The economic viability of the three original U. S . television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, is threatened by emerging competition, excessive regulation, and the proliferation of new broadcasting and telecommunications technologies. This is a significant problem because United States viewers have depended upon free, diverse, broadcast television programming for more than forty years. This programming has traditionally been provided to viewers at no charge, unlike costly pay-per-view, direct broadcast satellite systems, cable television, backyard or rooftop television satellite receiving dishes, video programming via the Regional Bell Operating Companies (video Dialtone), wide and local area computer networks, or the Internet. Each network's survival depends upon its strategies in the areas of new technologies and political action with regard to regulation. Moreover, the three original networks are healthier than they may appear because the financial takeovers that occurred in 1985-1986 provided each with financial strength and strong corporate leadership.

One of the greatest natural hazards that is faced with in much of the United States are tornadoes. Despite improvements in the warning processes, the risk of significant loss of life remains high. That is particularly true with vulnerable communities which have higher proportions of mobile homes; however, violent tornadoes are very difficult to manage in permanent homes or buildings as well. As a result, tornado shelters have been built in some communities and have become available to the public. However, their presence is intermittent, and there are many tornado-prone areas that lack such shelters. After a public survey, it was found that there was unmet demand for tornado shelters and, at least in the most extreme circumstances, a large percentage of the population would be willing to utilize such. It was also found that better communication of tornado shelters would increase utilization rates either in circumstances where they already exist or where the need exists. Some residents, particularly those in mobile homes, were likely to utilize shelters more frequently, which increased their need to an even greater extent. Once both the public and broadcast meteorologists were surveyed, it was found that the public was strongly supportive of mobile applications about tornado shelters in their area, and local television sources and the websites and applications related to those stations were also popular sources. Broadcast meteorologists in the Deep South in particular mentioned the need for more shelters and advocated construction, but not as much in other regions. They mentioned that mobile apps would be quite useful for the public to locate shelters. A case study in the context of the concurrent COVID-19 pandemic (knowing that crowded spaces was not a desirable situation amidst the pandemic) found that shelters were still potentially useful with mitigation. Those concurrent hazards made for a more challenging study and proved to be a valuable case study in tornado sheltering. The results found that it was possible to attenuate both threats provided that careful planning and actions were undertaken. As a result, both short-term and long-term recommendations were suggested which may also be useful in future pandemic situations.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between religiosity and broadcast news usage. This study examines the level of religiosity of individuals and its correlation to broadcast news exposure. The correlation between religiosity and perceptions of violence on broadcast news was also measured. Two theories were applied in this study. Uses and Gratifications asserts the active character of the audience to choose what they watch, how often, etc., and Selective Exposure defends the ability of the individual to select media that coincides with personal value systems. These two theories complement each other and provide support in the evaluation of religiosity and broadcast news exposure. A survey was posted on-line through various message boards. Twenty-five questions were used to determine religiosity, broadcast news exposure, broadcast news and perceptions of violence on broadcast news. In sum, all hypotheses were supported and the general idea that as religiosity increases broadcast news exposure decreases was confirmed. Nevertheless, due to the small effect size the study also indicates that religiosity does not explain a great percentage of the behavior of an individual towards broadcast news exposure. Therefore, the results of the study indicate that even though religiosity is not a good predictor of broadcast news exposure in general, religiosity affects to a small degree the choices of a more religious individual to expose himself to broadcast news. The perception of violence in broadcast news is also greater in religious than non-religious individuals.

Radio’s first fifteen years were filled with experiment and innovation, as well as conflicting visions of what broadcasting’s role in society ought to be. But while there was an ongoing debate about radio’s mission (should it be mainly educational or mainly entertaining?), radio’s impact on daily life was undeniable. To cite a few examples, radio was the first mass medium to provide access to current events as they were happening. It allowed people of all races and social classes to hear great orators, newsmakers, and entertainers. Radio not only brought hit songs and famous singers directly into the listener’s home; it also created a new form of intimacy based on imagination -- although the listeners generally had never met the men and women they heard on the air, they felt close to these people and imagined what they must really be like. Radio was a medium that enhanced the importance of the human voice-- vii politicians, preachers, and performers were now judged by their ability to communicate with the “invisible audience.” My dissertation employs a media ecology perspective to examine how the arrival and growth of radio altered a media environment that, until 1920, was dominated by the printed word. Neil Postman, a seminal figure in Media Ecology, wrote that this field of inquiry “looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value.” Radio certainly exemplified that description: it not only affected popular culture and public opinion; it affected the other media with which it competed. My research utilizes one of those competing media-- print journalism. Using content and discourse analysis of articles in thirty-three newspapers and sixteen magazines of the 1920s and early 1930s, I examine how print and radio interacted and affected each other. My dissertation also analyzes the differing perceptions about radio as expressed in print by fans, reporters, and such interest groups as clergy or educators. And finally, my research explores some of the critiques of the programs, and compares the reactions of the critics at the mainstream press with those who worked for the ethnic press.

