Academic literature on the topic 'Node replacement policy'

Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANETs) are autonomously structured multi-hop wireless links in peer to peer fashion without aid of any infrastructure network. In MANETs network topology is dynamic, as nodes are mobile. Due to this dynamic topology and multi-hop environment data availability in MANETs is low. Caching of frequently accessed data in ad hoc networks is a potential technique that can improve the data access, performance and availability. While caching the new data items, it is very important which data item is to be removed, as in MANETs the data is not stored only on behalf of caching node but interest of the vicinity is also considered. In this paper the authors presented a new cache replacement policy for MANETs. This policy is based on multi-parameter value called SAT. We simulate the proposed work on OMNET++ and the simulation results shows that proposed replacement policy helps to improve the data availability in network.

In-network caching is one of the key aspects of content-centric networks (CCN), while the cache replacement algorithm of LRU does not consider the relation between the cache contents and its neighbor nodes in the cache replacement process, which reduced the efficiency of the cache. In this paper, a Neighbor-Referencing Cooperative Cache Policy (NRCCP) in CCN has been proposed to check whether the neighbors have cached the content. Node will cache the content while none of its neighbors has cached it, therefore reduce redundancy of cached content and increase the variety of contents. Simulation results show that NRCCP has better performance, as the network path had more caching ability and more content popularity densely distributed.

This article proposes a novel chunk-based caching scheme known as the Progressive Popularity-Aware Caching Scheme (PPCS) to improve content availability and eliminate the cache redundancy issue of Information-Centric Networking (ICN). Particularly, the proposal considers both entire-object caching and partial-progressive caching for popular and non-popular content objects, respectively. In the case that the content is not popular enough, PPCS first caches initial chunks of the content at the edge node and then progressively continues caching subsequent chunks at upstream Content Nodes (CNs) along the delivery path over time, according to the content popularity and each CN position. Therefore, PPCS efficiently avoids wasting cache space for storing on-path content duplicates and improves cache diversity by allowing no more than one replica of a specified content to be cached. To enable a complete ICN caching solution for communication networks, we also propose an autonomous replacement policy to optimize the cache utilization by maximizing the utility of each CN from caching content items. By simulation, we show that PPCS, utilizing edge-computing for the joint optimization of caching decision and replacement policies, considerably outperforms relevant existing ICN caching strategies in terms of latency (number of hops), cache redundancy, and content availability (hit rate), especially when the CN’s cache size is small.

Abstract. In this work, we propose a dynamic, flexible and interactive urban digital terrain platform with spatial data and query processing capabilities of geographic information systems, multimedia database functionality and graphical modeling infrastructure. A new data element, called Geo-Node, which stores image, spatial data and 3-D CAD objects is developed using an efficient data structure. The system effectively handles data transfer of Geo-Nodes between main memory and secondary storage with an optimized directional replacement policy (DRP) based buffer management scheme. Polyhedron structures are used in digital surface modeling and smoothing process is performed by interpolation. The experimental results show that our framework achieves high performance and works effectively with urban scenes independent from the amount of spatial data and image size. The proposed platform may contribute to the development of various applications such as Web GIS systems based on 3-D graphics standards (e.g., X3-D and VRML) and services which integrate multi-dimensional spatial information and satellite/aerial imagery.

Abstract. In this work, we propose a dynamic, flexible and interactive urban digital terrain platform (DTP) with spatial data and query processing capabilities of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), multimedia database functionality and graphical modeling infrastructure. A new data element, called Geo-Node, which stores image, spatial data and 3-D CAD objects is developed using an efficient data structure. The system effectively handles data transfer of Geo-Nodes between main memory and secondary storage with an optimized Directional Replacement Policy (DRP) based buffer management scheme. Polyhedron structures are used in Digital Surface Modeling (DSM) and smoothing process is performed by interpolation. The experimental results show that our framework achieves high performance and works effectively with urban scenes independent from the amount of spatial data and image size. The proposed platform may contribute to the development of various applications such as Web GIS systems based on 3-D graphics standards (e.g. X3-D and VRML) and services which integrate multi-dimensional spatial information and satellite/aerial imagery.

