Is the use of an online course delivery format, when compared with the more traditional face-to-face format, good or bad in the context of university education? Those who subscribe to the no-significant-difference perspective argue that online delivery is good, because it allows students with time and geographic distance constraints to obtain the education that they need, with no significant ne...

Current industrial processes often involve the collaboration of people at distant and remote locations. The technological media for such a tele-cooperation reach from simple email or text-based chatting systems to highly-sophisticated systems for an interactive video-conferencing. But with limited bandwidth the communication between persons at distant locations is often restricted to single mod...

In this paper, we introduce three methods bringing new solutions to the communication security which is of great importance in modern communication systems. The methods proposed include data embedding and a new R-weighted coding scheme enabling more data to be stored in video streams. In the first proposal, an RGB-weighted mean value technique is used to obtain a reduced frame to store data. In...

OBJECTIVE This study was aimed to examine how well readers of newspapers understand cancer survival rate data, and the effect of this understanding on their behavioral intent. METHODS We recruited 1950 persons who were 20 years old or older registered with a market research company. Participants were randomly divided into 10 groups; 9 were assigned one of nine newspaper articles, and the rema...

As our field moves beyond the traditional dualism of mass and interpersonal forms of communication to encompass new, interactive, networked forms of communication whose influence may be traced across multiple spheres of modern life, it is commonly claimed that ‘‘everything is mediated’’ and that this represents a historically significant change. This article inquires into these rhetorically gra...

The rise of social media has transformed the way the public engages with science organisations and scientists. ‘Retweet’, ‘Like’, ‘Share’ and ‘Comment’ are a few ways users engage with messages on Twitter and Facebook, two of the most popular social media platforms. Despite the availability of big data from these digital footprints, research into social media science communication is scant. Thi...

This paper critically examines the affordances and limitations of big data for the study of crime and disorder. We hypothesize that disorder-related posts on Twitter are associated with actual police crime rates. Our results provide evidence that naturally occurring social media data may provide an alternative information source on the crime problem. This paper adds to the emerging field of com...

Funding bodies and policy imperatives increasingly favour comparative research. Stimulated also by the phenomena of globalisation and the concomitant rise of globalisation theory, researchers in media, communication and cultural studies increasingly find themselves initiating or invited to collaborate in multinational comparative projects. Given the growing prominence of comparative media and c...