Exploring the potential of Google Earth as a communication and engagement tool in collaborative Natural Flood Management planning

This paper considers the development and evaluation of a Google Earth “virtual globe” tour for communicating spatial data and engaging stakeholders in the early stages of a natural flood management (NFM) planning scenario, using a rural UK river catchment that suffered significant flooding in 2007. With a range of diverse stakeholder interests to consider, early engagement and the development of trust before decision‐making are essential for the long‐term success of such catchment‐wide projects. A local catchment group was consulted to identify key information requirements, and from this a “virtual globe” tour was created. The process involved specialist skills and expert leadership, but the end result was accessible to a range of audiences. User evaluation indicated that it was easy to navigate and can be used to stimulate interest and engage stakeholders. Participants trusted the content and valued the interactivity of the tour. It was helpful for communicating and educating participants about the catchment, the issues it faces, and the potential to incorporate NFM, particularly for those with little or no prior knowledge. More abstract information was harder to convey and there were limitations in the availability of suitable data for some variables and the in quality of satellite imagery. This exploratory research found that a Google Earth “virtual globe” tour can be a valuable tool in the initial stages of an NFM project, but there are also opportunities to use this technique in the more advanced stages of the planning process. The approach could be used as part of a wider toolkit for communication and engagement and has potential as a decision support tool in other environmental management scenarios with requirements for public participation, enabling the views of a range of participants to be captured through online distribution and to generate discussion in workshop setting

The Bits of Silence : Redundant Traffic in VoIP

Human conversation is characterized by brief pauses and so-called turn-taking behavior between the speakers. In the context of VoIP, this means that there are frequent periods where the microphone captures only background noise – or even silence whenever the microphone is muted. The bits transmitted from such silence periods introduce overhead in terms of data usage, energy consumption, and network infrastructure costs. In this paper, we contribute by shedding light on these costs for VoIP applications. We systematically measure the performance of six popular mobile VoIP applications with controlled human conversation and acoustic setup. Our analysis demonstrates that significant savings can indeed be achievable - with the best performing silence suppression technique being effective on 75% of silent pauses in the conversation in a quiet place. This results in 2-5 times data savings, and 50-90% lower energy consumption compared to the next better alternative. Even then, the effectiveness of silence suppression can be sensitive to the amount of background noise, underlying speech codec, and the device being used. The codec characteristics and performance do not depend on the network type. However, silence suppression makes VoIP traffic network friendly as much as VoLTE traffic. Our results provide new insights into VoIP performance and offer a motivation for further enhancements, such as performance-aware codec selection, that can significantly benefit a wide variety of voice assisted applications, as such intelligent home assistants and other speech codec enabled IoT devices.Peer reviewe

User Activity in Context: Technical Communicators as Articulators of Google Analytics Data

This technical report addresses questions raised by technical communication scholars concerning who or what may have rhetorical agency [1] in technology tools used to organize and manage information. One such tool is Google Analytics, a self-contained third-party system that technical communicators deploy by adding tracking code to web pages. Data collected through Google\u27s algorithms are processed and presented through the Analytics reporting tool. Customizable reports are managed by the Analytics account administrator and shared with web developers, designers, and writers to assess rhetorical value, defined as whether the page reached its audience and achieved its communicative purpose. The data are also frequently shared with administrators, supervisors, and data technicians to demonstrate ongoing value of website work and technical communicator labor. Report data, in the form of metrics and customizable visual interfaces, not only visualize the rhetorical value of web pages, but also represent Google\u27s rhetorical agency as designer and presenter of metrics. The paper encourages technical communicators to do symbolic-analytic work [34] to contextualize and remediate report data in their organizations. It reframes Analytics reports as network exchanges [29] in which responses, not resolution, are the goal of the Analytics report\u27s rhetorical work. In this way, Google Analytics reports generate responses, rather than results, where technical communicators become part of the rhetorical network exchange and articulate Analytics data for stakeholders seeking website user and visit metrics