OBJECTIVE: To compare the prognostic factor of breast cancer survival between breast cancer diagnosed in subjects receiving hormone replacement therapy (HRT) before diagnosis to those without such a therapy. Subjects and methods: All breast cancers diagnosed between 1993 and 2000 within the breast cancer screening programme in Bouches du Rhône (France) were analysed for size, node status, and grade according to use, or not, of HRT. Univariate and multivariate analyses were carried out taking into account age, density of the breast, and mode of detection. RESULTS: The breast tumours diagnosed among HRT users had a lower grade whatever the mode of detection. The proportion of node positive tumours was identical in the two groups after adjustment for age. The smaller size of the tumours among HRT users is partly explained by the lower grade of these tumours Conclusion: Although tumours occurring in HRT users have a lower chance of being detected by screening, their prognostic factors, especially the grade of the tumour, are better than in non-users. More work is needed to find which part of this advantage is attributable to better surveillance of women treated with HRT

The move from analog distribution to online digital delivery is common in the contemporary mediascape. Music is in the midst of an ipod driven paradigm shift (Levy), television and movie delivery is being reconfigured (Johnson), and newspaper and magazines are confronting the reality of the world wide web and what it means for business models and ideas of journalism (Beecher). In the midst of this change, the book publishing industry remains defiant. While embracing digital production technologies, the vast majority of book content is still delivered in material form, printed and shipped the old-fashioned way—despite the efforts of many technology companies over the last decade. Even the latest efforts from corporate giants such as Sony and Amazon (who appear to have solved many of the technical hurdles of electronic reading devices) have had little visible impact. The idea of electronic books, or e-books, remains the domain of geeky early adopters (“Have”). The reasons for this are manifold, but, arguably, a broader uptake of e-books has not occurred because cultural change is much more difficult than technological change and book readers have yet to be persuaded to change their cultural habits. Electronic reading devices have been around for as long as there have been computers with screens, but serious attempts to replicate the portability, readability, and convenience of a printed book have only been with us for a decade or so. The late 1990s saw the release of a number of e-book devices. In quick succession, the likes of the Rocket e-Book, the SoftBook and the Franklin eBookman all failed to catch on. Despite this lack of market penetration, software companies began to explore the possibilities—Microsoft’s Reader software competed with a similar product from Adobe, some publishers became content providers, and a niche market of consumers began reading e-books on personal digital assistants (PDAs). That niche was sufficient for e-reading communities and shopfronts to appear, with a reasonable range of titles becoming available for purchase to feed demand that was very much driven by early adopters. But the e-book market was and remains small. For most people, books are still regarded as printed paper objects, purchased from a bookstore, borrowed from a library, or bought online from companies like Amazon.com. More recently, the introduction of e-ink technologies (EPDs) (DeJean), which allow for screens with far more book-like resolution and contrast, has provided the impetus for a new generation of e-book devices. In combination with an expanded range of titles (and deals with major publishing houses to include current best-sellers), there has been renewed interest in the idea of e-books. Those who have used the current generation of e-ink devices are generally positive about the experience. Except for some sluggishness in “turning” pages, the screens appear crisp, clear and are not as tiring to read as older displays. There are a number of devices that have embraced the new screen technologies (mobileread) but most attention has been paid to three devices in particular—mainly because their manufacturers have tried to create an ecosystem that provides content for their reading devices in much the same way that Apple’s itunes store provides content for ipods. The Sony Portable Reader (Sonystyle) was the first electronic ink device to be produced by a mainstream consumers electronics company. Sony ties the Reader to its Connect store, which allows the purchase of book titles via a computer; titles are then downloaded to the Reader in the same way that an mp3 player is loaded with music. Sony’s most prominent competition in the marketplace is Amazon’s Kindle, which does not require users to have a computer. Instead, its key feature is a constant wireless connection to Amazon’s growing library of Kindle titles. This works in conjunction with US cellphone provider Sprint to allow the purchase of books via wireless downloads wherever the Sprint network exists. The system, which Amazon calls “whispernet,” is invisible to readers and the cost is incorporated into the price of books, so Kindle users never see a bill from Sprint (“Frequently”). Both the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle are available only in limited markets; Kindle’s reliance on a cellphone network means that its adoption internationally is dependent on Amazon establishing a relationship with a cellphone provider in each country of release. And because both devices are linked to e-bookstores, territorial rights issues with book publishers (who trade publishing rights for particular global territories in a colonial-era mode of operation that seems to ignore the reality of global information mobility (Thompson 74–77)) contribute to the restricted availability of both the Sony and Amazon products. The other mainstream device is the iRex Iliad, which is not constrained to a particular online bookstore and thus is available internationally. Its bookstore ecosystems are local relationships—with Dymocks in Australia, Borders in the UK, and other booksellers across Europe (iRex). All three devices use EPDs and share similar specifications for the actual reading of e-books. Some might argue that the lack of a search function in the Sony and the ability to write on pages in the Iliad are quite substantive differences, but overall the devices are distinguished by their availability and the accessibility of book titles. Those who have used the devices extensively are generally positive about the experience. Amazon’s Customer Reviews are full of positive comments, and the sense from many commentators is that the systems are a viable replacement for old-fashioned printed books (Marr). Despite the good reviews—which suggest that the technology is actually now good