No description available.

In this work we present a traffic information dissemination system that seeks to deliver relevant traffic information to drivers to help make their driving experience more efficient, pleasant and safe. The system uses the crowd of drivers as the main source of information. The crowd reports information about traffic either directly to our system’s central server or to social networks. In case the information is reported to a social network our system architecture allows the integration of social networks as a traffic information source. It also allows the integration of other traffic information sources such as local traffic monitoring agencies. Our system aggregates all traffic information and delivers it to drivers subscribed to the system when they demand it. In addition, our system provides an efficient navigation service that it takes into account the current traffic conditions when planning a route. Furthermore, it periodically checks if there are new traffic events that appear on the user’s current route in which case the system will automatically give the user an alternate route. We implement a prototype of our system that use the social networks as a traffic information source and through the prototype evaluation we show that the prototype of our system indeed delivers relevant traffic information to drivers and performs intelligent navigation. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2012-04-30 14:49:14.933

As broadband connections to the Internet become more common, new information sharing applications that provide rich services to distributed users will emerge. Furthermore, as computing devices become pervasive and better connected, the scalability requirements for Internet-based services are also increasing. Distributed object middleware has been widely used to develop such applications since it made it easier to rapidly develop distributed applications for heterogeneous computing and communication systems. As the application's scale increases, however, the client/server architecture limits the performance due to the bottleneck at the centralized servers. The recent development in peer-to-peer technologies creates a new opportunity for addressing scalability and performance problems for services that are used by many nodes. In a peer-to-peer system, peer nodes can contribute a fraction of their resources to the system, enabling more flexible and extended sharing between the entities in the system. When peer nodes are required to contribute their resources by replicating a service for self and others, however, several new challenges arise. Our thesis is that non-dedicated resources in a distributed system can be utilized to replicate shared objects dynamically so that the quality and scalability of a distributed service can be achieved with lower cost by replicating the objects at right places and updates to those shared objects can be disseminated efficiently and quickly. The following are the contributions of our work that has been done to validate the thesis. 1. A new fair and self-managing replication algorithm that allows distributed non-dedicated resources to be used to improve service performance with lower cost. 2. A multicast grouping algorithm that is used to disseminate updates to the shared objects among a large set of heterogeneous peer nodes to keep consistent view for all peer nodes. It groups nodes with similar interests into same group and multicasts all the required data to the group so that the unwanted data received by each node can be minimized. 3. An overlay construction algorithm that aims at reducing both network latency and total network traffic when delivering data through the built overlay network. 4. An implementation of a distributed object framework, GT-RMI, that allows peer nodes to invoke dynamically replicated objects transparently. The framework can be configured for a particular peer node through a policy file.

This study investigates the role of the business press in disseminating management earnings guidance news to capital market participants. Using a unique sample of over 55,000 articles that relate specifically to management guidance, I find that 48 percent of all guidance receives coverage in the business press, with substantial within-firm variation. I then identify firm and guidance characteristics that are associated with the likelihood that guidance receives press coverage. Controlling for the endogeneity of press coverage, I find that dissemination in the press has a significant impact on the market reaction to guidance, and this effect is economically large. This study is the first to provide evidence that there is systematic variation in the extent to which guidance news is disseminated through the press, and that this variation has a significant effect on the market consequences of guidance.

This practice of traditional male circumcision among the Xhosa people in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa is accompanied by a high level of secrecy: details of the practice may not be shared with non-members such as women, uninitiated boys and strangers. To address the issue of injuries and deaths resulting from poorly performed unhygienic circumcision by untrained practitioners, the Department of Public Health in the Eastern Cape passed the Application of Health Standards in Traditional Circumcision Act No 6 of 2001. In order to explore the conflicting interests between public health and custodians of indigenous knowledge of curation and dissemination of information about Xhosa initiation rites, sociocultural theory through a systematic review of literature is used. Meta-ethnography design and a qualitative research approach is also used, as well as NVivo 11 qualitative data analysis software to analyse the data. Eighteen databases were used, and searches were conducted on 9 June 2016 and 13 October 2018. Using the systematic review screening process and PRISMA checklist, articles were screened against inclusion criteria, resulting in nine articles being included in the final review. Apart from the aforementioned findings that the practice excludes non-members from participating and disseminating information, and that traditional practitioners lack basic skills and knowledge necessary for procedures, findings also showed that the establishment of the Circumcision Act was the major reason for the conflict that exists between public health and Xhosa people: Xhosa people do not want secret information about the practice to be disseminated to non-members. In conclusion it is recommended that the Xhosa-speaking community make some Traditional Male Circumcision (TMC) information available while still preserving the fundamental secret information for traditional purposes. For example, access to pertinent information should be given to public health officials to enable assistance in addressing botched circumcisions.

