Information Transmission

Purpose – To explore the use of LexiURL as a Web intelligence tool for collecting and analysing links to digital libraries, focusing specifically on the National electronic Library for Health (NeLH). Design/methodology/approach – The Web intelligence techniques in this study are a combination of link analysis (web structure mining), web server log file analysis (web usage mining), and text analysis (web content mining), utilizing the power of commercial search engines and drawing upon the information science fields of bibliometrics and webometrics. LexiURL is a computer program designed to calculate summary statistics for lists of links or URLs. Its output is a series of standard reports, for example listing and counting all of the different domain names in the data. Findings – Link data, when analysed together with user transaction log files (i.e., Web referring domains) can provide insights into who is using a digital library and when, and who could be using the digital library if...

The alpha (8-13 Hz), beta (15-25 Hz) and gamma (30-60 Hz) bands of the EEG have been long studied clinically because of their putative functional importance. Old experimental results indicate that repetitive stimulation of the visual pathway evokes synchronous responses at the cortical level with a gain that depends on frequency; oscillations within relevant bands are less damped at subsequent processing levels than others. Our current results show in the cat that cortico-geniculate feedback has a build-in potentiation mechanism that operates at around the beta frequency and activates thalamic cells thus lowering the threshold for visual information transmission. We have also shown that enhanced beta activity is propagated along this feedback pathway solely during attentive visual behavior. This activity consists of 300-1,000 ms bursts that correlate in time with gamma oscillatory events. Beta-bursting activity spreads to all investigated visual centers, including the lateral poster...

Photonic devices with low insertion loss are important in dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) systems. Currently most of these devices, such as variable optical attenuators (VOA), switches, filters, and dispersion compensators, etc., involve bulk (or micro-optic) ...

Speech intelligibility can be severely compromised in environments where there are several competing speakers. It may be possible, however, to improve speech intelligibility in such environments by manipulating certain acoustic parameters known to facilitate the segregation of competing signals. The first step in designing such a feature-rich audio display is to understand the significant elements of human auditory perception that affect information transmission capacity. We review a series of experiments to examine the ...

Pressure to change business education is rising. Lectures, where students listen to an expert academic should be the exception rather than the rule. A reliance on passive learning tasks reflects an informationtransmission concept of teaching which produces inferior learning outcomes. Incorporating new learning and assessment tasks can improve learning outcomes. Since technology is one source of innovation currently in the spotlight, this paper describes the opportunities and the obstacles to improving outcomes through ...

The ability of citizens to advance arguments and have them considered fairly is essential to the equality and epistemic quality of deliberative institutions. But is this generally true? This paper builds on game-theoretic models of strategic information transmission to offer a theory of how the interests that deliberators have in the outcome of deliberation can reduce the influence of some citizens in deliberative process. Specifically, this paper argues that the influence of an argument depends on whether the deliberator making the argument is in the majority or minority in terms of her interests in the outcome of deliberation. An arguments made by a member of the minority will be less influential than the same argument made by a member of the majority. I conduct first empirical test of this kind of model in realistic deliberative conditions using a laboratory experiment and a field experiment, and find support for this theory.

At the single-neuron level, precisely timed spikes can either constitute firing-rate codes or spike-pattern codes that utilize the relative timing between consecutive spikes. There has been little experimental support for the hypothesis that such temporal patterns contribute substantially to information transmission. By using grasshopper auditory receptors as a model system, we show that correlations between spikes can be used to represent behaviorally relevant stimuli. The correlations reflect the inner structure of the spike train: a succession of burst-like patterns. We demonstrate that bursts with different spike counts encode different stimulus features, such that about 20% of the transmitted information corresponds to discriminating between different features, and the remaining 80% is used to allocate these features in time. In this spike-pattern code, the what and the when of the stimuli are encoded in the duration of each burst and the time of burst onset, respectively. Given the ubiquity of burst firing, we expect similar findings also for other neural systems.