enough to compete with printed books—the e-book devices have failed to catch on. Amazon has been hesitant to state actual sales figures, leaving it to so-called analysts to guess with the most optimistic suggesting that only 30 to 50,000 have sold since launch in late 2007 (Sridharan). By comparison, a mid-list book title (in the US) would expect to sell a similar number of copies. The sales data for the Sony Portable Reader (which has been on the market for nearly two years) and the iRex iliad are also elusive (Slocum), suggesting that they have not meaningfully changed the landscape. Tellingly, despite the new devices, the e-book industry is still tiny. Although it is growing, the latest American data show that the e-book market has wholesale revenues of around $10 million per quarter (or around $40 million per year), which is dwarfed by the $35 billion in revenues regularly earned annually in the US printed book industry ("Book"). It’s clear that despite the technological advances, e-books have yet to cross the chasm from early adopter to mainstream usage (see IPDF). The reason for this is complex; there are issues of marketing and distribution that need to be considered, as well as continuing arguments about screen technologies, appropriate publishing models, and digital rights management. It is beyond the scope of this article to do justice to those issues. Suffice to say, the book industry is affected by the same debates over content that plague other media industries (Vershbow). But, arguably, the key reason for the minimal market impact is straightforward—technological change is relatively easy, but cultural change is much more difficult. The current generation of e-book devices might be technically very close to being a viable replacement for print on paper (and the next generation of devices will no doubt be even better), but there are bigger cultural hurdles to be overcome. For most people, the social practice of reading books (du Gay et al 10) is inextricably tied with printed objects and a print culture that is not yet commonly associated with “technology” (perhaps because books, as machines for reading (Young 160), have become an invisible technology (Norman 246)). E. Annie Proulx’s dismissive suggestion that “nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little screen. Ever” (1994) is commonly echoed when book buyers consider the digital alternative. Those thoughts only scratch the surface of a deeply embedded cultural practice. The centuries since Gutenberg’s printing press and the vast social and cultural changes that followed positioned print culture as the dominant cultural mode until relatively recently (Eisenstein; Ong). The emerging electronic media forms of the twentieth century displaced that dominance with many arguing that the print age was moved aside by first radio and television and now computers and the Internet (McLuhan; Postman). Indeed, there is a subtext in that line of thought, one that situates electronic media forms (particularly screen-based ones) as the antithesis of print and book culture. Current e-book reading devices attempt to minimise the need for cultural change by trying to replicate a print culture within an e-print culture. For the most part, they are designed to appeal to book readers as a replacement for printed books. But it will take more than a perfect electronic facsimile of print on paper to persuade readers to disengage with a print culture that incorporates bookshops, bookclubs, writing in the margins, touching and smelling the pages and covers, admiring the typesetting, showing off their bookshelves, and visibly identifying with their collections. The frequently made technical arguments (about flashing screens and reading in the bath (Randolph)) do not address the broader apprehension about a cultural experience that many readers do not wish to leave behind. It is in that context that booklovers appear particularly resistant to any shift from print to a screen-based format. One only has to engage in a discussion about e-books (or lurk on an online forum where one is happening) to appreciate how deeply embedded print culture is (Hepworth)—book readers have a historical attachment to the printed object and it is this embedded cultural resistance that is the biggest barrier for e-books to overcome. Although e-book devices in no way resemble television, print culture is still deeply suspicious of any screen-based media and arguments are often made that the book as a physical object is critical because “different types of media function differently, and even if the content is similar the form matters quite a lot” (Weber). Of course, many in the newspaper industry would argue that long-standing cultural habits can change very rapidly and the migration of eyeballs from newsprint to the Internet is a cautionary tale (see Auckland). That specific format shift saw cultural change driven by increased convenience and a perception of decreased cost. For those already connected to the Internet, reading newspapers online represented zero marginal cost, and the range of online offerings dwarfed that of the local newsagency. The advantage of immediacy and multimedia elements, and the possibility of immediate feedback, appeared sufficient to drive many away from print towards online newspapers.For a similar shift in the e-book realm, there must be similar incentives for readers. At the moment, the only advantages on offer are weightlessness (which only appeals to frequent travellers) and convenience via constant access to a heavenly library of titles (Young 150). Amazon’s Kindle bookshop can be accessed 24/7 from anywhere there is a Sprint network coverage (Nelson). However, even this advantage is not so clear-cut—there is a meagre range of available electronic titles compared to printed offerings. For example, Amazon claims 130,000 titles are currently available for Kindle and Sony has 50,000 for its Reader, figures that are dwarfed by Amazon’s own printed book range. Importantly, there is little apparent cost advantage to e-books. The price of electronic reading devices is significant, amounting to a few hundred dollars to which must be added the cost of e-books. The actual cost of those titles is also not as attractive as it might be. In an age where much digital content often appears to be free, consumers demand a significant price advantage for purchasing online. Although some e-book titles are priced more affordably than their printed counterparts, the cost of many seems strangely high given the lack of a physical object to print and ship. For example, Amazon Kindle titles might be cheaper than the print version, but the actual difference (after discounting) is not an order of magnitude, but of degree. For example, Randy Pausch’s bestselling The Last Lecture is available for $12.07 as a paperback or $9.99 as a Kindle edition (“Last”). For casual readers, the numbers make no sense—when the price of the reading device is included, the actual cost is