Based on previous evidence that there are information heterogeneities in capital markets, three essays including empirical frameworks for examining the information processes that impact portfolio investments and corporate investments was proposed. The first essay considers information channels among mutual fund managers (fund-fund networks), and between holding companies and fund managers (fund-company networks). Results show that (1) fund-fund (fund-company) information networks help in generating positive risk-adjusted returns from holdings in absence of fund-company (fund-fund) networks; (2) fund-company networks create information advantage only when the networks are relatively exclusive. Superior networks seem to pick stocks which outperform beyond the quarter. The second essay examines mutual fund managers tendency to deviate from the strategies of their peers. Results indicate a significantly negative relationship between the managers deviating tendency and fund performance, suggesting that the average fund manager is more likely to make erroneous decisions when they deviate from their peers. The third essay investigates the determinants of target choices in corporate acquisitions. Results reveal the influence of various factors, including information asymmetries, which may drive this behavior, including economic opportunities, anti-takeover regimes, competitive responses to other managers, and acquirers size and book-to-market ratios.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T12:32:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T14:10:39Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 02677.pdf: 9140432 bytes, checksum: f0be409c61becbad410d2fbe09c0d35b (MD5) / Dissertacao (Mestrado) / IPEN/D / Escola de Comunicacoes e Artes - ECA/USP

Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T12:32:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T14:10:39Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 02677.pdf: 9140432 bytes, checksum: f0be409c61becbad410d2fbe09c0d35b (MD5) / Dissertacao (Mestrado) / IPEN/D / Escola de Comunicacoes e Artes - ECA/USP

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is formed by a collection of self-organizing nodes. Such networks are being deployed in a variety of environments, for example to provide mission-critical services in times of crises. Nodes participating in a MANET tend to have limited energy and computing resources and depend on various network-based resources to operate as a cohesive system. The same features such as dynamic and adaptive network topologies that make MANETs powerful also make the discovery and operation of network services a challenge. This thesis presents the design and implementation of an extensible information dissemination scheme that is integrated with the Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol to address the challenges of service discovery in mobile ad hoc networks. The thesis presents a detailed design of the information dissemination scheme based on the Naval Research Laboratory's (NRL) ProtoLib network protocol programming framework. In the proposed scheme, a solution that separates the routing process from the NRL OLSR routing protocol was designed, thus making OLSR a topology discovery protocol. This can further facilitate the implementation of various routing algorithms based on other metrics, such as the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of wireless links or the nodes' level of cooperation, when forwarding messages in the network. Additionally, a reusable event-driven programming interface to the NRL OLSR routing protocol was designed and implemented in this research. Events are triggered based on changes in the network topology. This programming interface can be used by other management and monitoring clients on the network for receiving real-time updates about link and topology changes as seen by OLSR. A priority message delivery scheme was developed that provides different quality of service (QoS) levels for information dissemination in mobile ad hoc networks. To ensure a fair use of the transport media and support various message sizes, a message fragmentation solution was implemented. The proposed information dissemination solution was then deployed in a real wireless ad-hoc environment for further validation and testing. Using experiments with six nodes and various test scenarios, this research verified the functionality and characterized the performance of the proposed system. It was observed that the link-state nature of information dissemination solution helped it to adapt to topology changes. It was also realized that service discovery latency after information convergence in the network was independent of the number of nodes between the service providers and clients. The experiments also confirmed that the immediate message delivery scheme provides superior quality of service to registered users in presence of radio interference and other delays caused by Multipoint Relay Nodes (MPR) message forwarding in OLSR. / Master of Science

Master of Science / Department of Industrial & Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Jessica L. Heier Stamm / Communication is an integral part of emergency response, and improving the information dissemination network for crisis communication can save time, resources, and lives. This thesis focuses specifically on emergency response to a foreign animal disease (FAD) outbreak, an incident in which an animal disease that is not active domestically is introduced and being spreading in the U.S. In a FAD outbreak, timeliness of detection and response are critical. An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, a particularly significant FAD, could cripple the agriculture economy and every hour of poor communication could result in the loss of thousands of animals. Improving this and other such crisis communication networks is of high importance. There is a comparatively large amount of prior research that critiques past catastrophic events but very little that aims to quantitatively improve such networks. This research uses communication data from a FAD response exercise in Kansas to develop a reliable network model, contributing a general method for creating an information dissemination network from empirical communication data. The thesis then introduces a simulated annealing heuristic to alter the network structure, reducing the overall information transmission time by almost 90%. Both the application of simulated annealing in network design and the use of discrete event simulation to calculate the heuristic objective function are new contributions to the field of crisis communication and emergency response. This work begins by extracting data from communication logs, grouping the large numbers of stakeholders into more manageable clusters, and developing a simulation model framework that accurately depicts the flow of information in the actual network. Then a simulated annealing heuristic is used to alter the network structure. The goal is to identify an alternative network structure in which the time for information to reach all response participants is minimized. The resultant network structures are analyzed to reveal observations and recommendations for FAD response communication. This research finds that not only can such a network be improved significantly, but the quantitative results support the qualitative observations from early in the data extraction process. This paper adds original methods to the literature and opens the door for future quantitative work in the area of crisis communication and emergency response.