When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion1: NLM’s work in Information Technology and Health in Africa, 1997–2011

In 1997, Donald A.B. Lindberg M.D., Director, U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) agreed to address the request of African malaria researchers for access to the Internet and medical journals as part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) contribution to the Multilateral Initiative on Malaria (MIM). This challenge matched my interests and previous experience in Africa. I joined NLM in 1997 to help establish the MIM Communications Network (MIMCom) in partnership with several NIH components and more than 30 other partners in Africa, the U.S., the United Kingdom (U.K.), and Europe. After a successful launch of MIMCom, NLM worked with African partners to create a series of innovative programs to build capacity in Africa and enhance global access to indigenous African research.

THE IMAGINED INDEPENDENCE OF CANADA’S INTERNET

Internet scholars are uncovering and connecting military, political and cultural histories of early internets across the globe, including in the US, (Abbate 1999), Chile (Medina 2011) and France (Mailland & Driscoll 2016), respectively. All three approaches inform this history, exploring the Canadian context. On the recommendation of US counterparts at NORAD, a top-secret whitepaper recommended Canada develop a distributed communications network (NORAD 1965), which became SAMSON: Strategic Automatic Message Switching Operational Network. SAMSON developed into an internet, though riddled with a series of setbacks beginning almost immediately, until it was disbanded in 1984. (Canadian Armed Forces 1985). This paper investigates Canada’s internet infrastructural technopolitics through Larkin’s framework of questioning how they “emerge out of and store within them forms of desire and fantasy” (2013, 329). Specifically, it asks how the design, equipment, and network protocols of this Canadian internet embodied the imaginary of Canadian independence from 1965 to 1984, drawing on primary sources from the unpublished documents of the Canadian Armed Forces that have since been declassified. The emergence of the early Canadian internet occurred during a political renewal. At a time of pushback against American and British influence, the Canadian military rejected cooperation with the US, and focused on internal threats over Cold War rivalries (Hatt 1984). By design the Canadian internet was a security apparatus, but the technopolitics embedded in the system dictate who is to be secured against whom. This paper asks how this history persists in Canada’s internet infrastructure today.

Implementation of Automatic Power Consumption Control in Smart Grid

Transformation to Smart Grid needs proper design of good communication and monitoring infrastructure for the Smart meters as well as understanding the power use pattern of the individual users for providing them uniform power supply as per the individual consumer’s requirement.In the proposed system, the meter monitors and calculates the power and if the consumer exceeds the prescribed load limit it alarms. In case the consumer does not reduce his load meter automatically it cuts off the particular loads in consumer connection. GSM communications network are used to transfer electricity consumed data to the consumer as per programmed in the Arduino kit.

Paper Trails

Paper Trails presents a new history of the American state and its efforts to conquer, occupy, and integrate the western United States between the 1860s and early 1900s. The success of this project depended on an unassuming government institution: the US Post. As millions of settlers rushed into remote corners of the region, they relied on the mail to stay connected to the wider world. Letters and newspapers, magazines and pamphlets, petitions and money orders, all traveled across the most expansive communications network on earth. Paper Trails maps the year-by-year spread of this infrastructure using a dataset of more than one hundred thousand post offices, revealing a new and unfamiliar picture of the federal government in the West. Despite its size, the US Post was both nimble and ephemeral, rapidly spinning out its infrastructure to distant places before melting away at a moment’s notice. The administration of this network bore little resemblance to the civil service bureaucracies typically associated with government institutions today. Instead, the US Post grafted public mail service onto the private operations of thousands of local businesses, contracting with stagecoach companies to carry bags of mail and paying local merchants to distribute letters from their stores. The postal network’s sprawling geography and localized operations force a reconsideration of the American state, its history, and the ways in which it exercised power. This book tells the story of one of the most dramatic reorganizations of people, land, and resources in American history and the underlying spatial circuitry that wove this project together.

World-ready: A Journalism Capstone Unit Model with International Focus in a Pandemic and Post-pandemic Landscape

In assessing the literature to date, in the field of journalism capstone units, there is an absence of research on the potential of Australian journalism capstone units that help cultivate journalism students’ international networks through new media platforms. I argue that there is a need for an Australian journalism capstone unit that focuses on a global vision for post-programme work opportunities in a radically changed and digitally driven global landscape, which does not rely on physical travel. This is especially pertinent for students in the Australian communications network, which has a legacy tradition of insularity that is cultivated by geographical isolation. This factor has also become more pertinent in the wake of COVID-19 travel restrictions.

Self-similar traffic modeling in modern communication systems

The traffic is modeled as a stochastic process representing the demand that users of a communications network impose on the resources of the network. Originally it was considered that the times between arrivals of the demands of the users were independent of each other, as well as the same quantity of the demand (times between calls and duration of the calls, times between arrival of packages and length of the packages, times between requests for connections and length of sessions, etc.). Later, it was necessary to include the effect of the existing correlation between these variables, for which more elaborate models were developed in which the correlation declined exponentially with time. However, it has recently been shown that in modern communications networks, the correlation between these variables does not decay as rapidly and can persist across many time scales. This phenomenon, which significantly affects the performance of communications networks, can be adequately represented by fractal or autosimilar and multifractal traffic models. This article presents the basal concepts that are involved in the study of these models, in order to facilitate the reader introduction to the specialized literature on the subject.