prohibitive for those who only buy a few titles a year. At the moment, e-books only make sense for heavy readers for whom the additional cost of the reading device will be amortised over a large number of books in a reasonably short time. (A recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggested that the break-even point for the Kindle was the purchase of 61 books (Arends).) Unfortunately for the e-book industry, not is only is that particular market relatively small, it is the one least likely to shift from the embedded habits of print culture. Arguably, should e-books eventually offer a significant cost benefit for consumers, uptake would be more dramatic. However, in his study of cellphone cultures, Gerard Goggin argues against purely fiscal motivations, suggesting that cultural change is driven by other factors—in his example, new ways of communicating, connecting, and engaging (205–211). The few market segments where electronic books have succeeded are informative. For example, the market for printed encyclopedias has essentially disappeared. Most have reinvented themselves as CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs and are sold for a fraction of the price. Although cost is undoubtedly a factor in their market success, added features such as multimedia, searchability, and immediacy via associated websites are compelling reasons driving the purchase of electronic encyclopedias over the printed versions. The contrast with the aforementioned e-book devices is apparent with encyclopedias moving away from their historical role in print culture. Electronic encyclopedias don’t try to replicate the older print forms. Rather they represent a dramatic shift of book content into an interactive audio-visual domain. They have experimented with new formats and reconfigured content for the new media forms—the publishers in question simply left print culture behind and embraced a newly emerging computer or multimedia culture. This step into another realm of social practices also happened in the academic realm, which is now deeply embedded in computer-based delivery of research and pedagogy. Not only are scholarly journals moving online (Thompson 320–325), but so too are scholarly books. For example, at the Macquarie University Library, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of electronic books in the collection. The library purchased 895 e-books in 2005 and 68,000 in 2007. During the same period, the number of printed books purchased remained relatively stable with about 16,000 bought annually (Macquarie University Library). The reasons for the dramatic increase in e-book purchases are manifold and not primarily driven by cost considerations. Not only does the library have limited space for physical storage, but Macquarie (like most other Universities) emphasises its e-learning environment. In that context, a single e-book allows multiple, geographically dispersed, simultaneous access, which better suits the flexibility demanded of the current generation of students. Significantly, these e-books require no electronic reading device beyond a standard computer with an internet connection. Users simply search for their required reading online and read it via their web browser—the library is operating in a pedagogical culture that assumes that staff and students have ready access to the necessary resources and are happy to read large amounts of text on a screen. Again, gestures towards print culture are minimal, and the e-books in question exist in a completely different distributed electronic environment. Another interesting example is that of mobile phone novels, or “keitai” fiction, popular in Japan. These novels typically consist of a few hundred pages, each of which contains about 500 Japanese characters. They are downloaded to (and read on) cellphones for about ten dollars apiece and can sell in the millions of copies (Katayama). There are many reasons why the keitai novel has achieved such popularity compared to the e-book approaches pursued in the West. The relatively low cost of wireless data in Japan, and the ubiquity of the cellphone are probably factors. But the presence of keitai culture—a set of cultural practices surrounding the mobile phone—suggests that the mobile novel springs not from a print culture, but from somewhere else. Indeed, keitai novels are written (often on the phones themselves) in a manner that lends itself to the constraints of highly portable devices with small screens, and provides new modes of engagement and communication. Their editors attribute the success of keitai novels to how well they fit into the lifestyle of their target demographic, and how they act as community nodes around which readers and writers interact (Hani). Although some will instinctively suggest that long-form narratives are doomed with such an approach, it is worthwhile remembering that, a decade ago, few considered reading long articles using a web browser and the appropriate response to computer-based media was to rewrite material to suit the screen (Nielsen). However, without really noticing the change, the Web became mainstream and users began reading everything on their computers, including much longer pieces of text. Apart from the examples cited, the wider book trade has largely approached e-books by trying to replicate print culture, albeit with an electronic reading device. Until there is a significant cost and convenience benefit for readers, this approach is unlikely to be widely successful. As indicated above, those segments of the market where e-books have succeeded are those whose social practices are driven by different cultural motivations. It may well be that the full-frontal approach attempted to date is doomed to failure, and e-books would achieve more widespread adoption if the book trade took a different approach. The Amazon Kindle has not yet persuaded bookloving readers to abandon print for screen in sufficient numbers to mark a seachange. Indeed, it is unlikely that any device positioned specifically as a book replacement will succeed. Instead of seeking to make an e-book culture a replacement for print culture, effectively placing the reading of books in a silo separated from other day-to-day activities, it might be better to situate e-books within a mobility culture, as part of the burgeoning range of social activities revolving around a connected, convergent mobile device. Reading should be understood as an activity that doesn’t begin with a particular device, but is done with whatever device is at hand. In much the same way that other media producers make content available for a number of platforms, book publishers should explore the potential of the new mobile devices. Over 45 million smartphones were sold globally in the first three months of 2008 (“Gartner”)—somewhat more than the estimated shipments of e-book reading devices. As well as allowing a range of communications possibilities, these convergent devices are emerging as key