Thesis (M. A. (African Languages)) -- University of the North, 1993 / Refer to the document

Samples of several populations, made up of both traditional and non-traditional students attending the University of Tennessee at Martin were shown different "newscasts," each newscast depicting a different style of news presentation. One style was the "Formal" newscast, and the other was the "Informal" style. The Formal style is characterized by direct eye-camera contact by the newscaster, a direct style of presentation, and no interaction between newscasters. The Informal style is characterized by interaction between newscasters, a more Informal presentation of the facts, and a relaxed atmosphere as the newscast progresses. The study attempted to find whether either style increased short-term retention of the news facts via a questionnaire administered following a video tape of a newscast. One group was shown an Informal newscast, while another separate group was shown a Formal newscast made up of the same stories. The questionnaire was administered following the completion of the tape. An analysis of the results shows there is no significant difference in retention of facts between the styles of newscasts. The only difference was an observed increase in interest with the Informal newscast, but this observance was not quantitatively analyzed and awaits further study.

During high-impact weather events like Hurricane Harvey, broadcast meteorologists take on the role of sensegiver, as they develop frameworks to help their viewers make sense of the storm. These frameworks are communicated through rhetorical choices evident in the language the meteorologists use to describe the storm’s threat and impact. This study investigates the rhetorical choices of KHOU broadcast meteorologists during Hurricane Harvey in order to make sense of the disaster, using an inductive thematic analysis. The results indicate that the KHOU broadcasters framed Harvey figuratively as an all-encompassing monster and a heat-seeking machine. The meteorologists used emotionally intense language to emphasize their concern about the forecast, to compare the event to previous flooding disasters, to describe Harvey’s catastrophic impact, and to express disbelief regarding the situation unfolding around them. These results show how sensegiving can be articulated rhetorically via specific language features like describing Harvey as a monster, or comparing Harvey’s impact to Hurricane Katrina. These specific language features identified here should be tested for their effectiveness in order to allow meteorologists across the weather enterprise to speak about threats and impacts in a more consistent manner.

This study examines the infotainment versus social responsibility debate as it applies to local television newscasts in the United States. An overview of the concerns surrounding infotainment as news follows, including a look at a newsroom's traditional responsibilities to its viewers, as well as its current role in adding to parent company profit. Socially responsible hard news and infotainment characteristics are defined as they apply to television news broadcasts, both within the context of news story content and in presentation style. A descriptive content analysis examines these characteristics within the late night local newscasts airing in Portland, Oregon. Portland is a large broadcast news market with over one million potential local news viewers. It is also a community with an exceptionally high rate of civic engagement (Abbott, 2001; Putnam & Feldstein, 2003). Its media coverage of the city, however, has been the subject of criticism by local columnists and national journalism scholars. A socially responsible news product would provide the city's residents with the information needed to continue the trend of participation, community betterment, and overall citizenship knowledge.

In this study l investigate the Singaporean characteristics of broadcast media internationalisation. I ask the question &quote Does Internationalisation lead to homogenisation and commercialisation of the television culture in Singapore or does it give way to more diversity, thus stimulating cultural differentiation?&quote . I articulate the constraints and/or tensions of supranational regulation, foreign policy, regional and intraregional alliances upon communication and the cultural and social effects as they impact on and respond to production, programming, scheduling and output in Singapore. I explain how Singaporean Television media culture takes part in the processes of globalisation, and how it challenges existing cultures and creates new and alternative symbolic and cultural communities, within the context of regional communication. In this thesis 1 conclude that whilst Singapore definitely does not have equity in information, wealth or resource flows it is attempting to liberalise. To do so, the government recognises that serious inadequacies and imbalances must be addressed and that the path to greater political and economic growth is through an actively informed public. Despite regulatory restrictions on data flow and technical and service ownership, Singapore is encouraging regional alliances, depoliticising cultural differences and concentrating on economic imperatives to build mutual knowledge and understanding, multilateral agreements, collective ownership, mutual exchange and cooperative dissemination.

<p>Broadcast encryption is a fairly new area in cryptology. It was first addressed in 1992, and the research in this area has been large ever since. In short, broadcast encryption is used for efficient and secure broadcasting to an authorized group of users. This group can change dynamically, and in some cases only one-way communication between the sender and receivers is available. An example of this is digital TV transmissions via satellite, in which only the paying customers can decrypt and view the broadcast. </p><p>The purpose of this thesis is to develop a general Java framework for implementation and performance analysis of broadcast encryption algorithms. In addition to the actual framework a few of the most common broadcast encryption algorithms (Complete Subtree, Subset Difference, and the Logical Key Hierarchy scheme) have been implemented in the system. </p><p>This master’s thesis project was defined by and carried out at the Information Theory division at the Department of Electrical Engineering (ISY), Linköping Institute of Technology, during the first half of 2004.</p>

