Transnational Screens and Asia Pacific Public Cultures: Vancouver, Toronto, and Hong Kong, 1997-2007

Despite widespread scholarly interest in media globalization in East Asia and the Asia Pacific region, there has been very little attention paid to the circulation of independent screen media. This thesis aims to address this gap by examining three sites and processes of non-mainstream screen distribution and exhibition: a non-profit film distributor in Hong Kong, a diasporic film festival in Toronto, and a non-collecting gallery in Vancouver. Using a scavenger methodology and through empirical research, the thesis reveals how these sites have responded proactively to opportunities and threats posed by deregulation, privatization, and the rise of Asia. Unlike governments or media conglomerates, however, these sites have not been driven by competition and profit-seeking, but by a commitment to social and political transformation. The study highlights the sites’ adoption of a minor transnational strategy—a linking together of peripheral screen cultures and marginal groups to other peripheral screen cultures and marginal groups—as an alternative within globalism and regionalization. It argues that minor transnational practices depend first on “independent sole traders”—educational migrants and cultural workers who broker the movement of media within and across marginal groups—and second, on minor-to-minor distribution and exhibition circuits that are contingent and dispersed. By staging cultural connections and exchanges within and between peripheries, these sites have led to the production of new identities, such as queer Asian, and social imaginaries, such as an “imagined community of indies,” that exceed the logics of the market and the neoliberal nation-state

Effect of Location Accuracy and Shadowing on the Probability of Non-Interfering Concurrent Transmissions in Cognitive Ad Hoc Networks

Cognitive radio ad hoc systems can coexist with a primary network in a scanning-free region, which can be dimensioned by location awareness. This coexistence of networks improves system throughput and increases the efficiency of radio spectrum utilization. However, the location accuracy of real positioning systems affects the right dimensioning of the concurrent transmission region. Moreover, an ad hoc connection may not be able to coexist with the primary link due to the shadowing effect. In this paper we investigate the impact of location accuracy on the concurrent transmission probability and analyze the reliability of concurrent transmissions when shadowing is taken into account. A new analytical model is proposed, which allows to estimate the resulting secure region when the localization uncertainty range is known. Computer simulations show the dependency between the location accuracy and the performance of the proposed topology, as well as the reliability of the resulting secure region

Combining relevance information in a synchronous collaborative information retrieval environment

Traditionally information retrieval (IR) research has focussed on a single user interaction modality, where a user searches to satisfy an information need. Recent advances in both web technologies, such as the sociable web of Web 2.0, and computer hardware, such as tabletop interface devices, have enabled multiple users to collaborate on many computer-related tasks. Due to these advances there is an increasing need to support two or more users searching together at the same time, in order to satisfy a shared information need, which we refer to as Synchronous Collaborative Information Retrieval. Synchronous Collaborative Information Retrieval (SCIR) represents a significant paradigmatic shift from traditional IR systems. In order to support an effective SCIR search, new techniques are required to coordinate users' activities. In this chapter we explore the effectiveness of a sharing of knowledge policy on a collaborating group. Sharing of knowledge refers to the process of passing relevance information across users, if one user finds items of relevance to the search task then the group should benefit in the form of improved ranked lists returned to each searcher. In order to evaluate the proposed techniques we simulate two users searching together through an incremental feedback system. The simulation assumes that users decide on an initial query with which to begin the collaborative search and proceed through the search by providing relevance judgments to the system and receiving a new ranked list. In order to populate these simulations we extract data from the interaction logs of various experimental IR systems from previous Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) workshops

Lattice Green functions and diffusion for modelling traffic routing in ad hoc networks

We describe basic properties of Markov chains on finite state spaces and their application to Green functions, partial differential equations, and their (approximate) solution using random walks on a graph. Attention is paid to the influence of boundary conditions (Dirichlet/von Neumann). We apply these ideas to the study of traffic propagation and distribution in ad hoc networks

Geographic Centroid Routing for Vehicular Networks

A number of geolocation-based Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) routing protocols have been shown to perform well in selected simulation and mobility scenarios. However, the suitability of these mechanisms for vehicular networks utilizing widely-available inexpensive Global Positioning System (GPS) hardware has not been evaluated. We propose a novel geolocation-based routing primitive (Centroid Routing) that is resilient to the measurement errors commonly present in low-cost GPS devices. Using this notion of Centroids, we construct two novel routing protocols and evaluate their performance with respect to positional errors as well as traditional DTN routing metrics. We show that they outperform existing approaches by a significant margin.Comment: 6 page