Building Blocks for the Next eGovernment Era: Exploratory Study Based on Dubai and UAE’s Ministry of Happiness Communication in 2020

Dubai and the UAE governments have been investing in technology and digital communication for a long time. These governments are pioneers in introducing innovative strategies, policies and projects. They are also recognized worldwide for defining and implementing long term public programs. In terms of eGovernment Dubai and the UAE rank among the world’s most advanced. Both governments have surprised the world a few years ago by creating a Happiness Ministry. This paper focuses on UAE’s government digital strategies and its approach to the next era. The main goal of this exploratory study is to understand the new era of eGovernment and transfer of the happiness and wellness programs. Data were collected from the corpus latente and analysis was anchored in qualitative methodology using content analysis and observation as analysis techniques. The study allowed to highlight that the 2020 government reshuffle has a strong focus on digital reorganisation and digital sustainability, one of the newest trends in sustainability. Regarding happiness and wellbeing portfolio, we were able to observe that there has been a major change within the government organisation: The Ministry of Happiness was extinct and the Ministry of Community Development will manage the so-called ‘Happiness Portfolio’. Additionally, our observation allowed to note the government dual approach to governance: one through digital transformation, thus enhancing the digital sustainability process and, the second one trough government development.

“Post-Industrial” Journalism as a Creative Industry

The context of post-industrial journalism is one in which the material circumstances of mechanical publication have been displaced by digital technologies, increasing the distance between the orthodoxy of the newsroom and the culture of journalistic writing. Content is, with growing frequency, created for delivery via the internet, publication on web-based ‘platforms’ and consumption on screen media. In this environment, the question is not ‘who is a journalist?’ but ‘what is journalism?’ today. The changes bring into sharp relief new distinctions between journalistic work and journalistic labor, providing a key insight into the current transition between the industrial journalism of the 20th century, and the post-industrial journalism of the present. In the 20th century, the work of journalists and journalistic labor went hand-in-hand as most journalists were employees of news organizations, whilst in the 21st century evidence of a decoupling of ‘acts of journalism’ (work) and journalistic employment (labor) is beginning to appear. This 'decoupling' of the work and labor that underpins journalism practice is far reaching in its implications, not least for institutional structures. Under these conditions we are witnessing the emergence of expanded ‘entrepreneurial’ journalism, based on smaller, more independent and agile - if less stable - enterprise constructs that are a feature of creative industries. Entrepreneurial journalism is realized in a range of organizational forms from social enterprise, through to profit driven start-ups and hybrids of the two. In all instances, however, the primary motif of the organization is an ideological definition of journalism. An example is the Scoop Foundation for Public Interest Journalism in New Zealand, which owns and operates Scoop Publishing Limited, a not for profit company and social enterprise that publishes an independent news site that claims to have over 500,000 monthly users. Our paper demonstrates that this journalistic work meets the ideological definition of journalism; conducted within the creative industries using an innovative organizational structure that offers a new, viable post-industrial future for journalism.

Detection Characteristics of the Random and Deterministic Signals in Antenna Arrays

In this paper, approach to incoherent signal detection in multi-element antenna array are researched and modeled. Two types of useful signals with unknown wavefront were considered: first one, deterministic (Barker code), and second one, random (Gaussian distribution). The derivation of the sufficient statistics took into account the linearity of the antenna array. The performance characteristics and detecting curves are modeled and compared for different useful signals parameters and for different number of elements of the antenna array. Results of researches in case of some additional conditions can be applied to a digital communications systems.

Subjective Quality Assessment for Impaired Videos with Varying Spatial and Temporal Information

The new era of digital communication has brought up many challenges that network operators need to overcome. The high demand of mobile data rates require improved networks, which is a challenge for the operators in terms of maintaining the quality of experience (QoE) for their consumers. In live video transmission, there is a sheer need for live surveillance of the videos in order to maintain the quality of the network. For this purpose objective algorithms are employed to monitor the quality of the videos that are transmitted over a network. In order to test these objective algorithms, subjective quality assessment of the streamed videos is required, as the human eye is the best source of perceptual assessment. In this paper we have conducted subjective evaluation of videos with varying spatial and temporal impairments. These videos were impaired with frame freezing distortions so that the impact of frame freezing on the quality of experience could be studied. We present subjective Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for these videos that can be used for fine tuning the objective algorithms for video quality assessment.

A New Microstrip Diplexer Using Coupled Stepped Impedance Resonators

This paper presents a new structure of microstrip band pass filter (BPF) based on coupled stepped impedance resonators. Each filter consists of two coupled stepped impedance resonators connected to microstrip feed lines. The coupled junction is utilized to connect the two BPFs to the antenna. This two band pass filters are designed and simulated to operate for the digital communication system (DCS) and Industrial Scientific and Medical (ISM) bands at 1.8 GHz and 2.45 GHz respectively. The proposed circuit presents good performances with an insertion loss lower than 2.3 dB and isolation between the two channels greater than 21 dB. The prototype of the optimized diplexer have been investigated numerically by using ADS Agilent and verified with CST microwave software.

