Communication Commons^™

Democracy, Technology And The Civil Rights Project, Caesar L. Mcdowell, Marianne S. Castano

Trotter Review

Democracy has been defined as "a political system in which the whole people make, and are entitled to make, the basic determining decisions on important matters of public policy." While the United States is often touted as the world's leading proponent of democracy, many U.S. citizens find themselves unable to engage in one of the central acts of democracy—creating public voice through public engagement. Public engagement in the United States is constrained by our inability to talk through our shared, complementary and divergent values. This lack of public engagement and our inability to speak in a "public voice" is also …

Creative Destruction In The Information Age: The Fallout On America's Latino Communities, Anthony G. Wilhelm

Trotter Review

The 104th Congress is in the midst of the first wholesale reform of telecommunications regulation in one-half century. The new regulatory framework emerging in the Republican-controlled Congress, if enacted, will usher in a radically deregulated, market-driven telecom environment, one in which the benefits of the emerging national information infrastructure will likely be distributed differentially, based on ethnicity and socio-economic status. Many U.S. residents may actually be charged higher rates for essential telecommunication services after deregulation (just as they did when cable television was deregulated), which may force many vulnerable users off the network. In addition, the concentration of media ownership …

Computer Utilization And Attitudinal Patterns In A Black Community, James Jennings

Trotter Review

During the Spring and Summer of 1995 The William Monroe Trotter Institute conducted a survey of resident utilization patterns and attitudes towards various facets of computer technology. This survey was commissioned by Freedom House, Inc. and supported with a grant from the AT&T Foundation in Boston, Massachusetts. The goal of this survey, composed of adult residents who have been served by Freedom House, and agency representatives of a small number of selected community-based organizations, is to inform planners at this agency about the computer technical needs, interests, and utilization patterns of its clients.

Introduction, James Jennings

Trotter Review

This issue of the Trotter Review focuses on one of the most important set of challenges facing the Black community in the U.S., and that is, how to access, and manage, and control, significant facets and processes associated with the information superhighway. This current issue identifies the nature of the challenges, but also proposes some strategies that the Black community and its leadership might consider to ensure both access and control over information technology.

Vrware Beware: Vr At Siggraph, P.D. Quick

SWITCH

The article uses the author’s experiences from the event of Siggraph ‘95 to comment on upcoming products using virtual or augmented reality. The article includes further discussion on the products’ effects on the psychology and physiology of consumers. Some examples include the “i-Glasses” from Virtual I/O, the “Smart Model” from Multigen, as well as the nanomanipulator created by University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Department of Computer Science, and the Phobia Project developed by the Georgia Tech Graphics Visualization and Usability Center. The article also covers not only the products of this event, but also the courses, panels, papers, and …

Power Systems Marginal Cost Curve And Its Applications, Shaojun Wang, S. M. Shahidehpour, Nian-De Xiang

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper presents a forward recursive procedure to calculate the expected system marginal cost curve (EMC). The EMC formulation allows for multi-state and multi-block dispatch of generating units and is used to determine the optimal energy of pumped-storage units. A new approach is developed to compute the first and second derivatives of the expected generation energy of a thermal unit with respect to the capacity of all thermal units in the system. The salient feature of the proposed approach is that it applies to hydro-thermal systems with multiple limited-energy hydro units.

Predicting Conserved Water-Mediated Interactions In Protein Active Sites, Michael L. Raymer, Sridhar Venkataraman, William F. Punch, Erik D. Goodman, Brenda Kuhn

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

A Meta-Interpreter For Circuit-Extraction, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

The design of a VLSI circuit consists of a description of the circuit in terms of its components and subcomponents, at various levels of detail. To verify that the layout of a VLSI circuit conforms to its design, one needs to work backwards from the lowest-level description of the circuit and recognize the higher-level components it constitutes. This paper is concerned with the application of logic programming techniques in the formal verification of the structural correctness of the VLSI circuit layouts. In particular, we review Michael Dukes' Generalized Extraction System (1990) that compiles design descriptions into a set of extraction …

Interview: Joel Slayton, Christine Laffer

SWITCH

Interview with Joel Slayton, Professor of Computers in Fine Art at San José State University, and Director of the CADRE Institute. Slayton discusses the history of the Cadre Institute and details his views on the relationship between art and new technology. Slayton describes the role of artists in exploring the possibilities and ethical implications of emerging technologies such as genetic engineering, nano-techology, robotics, and artificial life. He describes installations and in-progress work focused on ubiquitous video surveillance. The interview concludes with a discussion of Slayton’s use of the DoWhatDo model for artistic collaboration and of his piece "Conduits," presented in …

Privacy And The News Media, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

The right of the public to know and the right of the individual to be let alone are inherently in conflict. The origins of these rights are quite different: the former derived from the First Amendment's protection of a free press, the latter in a law journal article published in the late nineteenth century. So, too, has the development of these ideas followed different paths: the former as Constitutional law, the latter as tort law. This article examines the relationship between privacy law and the press. A century ago two lawyers called for legal relief from aggressive newspaper reporters. At …

