Introduction to the special section: professional communication inRussia

There is a rising interest within the world community in what is occurring in professional communication in Russia, and in the social and market opportunities that will appear there in the future. We live in a world in which the pace of change is more rapid than at any time in our history. The most important aspect of this change is the fact that we are making a transition to a democratic society at the same time as we are in the process of establishing the principles of a market economy. Russia is a country with enormous reserves of raw materials, vast territories, and rich intellectual resources. And now, as Russia is experiencing a painful transition to a market economy, the nation's economic potential becomes more and more dependent on the sophistication of its infrastructure. That is the reason why the information technologies and professional communication have become key factors of social progress. The Russian centers of research and industry are widely dispersed geographically, in such cities as Vladivostok, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Ekaterinburg, Saint Petersburg and Moscow. The last three or four years have seen a sharp increase in the demands for business information, electronic mail and communications for far-flung business and financial operations     

Describing collaborative forms: a profile of the team-writingprocess

The paper examines collaborative writing practices students in the Air Force Institute of Technology's Graduate School of Logistics and Acquisition Management use to produce team-authored theses. In analyzing how student writing teams plan, execute, and assess writing activities, the researchers identify and describe some of the forms that collaboration takes, thereby successfully connecting their work within a broader research continuum concerning collaborative writing, particularly when applied in academic settings     

The evolution of communication vehicles: linear progress andcyclical progress

Examines several aspects of communication methods (`vehicles') and the various types of progress that have been made over the years. Much of the progress we have made in communicating is rooted strongly in our past. Much of the future of our communication vehicles will be rooted in our present and our understanding of our present. In this paper, we focus our discussion on six aspects of communication: (1) communication vehicles for teaching and learning; (2) forums for communication-wide interchange of ideas; (3) vehicles for search-and-retrieval of information; (4) the richness of the communication media set; (5) venues of communication-where we communicate and the tools we use; and (6) the idea of linearity in communication     

Call control and traffic transport for connection-oriented highspeed wireless personal communications over metropolitan area networks

A distributed circuit-switched approach for supporting the deployment of high speed wireless personal communication services in urban areas through the interconnection of base stations via metropolitan area networks (MANs) is proposed. Broadband MANs minimize traffic congestion by dynamic sharing of link capacity and by serving as distributed switches for partitioning call control functions. While the DQDB protocol readily supports distributed packet-switching over the IEEE 802.6 MAN, isochronous traffic such as voice and video is best supported by circuit-switched connections. The authors present an enhanced bi-state pre-arbitrated (PA) transport mechanism, and associated call control and handoff management techniques, which enable distributed circuit-switching over the MAN. These capabilities are not currently addressed in the 802.6 standards. The bi-state PA transport mechanism facilitates statistical multiplexing of variable rate isochronous traffic sources. The network capacity is constrained by the call setup delay performance, and is analyzed by simulations. Alternative signaling architectures, involving different placements of call control network elements, are evaluated. The effects of erasure nodes, and close bus versus open bus architectures, are considered. The overlap inter-MAN call setup procedure is proposed to reduce delays. Different call handoff procedures are formulated according to the type of handoff and the resulting change in call connectivity. Most handoffs are intra-MAN, requiring simple procedures with short delays