elements in the new digital mediascape—one that allows users access to a broad range of media products via a single pocket-sized device. Each of those smartphones makes a perfectly adequate e-book reading device, and it might be useful to pursue a strategy that embeds book reading as one of the key possibilities of this growing mobility culture. The casual gaming market serves as an interesting example. While hardcore gamers cling to their games PCs and consoles, a burgeoning alternative games market has emerged, with a different demographic purchasing less technically challenging games for more informal gaming encounters. This market has slowly shifted to convergent mobile devices, exemplified by Sega’s success in selling 300,000 copies of Super Monkey Ball within 20 days of its release for Apple’s iphone (“Super”). Casual gamers do not necessarily go on to become hardcore games, but they are gamers nonetheless—and today’s casual games (like the aforementioned Super Monkey Ball) are yesterday’s hardcore games of choice. It might be the same for reading. The availability of e-books on mobile platforms may not result in more people embracing longer-form literature. But it will increase the number of people actually reading, and, just as casual gaming has attracted a female demographic (Wallace 8), the instant availability of appropriate reading material might sway some of those men who appear to be reluctant readers (McEwan). Rather than focus on printed books, and book-like reading devices, the industry should re-position e-books as an easily accessible content choice in a digitally converged media environment. This is more a cultural shift than a technological one—for publishers and readers alike. Situating e-books in such a way may alienate a segment of the bookloving community, but such readers are unlikely to respond to anything other than print on paper. Indeed, it may encourage a whole new demographic—unafraid of the flickering screen—to engage with the manifold attractions of “books.” References Arends, Brett. “Can Amazon’s Kindle Save You Money?” The Wall St Journal 24 June 2008. 25 June 2008 ‹http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121431458215899767.html? mod=rss_whats_news_technology>. Auckland, Steve. “The Future of Newspapers.” The Independent 13 Nov. 2008. 24 June 2008 ‹http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article1963543.ece>. Beecher, Eric. “War of Words.” The Monthly, June 2007: 22–26. 25 June 2008 . “Book Industry Trends 2006 Shows Publishers’ Net Revenues at $34.59 Billion for 2005.” Book Industry Study Group. 22 May 2006 ‹http://www.bisg.org/news/press.php?pressid=35>. 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Hani, Yoko. “Cellphone Bards Make Bestseller Lists.” Japan Times Online Sep. 2007. 20 June 2008 ‹http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20070923x4.html>. “Have you Changed your mind on Ebook Readers?” Slashdot. 25 June 2008 ‹http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/08/2317250>. Hepworth, David. “The Future of Reading or the Sinclair C5.” The Word 17 June 2008. 20 June 2008 ‹http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/future-reading-or-sinclair-c5>. IPDF (International Digital Publishing Forum) Industry Statistics. 24 June 2008 ‹http://www.openebook.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm>. iRex Technologies Press. 12 June 2008 ‹http://www.irextechnologies.com/about/press>. Johnson, Bobbie. “Vince Cerf, AKA the Godfather of the Net, Predicts the End of TV as We Know It.” The Guardian 27 Aug. 2008. 24 June 2008 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/27/news.google>. 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E-book Reader Matrix, Mobileread Wiki. 30 May 2008 ‹http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix>. Nelson, Sara. “Warming to Kindle.” Publishers Weekly 10 Dec. 2007. 31 Jan. 2008 ‹http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6510861.htm.html>. Nielsen, Jakob. “Concise, Scannable and Objective, How to Write for the Web.” 1997. ‹20 June 2008 ‹http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/writing.html>. Norman, Don. The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1998. Ong, Walter. Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen, 1988. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Penguin, 1986. Proulx, E. Annie. “Books on Top.” The New York Times 26 May 1994. 28 June 2008 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/23/specials/proulx-top.html>. Randolph, Eleanor. “Reading into the Future.” The New York Times 18 June 2008. 19 June 2008 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/opinion/18wed3.html?>. 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Weber, Jonathan. “Why Books Resist the Rise of Novel Technologies.” The Times Online 23 May 2006. 25 June 2008 ‹http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article724510.ece> Young, Sherman. The Book is Dead, Long Live the Book. Sydney: UNSW P, 2007.

Our thesis is that the city’s ambience is now an unstable dialectic in which we are watchers and watched, mirrored and refracted in a landscape of iPhone auteurs, eTags, CCTV and sousveillance. Embrace ambience! Invoking Benjamin’s spirit, this article does not seek to limit understanding through restriction to a particular theme or theoretical construct (Buck-Morss 253). Instead, it offers snapshots of interactions at the dawn of the postmodern city. That bricolage also engages how people appropriate, manipulate, disrupt and divert urban spaces and strategies of power in their everyday life. Ambient information can both liberate and disenfranchise the individual. This article asks whether our era’s dialectics result in a new personhood or merely restate the traditional spectacle of ‘bright lights, big city’. Does the virtualized city result in ambient anomie and satiation or in surprise, autonomy and serendipity? (Gumpert 36) Since the steam age, ambience has been characterised in terms of urban sound, particularly the alienation attributable to the individual’s experience as a passive receptor of a cacophony of sounds – now soft, now loud, random and recurrent–from the hubbub of crowds, the crash and grind of traffic, the noise of industrial processes and domestic activity, factory whistles, fire alarms, radio, television and gramophones (Merchant 111; Thompson 6). In the age of the internet, personal devices such as digital cameras and iPhones, and urban informatics such as CCTV networks and e-Tags, ambience is interactivity, monitoring and signalling across multiple media, rather than just sound. It is an interactivity in which watchers observe the watched observing them and the watched reshape the fabric of virtualized cities merely by traversing urban precincts (Hillier 295; De Certeau 163). It is also about pervasive although unevenly distributed monitoring of individuals, using sensors that are remote to the individual (for example cameras or tag-readers