Nonrecursive Incremental Evaluation Of Datalog Queries, Guozhu Dong, Jianwen Su, Rodney Topor

Kno.e.sis Publications

We consider the problem of repeatedly evaluating the same (computationally expensive) query to a database that is being updated between successive query requests. In this situation, it should be possible to use the difference between successive database states and the answer to the query in one state to reduce the cost of evaluating the query in the next state. We use nonrecursive Datalog (which are unions of conjunctive queries) to compute the differences, and call this process “incremental query evaluation using conjunctive queries”. After formalizing the notion of incremental query evaluation using conjunctive queries, we give an algorithm that constructs, …

How Will Cable And Home Video Impact The Motion Picture Industry In Jamaica?, Steven-Anthony Cooke

Graduate Student Dissertations, Theses, Capstones, and Portfolios

Objective

How will cable and home video impact the Motion Picture Industry in Jamaica?

This study examines the Motion Picture Industry in Jamaica and the impact that video rentals have had on the industry, as well as to predict the impact it may have on it in the future. The new emergence of cable operators may be in full operation in 1996. The impact that this new medium will have on the movie industry in the future will also be examined.

Methodology

• Interviews were conducted with the Managing Director of Palace Amusement Co. (1921) Ltd., a video store owner, as …

Nsu M.S. And Ed.S. In Educational Media 1995, Nova Southeastern University

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education and School of Criminal Justice College Archive

No abstract provided.

Nsu Graduate Teacher Education Program (Gtep) M.S. And Ed.S. In Educational Media 1995, Nova Southeastern University

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education and School of Criminal Justice College Archive

No abstract provided.

The Atis Message: A Study In One-Way Communication, Sam C. Kelly Iii

Master's Theses - Daytona Beach

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of high fidelity digital voice transmission, some aspects of information processing and the effect of short-term memory and long-term memory on one-way verbal communication. The experiment consisted of one realistic scenario with each of the twenty-four subjects involved recording on paper each of the sixteen Automatic Terminal Information Service (ATIS) messages that they heard. Each subject heard each message one time, and the listening devices used were changed after four messages. The ATIS message consists of eleven hem groups of information. The results were viewed in group, number, and word …

The "Infoharness" Information Integration Platform, Leon Shklar, Satish Thatte, Howard Marcus, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The "InfoHarness" information integration platform, tools, and services being developed at Bellcore are aimed at providing integrated and rapid access to huge amounts of heterogeneous information independent of the type, representation, and location of information. InfoHarness provides advanced search and browsing capabilities without imposing the burden of restructuring, reformatting or relocating information on information suppliers or creators. This is achieved through object-oriented encapsulation of information and the associated meta-information (e.g., type, location, access rights, owner, creation date, etc.). The meta-information extraction methods ensure rapid and largely automatic creation of information repositories. A gateway that supports access to InfoHarness repositories from …

Community Structure And Media Risk Coverage, Sharon Dunwoody

RISK: Health, Safety & Environment (1990-2002)

Professor Dunwoody regards media organizations to be community creatures; their accounts to be social constructions; and answers to, "Who's right?" to be relative.

The Media, Risk Assessment And Numbers: They Don't Add Up, Sharon M. Friedman

RISK: Health, Safety & Environment (1990-2002)

Professor Friedman argues that, for risks to be reported accurately, journalism educators must help their students understand science, numbers and statistics.

Technical Risk In The Mass Media: Introduction, Allan Mazur

RISK: Health, Safety & Environment (1990-2002)

Special editor, Professor Mazur introduces and explains the origins of the symposium.

Satellite Data Communications Link Requirements For A Proposed Flight Simulation System, Gerald M. Kowalski

Master's Theses - Daytona Beach

The purpose of this study was to investigate the requirements necessary for data and voice communication via satellite, linking Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) and other flight training facilities. The proposed research was conducted following a descriptive method of collecting information, generating and analyzing data, and listing the results for the proposed link requirements. The current fiber-optic communications link at ERAU in Daytona Beach was presented to establish a general foundation of communications. Research was done into methods used by satellite common carriers for realistic data and calculations. A proposed data link to connect flight simulators at the ERAU Prescott campus …

Using Tickets To Enforce The Serializability Of Multidatabase Transactions, Dimitrios Georgakopoulos, Marek Rusinkiewicz, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

To enforce global serializability in a multidatabase environment the multidatabase transaction manager must take into account the indirect (transitive) conflicts between multidatabase transactions caused by local transactions. Such conflicts are difficult to resolve because the behavior or even the existence of local transactions is not known to the multidatabase system. To overcome these difficulties, we propose to incorporate additional data manipulation operations in the subtransactions of each multidatabase transaction. We show that if these operations create direct conflicts between subtransactions at each participating local database system, indirect conflicts can be resolved even if the multidatabase system is not aware of …

News Media Objectivity: How Do We Ask The Questions?, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

There is a lively and often public debate in progress concerning the objectivity of the news media, or the lack of it Scholars have approached this topic from three distinct angles: content analysis, values, and the economics of the news industry. Their conclusions have varied markedly, apparently guided by their particular frames of reference.

