Journal of Applied Communications vol. 97 (1) Full Issue

Journal of Applied Communications vol. 97 (1) - Full Issu

First Amendment (Un)Exceptionalism: A Comparative Taxonomy of Campaign Finance Reform Proposals in the United States and United Kingdom

There is an urgent conversation happening among the world’s democracies about how to respond to the combined threat of online electioneering and foreign interference in domestic elections. Despite the shadow such activities cast over the 2016 presidential election in the United States, the US has been largely absent from comparative discussions about how to tackle the problem. This is not just because of a recalcitrant president. The assumption that America’s “First Amendment Exceptionalism” – the idea that American freedom of expression law is simply too much of an outlier to warrant useful comparative consideration – is strong on both sides of the Atlantic. This is especially true in regard to the regulation of political campaigns.This article challenges that assumption, and argues that America’s more libertarian approach to the legal regulation of political speech does not pose a barrier to fruitful comparative work in this area. It does so by comparing the law of the US to that of the UK. Specifically, it organizes reform proposals being considered in the US and UK into a common taxonomy, and sets out the legal standard governing each type of proposal in each country. Considering each country’s law through this organizational structure allows us to see that the legal differences between the US and UK, while significant, rarely bar the types of changes being considered in either nation. Indeed, the two countries have much to learn from each other’s efforts in this area, and lawmakers, regulators, and scholars should not hesitate to engage with the experiences of their transatlantic peers.In reaching this conclusion, the paper makes three distinct contributions. First, by clustering reform proposals into a taxonomy, it provides a structure for comparative work that will be useful not just in the US and UK, but in all countries working to bring their election laws fully into the internet era. Second, by providing an in-depth yet accessible guide to the legal structures undergirding election law in the US and UK, it provides a useful tool for scholars attempting to understand these systems. The US system in particular is often quickly dismissed by other nations, but without a deeper understanding of how and why US law has ended up as it has those nations risk inadvertently following in its footsteps. Finally, it identifies several concrete areas where the US and UK can benefit from each other’s expertise, thereby providing a roadmap for regulators, lawmakers, and reform advocates in both countries

Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

Applications of Repeated Games in Wireless Networks: A Survey

A repeated game is an effective tool to model interactions and conflicts for players aiming to achieve their objectives in a long-term basis. Contrary to static noncooperative games that model an interaction among players in only one period, in repeated games, interactions of players repeat for multiple periods; and thus the players become aware of other players' past behaviors and their future benefits, and will adapt their behavior accordingly. In wireless networks, conflicts among wireless nodes can lead to selfish behaviors, resulting in poor network performances and detrimental individual payoffs. In this paper, we survey the applications of repeated games in different wireless networks. The main goal is to demonstrate the use of repeated games to encourage wireless nodes to cooperate, thereby improving network performances and avoiding network disruption due to selfish behaviors. Furthermore, various problems in wireless networks and variations of repeated game models together with the corresponding solutions are discussed in this survey. Finally, we outline some open issues and future research directions.Comment: 32 pages, 15 figures, 5 tables, 168 reference

Should Public Relations Experts Ever Be Privileged Persons?

This Comment addresses the issue of whether, and under what circumstances, a lawyer’s communications with a public relations expert, whose advice is only valuable to the extent that it is communicated fully and freely with the attorney, will be protected by the attorney-client privilege. This Comment focuses on the role of public relations firms in the criminal law context, where constitutional concerns often arise. The author begins by laying out the history and background of the attorney-client privilege, and how the defense lawyer’s role has changed as a result of the rise of mass media. The Comment then goes on to explore the recent case law from the Second Circuit involving public relations firms and their applicability to the attorney-client privilege. From these cases the author synthesizes what she believes are the relevant factors used to decide whether the privilege attaches to public relations firms. Applying these factors the Comment argues that in orderr for our system of adjudication to be fair and just, we must permit attorneys to engage the media through assistance of public relations experts to whom the attorney-client privilege reaches

Maximum Production Of Transmission Messages Rate For Service Discovery Protocols

Minimizing the number of dropped User Datagram Protocol (UDP) messages in a network is regarded as a challenge by researchers. This issue represents serious problems for many protocols particularly those that depend on sending messages as part of their strategy, such us service discovery protocols. This paper proposes and evaluates an algorithm to predict the minimum period of time required between two or more consecutive messages and suggests the minimum queue sizes for the routers, to manage the traffic and minimise the number of dropped messages that has been caused by either congestion or queue overflow or both together. The algorithm has been applied to the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol using ns2 simulator. It was tested when the routers were connected in two configurations; as a centralized and de centralized. The message length and bandwidth of the links among the routers were taken in the consideration. The result shows Better improvement in number of dropped messages `among the routers