Cross-Cultural Communication within American and Chinese Colleagues in Multinational Organizations

Globalization is a mantra nowadays that has been employed to describe the highly active exchange activities between countries and regions across the globe. It takes a multidimensional form, connecting people and things regardless of spatial and temporal confines, and permeating into all walks of life. Along with changes brought by this dynamic international interaction, a myriad of organizations, no longer isolated and static, are beginning to ride on this gravy train by expanding tentacles into every cranny and nook of the globe. One of the challenges that is facing the multinational organizations is the increasing diversity of the workforce and similarly complex prospective customers with disparate cultural backgrounds. After all, language barriers, cultural nuances, and value divergence can easily cause unintended misunderstanding and low efficiency in internal communication in a multinational environment. It leads to conflict among employees and profit loss in organizational productivity. Therefore, in international organization, cross-cultural communication, also known as intercultural and trans-cultural communication, serves as a lubricant, which mitigates frictions, resolves conflicts, and improves overall work efficiency; likewise, it serves as coagulant, which integrates the collective wisdom and strength, enhances the collaboration of team work, and unites multiple cultures together between race and ethnicity, which leads to desirable virtuous circle of synergy effect. This paper identifies three aspects of culture that constitute people’s understanding between each other in professional settings, namely, language and non-language code; cultural values and beliefs; as well as cultural stereotypes and preconceptions

Where is My Attention?

Attention is the key to all learning. Indeed, it is what will save our lives on a daily basis. In all my Communication courses, it is one of the first things I put forward as a question that students may ask of themselves as a check on their “internal considering.” Philosopher/practitioner George Gurdjieff (1866-1949) called the constant rumble in our minds of random condemnations and re-imaginings of past events as “internal considering.” He felt it was detrimental to ourselves and our relationships with others; it is, I maintain, a constant “self considering” that takes us away from the present and “being here now.” So recognizing that we are often not paying attention to what is happening in the space we are in now, with the people we are with now, is the first step in correcting this distracting state of affairs

A three person poncho and a set of maracas:designing Ola De La Vida, a co-located social play computer game

Events that bring people together to play video games as a social experience are growing in popularity across the western world. Amongst these events are ‘play parties,’ temporary social play environments which create unique shared play experiences for attendees unlike anything they could experience elsewhere. This paper explores co-located play experience design and proposes that social play games can lead to the formation of temporary play communities. These communities may last for a single gameplay session, for a whole event, or beyond the event. The paper analyses games designed or enhanced by social play contexts and evaluates a social play game, Ola de la Vida. The research findings suggest that social play games can foster community through the design of game play within the game itself, through curation which enhances their social potential, and through design for ‘semi-spectatorship’, which blurs the boundaries between player and spectator thus widening the game’s magic circle

Concurrent Geometric Multicasting

We present MCFR, a multicasting concurrent face routing algorithm that uses geometric routing to deliver a message from source to multiple targets. We describe the algorithm's operation, prove it correct, estimate its performance bounds and evaluate its performance using simulation. Our estimate shows that MCFR is the first geometric multicast routing algorithm whose message delivery latency is independent of network size and only proportional to the distance between the source and the targets. Our simulation indicates that MCFR has significantly better reliability than existing algorithms