This article suggests that while we seem to have lost our fix on objectivity as a measurable attribute of news products, the news work routine of objectivity encourages fairness in our public discourse, and deserves attention in scholarly research.

Semantics-Based Information Brokering: A Step Towards Realizing The Infocosm, Vipul Kashyap, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The rapid advances in computer and communication technologies, and their merger, is leading to a global information market place. It will consist of federations of very large number of information systems that will cooperate to varying extents to support the users' information needs. We propose an architecture which may facilitate meeting these needs. It consists of three main components: information providers, information brokers and information consumers. We also propose an approach to information brokering. We discuss two of it's tasks: information resource discovery, which identities relevant information sources for a given query, and query processing, which involves the generation of …

Specifying And Enforcing Intertask Dependencies, Paul Attie, Munindar Singh, Amit P. Sheth, Marek Rusinkiewicz

Kno.e.sis Publications

Extensions of the traditional atomic transaction model are needed to support the development of multi-system applications or workflows that access heterogeneous databases and legacy application systems. Most extended transaction models use conditions involving events or dependencies between transactions. Intertask dependencies can serve as a uniform framework for defining extended transaction models. In this paper we introduce event attributes needed to determine whether a dependency is enforceable and to properly schedule events in extended transaction models. Using these attributes and a formalization of a dependency into the temporal logic CTL, we can automatically synthesize an automaton that captures the computations that …

A Framework For Controlling Cooperative Agents, Kuo-Chu Lee, William H. Mansfield, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Presents an overview of the ITX (Interacting Transaction) system, which supports complex interactions among cooperating agents in the presence of user interventions that change application objectives and system failures. The system's components and its unique fixed-point criterion for feedback control of iterative interactions are described. An example of a simplified multimedia teleconferencing application is discussed to illustrate the features of the ITX system.

So Far (Schematically) Yet So Near (Semantically), Amit P. Sheth, Vipul Kashyap

Kno.e.sis Publications

In a multidatabase system, schematic conflicts between two objects are usually of interest only when the objects have some semantic affinity. In this paper we try to reconcile the two perspectives. We first define the concept of semantic proximity and provide a semantic taxonomy. We then enumerate and classify the schematic and data conflicts. We discuss possible semantic similarities between two objects that have various types of schematic and data conflicts. Issues of uncertain information and inconsistent information are also addressed.

On Transactional Workflows, Amit P. Sheth, Marek Rusinkiewicz

Kno.e.sis Publications

The basic transaction model has evolved over time to incorporate more complex transactions structures and to take the advantage of semantics of higher-level operations that cannot be seen at the level of page reads and writes. Well known examples of such extended transaction models include nested and multi-level transactions. A number of relaxed transaction models have been defined in the last several years that permit a controlled relaxation of the transaction isolation and atomicity to better match the requirements of various database applications. Correctness criteria other than global serializability have also been proposed. Several examples of extended/relaxed transaction models are …

Abduction In Annotated Logic Programming, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

The author investigates techniques to make the logic programming paradigm more expressive for knowledge representation, while simultaneously retaining the computational advantages of efficiency and simplicity. He extends the annotated language of K. Thirunarayan and K. Kifer (1989) in various directions to obtain an enriched representation language. In particular, rule bodies are permitted to be a conjunction of literals, and the rules to be recursive. A class of annotated logic programs called the stratified programs is identified which can be given a unique supported minimal Herbrand model as their meaning. Abductive reasoning is integrated into this annotated logic framework. The notion …

Using Flexible Transactions To Support Multisystem Telecommunication Applications, Mansoor Ansari, Linda Ness, Marek Rusinkiewicz, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Service order provisioning is an important telecommunication application that automates the process of providing telephone services in response to the customer requests. It is an example of a multi-system application that requires access to multiple, independently developed application systems and their databases. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a prototype system1 that supports the execution of the Flexible Transactions and its use to develop the service order provisioning application. We argue that such approach may be used to support the development of multi-system, flow-through processing applications in a systematic and organized manner. Its advantages include fast …

Algorithms For Structural Schema Integration, James Geller, Ashish Mehra, Yehoshua Perl, Erich Neuhold, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Current view and schema integration methodologies are driven by semantic considerations, and allow integration of objects only if that is valid from semantic and structural viewpoints. We had introduced a new integration technique called structural integration. It permits integration of objects that have structural similarities, even if they differ semantically. This technique uses the object-oriented Dual Model which separates the representation of structure and semantics.

In this paper we introduce algorithms for structural integration. We apply these algorithms to integrate two views of a large university database schema which had significant structural similarities but differed semantically.