Introduction: Infrastructural stigma and urban vulnerability

In this introduction to the Special Issue ‘Infrastructural Stigma and Urban Vulnerability’, we outline the need to join up debates on infrastructural exclusion on the one hand and urban stigma on the other. We argue that doing so will allow us to develop a better understanding of the co-constitutive relationship between the material and the symbolic structures of the city shaping urban exclusion and vulnerability. Positing that stigma is not merely a symbolic force but has significant material effects, we show how urban dwellers often experience it in deeply embodied ways, including through impacts on their physical health. Furthermore, stigma is not only imposed on the built environment through discourse, it also emanates from the materiality of the city; this agentic role of the city is often disregarded in sociologically-informed approaches to urban stigma. When infrastructures become sites of contestation about urban inclusion, stigma can be utilised by stigmatised residents to demand connection to public networks, and the wider symbolic inclusion this entails. Through examining the issue of infrastructural stigma in cities and urban territories across the Global North and Global South, as well as the places in between, the nine articles in this Special Issue pay attention to the global relationalities of infrastructural stigma. Ultimately, our focus on the infrastructural origins of stigma draws attention to the structural causes of urban inequality – a reality which is often occluded by both stigma itself and by prevalent academic approaches to understanding it.

Network and Data Transfer Security Management in Higher Educational Institutions

This chapter explored communications security through the use of an empirical survey to assess the extent of network and data transfer security management in Ghanaian higher educational institutions. Network security management controls consist of monitoring of networks, posture checking, network segmentation, and defense-in-depth. Data transfer security management includes encryption, media access control, and protection of data from public networks. Data were collected from information technology (IT) personnel. The ISO/IEC 21827 maturity model for assessing IT security posture was used to measure the controls. Overall, the result showed that the institutions were at the planned stage of communications security management. In particular, network monitoring, defense-in-depth, and the protection of data from public networks were the most applied controls. Conversely, posture checking was the least applied control. Higher educational institutions need to review their communications security plans and better manage network and data transfer security controls to mitigate data breaches.

Research on Design and Application of National Fitness System

In order to improve the physical quality of the national people, a national fitness system is designed and applied to practice. Design the overall architecture of the national fitness system, including the perception layer, network layer, and application layer. The perception layer mainly uses Internet of Things gateway, central machine, wireless perception node, and fitness data dashboard to obtain fitness data. The network layer mainly uses WiFi, 4G, Ethernet, and other public networks to transmit fitness data, fitness guidance data, and equipment operation and maintenance data. The application layer provides data storage, device management, user management, and client services. On this basis, through the collection of users’ fitness data rating data, the data are transformed into fitness data rating matrix, and the matrix is analyzed and calculated to realize the intelligent recommendation of fitness data and complete the design of national fitness data recommendation algorithm. The test results show that the system can meet the requirements of normal use, good compatibility, and user score is high and has high practical application value.

Design and Simulation of Smart Communication System for Unmanned Arial Vehicles

In recent years, the use of drones has drastically increased as the evolution of drone use in commercial sectors and reduced costs of the hardware. Earlier drone services were mostly used for military operations but nowadays the Unmanned Arial Vehicles (UAV) system is very advanced and its applications are not limited to military operations. The recent years have also witnessed a network evolution of UAVs from single ground to air network to multi-UAV network systems along with usage of wireless public networks like LTE which can act as UAV communication channel. In the proposed project, a communication system used in the UAS system is simulated to analyze the UAV behavior under different conditions with respect to mission planning and the communication networks used. A comprehensive study is done on communication networks used in controlling UAVs. For a safer approach, the proposed model is simulated using available software instead of hardware implementations. ArduPilot SITL, MAVProxy and Mission Planner are used to simulate the UAV system virtually. Whereas network simulations of Wi-Fi and LTE network are done with the help of NS-3 on a separate platform. Various network parameters like network delay, throughput, etc., are graphically represented.

The constraints, aesthetic implications, and creative strategies of composing for networked music performance

<p>Performing music together over a public network while being located at a distance from each other necessarily means performing under a particular set of technical and performative constraints. These constraints are antithetical to—and make cumbersome—the performance of tightly synchronised music, which traditionally depends on the conditions of transmission stability, ultra-low latency, and shared presence. These conditions are experienced optimally only when musicians perform at the same time and in the same place. Except for specialized private network services, public networks are inherently latent and unstable, which disrupts musicians’ ability to achieve precise vertical synchronisation and create an environment where approaches to music performance and composition must be reconsidered. It is widely considered that these conditions mean that networked music performance is a future genre for when network latencies and throughput improve, or one that is currently reserved for high-end heavily optimised networks afforded by institutions and not individuals, or one that is primarily reserved for improvisatory or aleatoric composition and performance techniques. I disagree that networked music is dependent on access to advanced Internet technologies and suggest that music compositions for networked music performance can be highly successful over regular broadband conditions when the composer considers the limitations as opportunities for new creative strategies and aesthetic approaches. In this exegesis, I outline the constraints that prove that while networked music performance is latent, asynchronous, multi-located, multi-authorial, and hopelessly, intrinsically, and passionately digitally mediated, these constraints provide rich creative opportunities for the composition and performance of synchronised and resonant music. I introduce four aesthetic approaches, which I determine as being critical towards the development of networked music: 1) postvertical harmony, where the asynchronous arrival of signals ruptures the harmonic experience; 2) new timbral fusions created through multi-located resonant sources; 3) a contribution to performative relationships through the generation and transmission of vital information in the musical score and through the development of new technologies for facilitating performer synchronisation; and 4) the post-digital experience, where all digital means of manipulation are permitted and embraced, leading to new ways of listening to and forming reproduced realities. Each of these four aesthetic approaches are considered individually in relation to the core constraints, through discussion of the present-day technical conditions, and how each of these approaches are applied to my musical portfolio through practical illustration.</p>

