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Channel coding lies at the heart of digital communication and data storage. Fully updated, including a new chapter on polar codes, this detailed introduction describes the core theory of channel coding, decoding algorithms, implementation details, and performance analyses. This new edition includes over 50 new end-of-chapter problems and new figures and worked examples throughout. The authors emphasize the practical approach and present clear information on modern channel codes, including turbo and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, detailed coverage of BCH codes, Reed-Solomon codes, convolutional codes, finite geometry codes, product codes as well as polar codes for error correction and detection, providing a one-stop resource for classical and modern coding techniques. Assuming no prior knowledge in the field of channel coding, the opening chapters begin with basic theory to introduce newcomers to the subject. Later chapters then extend to advanced topics such as code ensemble performance analyses and algebraic code design.
Interprofessional teams in the pediatric cardiac ICU consolidate their management plans in pre-family meeting huddles, a process that affects the course of family meetings but often lacks optimal communication and teamwork.
Methods:
Cardiac ICU clinicians participated in an interprofessional intervention to improve how they prepared for and conducted family meetings. We conducted a pretest–posttest study with clinicians participating in huddles before family meetings. We assessed feasibility of clinician enrollment, assessed clinician perception of acceptability of the intervention via questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, and impact on team performance using a validated tool. Wilcoxon rank sum test assessed intervention impact on team performance at meeting level comparing pre- and post-intervention data.
Results:
Totally, 24 clinicians enrolled in the intervention (92% retention) with 100% completion of training. All participants recommend cardiac ICU Teams and Loved ones Communicating to others and 96% believe it improved their participation in family meetings. We exceeded an acceptable level of protocol fidelity (>75%). Team performance was significantly (p < 0.001) higher in post-intervention huddles (n = 30) than in pre-intervention (n = 28) in all domains. Median comparisons: Team structure [2 vs. 5], Leadership [3 vs. 5], Situation Monitoring [3 vs. 5], Mutual Support [ 3 vs. 5], and Communication [3 vs. 5].
Conclusion:
Implementing an interprofessional team intervention to improve team performance in pre-family meeting huddles is feasible, acceptable, and improves team function. Future research should further assess impact on clinicians, patients, and families.
The battles over official secrecy have to be fought on many different fronts. In the United Kingdom—whose ministers and public servants allegedly have a “passion for secrecy”—this was more than usually evident during 1967. Two pieces of legislation—namely, the Parliamentary Commissioner Act, 1967 (U.K.) and the Public Records Act, 1967 (Eng.)—represented a modest triumph for those who would wish to see more light shed upon the affairs of the nation. Elsewhere the picture was rather more familiar. The Security Commission recommended a further tightening of documentary security in the Cabinet Office; this followed upon the conviction under the Official Secrets Acts, 1911 to 1939 (U.K.) of a young typist in the Cabinet Office, “the first known occasion on which classified papers have been extracted from” this inner sanctum of government.
Sometime after 1992, I first learned that the High Court of Australia had discovered that the Australian Constitution contained something that sounded very much like a freedom of speech guarantee. And the reasoning that supported that discovery sounded like the philosophy of Alexander Meiklejohn which I had been teaching in a seminar on Free Speech for several years.
Although Meiklejohn was talking about the United States Constitution, he was not emphasising the words of the First Amendment thereto. Drawing upon pre-Bill of Rights commitments recorded in various historical documents, Meiklejohn's view was that the framers of the United States Constitution had made a covenant with each other to build a democracy in which the people were both the governors and the governed. Freedom of speech, according to Meiklejohn, was necessary to make a democracy, and that was all that freedom of speech was designed to do.
