The Bell System dominated telecommunications in the United States and Canada for most of the twentieth century, but its monopoly was not inevitable. In the decades around 1900, ordinary ...citizens-farmers, doctors, small-town entrepreneurs-established tens of thousands of independent telephone systems, stringing their own wires to bring this new technology to the people. Managed by opportunists and idealists alike, these small businesses were motivated not only by profit but also by the promise of open communication as a weapon against monopoly capital and for protection of regional autonomy. As the Bell empire grew, independents fought fiercely to retain control of their local networks and companies-a struggle with an emerging corporate giant that has been almost entirely forgotten.
The People's Networkreconstructs the story of the telephone's contentious beginnings, exploring the interplay of political economy, business strategy, and social practice in the creation of modern North American telecommunications. Drawing from government documents in the United States and Canada, independent telephone journals and publications, and the archives of regional Bell operating companies and their rivals, Robert MacDougall locates the national debates over the meaning, use, and organization of the telephone industry as a turning point in the history of information networks. The competing businesses represented dueling political philosophies: regional versus national identity and local versus centralized power. Although independent telephone companies did not win their fight with big business, they fundamentally changed the way telecommunications were conceived.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The phone booth exists as a fond but distant memory for some people, and as a strange and ...dysfunctional waste of space for many more. Ariana Kelly approaches the phone booth as an entity that embodies diverse attitudes about privacy, freedom, power, sanctuary, and communication in its various forms all around the world. Through portrayals of phone booths in literature, film, personal narrative, philosophy, and religion, Phone Booth offers a definitive account of an object on the cusp of obsolescence. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Has the cell phone forever changed the way people communicate? The mobile phone is used for "real time" coordination while on the run, adolescents use it to manage their freedom, and teens "text" to ...each other day and night. The mobile phone is more than a simple technical innovation or social fad, more than just an intrusion on polite society. This book, based on world-wide research involving tens of thousands of interviews and contextual observations, looks into the impact of the phone on our daily lives. The mobile phone has fundamentally affected our accessibility, safety and security, coordination of social and business activities, and use of public places. Based on research conducted in dozens of countries, this insightful and entertaining book examines the once unexpected interaction between humans and cell phones, and between humans, period. The compelling discussion and projections about the future of the telephone should give designers everywhere a more informed practice and process, and provide researchers with new ideas to last years.*Rich Ling (an American working in Norway) is a prominent researcher, interviewed in the new technology article in the November 9 issue of the New York Times Magazine. *A particularly "good read", this book will be important to the designers, information designers, social psychologists, and others who will have an impact on the development of the new third generation of mobile telephones. *Carefully and wittily written by a senior research scientist at Telenor, Norway's largest telecommunications company, and developer of the first mobile telephone system that allowed for international roaming.
Cellular Garcia-Swartz, Daniel D; Campbell-Kelly, Martin
2022
eBook
Odprti dostop
Tracks the evolution of the international cellular industry from the late 1970s to the present. The development of the mobile-phone industry into what we know today required remarkable cooperation ...between companies, governments, and industrial sectors. Companies developing cellular infrastructure, cellular devices, cellular network services, and eventually software and mobile semiconductors had to cooperate, not simply compete, with each other. In this global history of the mobile-phone industry, Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz and Martin Campbell-Kelly examine its development in the United States, Europe, Japan, and several emerging economies, including China and India. They present the evolution of mobile phones from the perspective of vendors of telephone equipment and network operators, users whose lives have been transformed by mobile phones, and governments that have fostered specific mobile-phone standards. Cellular covers the technical aspects of the cellphone, as well as its social and political impact. Beginning with the 1980s, the authors trace the development of closed (proprietary) and open (available to all) cellular standards, the impact of network effects as cellular adoption increased, major technological changes affecting mobile phone hardware, and the role of national governments in shaping the industry. The authors also consider the changing roles that cellular phones have played in the everyday lives of people around the world and the implications 5G technology may have for the future. Finally, they offer statistics on how quickly the cellular industry grew in different regions of the world and how firms competed in those various markets.
Digital Youth Subrahmanyam, Kaveri; Smahel, David
2010, 20101020, 20110401
eBook
Filling a critical gap in the literature, this much-needed publication is an in-depth analysis of the diverse array of research into adolescents' virtual lives. It sets young people's 'virtual' ...behavior in the context of contemporary developmental theory.
In recent years response rates on telephone surveys have been declining. Rates for the behavioral risk factor surveillance system (BRFSS) have also declined, prompting the use of new methods of ...weighting and the inclusion of cell phone sampling frames. A number of scholars and researchers have conducted studies of the reliability and validity of the BRFSS estimates in the context of these changes. As the BRFSS makes changes in its methods of sampling and weighting, a review of reliability and validity studies of the BRFSS is needed.