mounted above highways) or are borne by the individual (for example mobile phones or badges that systematically report the location to a parent, employer or sex offender register) (Holmes 176; Savitch 130). That monitoring reflects what Doel and Clark characterized as a pervasive sense of ambient fear in the postmodern city, albeit fear that like much contemporary anxiety is misplaced–you are more at risk from intimates than from strangers, from car accidents than terrorists or stalkers–and that is ahistorical (Doel 13; Scheingold 33). Finally, it is about cooption, with individuals signalling their identity through ambient advertising: wearing tshirts, sweatshirts, caps and other apparel that display iconic faces such as Obama and Monroe or that embody corporate imagery such as the Nike ‘Swoosh’, Coca-Cola ‘Ribbon’, Linux Penguin and Hello Kitty feline (Sayre 82; Maynard 97). In the postmodern global village much advertising is ambient, rather than merely delivered to a device or fixed on a billboard. Australian cities are now seas of information, phantasmagoric environments in which the ambient noise encountered by residents and visitors comprises corporate signage, intelligent traffic signs, displays at public transport nodes, shop-window video screens displaying us watching them, and a plethora of personal devices showing everything from the weather to snaps of people in the street or neighborhood satellite maps. They are environments through which people traverse both as persons and abstractions, virtual presences on volatile digital maps and in online social networks. Spectacle, Anomie or Personhood The spectacular city of modernity is a meme of communication, cultural and urban development theory. It is spectacular in the sense that of large, artificial, even sublime. It is also spectacular because it is built around the gaze, whether the vistas of Hausmann’s boulevards, the towers of Manhattan and Chicago, the shopfront ‘sea of light’ and advertising pillars noted by visitors to Weimar Berlin or the neon ‘neo-baroque’ of Las Vegas (Schivelbusch 114; Fritzsche 164; Ndalianis 535). In the year 2010 it aspires to 2020 vision, a panoptic and panspectric gaze on the part of governors and governed alike (Kullenberg 38). In contrast to the timelessness of Heidegger’s hut and the ‘fixity’ of rural backwaters, spectacular cities are volatile domains where all that is solid continues to melt into air with the aid of jackhammers and the latest ‘new media’ potentially result in a hypereality that make it difficult to determine what is real and what is not (Wark 22; Berman 19). The spectacular city embodies a dialectic. It is anomic because it induces an alienation in the spectator, a fatigue attributable to media satiation and to a sense of being a mere cog in a wheel, a disempowered and readily-replaceable entity that is denied personhood–recognition as an autonomous individual–through subjection to a Fordist and post-Fordist industrial discipline or the more insidious imprisonment of being ‘a housewife’, one ant in a very large ant hill (Dyer-Witheford 58). People, however, are not automatons: they experience media, modernity and urbanism in different ways. The same attributes that erode the selfhood of some people enhance the autonomy and personhood of others. The spectacular city, now a matrix of digits, information flows and opportunities, is a realm in which people can subvert expectations and find scope for self-fulfillment, whether by wearing a hoodie that defeats CCTV or by using digital technologies to find and associate with other members of stigmatized affinity groups. One person’s anomie is another’s opportunity. Ambience and Virtualisation Eighty years after Fritz Lang’s Metropolis forecast a cyber-sociality, digital technologies are resulting in a ‘virtualisation’ of social interactions and cities. In post-modern cityscapes, the space of flows comprises an increasing number of electronic exchanges through physically disjointed places (Castells 2002). Virtualisation involves supplementation or replacement of face-to-face contact with hypersocial communication via new media, including SMS, email, blogging and Facebook. In 2010 your friends (or your boss or a bully) may always be just a few keystrokes away, irrespective of whether it is raining outside, there is a public transport strike or the car is in for repairs (Hassan 69; Baron 215). Virtualisation also involves an abstraction of bodies and physical movements, with the information that represents individual identities or vehicles traversing the virtual spaces comprised of CCTV networks (where viewers never encounter the person or crowd face to face), rail ticketing systems and road management systems (x e-Tag passed by this tag reader, y camera logged a specific vehicle onto a database using automated number-plate recognition software) (Wood 93; Lyon 253). Surveillant Cities Pervasive anxiety is a permanent and recurrent feature of urban experience. Often navigated by an urgency to control perceived disorder, both physically and through cultivated dominant theory (early twentieth century gendered discourses to push women back into the private sphere; ethno-racial closure and control in the Black Metropolis of 1940s Chicago), history is punctuated by attempts to dissolve public debate and infringe minority freedoms (Wilson 1991). In the Post-modern city unprecedented technological capacity generates a totalizing media vector whose plausible by-product is the perception of an ambient menace (Wark 3). Concurrent faith in technology as a cost-effective mechanism for public management (policing, traffic, planning, revenue generation) has resulted in emergence of the surveillant city. It is both a social and architectural fabric whose infrastructure is dotted with sensors and whose people assume that they will be monitored by private/public sector entities and directed by interactive traffic management systems – from electronic speed signs and congestion indicators through to rail schedule displays –leveraging data collected through those sensors. The fabric embodies tensions between governance (at its crudest, enforcement of law by police and their surrogates in private security services) and the soft cage of digital governmentality, with people being disciplined through knowledge that they are being watched and that the observation may be shared with others in an official or non-official shaming (Parenti 51; Staples 41). Encounters with a railway station CCTV might thus result in exhibition of the individual in court or on broadcast television, whether in nightly news or in a ‘reality tv’ crime expose built around ‘most wanted’ footage (Jermyn 109). Misbehaviour by a partner might merely result in scrutiny of mobile phone bills or web browser histories (which illicit content has the partner consumed, which parts of cyberspace has been visited), followed by a visit to the family court. It might instead result in digital viligilantism, with