A \textit{broadcast} on a connected graph $G$ with vertex set $V(G)$ is a function $f:V(G)\rightarrow \{0, 1, ..., \text{diam}(G)\}$ such that $f(v)\leq e(v)$, where $e(v)$ denotes the eccentricity of $v$. A vertex $v$ is said to be \textit{broadcasting} if $f(v)>0$. The \textit{cost} of $f$ is $\sigma(f)=\sum_{v\in V(G)}f(v)$, or the sum of the strengths of the broadcasts on the set of broadcasting vertices $V_f^+=\{v\in V(G)\,:\,f(v)>0\}$. A vertex $u$ \textit{hears} $f$ from $v\in V_f^+$ if $d_G(u, v)\leq f(v)$. The broadcast $f$ is \textit{hearing independent} if no broadcasting vertex hears another. If, in addition, any vertex $u$ that hears $f$ from multiple broadcasting vertices satisfies $f(v)\leq d_G(u, v)$ for all $v\in V_f^+$, the broadcast is said to be \textit{boundary independent.} The minimum cost of a maximal boundary independent broadcast on $G$, called the \textit{lower bn-independence number}, is denoted $i_{bn}(G)$. The \textit{lower h-independence number} $i_h(G)$ is defined analogously for hearing independent broadcasts. We prove that $i_{bn}(G)\leq i_h(G)$ for all graphs $G$, and show that $i_h(G)/i_{bn}(G)$ is bounded, finding classes of graphs for which the two parameters are equal. For both parameters, we show that the lower bn-independence number (h-independence number) of an arbitrary connected graph $G$ equals the minimum lower bn-independence number (h-independence number) among those of its spanning trees. We further study the maximum cost of boundary independent broadcasts, denoted $\alpha_{bn}(G)$. We show $\alpha_{bn}(G)$ can be bounded in terms of the independence number $\alpha(G)$, and prove that the maximum bn-independent broadcast problem is NP-hard by a reduction from the independent set problem to an instance of the maximum bn-independent broadcast problem. With particular interest in caterpillars, we investigate bounds on $\alpha_{bn}(T)$ when $T$ is a tree in terms of its order and the number of vertices of degree at least 3, known as the \textit{branch vertices} of $T$. We conclude by describing a polynomial-time algorithm to determine $\alpha_{bn}(T)$ for a given tree $T$. / Graduate

Media such as movies and images are nowadays produced and distributed digitally. It is usually simple to make copies of digital content. Consequently illegal pirate copies can be duplicated and distributed in large quantities. One way to deter authorized content receivers from illegally redistributing the media is watermarking. If individual watermarks are contained in the digital media and a receiver is a pirate and redistributes it, the pirate at the same time distributes his identity. Thus a located pirate copy can be traced back to the pirate. The watermarked media should otherwise be indistinguishable from the original media content. To distribute media content scalable transmission methods such as broadcast and multicast should be used. This way the distributor will only need to transmit the media once to reach all his authorized receivers. But since the same content is distributed to all receivers the requirement of individual watermarks seems to be contradictory. In this thesis we will show how individually watermarked media content can be transmitted in a scalable way. Known methods will be reviewed and a new method will be presented. The new method is independent of what type of distribution that is used. A system with robust watermarks that are difficult to remove is described. Only small parts of the media content will be needed to identify the pirates. The method will only give a small data expansion compared to distribution of non-watermarked media. We will also show how information theory tools can be used to expand the amount of data in the watermarks given a specific size of the media used for the watermarking. These tools can also be used to identify parts of the watermark that have been changed by deliberate deterioration of the watermarked media, made by pirates. / <p>Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2005:67.</p>

Book Summary: From television, film, and music to sports, comics, and everyday life, this book provides a comprehensive view of working-class culture in America.

