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One of the pioneers in the mathematical and conceptual study of oscillations was Norbert Wiener, whose book Cybernetics first appeared in 1948. The authors review the type of data, experimental techniques, and computing tools available to Wiener for the study of brain oscillations, and describes some of the vast expansions in data base, techniques, and ideas about function that have occurred since Wiener's time.

This chapter examines telecommunications development in Macau. The telecommunications infrastructure was built under the monopoly of CTM (Companhia de Telecomunicações de Macau) — a joint venture between Cable and Wireless, Portugal Telecom International, CITIC Pacific, and the Macau SAR government. The monopoly was partially ended in 1999 when the twenty-year build-operate-transfer franchise, granted in 1981, was extended to 2011, but only for fixed line and international gateway services. Competition with CTM's GSM 900/1800 MHz mobile services was introduced in 2001 when Hutchison and SmarTone from Hong Kong were licensed to operate GSM.

This chapter focuses on the achievements of Lord Kelvin as one of the great engineers of the 19th century. Topics discussed include his interest in laying a transatlantic telegraph cable, his contributions to marine technology, and his invention of the heat pump.

This chapter describes the unique market structure of cable TV services and the success or otherwise of the Conditional Access System (CAS) to bring in transparency in cable provisioning. The alternatives to cable TV services, namely, direct-to-home (DTH) and the recent advancements in other digital cable distribution services along with their regulatory implications are also reported. The CAS introduced addressability in the cable TV network along with providing signals in digital format. Provisioning of interoperable Set-Top Boxes (STBs) has not been successful in India. Its radio coverage is available in amplitude modulation (AM), and frequency modulation (FM) modes. With the guidelines for DTH and Head-end in the Sky (HITS) allowed, the industry is all set to witness a revolution in digital broadcasting services in the years to come.

Given the relative cheapness of electronic and physical distribution, it is usually more cost effective to produce a program centrally and distribute it widely rather than for each retail outlet to produce its own content. Thus, networks and syndicators emerged from which retail outlets acquired programming, or they produced the program themselves. These networks and syndicators package the content and distribute it to retail outlets such as broadcast stations, cable network operators, and satellite distribution systems. This chapter analyzes the concentration of trends in radio program networks and television broadcast networks. Because radio is often used as an example for media concentration trends, it needs to be discussed at greater length. In about one decade, from 1992 to 2001, the market share of the top four firms increased from 9% to 38%. The national level of radio concentration was less dramatic than its rapid rate of change suggests, coupled with local concentration. In the case of television stations, the concentration trend in ownership has received high visibility. Cable television has become the major delivery platform for additional video channels.

This chapter looks at the vicissitudes of Saudi–Egyptian relations as the two countries attempted to negotiate a peaceful settlement in Yemen. Based primarily on US diplomatic cables and Egyptian memoirs, it demonstrates how negotiations between Nasser and Faysal faltered over mutual mistrust, exacerbated by the perennial spoiling effect of Yemeni politics. The chapter also shows how the Egyptians and the Saudis used the Arab summits, ostensibly convened to discuss the Palestine question, as a camouflage for the mediation of the conflict between them. The Egyptians had invoked the image of Palestine from the beginning of the intervention in Yemen in order to illuminate the glum reality of hopeless fratricide with the light of a higher cause.

Having won the ballot, the former suffragists organized the nonpartisan League of Women Voters, through which women could continue to work as a pressure group for a female reform agenda. Minnie Fisher Cunningham helped found both the Texas and the national LWVs; from 1921-23 she served in Washington, D.C. as the national organization's first executive secretary, working closely with President Maud Wood Park. She helped the LWV, as part of the Women's Joint Congressional Committee, lobby through Congress two signature achievements: the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act (1921) and the Cable Act (1922). Cunningham oversaw the planning for the LWV's Pan American Congress of Women in 1922, and she quietly and persistently worked to keep the LWV's Negro Problems Committee from dying of neglect. After becoming chair of the committee in 1924, she advocated that the LWV encourage and assist African-American women to vote.

This epilogue provides an update on MSNBC and NBC News's footprint in the distribution of online television news since their acquisition by Comcast, with particular emphasis on the restructuring of MSNBC.com into an expanded NBC News Digital and the creation of an entirely new website for the MSNBC cable news channel. It discusses other changes at MSNBC, including the rebranding of the Blue Site as NBCNews.com, the creation of a new MSNBC.com based on the open source content management system Drupal, and the use of the “Newsvine 3.0” commenting system as the basis for all the community features on the new site. Despite some changes that seem to show the influence of a centralized management and hierarchy, complex assemblages of system builders remain both inside and outside the MSNBC organization. Heterarchy is alive and well within MSNBC's constellation of companies and teams.

