Quasirandom Rumor Spreading: An Experimental Analysis

We empirically analyze two versions of the well-known "randomized rumor spreading" protocol to disseminate a piece of information in networks. In the classical model, in each round each informed node informs a random neighbor. In the recently proposed quasirandom variant, each node has a (cyclic) list of its neighbors. Once informed, it starts at a random position of the list, but from then on informs its neighbors in the order of the list. While for sparse random graphs a better performance of the quasirandom model could be proven, all other results show that, independent of the structure of the lists, the same asymptotic performance guarantees hold as for the classical model. In this work, we compare the two models experimentally. This not only shows that the quasirandom model generally is faster, but also that the runtime is more concentrated around the mean. This is surprising given that much fewer random bits are used in the quasirandom process. These advantages are also observed in a lossy communication model, where each transmission does not reach its target with a certain probability, and in an asynchronous model, where nodes send at random times drawn from an exponential distribution. We also show that typically the particular structure of the lists has little influence on the efficiency.Comment: 14 pages, appeared in ALENEX'0

Success: talent, intelligence or beauty ?

We analyze the Celebrity 100 annual list of the world’s most “powerful celebrities” compiled and published by Forbes Magazine. The lists provide an interesting collection of people, that includes their earnings, and the perception of citizens concerning the attributes that made them become celebrities. We analyze the relationship between their earnings and the perceptions on their intelligence, talent, beauty and other attributes, and show that though beauty plays a role, intelligence and talent are more important.earnings, economic success, talent

Broadcasting services amendment (Media Ownership) Bill 2006 and related bills

To help better explore the potential implications associated with the proposed legislation, we conducted a survey of 919 WA television viewers drawing from our TV Panel of 3000 viewers. Our panel has been recruited from a variety of sources including through lists acquired through marketing research firms, as well as direct mail and newspaper advertising recruitment drives. In many ways, our panel is better informed regarding future possibilities because they participate in regular studies where such scenarios are tested. In this way, the panel is better positioned to understand potential futures

Rethinking the Role of History in Law & Economics: The Case of the Federal Radio Commission in 1927

In the study of law and economics, there is a danger that historical inferences from theory may infect historical tests of theory. It is imperative, therefore, that historical tests always involve a vigorous search not only for confirming evidence, but for disconfirming evidence as well. We undertake such a search in the context of a single well-known case: the Federal Radio Commission's (FRC's) 1927 decision not to expand the broadcast radio band. The standard account of this decision holds that incumbent broadcasters opposed expansion (to avoid increased competition) and succeeded in capturing the FRC. Although successful broadcaster opposition may be taken as confirming evidence for this interpretation, our review of the record reveals even stronger disconfirming evidence. In particular, we find that every major interest group, not just radio broadcasters, publicly opposed expansion of the band in 1927, and that broadcasters themselves were divided at the FRC's hearings.

Automatically Leveraging MapReduce Frameworks for Data-Intensive Applications

MapReduce is a popular programming paradigm for developing large-scale, data-intensive computation. Many frameworks that implement this paradigm have recently been developed. To leverage these frameworks, however, developers must become familiar with their APIs and rewrite existing code. Casper is a new tool that automatically translates sequential Java programs into the MapReduce paradigm. Casper identifies potential code fragments to rewrite and translates them in two steps: (1) Casper uses program synthesis to search for a program summary (i.e., a functional specification) of each code fragment. The summary is expressed using a high-level intermediate language resembling the MapReduce paradigm and verified to be semantically equivalent to the original using a theorem prover. (2) Casper generates executable code from the summary, using either the Hadoop, Spark, or Flink API. We evaluated Casper by automatically converting real-world, sequential Java benchmarks to MapReduce. The resulting benchmarks perform up to 48.2x faster compared to the original.Comment: 12 pages, additional 4 pages of references and appendi

Outsourcing in the UK television industry: A global value chain analysis

The aim of this study is twofold. First, it identifies outsourcing as a growing trend in the media industries: as leading media corporations integrate vertically and invest in segments that increase their asset specificity, they are also withdrawing from other segments and delegating a growing number of tasks to suppliers. This article uses the United Kingdom as a case study to demonstrate that while broadcasters are investing in TV content production, they are also stepping away from technology investments and media delivery tasks. It is a significant phenomenon that contributes to redefine the scope of companies whose engineering know-how was part of their core activity. Then, this article analyses the consequences of outsourcing as it contributes to vertical disintegration and the formation of global value chains in the media industries. It is also creating power asymmetries between lead firms and suppliers that have an impact on the type of M&A activities these companies pursue . The second contribution is theoretical in scope, as this article aims to state a case for GVC analysis in media and communication studies, showing the benefits of placing the evolution of the media industries in the context of long-term trends in the world economy