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<p> There are two popular approaches in the communication between multiple receivers and a base station with multiple antennas: dirty paper coding and multiuser diversity. Dirty paper coding can be rather difficult to realize, which motivates people to find some practical schemes. When there are a lot of users, multiuser diversity requires a lot of feedback which decrease the uplink spectrum efficiency.</p> <p> In this paper, we aim to minimize the probability of error subject to the total transmit power constraint and decrease the amount of feedback required by the multiuser diversity instead of trying to achieve the dirty paper coding. There are two main results in this thesis: First, we formulate the minimization of the average probability of error of all the users as a convex optimization problem, subject to the peak or the average power constraints. The proposed transmitter represents a nonlinear one-to-one mapping between the transmitted data vector and the symbol vector. The transmitted data vector going through the base station antennas is obtained as a solution to the proposed convex error probability optimization problem that can be solved using computationally efficient interior point algorithms. Furthermore, we propose a random unitary beamforming technique to reduce the feedback by selecting a threshold for the users. To improve fairness, an equal ratio scheduling algorithm which could serve the users with different rate requirements is developed. We also give an upper and lower bound on the sum rate achievable in our approach. Monte Carlo simulation results is provided to verify the performance of the proposed algorithms.</p> / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

In order to save energy consumption in idle states, low duty-cycled operation is widely used in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), where each node periodically switches between sleeping mode and awake mode. Although efficient toward saving energy, duty-cycling causes many challenges, such as difficulty in neighbor discovery due to asynchronous wakeup/sleep scheduling, time-varying transmission latencies due to varying neighbor discovery latencies, and difficulty on multihop broadcasting due to non-simultaneous wakeup in neighborhood. This dissertation focuses on this problem space. Specifically, we focus on three co-related problems in duty-cycled WSNs: wakeup scheduling, routing and broadcasting. We propose an asynchronous quorum-based wakeup scheduling scheme, which optimizes heterogenous energy saving ratio and achieves bounded neighbor discovery latency, without requiring time synchronization. Our solution is based on quorum system design. We propose two designs: cyclic quorum system pair (cqs-pair) and grid quorum system pair (gqs-pair). We also present fast offline construction algorithms for such designs. Our analytical and experimental results show that cqs-pair and gqs-pair achieve better trade-off between the average discovery delay and energy consumption ratio. We also study asymmetric quorum-based wakeup scheduling for two-tiered network topologies for further improving energy efficiency. Heterogenous duty-cycling causes transmission latencies to be time-varying. Hence, the routing problem becomes more complex when the time domain must be considered for data delivery in duty-cycled WSNs. We formulate the routing problem as time-dependent Bellman-Ford problem, and use vector representation for time-varying link costs and end-to-end (E2E) distances. We present efficient algorithms for route construction and maintenance, which have bounded time and message complexities in the worst case by ameliorating with beta-synchronizer. Multihop broadcast is complex in duty-cycled WSNs due to non simultaneous wakeup in neighborhoods. We present Hybrid-cast, an asynchronous multihop broadcast protocol, which can be applied to low duty-cycling or quorum-based duty-cycling schedules, where nodes send out a beacon message at the beginning of wakeup slots. Hybrid-cast achieves better tradeoff between broadcast latency and broadcast count compared to previous broadcast solutions. It adopts opportunistic data delivery in order to reduce the broadcast latency. Meanwhile, it reduces redundant transmission via delivery deferring and online forwarder selection. We analytically establish the upper bound of broadcast count and the broadcast latency under Hybrid-cast. To verify the feasibility, effectiveness, and performance of our solutions for asynchronous wakeup scheduling, we developed a prototype implementation using Telosb and TinyOS 2.0 WSN platforms. We integrated our algorithms with the existing protocol stack in TinyOS, and compared them with the CSMA mechanism. Our implementation measurements illustrate the feasibility, performance trade-off, and effectiveness of the proposed solutions for low duty-cycled WSNs. / Ph. D.