CODEBOOK FOR ANALYZING CONTENT AND FUNCTION OF COMMUNICATION IN SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL DILEMMA EXPERIMENTS

This codebook provides concepts and methodologies for coding and quantifying the content and function of communication in group social dilemma experiments, specifically with a social and ecological component (e.g., common pool resource dilemma). The content that is coded pertains to such categories as small talk, humor, information exchange (e.g., ecological, social, institutional), enforcement (e.g., praise, warnings, threats), decision making (e.g., proposals, choosing). Functional categories pertain to key functions needed for group members to govern the dilemma: e.g., develop agreements, make group decisions (e.g., democratic decision making), resolve conflicts, and enforce compliance. This codebook provides guidance for metrics to associate coded communication content and function to observed cooperation.

Study in the Virtual Class: Doings of Feminist Pedagogy and the Covid-19 Crisis

While reflecting on our lecturing practices, many of us feminists wish to deconstruct the ex-cathedra teaching position and its symbolic effects. After initial inquiry into feminist pedagogy, the present discussion combines basic information with the author’s teaching practice: underway in tertiary-level education and involving University of Ljubljana students. Some of the preconceived and some spontaneous, yet informed teaching approaches have been tested with positive results, and are worth sharing. They are accompanied by certain concepts, and their applied use which is presented on the list of teaching/learning topoi. Personal advancement in terms of more knowledgeable, skilled and emotionally fulfilling teaching and learning occurred in the first phase of the anti-Covid-19 regime and the virtual studying. The heavy working overload and new teaching and learning technological mode have pushed me towards the vivified and inventive “moderation” of Zoom and Google study meetings. The flexibility of the web lectures and seminars has promoted the invention of less conventional and coded communication, and the situational introduction of actual socio-political topics not inscribed in the curriculum. One of these outer topics was “gender relations in the anti-Covid-19 regime”. The search for novel teaching and learning practices has induced the need to systematise work practices. Reorganisation has been conceptual: the triangulation of students, the “object” (subject matter, related experience, and embodiment through feelings), the teacher. The quality of studying by way of the two way-transfer of knowledges and transferable skills has been proven while working together with students in research experiment at one of the subjects.

A Mechanism of Coded Communication: Xinwen Lianbo and CCP Politics

Studies of the official media of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have long focused on interpretations of political propaganda. In this article, we propose another model—the “secret code communication” model. We find that the main audience for some of the official media consists not of members of the public but rather cadres. The China Central Television (CCTV) program Xinwen Lianbo is a typical example. The program operates according to a very obscure political code. By watching and decoding Xinwen Lianbo, cadres can see that Xi Jinping is firmly in power. They can also gain insight into the policy directions favored by the CCP. Xinwen Lianbo thus acts as a mechanism for communication within the party using a code that can only be deciphered by insiders.

Straggler-Aware Distributed Learning: Communication–Computation Latency Trade-Off

When gradient descent (GD) is scaled to many parallel workers for large-scale machine learning applications, its per-iteration computation time is limited by straggling workers. Straggling workers can be tolerated by assigning redundant computations and/or coding across data and computations, but in most existing schemes, each non-straggling worker transmits one message per iteration to the parameter server (PS) after completing all its computations. Imposing such a limitation results in two drawbacks: over-computation due to inaccurate prediction of the straggling behavior, and under-utilization due to discarding partial computations carried out by stragglers. To overcome these drawbacks, we consider multi-message communication (MMC) by allowing multiple computations to be conveyed from each worker per iteration, and propose novel straggler avoidance techniques for both coded computation and coded communication with MMC. We analyze how the proposed designs can be employed efficiently to seek a balance between the computation and communication latency. Furthermore, we identify the advantages and disadvantages of these designs in different settings through extensive simulations, both model-based and real implementation on Amazon EC2 servers, and demonstrate that proposed schemes with MMC can help improve upon existing straggler avoidance schemes.

A Viterbi decoder and its hardware Trojan models: an FPGA-based implementation study

Integrated circuits may be vulnerable to hardware Trojan attacks during its design or fabrication phases. This article is a case study of the design of a Viterbi decoder and the effect of hardware Trojans on a coded communication system employing the Viterbi decoder. Design of a Viterbi decoder and possible hardware Trojan models for the same are proposed. An FPGA-based implementation of the decoder and the associated Trojan circuits have been discussed. The noise-added encoded input data stream is stored in the block RAM of the FPGA and the decoded data stream is monitored on the PC through an universal asynchronous receiver transmitter interface. The implementation results show that there is barely any change in the LUTs used (0.5%) and power dissipation (3%) due to the insertion of the proposed Trojan circuits, thus establishing the surreptitious nature of the Trojan. In spite of the fact that the Trojans cause negligible changes in the circuit parameters, there are significant changes in the bit error rate (BER) due to the presence of Trojans. In the absence of Trojans, BER drops down to zero for signal to noise rations (SNRs) higher than 6 dB, but with the presence of Trojans, BER doesn’t reduce to zero even at a very high SNRs. This is true even with the Trojan being activated only once during the entire duration of the transmission.