, it was revealed that the importance of this process for management is recognized and that managers are using variety of different communicational forms. Also, there are no differences between the ways of communication at work and in everyday life, so, there is an idea that we should investigate personal characteristics of individuals when evaluating the quality of communicational processes.

One of the weaknesses of the Romanian medical system is the absence of the communicational culture. This absence is felt at all levels of the healthcare system: doctor-patient relationship, doctor-patient's relatives relationship, labor relations within the medical teams and units, the management of the large hospitals and of the medical institutions from the public administration system and last, but not least, the relationships of these units and institutions with the public opinion and, particularly, with the stakeholders. This paper tackled with some of the principles and values that underlie an efficient communication, the default of which was felt in various domains of the Romanian medical life. They were analyzed from the perspective of the Romanian and international literature and the conclusions drawn might inspire proposals for the improvement of the medical education as well as for the professional development of the Romanian doctors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical ambiguity is pervasive in language, and often systematic. For instance, the Spanish word dedo can refer to a toe or a finger, that is, these two meanings colexify in Spanish; and they do so as well in over one hundred other languages. Previous work shows that related meanings are more likely to colexify. This is attributed to cognitive pressure towards simplicity in language, as it makes lexicons easier to learn and use. The present study examines the interplay between this pressure and the competing pressure for languages to support accurate information transfer. We hypothesize that colexification follows a Goldilocks principle that balances the two pressures: meanings are more likely to attach to the same word when they are related to an optimal degree-neither too much, nor too little. We find support for this principle in data from over 1200 languages and 1400 meanings. Our results thus suggest that universal forces shape the lexicons of natural languages. More broadly, they contribute to the growing body of evidence suggesting that languages evolve to strike a balance between competing functional and cognitive pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]