A powerful heuristic for telephone gossiping

A refined heuristic for computing schedules for gossiping in the telephone model is presented. The heuristic is fast: for a network with n nodes and m edges, requiring R rounds for gossiping, the running time is O(R n log(n) m) for all tested classes of graphs. This moderate time consumption allows to compute gossiping schedules for networks with more than 10,000 PUs and 100,000 connections. The heuristic is good: in practice the computed schedules never exceed the optimum by more than a few rounds. The heuristic is versatile: it can also be used for broadcasting and more general information dispersion patterns. It can handle both the unit-cost and the linear-cost model. Actually, the heuristic is so good, that for CCC, shuffle-exchange, butterfly de Bruijn, star and pancake networks the constructed gossiping schedules are better than the best theoretically derived ones. For example, for gossiping on a shuffle-exchange network with 2^{13} PUs, the former upper bound was 49 rounds, while our heuristic finds a schedule requiring 31 rounds. Also for broadcasting the heuristic improves on many formerly known results. A second heuristic, works even better for CCC, butterfly, star and pancake networks. For example, with this heuristic we found that gossiping on a pancake network with 7! PUs can be performed in 15 rounds, 2 fewer than achieved by the best theoretical construction. This second heuristic is less versatile than the first, but by refined search techniques it can tackle even larger problems, the main limitation being the storage capacity. Another advantage is that the constructed schedules can be represented concisely

Lower bounds on systolic gossip

AbstractGossiping is an extensively investigated information dissemination process in which each processor has a distinct item of information and has to collect all the items possessed by the other processors. In this paper we provide an innovative and general lower bound technique relying on the novel notion of delay digraph of a gossiping protocol and on the use of matrix norm methods. Such a technique is very powerful and allows the determination of new and significantly improved lower bounds in many cases. In fact, we derive the first general lower bound on the gossiping time of systolic protocols, i.e., constituted by a periodic repetition of simple communication steps. In particular, given any network of n processors and any systolic period s, in the directed and the undirected half-duplex cases every s-systolic gossip protocol takes at least log(n)/log(1/λ)−O(loglog(n)) time steps, where λ is the unique solution between 0 and 1 of λ·p⌊s/2⌋(λ)·p⌈s/2⌉(λ)=1, with pi(λ)=1+λ2+⋯+λ2i−2 for any integer i>0. We then provide improved lower bounds in the directed and half-duplex cases for many well-known network topologies, such as Butterfly, de Bruijn, and Kautz graphs. All the results are extended also to the full-duplex case. Our technique is very general, as for s→∞ it allows the determination of improved results even for non-systolic protocols. In fact, for general networks, as a simple corollary it yields a lower bound only an O(loglog(n)) additive factor far from the general one independently proved in [Proc. 1st ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), 1989, p. 318; Topics in Combinatorics and Graph Theory (1990) 451; SIAM Journal on Computing 21(1) (1992) 111; Discrete Applied Mathematics 42 (1993) 75] for all graphs and any (non-systolic) gossip protocol. Moreover, for specific networks, it significantly improves with respect to the previously known results, even in the full-duplex case. Correspondingly, better lower bounds on the gossiping time of non-systolic protocols are determined in the directed, half-duplex and full-duplex cases for Butterfly, de Bruijn, and Kautz graphs. Even if in this paper we give only a limited number of examples, our technique has wide applicability and gives a general framework that often allows to get improved lower bounds on the gossiping time of systolic and non-systolic protocols in the directed, half-duplex and full-duplex cases

Roswell Daily Record, 11-25-1904

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/roswell_record_news/1373/thumbnail.jp

Colonist, 1886-06-26

The Colonist began on 6 March 1886, changing its name to The Newfoundland Colonist after 18 July 1891. Having printed local and international news Monday to Saturday for six years, the paper came to an abrupt end when its offices were destroyed in The Great Fire of 8 July 1892.Title variations recorded in Alternative Title, as needed

Rise of the Modern Mediatrix: The Feminization of Media and Mediating Labor, 1865-1945