This chapter examines media distribution within the context of sociotechnical systems. It begins with a discussion of the concept of recalcitrance and its relation to heterogeneous engineering before turning to technologies as parts of heterogeneous systems. It then considers the persistence of heterogeneous engineering in the world of online television news distribution, along with time delay as an example of how the route of online video is influenced by the various forces and architects involved in online and social television news distribution. It also describes the distribution system developed by MSNBC for online television news in the years leading up to 2010 by tracing how a typical cable news program is brought to online audiences.

This chapter focuses on the construction of MSNBC.com's web video player, the primary means by which NBC's cable news and broadcast news programs were made available to users and audiences online. More specifically, it examines the video player's interface and other features in order to elucidate the complex relationships, interests, and motivations devoted to the design of the everyday objects used in online distribution. It also considers the importance of syndication to MSNBC's web presence and how MSNBC.com was able to dramatically expand the reach of its online video by pushing clips to other web properties in Microsoft's online services division, including Bing and MSN.

This chapter examines the case of The Rachel Maddow Show (TRMS) and how it developed a new and different online strategy that ultimately became the model for other MSNBC television programs. TRMS is a cable news site that has grown into a great success story of television on the web. Consistently ranking at the top of many popular online audience metrics, TRMS is considered one of the top three sites attached to cable news programs. This chapter considers how Rachel Maddow's characterization of herself and her affinity for the web has contributed to TRMS's online efforts. It also looks at the appointment of Will Femia as a single, dedicated web producer for TRMS and Femia's use of standard templates to simulate blogware.

This chapter investigates the origins of the South African War and how it manipulated the British press. It discusses that the reliance of British papers on the South African press for war news showed commercial concerns rather than manipulation. It adds that papers in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada depended in turn on the British press for reports from South Africa, reflecting the commercial structures that had been set up by the press in the Dominions to secure supplies of news on an economical basis. It also talks about cable communication in the wake of the war.

This chapter covers the hardware industry in the areas of network equipment, cables and transmission, hardware components, and handsets. The growth of this outsourcing and the recent advancements in reverse outsourcing of software services by Indian telecos to multinational software firms are also reported. The Government has been easing regulatory policies to encourage the growth of the telecom manufacturing industry. Until now, India has demonstrated significant innovation capability in only two kinds of hardware. The rapid growth of mobile services brought innovation in service offerings. Network operations and management, information technology management, and customer relationship management are the three different areas of outsourcing that are being pursued by the telecom operators. Domestic manufacturing and Research and Development of telecom products both by the multinationals and indigenous manufacturers have fostered the growth of the industry; not all components can be sourced locally and are procured through global suppliers.

Where companies compete against each other across the country, one must analyze an industry's market structure on a national scale. But in other situations, the relevant geographic markets are not national or international but local. This chapter examines local media concentration trends for several local media over a period of twenty years. The relevant industries of local mass media that are analyzed are: radio stations, television stations, newspapers, city magazines and periodicals, and cable television operators. The following, also considered, are also local distribution media, although of a different kind and dynamics: local wireline telephone networks and cellular mobile networks. Here, the local market is defined as the city itself. Since there are many hundreds of cities large and small in the United States, and it would be impractical to seek the media concentration trends for each, thirty markets are chosen to be representative of their categories. All of the seven local media are then averaged by using weights based on their revenue volumes.

This chapter examines the electronic mass media of retail distribution—radio, television, cable, and direct broadcast satellites. These media consist of two major segments; there are local retail media and national wholesale networks. Retail media distribute content directly to audiences. Examples are local radio and television stations and cable distribution systems. In contrast, wholesale networks bundle programs created by content producers and distribute them to retailers. Examples are radio and television networks, cable channels, and program syndicators. Radio has become the poster boy for media concentration. Most public discussions of media trends refer to the developments in radio and its lessons for public policy. No media industry in the United States has changed more in ownership than local radio stations. The level of local television station concentration is the lowest among all of the eight local mass media analyzed.

Law is a crucial element that could and did become the focus of many interracial literary works. The different descriptions of fingernails in interracial literature focused on a detail that repeated in many texts but that rarely if ever constituted an important pivotal element. It was a theme that was unlikely to become plot-constitutive and that remained a minor focus of the works in which it occurred. For example, George Washington Cable, popularly known in Louisiana law as a marriage barrier when he let Madame Delphine say memorably: “'Tis dad lawl Dad law is crezzie! Dad law is a fool!” and let Pere Jerome elaborate that they made the law “to keep the two races separate.”