In order to assess the reliability and validity of prevalence estimates taken from the BRFSS, scholarship published from 2004-2011 dealing with tests of reliability and validity of BRFSS measures was compiled and presented by topics of health risk behavior. Assessments of the quality of each publication were undertaken using a categorical rubric. Higher rankings were achieved by authors who conducted reliability tests using repeated test/retest measures, or who conducted tests using multiple samples. A similar rubric was used to rank validity assessments. Validity tests which compared the BRFSS to physical measures were ranked higher than those comparing the BRFSS to other self-reported data. Literature which undertook more sophisticated statistical comparisons was also ranked higher.
Overall findings indicated that BRFSS prevalence rates were comparable to other national surveys which rely on self-reports, although specific differences are noted for some categories of response. BRFSS prevalence rates were less similar to surveys which utilize physical measures in addition to self-reported data. There is very little research on reliability and validity for some health topics, but a great deal of information supporting the validity of the BRFSS data for others.
Limitations of the examination of the BRFSS were due to question differences among surveys used as comparisons, as well as mode of data collection differences. As the BRFSS moves to incorporating cell phone data and changing weighting methods, a review of reliability and validity research indicated that past BRFSS landline only data were reliable and valid as measured against other surveys. New analyses and comparisons of BRFSS data which include the new methodologies and cell phone data will be needed to ascertain the impact of these changes on estimates in the future.
Identifying a form of government intervention in social and economic affairs called public service liberalism, Alan Stone looks to that ideology to confront the problems of the 1990s and beyond. He ...shows in this fascinating case study that the policy has been effective in the past: the American telephone industry from its inception until 1934 is an illustration of how public service liberalism served both economic efficiency and a complex structure of public values. Stone depicts the stages by which public service liberalism was replaced by less adequate policies and suggests ways that it could be successfully restored. Furthermore, Stone demonstrates that government-business relationships like the one that prevailed in the telephone industry were common in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. He argues that this period was not an era of laissez-faire, as is often alleged, but that its economic energy and extraordinary technological progress were accompanied by complete acceptance of certain kinds of government intervention. Challenging the presuppositions not only of the new ideologists of deregulation, privatization, and competition but also of the practitioners of what he calls the "sanctimonious muddle" of present-day liberalism, Stone demonstrates that public service liberalism could help resolve current problems, such as those in the savings and loan institutions and the cable television industry.
Originally published in 1991.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
This book is a tutorial, with plenty of step-by-step instructions bundled with examples and screenshots. VoIP telephony concepts are discussed, and how-tos are provided to help the reader become ...familiar with FreePBX. This book is targeted at system administrators who want to get started with FreePBX. Previous knowledge of Linux or networking is not required, although some basic knowledge of PBX and Linux will be a bonus.
Although mobile phones (MPs) are inexorably changing the forced migration experience, the realm of digital migration studies is still fragmented and lacking an analytical focus. Many research areas ...are still unexplored, while no narrative, scoping or systematic reviews have been conducted on this topic to date. The present review analyzed scientific contributions in Humanistic and Social Sciences with the aim to provide an overview of existing studies on the role of mobile phones (MPs) on refugees' experience, and to inform practice and policymaking for advancing the use of MPs for the protection of migrants' human rights. A scoping review was conducted using the Arksey and O'Malley framework and the JBI Reviewer's Manual recommendations. A three-step search was carried out in four bibliographic databases by three independent reviewers. Review selection and extraction were performed using an interactive team approach. Forty-three theoretical and empirical contributions were selected, and their content analyzed. The contributions ranged from 2013 to 2018 and varied in terms of disciplines, objectives, methodology, contexts, and migrants' origin, with the most studied group being Syrians. Five different topics concerning refugees' experience and MPs' usage emerged: (a) media practices in refugees' everyday lives; (b) opportunity and risks of MPs during the migration journey; (c) the role of MPs in maintaining and developing social relations; (d) potential of MPs for refugees" self-assertion and self-empowerment; (e) MPs for refugees' health and education. The results showed that modern devices, such as mobile phones, bring both risks and opportunities for refugees' experience, thereby both favouring and threatening asylum seekers' and refugees' human rights. Recommendations to policymaking and services and associations for advancing the use of MPs for the protection of the rights of migrants have been proposed.
Semantic communications could improve the transmission efficiency significantly by exploring the semantic information. In this paper, we make an effort to recover the transmitted speech signals in ...the semantic communication systems, which minimizes the error at the semantic level rather than the bit or symbol level. Particularly, we design a deep learning (DL)-enabled semantic communication system for speech signals, named DeepSC-S. In order to improve the recovery accuracy of speech signals, especially for the essential information, DeepSC-S is developed based on an attention mechanism by utilizing a squeeze-and-excitation (SE) network. The motivation behind the attention mechanism is to identify the essential speech information by providing higher weights to them when training the neural network. Moreover, in order to facilitate the proposed DeepSC-S for dynamic channel environments, we find a general model to cope with various channel conditions without retraining. Furthermore, we investigate DeepSC-S in telephone systems as well as multimedia transmission systems to verify the model adaptation in practice. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed DeepSC-S outperforms the traditional communications in both cases in terms of the speech signals metrics, such as signal-to-distortion ration and perceptual evaluation of speech distortion. Besides, DeepSC-S is more robust to channel variations, especially in the low signal-to-noise (SNR) regime.
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