private offences being named and shamed on electronic walls across the global village, such as Facebook. iPhone Auteurism Activists have responded to pervasive surveillance by turning the cameras on ‘the watchers’ in an exercise of ‘sousveillance’ (Bennett 13; Huey 158). That mirroring might involve the meticulous documentation, often using the same geospatial tools deployed by public/private security agents, of the location of closed circuit television cameras and other surveillance devices. One outcome is the production of maps identifying who is watching and where that watching is taking place. As a corollary, people with anxieties about being surveilled, with a taste for street theatre or a receptiveness to a new form of urban adventure have used those maps to traverse cities via routes along which they cannot be identified by cameras, tags and other tools of the panoptic sort, or to simply adopt masks at particular locations. In 2020 can anyone aspire to be a protagonist in V for Vendetta? (iSee) Mirroring might take more visceral forms, with protestors for example increasingly making a practice of capturing images of police and private security services dealing with marches, riots and pickets. The advent of 3G mobile phones with a still/video image capability and ongoing ‘dematerialisation’ of traditional video cameras (ie progressively cheaper, lighter, more robust, less visible) means that those engaged in political action can document interaction with authority. So can passers-by. That ambient imaging, turning the public gaze on power and thereby potentially redefining the ‘public’ (given that in Australia the community has been embodied by the state and discourse has been mediated by state-sanctioned media), poses challenges for media scholars and exponents of an invigorated civil society in which we are looking together – and looking at each other – rather than bowling alone. One challenge for consumers in construing ambient media is trust. Can we believe what we see, particularly when few audiences have forensic skills and intermediaries such as commercial broadcasters may privilege immediacy (the ‘breaking news’ snippet from participants) over context and verification. Social critics such as Baudelaire and Benjamin exalt the flaneur, the free spirit who gazed on the street, a street that was as much a spectacle as the theatre and as vibrant as the circus. In 2010 the same technologies that empower citizen journalism and foster a succession of velvet revolutions feed flaneurs whose streetwalking doesn’t extend beyond a keyboard and a modem. The US and UK have thus seen emergence of gawker services, with new media entrepreneurs attempting to build sustainable businesses by encouraging fans to report the location of celebrities (and ideally provide images of those encounters) for the delectation of people who are web surfing or receiving a tweet (Burns 24). In the age of ambient cameras, where the media are everywhere and nowhere (and micro-stock photoservices challenge agencies such as Magnum), everyone can join the paparazzi. Anyone can deploy that ambient surveillance to become a stalker. The enthusiasm with which fans publish sightings of celebrities will presumably facilitate attacks on bodies rather than images. Information may want to be free but so, inconveniently, do iconoclasts and practitioners of participatory panopticism (Dodge 431; Dennis 348). Rhetoric about ‘citizen journalism’ has been co-opted by ‘old media’, with national broadcasters and commercial enterprises soliciting still images and video from non-professionals, whether for free or on a commercial basis. It is a world where ‘journalists’ are everywhere and where responsibility resides uncertainly at the editorial desk, able to reject or accept offerings from people with cameras but without the industrial discipline formerly exercised through professional training and adherence to formal codes of practice. It is thus unsurprising that South Australia’s Government, echoed by some peers, has mooted anti-gawker legislation aimed at would-be auteurs who impede emergency services by stopping their cars to take photos of bushfires, road accidents or other disasters. The flipside of that iPhone auteurism is anxiety about the public gaze, expressed through moral panics regarding street photography and sexting. Apart from a handful of exceptions (notably photography in the Sydney Opera House precinct, in the immediate vicinity of defence facilities and in some national parks), Australian law does not prohibit ‘street photography’ which includes photographs or videos of streetscapes or public places. Despite periodic assertions that it is a criminal offence to take photographs of people–particularly minors–without permission from an official, parent/guardian or individual there is no general restriction on ambient photography in public spaces. Moral panics about photographs of children (or adults) on beaches or in the street reflect an ambient anxiety in which danger is associated with strangers and strangers are everywhere (Marr 7; Bauman 93). That conceptualisation is one that would delight people who are wholly innocent of Judith Butler or Andrea Dworkin, in which the gaze (ever pervasive, ever powerful) is tantamount to a violation. The reality is more prosaic: most child sex offences involve intimates, rather than the ‘monstrous other’ with the telephoto lens or collection of nastiness on his iPod (Cossins 435; Ingebretsen 190). Recognition of that reality is important in considering moves that would egregiously restrict legitimate photography in public spaces or happy snaps made by doting relatives. An ambient image–unposed, unpremeditated, uncoerced–of an intimate may empower both authors and subjects when little is solid and memory is fleeting. The same caution might usefully be applied in considering alarms about sexting, ie creation using mobile phones (and access by phone or computer monitor) of intimate images of teenagers by teenagers. Australian governments have moved to emulate their US peers, treating such photography as a criminal offence that can be conceptualized as child pornography and addressed through permanent inclusion in sex offender registers. Lifelong stigmatisation is inappropriate in dealing with naïve or brash 12 and 16 year olds who have been exchanging intimate images without an awareness of legal frameworks or an understanding of consequences (Shafron-Perez 432). Cameras may be everywhere among the e-generation but legal knowledge, like the future, is unevenly distributed. Digital Handcuffs Generations prior to 2008 lost themselves in the streets, gaining individuality or personhood by escaping the surveillance inherent in living at home, being observed by neighbours or simply surrounded by colleagues. Streets offered anonymity and autonomy (Simmel 1903), one reason why heterodox sexuality has traditionally been negotiated in parks and other beats and on kerbs where sex workers ply