Controlling the Message


Book Description

Broken down into sections that examine new media strategy from the highest echelons of campaign management all the way down to passive citizen engagement with campaign issues in places like online comment forums, the book ultimately reveals that political messaging in today's diverse new media landscape is a fragile, unpredictable, and sometimes futile process. The result is a collection that both interprets important historical data from a watershed campaign season and also explains myriad approaches to political campaign media scholarship.




Message Control


Book Description

Message Control_a look at what shapes the news from the presidential campaign trail_comes out of the author's experience traveling with campaigns, interviews with other journalists who have covered campaigns from the road, and research on campaign news. Elizabeth Skewes, a journalism professor and former reporter, investigates journalists' beliefs and the role those beliefs play in the election process, as well as how the routines of campaign reporting affect news coverage. While Skewes does find that journalists make an effort to inform the voting decisions of their readers by giving them a sense of context for each campaign and each candidate's character, she also shows that journalists remain wary of staff manipulation and are constrained by pack journalism, press pools, and life 'in the bubble.' From on-the-trail perspectives to media theory explanations, Message Control begins to answer the question of why political coverage focuses on personalities and peccadilloes when studies show the public wants less of this and more discussion of political issues.




Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Reissue of the 1961 second edition


Book Description

A classic and influential work that laid the theoretical foundations for information theory and a timely text for contemporary informations theorists and practitioners. With the influential book Cybernetics, first published in 1948, Norbert Wiener laid the theoretical foundations for the multidisciplinary field of cybernetics, the study of controlling the flow of information in systems with feedback loops, be they biological, mechanical, cognitive, or social. At the core of Wiener's theory is the message (information), sent and responded to (feedback); the functionality of a machine, organism, or society depends on the quality of messages. Information corrupted by noise prevents homeostasis, or equilibrium. And yet Cybernetics is as philosophical as it is technical, with the first chapter devoted to Newtonian and Bergsonian time and the philosophical mixed with the technical throughout. This book brings the 1961 second edition back into print, with new forewords by Doug Hill and Sanjoy Mitter. Contemporary readers of Cybernetics will marvel at Wiener's prescience—his warnings against “noise,” his disdain for “hucksters” and “gadget worshipers,” and his view of the mass media as the single greatest anti-homeostatic force in society. This edition of Cybernetics gives a new generation access to a classic text.




Brand Command


Book Description

The pursuit of political power is strategic as never before. Ministers, MPs, and candidates parrot the same catchphrases. The public service has become politicized. And decision making is increasingly centralized in the Prime Minister’s Office. What is happening to our democracy? In this persuasive book, Alex argues that political parties and government are beholden to the same marketing principles used by the world’s largest corporations. Called branding, the strategy demands repetition of spoken, written, and visual messages, predetermined by the leader’s inner circle. Marland warns that public sector branding is an unstoppable force that will persist no matter who is in power. It also creates serious problems for parliamentary democracy that must be confronted. This book will fascinate anyone who is interested in how Ottawa works and where Canadian politics is headed.







Java Message Service API Tutorial and Reference


Book Description

Java Message Service (JMS) represents a powerful solution for communicating between Java enterprise applications, software components, and legacy systems. In this authoritative tutorial and comprehensive reference, Sun's Java Message Service architects offer start-to-finish coverage of peer-to-peer JMS development with Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition, Release 1.3. JMS is now fully integrated into the J2EE platform -- and this is the first book to show how to make the most of JMS in the context of sophisticated J2EE application development. The authors begin by introducing the JMS API to developers who are new to it. Then, with the help of extensive programming examples, they demonstrate key JMS techniques for enabling applications to create, send, receive, and read messages, and for integrating with existing back office and enterprise systems. Coverage includes: consuming messages asynchronously with message-driven beans; producing messages from application clients; accessing entity beans from message-driven bean; producing messages from session beans; and much more. For all Java developers building applications that must communicate and share information.







Topology Control in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks


Book Description

Topology control is fundamental to solving scalability and capacity problems in large-scale wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. Forthcoming wireless multi-hop networks such as ad hoc and sensor networks will allow network nodes to control the communication topology by choosing their transmitting ranges. Briefly, topology control (TC) is the art of co-ordinating nodes’ decisions regarding their transmitting ranges, to generate a network with the desired features. Building an optimized network topology helps surpass the prevalent scalability and capacity problems. Topology Control in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks makes the case for topology control and provides an exhaustive coverage of TC techniques in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks, considering both stationary networks, to which most of the existing solutions are tailored, and mobile networks. The author introduces a new taxonomy of topology control and gives a full explication of the applications and challenges of this important topic. Topology Control in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks: Defines topology control and explains its necessity, considering both stationary and mobile networks. Describes the most representative TC protocols and their performance. Covers the critical transmitting range for stationary and mobile networks, topology optimization problems such as energy efficiency, and distributed topology control. Discusses implementation and ‘open issues’, including realistic models and the effect of multi-hop data traffic. Presents a case study on routing protocol design, to demonstrate how TC can ease the design of cooperative routing protocols. This invaluable text will provide graduate students in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Applied Mathematics and Physics, researchers in the field of ad hoc networking, and professionals in wireless telecoms as well as networking system developers with a single reference resource on topology control.




Media Access Control and Resource Allocation


Book Description

This book focuses on various Passive optical networks (PONs) types, including currently deployed Ethernet PON (EPON) and Gigabit PON (GPON) as well as next generation WDM PON and OFDM PON. Also this book examines the integrated optical and wireless access networks. Concentrating on two issues in these networks: media access control (MAC) and resource allocation. These two problems can greatly affect performances of PONs such as network resource utilization and QoS of end users. Finally this book will discuss various solutions to address the MAC and resource allocation issues in various PON networks.




Virtual Private Networking


Book Description

This book provides network managers, LAN administrators and small business operators with all they need to know to "interconnect" multiple locations or travelling employees that need to access a single location. The operation and utilization of virtual private networks is discussed both in theory and practicality, covering the technical aspects associated with encryption and digital certificates as well as the manner by which readers can create VPNs using readily available products from Microsoft, Cisco, Checkpoint and possibly other vendors. The author was among the first to write about the concept of virtual private networking in a series of articles published over five years ago, and in the intervening years this has become a very hot topic - with the technology being increasing deployed by companies. Virtual Private Networking, by Gilbert Held, covers the technology and the theory, but also shows readers, through numerous examples, 'how to use ' the technology.