This dissertation uncovers a vast archive of fictional female telegraph, telephone, and typewriter girls, combining rigorous historical research with feminist, psychoanalytic readings of mass cultural texts to show how the global gendering of low-level communication work shaped modern media. It begins in the United States, where women first performed this work, and explores three further national contexts (France, Germany, and Britain) where female operators and typists circulated as media icons of techno-social connection in an increasingly atomized age. The title “modern mediatrix” describes the essential mediating role white-collar woman workers have played in modern media infrastructure, from switchboard to editing bench. This role has been promoted by corporations, nations, and mass media as feminine for over a century. Across four chapters that engage ad campaigns, plays, novels, and films, I reveal the modern mediatrix to be a uniquely flexible character, capable of creating continuity across industrial ruptures and activating new narrative forms. To trace this character’s construction, I tie her unique semiotic tools and social skills to evolving Christian notions of sanctified feminine transmission, weaving as women’s work, and Hollywood’s reliance on an invisible feminized clerical proletariat. Media scholars who point out telegraphs and typewriters still rarely note the girl behind the machine. For too long, my field has clung to the male factory worker as an all-purpose archetype for cinematic labor and depicted female tech users at home, alone, in the thrall of the apparatus. Instead, my project proposes the rise of the modern mediatrix as an essential theoretical and material foundation for film and media studies. Each of my chapters explores a different facet of the modern mediatrix. I begin in the 1860s, when Western Union began recruiting lady telegraphers and the Catholic Church premiered its Blessing of the Telegraph, with Mary cast as a pure channel for man’s natural use of electricity. Framed by this techno-romantic mother-figure, Chapter 1 examines three teenage girls enshrined in US popular history as the first users of the telegraph, telephone, and typewriter. I show how inventors and companies used virginal foremothers to claim paternity over communications technologies and their feminized workforces. Chapter 2 argues Bell’s speech-weaver ad campaigns coded onscreen operators as vernacular translators of transitional cinematic syntax. Highlighting telephone girls’ enlistment as temp techno-pedagogues during US film’s introduction of cross-cutting and European film’s polyglot transition to sound, it offers women’s film-weaving labor as an alternative to the surgical rhetoric (suture) and patriarchal authorship model typically used to historicize film editing conventions. Chapter 3 traces the secretary’s construction as an automatic audience member in interwar European modernist media. Suggesting that the hypnotic effects of taking dictation stoked Weimar-era anxieties about women workers’ receptivity to media-savvy fascist dictators, it catalogs secretarial symptoms that trouble Frankfurt school divisions of worker-spectators into shocked factory workers and absorbed little shopgirls. Chapter 4 uses the metallic echoes of taps to read Astaire-Rogers musicals as anxious allegories for the Production Code’s reliance on typists, and as encrypted channels to two fleetingly feminized languages, Morse and binary code. A postwar coda draws out the clerical conduit’s transgressive potential, hinted at by her narrative flexibility and explicitly reclaimed in the 1970s and 80s by feminist filmmakers and techno-scientists. With access to the codes of information capitalism, virginal electric muses and hysterical film fans became canny decipherers of mystified techno-cultural matrilineages

Shaw in Mid-Twentieth-Century Iran

The popular Iranian TV series, Shahrzad (2015-2018) titled after its female protagonist, features a reoccurring image of Shaw. The walls of the bedroom and study of Shahrzad’s main love interest, Farhad, include only two portraits — one of George Bernard Shaw and the other of Shakespeare. Shahrzad is set in 1950s Iran and begins in the aftermath of the US led 1953 coup which resulted in the overthrow of the then democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, a figure who had made enemies at home and abroad for seeking to nationalise Iran’s oil industry. Farhad is a firm supporter of Mossadegh and a revolutionary, exemplified in his involvement in an unsuccessful plot to free Mossadegh from prison. Farhad’s study is integral to the development of his character and the show’s plot. Farhad is a man of letters, a journalist, and enthusiast of modernist Persian poetry who reads avidly and often engages in intellectual debate. The study is also where he plots the acts of rebellion that then emerge as he meets with associates and friends, hiding plans and even ammunition amongst his books and other belongings. Shaw’s image in this room may at first glance seem insignificant or accidental. When positioned in the larger context of mid-twentieth-century Iranian politics, however, it is indicative of Shaw’s strong presence in the emerging debates around social and political reform amongst many Iranian intellectuals and literary figures of the period

Cruisin\u27 the Coast: A Practice in Passionate Observation

The term Passionate Observation is presented as an ability that improves creative writing. It requires a writer to absorb details, noticed or perceived, with intense imagination and reasoning. I present a three-pronged case for acceptance and development of this skill for writing mystery fiction. Examined in this paper are the literary talents of Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, along with the supposition both authors were passionate observers. Moreover, through the lens of education, I connect visual literacy, kinesthetic research, and passionate observation. Then, I show the philosophical correlation between observation in science and passionate observation in creative writing. I summarize my analysis into a closing argument for passionate observation and follow up my critical paper with a creative writing piece; several chapters of a developing mystery fiction novel titled, Cruisin’ the Coast, where I employed passionate observation to enhance and expand a previously worked narrative. The results expanded the original work, improved the imagery, and ignited my ability for invention. While the piece remains a work-in-progress, it has surpassed my initial artistic expectations

Informatics in the Future: Proceedings of the 11th European Computer Science Summit (ECSS 2015), Vienna, October 2015

Big data; Computing ethics; Women in computing; Research ethic