The constraints, aesthetic implications, and creative strategies of composing for networked music performance

<p>Performing music together over a public network while being located at a distance from each other necessarily means performing under a particular set of technical and performative constraints. These constraints are antithetical to—and make cumbersome—the performance of tightly synchronised music, which traditionally depends on the conditions of transmission stability, ultra-low latency, and shared presence. These conditions are experienced optimally only when musicians perform at the same time and in the same place. Except for specialized private network services, public networks are inherently latent and unstable, which disrupts musicians’ ability to achieve precise vertical synchronisation and create an environment where approaches to music performance and composition must be reconsidered. It is widely considered that these conditions mean that networked music performance is a future genre for when network latencies and throughput improve, or one that is currently reserved for high-end heavily optimised networks afforded by institutions and not individuals, or one that is primarily reserved for improvisatory or aleatoric composition and performance techniques. I disagree that networked music is dependent on access to advanced Internet technologies and suggest that music compositions for networked music performance can be highly successful over regular broadband conditions when the composer considers the limitations as opportunities for new creative strategies and aesthetic approaches. In this exegesis, I outline the constraints that prove that while networked music performance is latent, asynchronous, multi-located, multi-authorial, and hopelessly, intrinsically, and passionately digitally mediated, these constraints provide rich creative opportunities for the composition and performance of synchronised and resonant music. I introduce four aesthetic approaches, which I determine as being critical towards the development of networked music: 1) postvertical harmony, where the asynchronous arrival of signals ruptures the harmonic experience; 2) new timbral fusions created through multi-located resonant sources; 3) a contribution to performative relationships through the generation and transmission of vital information in the musical score and through the development of new technologies for facilitating performer synchronisation; and 4) the post-digital experience, where all digital means of manipulation are permitted and embraced, leading to new ways of listening to and forming reproduced realities. Each of these four aesthetic approaches are considered individually in relation to the core constraints, through discussion of the present-day technical conditions, and how each of these approaches are applied to my musical portfolio through practical illustration.</p>

Opinion of television managers about their viewers and their interest in science: audience images and lack of scientific content on television

Science does not occupy a prominent place on Spanish television, possibly due to those in charge of the creation, production, organization, and programming of content. Previous research has shown that television executives have mental images of their audiences that they actively use in their professional practice. This study adopts a mixed, qualitative-quantitative method to determine the beliefs of Spanish television executives regarding the attitudes of their audiences toward scientific programs and content. The study began with two focus groups, each made up of five professionals, to identify a wide range of attitudes. A Likert-scale questionnaire was then applied to examine the level of agreement with those attitudes among 450 employees of different types of private and public networks from six different regions of Spain. The main findings are that Spanish television managers do not believe that their viewers enjoy scientific topics or have any interest in them. However, professionals with previous experience of the production of scientific content tend to have a slightly more positive attitude about the opinion of general audiences regarding televised science. Hence, familiarity with televised science positively impacts the appreciation of such content on television. This research highlights the fundamental role of network managers in explaining the lack of science on Spanish media. Its results are coherent with previous studies confirming that TV professionals have preconceived images about their audiences that are derived from their own preferences and that guide their decisions.

WND-Identifier: Automated and Efficient Identification of Wireless Network Devices

The widespread application of wireless communication technology brings great convenience to people, but security and privacy problems also arise. To assess and guarantee the security of wireless networks and user devices, discovering and identifying wireless devices become a foremost task. Currently, effective device identification is still a challenging issue, as device fingerprinting requires huge training datasets and is difficult to expand, and rule-based identification is not accurate and reliable enough. In this paper, we propose WND-Identifier, a universal and extensible framework for the identification of wireless devices, which can generate high-precision device labels (vendor, type, and product model) efficiently without user interaction. We first introduce the concept of device-info-related network protocols. WND-Identifier makes full use of the natural language features in such protocol messages and combines with the device description in the welcome page, thereby utilizing extraction rules to generate concrete device labels. Considering that the device information in the protocol messages may be incomplete or forged, we further take advantage of the application logic independence and stability of the device-info-related protocol, so as to build a multiprotocol text classification model, which maps the device to a known label. We conduct experiments in homes and public networks and present three application scenarios to verify the effectiveness of WND-Identifier.

TeleSDC

Telemedicine promises to increase the quality of emergency treatments. Besides the transfer of speech and video data, medical device and patient data will add additional value to the tele-guided emergency personnel. In this paper, we develop a concept for transmitting device and patient data via the open communication standards SDC in a telemedical context, including data transmission over mobile radio networks while considering the limitations of public networks, and opening new usage scenarios for telemedicine.