<p>This thesis is a study of a new specification for end user interactivity developed by the Open Mobile Alliance, the specification is called OMA BCAST Service Interaction Function. The specification is one part of the OMA BCAST Service Enabler, which enables service delivery to mobile devices, where the most common service is mobile television. The Service Interaction Function enables end user interactivity related to a service, this could be a poll about the current television program or a chat where every message is presented to the users that are watching the same channel.</p><p>The specification is still of draft version and the scope of this thesis has been to investigate the Service Interaction Function and implement a PC prototype.</p>

<p>Cell Broadcast (CB) is a possible technical realisation of a global emergency alert system. It is a technique used for sending short text messages to all mobile stations (MSs) in a defined geographical area. An potential effect of using CB is the increase in battery consumption of the MS due to the fact that an extra channel has to be used to make the service available even when the network is otherwise congested. Another part of the service which leads to a potential problem is making CB messages available in different languages. Investigating these problems is the objective of this thesis and the studies it includes. During the first part of the thesis, we measured the battery consumption of MSs in different modes of operation in order to analyse how CB affects the amount of current drained. The tests showed that battery consumption increased only slightly when CB messages were being received at the MS. Although some of the results can be, and are, discussed, we believe that CB would have a small effect on the power consumption of an MS, particularly in a context where it would be used for emergency warning messages only. This mentioned, it would however be wishful to confirm the conclusions further through the realisation of long-term testing. The second part of the thesis deals with the investigation of the MSs’ support for CB messages with different coding schemes. Based on the investigation’s result, we have come to the conclusion that in the long term the usage of different coding schemes on the same channel is preferred. However, the usage of one, global, emergency channel is hard to realise since that requires a standardisation between all countries. In our opinion this may be achieved first in the long run and until then, the usage of separate channels seems to be necessary.</p>

<p>Abstract</p><p>Title: 2008- the year of the mobile-TV-markets expansion? (2008- ett år för mobil-tv-marknadens utbredning? Drivkrafter hinder och aktörer).</p><p>Number of pages: 50</p><p>Author: Hilda Engstrand</p><p>Tutor: Lowe Hedman</p><p>Course: Media and Communication Studies C</p><p>Period: Fall Semester 2007</p><p>University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University.</p><p>Purpose/Aim: The aim of this research paper is to identify the main operators on the mobile-tv-market and to map out the main forces behind its growth. What are the driving forces that creates a new disribution-market? Also to study how political media-regulation effect and urge the mobile-tv- market.</p><p>Material/Method: Interviews with people from the mobile-tv-market. To read public-documents, press releases and reports from the government, media-companies and organisations has also been a method used to gain information.</p><p>Main results: That the mobile-tv-markets growth is a result of several driving forces. Political regulation is an important force that can make a difference in how and when the mobile-tv-market will expand. My research has also showed that it is beneficial if operators on the market co-operate in different ways.</p><p>Keywords: Mobile TV, Communication Techniques, Political Regulation, Broadcast Standards, New Media</p>

The Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged as a new paradigm for collecting and processing data from physical environments, such as wild life sanctuaries, large warehouses, and battlefields. Users can access sensor data by issuing queries over the network, e.g., to find what are the 10 highest temperature values in the network. Typically, a WSN operates by constructing a logical topology, such as a spanning tree, built on top of the physical topology of the network. The constructed logical topology is then used to disseminate queries in the network, and also to process and return the results of such queries back to the user. A major challenge in this context is prolonging the network's lifetime that mainly depends on the energy cost of data communication via wireless radios, which is known to be very expensive as compared to the cost of data processing within the network. In this research, we investigate some of the core problems that deal with the different aspects of in-network query processing in WSNs. In that context, we propose an efficient filtering based algorithm for the top-k query processing in WSNs. Through a systematic study of the top-k query processing in WSNs we propose several solutions in this thesis, which are applicable not only to the top-k queries, but also to in-network query processing problems in general. Specifically, we consider broadcasting and convergecasting, which are two basic operations that are required by many in-network query processing solutions. Scheduling broadcasting and convergecasting is another problem that is important for energy efficiency in WSNs. Failure of communication links, which are common in WSNs, is yet another important issue that needs to be addressed. In this research, we take a holistic approach to deal with the above problems while processing the top-k queries in WSNs. To this end, the thesis makes several contributions. In particular, our proposed solutions include new logical topologies, scheduling algorithms, and an overall sophisticated communication framework, which allows to process the top-k queries efficiently and with increased reliability. Extensive simulation studies reveal that our solutions are not only energy efficient, saving up to 50% of the energy cost as compared to the current state-of-the-art solutions, but they are also robust to link failures.