their trade (Dalton 375). Recent decades have seen a privatisation of those public spaces, with urban planning and digital technologies imposing a new governmentality on hitherto ambient ‘deviance’ and on voyeuristic-exhibitionist practice such as heterosexual ‘dogging’ (Bell 387). That governmentality has been enforced through mechanisms such as replacement of traditional public toilets with ‘pods’ that are conveniently maintained by global service providers such as Veolia (the unromantic but profitable rump of former media & sewers conglomerate Vivendi) and function as billboards for advertising groups such as JC Decaux. Faces encountered in the vicinity of the twenty-first century pissoir are thus likely to be those of supermodels selling yoghurt, low interest loans or sportsgear – the same faces sighted at other venues across the nation and across the globe. Visiting ‘the mens’ gives new meaning to the word ambience when you are more likely to encounter Louis Vuitton and a CCTV camera than George Michael. George’s face, or that of Madonna, Barack Obama, Kevin 07 or Homer Simpson, might instead be sighted on the tshirts or hoodies mentioned above. George’s music might also be borne on the bodies of people you see in the park, on the street, or in the bus. This is the age of ambient performance, taken out of concert halls and virtualised on iPods, Walkmen and other personal devices, music at the demand of the consumer rather than as rationed by concert managers (Bull 85). The cost of that ambience, liberation of performance from time and space constraints, may be a Weberian disenchantment (Steiner 434). Technology has also removed anonymity by offering digital handcuffs to employees, partners, friends and children. The same mobile phones used in the past to offer excuses or otherwise disguise the bearer’s movement may now be tied to an observer through location services that plot the person’s movement across Google Maps or the geospatial information of similar services. That tracking is an extension into the private realm of the identification we now take for granted when using taxis or logistics services, with corporate Australia for example investing in systems that allow accurate determination of where a shipment is located (on Sydney Harbour Bridge? the loading dock? accompanying the truck driver on unauthorized visits to the pub?) and a forecast of when it will arrive (Monmonier 76). Such technologies are being used on a smaller scale to enforce digital Fordism among the binary proletariat in corporate buildings and campuses, with ‘smart badges’ and biometric gateways logging an individual’s movement across institutional terrain (so many minutes in the conference room, so many minutes in the bathroom or lingering among the faux rainforest near the Vice Chancellery) (Bolt). Bright Lights, Blog City It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by right-thinking Foucauldians, that modernity is a matter of coercion and anomie as all that is solid melts into air. If we are living in an age of hypersocialisation and hypercapitalism – movies and friends on tap, along with the panoptic sorting by marketers and pervasive scrutiny by both the ‘information state’ and public audiences (the million people or one person reading your blog) that is an inevitable accompaniment of the digital cornucopia–we might ask whether everyone is or should be unhappy. This article began by highlighting traditional responses to the bright lights, brashness and excitement of the big city. One conclusion might be that in 2010 not much has changed. Some people experience ambient information as liberating; others as threatening, productive of physical danger or of a more insidious anomie in which personal identity is blurred by an ineluctable electro-smog. There is disagreement about the professionalism (for which read ethics and inhibitions) of ‘citizen media’ and about a culture in which, as in the 1920s, audiences believe that they ‘own the image’ embodying the celebrity or public malefactor. Digital technologies allow you to navigate through the urban maze and allow officials, marketers or the hostile to track you. Those same technologies allow you to subvert both the governmentality and governance. You are free: Be ambient! References Baron, Naomi. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Bauman, Zygmunt. 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Recent advances in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and low-power short-range radios have enabled rapid development of wireless sensor networks. Future sensor networks are anticipated to include hundreds or thousands of these devices in many applications, such as capturing multimedia content for surveillance, structural health monitoring, tracking of accidental chemical leaks, machine failures, earthquakes and intrusion detection. With the increase of sensor applications, a number of challenging problems related to the network protocol design has emerged - the most important ones relating to energy efficiency and lifetime maximisation. Techniques devised for sensor networks should deal with a large number of sensors distributed in the field. Wireless sensor nodes are deployed with limited energy reserves, so the networks should operate with minimum energy overhead. In fact, the network should take into account not only individual node's energy efficiency but also consider the global picture, because surviving nodes' energy reserves in a failed network are wasted energy. This thesis examines a node organisation technique to deal with the above challenges. The focus is on improving network lifetime via organising the nodes in a distributed and energy efficient manner. The main goal is lowering wasted energy via energy balancing and exploiting node redundancy in case of node failure. In particular, this thesis proposes Energy Balanced Clustering (EBC) method for node self-organisation where network tasks (such as data aggregation and data forwarding) are shifted to high-energy neighbours to reduce the energy consumption of low energy nodes. After showing how to extend network lifetime by energy balanced node organisation, the effect of redundant node deployments on network lifetime is addressed. Redundant nodes consume energy by performing unnecessary tasks so a method called Self-Calculated Redundancy Check (SCRC) is proposed to deactivate redundant nodes. A deactivated redundant node can be used as a replacement for a failed node. The Asynchronous Failed Sensor node Detection (AFSD) proposed in this thesis uses the data packets exchanged between neighbours to identify failed neighbours. To restore coverage for network holes caused by failed nodes, policies are given for re-activating redundant nodes. Detailed analytical analysis and simulation of the proposed methods demonstrate that by taking into account energy balancing, eliminating redundant tasks and replacing failed nodes sensor network lifetime can significantly be improved.