Design and Implementation of Reed Solomon Encoder on FPGA

Error correcting codes are used for detection and correction of errors in digital communication system. Error correcting coding is based on appending of redundancy to the information message according to a prescribed algorithm. Reed Solomon codes are part of channel coding and withstand the effect of noise, interference and fading. Galois field arithmetic is used for encoding and decoding reed Solomon codes. Galois field multipliers and linear feedback shift registers are used for encoding the information data block. The design of Reed Solomon encoder is complex because of use of LFSR and Galois field arithmetic. The purpose of this paper is to design and implement Reed Solomon (255, 239) encoder with optimized and lesser number of Galois Field multipliers. Symmetric generator polynomial is used to reduce the number of GF multipliers. To increase the capability toward error correction, convolution interleaving will be used with RS encoder. The Design will be implemented on Xilinx FPGA Spartan II.

New Approach to Spectral Analysis of High Bit Rate PCM Signals

Pulse code modulation is a widespread technique in digital communication with significant impact on existing modern and proposed future communication technologies. Its widespread utilization is due to its simplicity and attractive spectral characteristics. In this paper, we present a new approach to the spectral analysis of PCM signals using Riemann-Stieltjes integrals, which is very accurate for high bit rates. This approach can serve as a model for similar spectral analysis of other competing modulation schemes.

Effect of Transmission Codes on Hybrid SC/MRC Diversity Reception MQAM system over Rayleigh Fading Channels

In this paper, the effect of transmission codes on the performance of coherent square M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (CSMQAM) under hybrid selection/maximal-ratio combining (H-S/MRC) diversity is analysed. The fading channels are modeled as frequency non-selective slow independent and identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The results for coded MQAM are computed numerically for the case of (24,12) extended Golay code and compared with uncoded MQAM under H-S/MRC diversity by plotting error probabilities versus average signal to noise ratio (SNR) for various values L and N in order to examine the improvement in the performance of the digital communications system as the number of selected diversity branches is increased. The results for no diversity, conventional SC and Lth order MRC schemes are also plotted for comparison. Closed form analytical results derived in this paper are sufficiently simple and therefore can be computed numerically without any approximations. The analytical results presented in this paper are expected to provide useful information needed for design and analysis of digital communication systems over wireless fading channels.

Error Rate Probability for Coded MQAM with MRC Diversity in the Presence of Cochannel Interferers over Nakagami-Fading Channels

Exact expressions for bit-error probability (BEP) for coherent square detection of uncoded and coded M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (MQAM) using an array of antennas with maximal ratio combining (MRC) in a flat fading channel interference limited system in a Nakagami-m fading environment is derived. The analysis assumes an arbitrary number of independent and identically distributed Nakagami interferers. The results for coded MQAM are computed numerically for the case of (24,12) extended Golay code and compared with uncoded MQAM by plotting error probabilities versus average signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) for various values of order of diversity N, number of distinct symbols M, in order to examine the effect of cochannel interferers on the performance of the digital communication system. The diversity gains and net gains are also presented in tabular form in order to examine the performance of digital communication system in the presence of interferers, as the order of diversity increases. The analytical results presented in this paper are expected to provide useful information needed for design and analysis of digital communication systems with space diversity in wireless fading channels.

Web Based Real Time Laboratory Applications of Analog and Digital Communication Courses with Lab VIEW Access

Developments in scientific and technical area cause to use new methods and techniques in education, as is the case in all fields. Especially, the internet contributes a variety of new methods to design virtual and real time laboratory applications in education. In this study, a real time virtual laboratory is designed and implemented for analog and digital communications laboratory experiments by using Lab VIEW program for Marmara University Electronics-Communication Department. In this application, students can access the virtual laboratory web site and perform their experiments without any limitation of time and location so as the students can observe the signals by changing the parameters of the experiment and evaluate the results.

Discrete-time Phase and Delay Locked Loops Analyses in Tracking Mode

Phase locked loops (PLL) and delay locked loops (DLL) play an important role in establishing coherent references (phase of carrier and symbol timing) in digital communication systems. Fully digital receiver including digital carrier synchronizer and symbol timing synchronizer fulfils the conditions for universal multi-mode communication receiver with option of symbol rate setting over several digit places and long-term stability of requirement parameters. Afterwards it is necessary to realize PLL and DLL in synchronizer in digital form and to approach to these subsystems as a discrete representation of analog template. Analysis of discrete phase locked loop (DPLL) or discrete delay locked loop (DDLL) and technique to determine their characteristics based on analog (continuous-time) template is performed in this posed paper. There are derived transmission response and error function for 1st order discrete locked loop and resulting equations and graphical representations for 2nd order one. It is shown that the spectrum translation due to sampling takes effect at frequency characteristics computing for specific values of loop parameters.

Study on the Evaluation of the Chaotic Cipher System Using the Improved Volterra Filters and the RBFN Mapping

In this paper, we propose a chaotic cipher system consisting of Improved Volterra Filters and the mapping that is created from the actual voice by using Radial Basis Function Network. In order to achieve a practical system, the system supposes to use the digital communication line, such as the Internet, to maintain the parameter matching between the transmitter and receiver sides. Therefore, in order to withstand the attack from outside, it is necessary that complicate the internal state and improve the sensitivity coefficient. In this paper, we validate the robustness of proposed method from three perspectives of "Chaotic properties", "Randomness", "Coefficient sensitivity".