Radio Spectrum Battles: Television Broadcast vs Wireless Broadband and the Future of PSB

A principal incentive behind the move to digital television has been the release of radio spectrum in the attractive UHF band which can be used for other, notably wireless, services. This so-called digital dividend and related spectrum battles have heightened in recent years as evidenced by the negotiations in the World Radiocommunication Conferences. Frequencies are a core input to many industries and thus radio spectrum management has acquired high economic and political significance. Historically in Europe, the terrestrial platform has been critical for the delivery of PSB. But increasingly since 2007, digital terrestrial network operators have come under enormous pressure to relinquish frequencies in response to the looming spectrum crunch of the wireless broadband sector and the projected phenomenal demand for its services. The article argues that limiting spectrum access for the DTT platform should not be synonymous with a corresponding weakening of PSB. The often dry and technical debate on radio spectrum management cannot obscure what is really at stake. The values that PSB stands for need to be adapted to and guaranteed in a likely post-broadcast [p. 348] environment. The political, economic, social and cultural principles of PSB remain valid irrespective of the underlying delivery platform used. The debate on a platform-neutral PSB is currently not as prominent as the debate on the spectrum demands of the wireless broadband industry. At best, the two debates (future of DTT/ WBB spectrum and future of PSB) are conducted in silos. Radio spectrum management should not be used as an(other) excuse to weaken PSB. Debate and action based on a digital commons space and communication rights can provide the way forward

Public Service Media as Enablers of Epistemic Rights

Growing concerns in recent years over threats to the foundations of democratic societies posed by misinformation, hate speech and other problems associated with digital communications have led to renewed calls for greater protection of epistemic rights within policy, advocacy and academic fora. Institutionally mandated to promote citizenship, public service media (PSM) organisations have an important role to play in supporting epistemic rights. We suggest four main conditions are required for PSM to fulfil this role. First, PSM are premised upon strong political commitment. At a time when this political commitment is dwindling, it is imperative that civil society, academia and international organisations continue to make the case for PSM strong. Second, we argue that PSM need to evolve with the times, and be allowed to use new transmission means, build new platforms and innovate. Third, we argue that PSM need to move beyond supporting epistemic rights, as they have traditionally been bestowed, and work to promote epistemic justice, by questioning the existing power structures of knowledge. Finally, PSM need to work together with other educational and cultural institutions towards the creation of an epistemic commons, countering the privatisation of communitive spaces and striving to make knowledge accessible to all

Why advocate for public service media? Perspectives from organizations for media development

In this commentary, we discuss how five prominent media development organizations (BBC Media Action, Council of Europe, DWA, PMA and UNESCO) define public service broadcasting (PSB)/public service media (PSM) and how they envisage its role and functions in their recent projects and reports. In view of the increasing challenges of the current media landscape, international donors are looking at models to provide a path to independent media and journalism and several international organizations support projects and institutional arrangements they label PSB/PSM. However, given the fundamental questions that existing PSBs face, is PSB a meaningful tool for media development? And how do these various advocates for PSB/PSM understand the concept and why do they feel that it is worth supporting? We find that there seems to have been a shift, common to all five organizations, towards defining PSB/PSM in terms of public service ethos, and we explain why this should be seen as a welcome development

D-cores: measuring collaboration of directed graphs based on degeneracy

International audienceCommunity detection and evaluation is an important task in graph mining. In many cases, a community is defined as a subgraph characterized by dense connections or interactions between its nodes. A variety of measures are proposed to evaluate different quality aspects of such communities--in most cases ignoring the directed nature of edges. In this paper, we introduce novel metrics for evaluating the collaborative nature of directed graphs--a property not captured by the single node metrics or by other established commu- nity evaluation metrics. In order to accomplish this objective, we capitalize on the concept of graph degeneracy and define a novel D-core framework, extending the classic graph-theoretic notion of k-cores for undirected graphs to directed ones. Based on the D-core, which essen- tially can be seen as a measure of the robustness of a community under degeneracy, we devise a wealth of novel metrics used to evaluate graph collaboration features of directed graphs. We applied the D-core approach on large synthetic and real-world graphs such as Wikipedia, DBLP, and ArXiv and report interesting results at the graph as well at the node level

CORECLUSTER: A Degeneracy Based Graph Clustering Framework

International audienceGraph clustering or community detection constitutes an important task forinvestigating the internal structure of graphs, with a plethora of applications in several domains. Traditional tools for graph clustering, such asspectral methods, typically suffer from high time and space complexity. In thisarticle, we present \textsc{CoreCluster}, an efficient graph clusteringframework based on the concept of graph degeneracy, that can be used along withany known graph clustering algorithm. Our approach capitalizes on processing thegraph in a hierarchical manner provided by its core expansion sequence, anordered partition of the graph into different levels according to the $k$-coredecomposition. Such a partition provides a way to process the graph inan incremental manner that preserves its clustering structure, whilemaking the execution of the chosen clustering algorithm much faster due to thesmaller size of the graph's partitions onto which the algorithm operates