This chapter tests observable implications of localized peace enforcement theory at the individual level using two experiments conducted in Mali. First, the chapter presents the results of a study designed to measure willingness to cooperate using a trust game where participants send money to an anonymous partner from a different ethnic group. A randomly assigned group of participants is told that two patrolling officers (from either the UN or France) will punish any low partner contributions with a fine. While the UN treatment increased participants’ willingness to cooperate, the France treatment had no effect. Follow-up interviews confirmed the importance of perceptions of the UN’s impartiality. Second, the chapter outlines the results of a survey that presents respondents with a vignette describing a communal dispute. Respondents were then randomly assigned to a control, UN, or French treatment group. Assignment to the UN treatment group – but not the French treatment group – reduced the likelihood that respondents said a communal dispute would escalate. To probe the plausibility of localized peace enforcement theory specifically, the chapter concludes with an analysis of specific questions about individuals’ perceptions of peacekeepers from the survey.
Chapter 9 concludes the book by highlighting implications that are relevant for academic researchers as well as policymakers. The book’s findings suggest at least three areas for future research. First, a more comprehensive analysis of the sources of perceptions of bias in conflict settings would productively inform scholarship and practice. Second, future work should investigate the conditions under which communal peace aggregates up to the national level. Third, scholars should examine whether governments and their partners succeed in leveraging gains from localized peace enforcement into states with robust institutions. The book also has two important implications for the practice of peacekeeping. First, given the importance of perceptions, policymakers must ensure that peacekeepers remain impartial. International actors perceived by local populations as relatively impartial are much more effective at promoting intergroup cooperation and facilitating the peaceful resolution of communal disputes. Second, given that communal peace in the analysis relies so heavily on the presence of UN peacekeepers, the international community must consider how to design peaceful transitions out of PKOs.
This chapter applies localized peace enforcement theory to a subnational analysis of patterns of dispute escalation in Mali. In order to investigate whether the previous chapters’ experimental findings generalize to real-world operations, the chapter presents the results of two analyses of UN peacekeeping efforts to prevent the onset of communal violence in the central Malian region of Mopti. The first study leverages a geographic regression discontinuity design to compare dispute escalation on either side of the Burkina Faso–Mali border. The border splits similar areas into those “treated” with UN peacekeeping patrols (on the Mali side) and “control” areas without peacekeeping (on the Burkina Faso side). The findings indicate that peacekeeping reduces the likelihood of communal violence. The second study delves deeper into the data with an analysis of UN peacekeepers from different countries deployed to the same regions of Mali and uncovers further evidence in line with the predictions of the theory. Rather than comparing UN peacekeeping in countries with against those without a peacekeeping operation, the study compares UN peacekeepers from different contributing countries – Togo and Senegal – deployed to the same area.
This introductory chapter explains the book’s motivating puzzles and outlines its theoretical and empirical strategies. The book focuses on local-level peacekeeping operations designed explicitly to prevent communal violence. It argues that deploying UN peacekeepers to fragile settings fundamentally changes the structural incentives facing communities in conflict. Scholars typically pinpoint the UN’s success at the negotiating table: peacekeepers help armed group leaders make lasting agreements that stabilize conflict settings from the top down. Yet such negotiations seem unable to prevent communal violence in places as diverse as South Sudan in East Africa, Mali in West Africa, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa. This book shifts the analytical lens to the local level to investigate the conditions under which peacekeepers successfully build peace from the bottom up. The book’s main argument is that UN peacekeepers succeed when local populations perceive them to be relatively impartial enforcers who are unconnected to the country of deployment, the conflict, and the parties to the dispute. Impartial peacekeepers convince all parties that they will punish those who escalate communal disputes regardless of their identity, which increases communities’ willingness to cooperate without the fear of violence.
This chapter begins the second part of the book, which tests the main empirical implications of localized peace enforcement theory using data from Mali, a land-locked country in West Africa. Though Mali experienced three coups, a separatist civil war, and an Islamist extremist insurgency from 2012 to 2024, no source of conflict has been more fatal or detrimental to Malian society than communal violence. The chapter starts by providing a very brief history of identity-based conflict in the country. It also places Mali within a broader historical context and demonstrates that its experience of interethnic tensions is representative of countries with colonial legacies. The chapter then draws on detailed interviews with forty-eight local leaders to describe what communal violence and peacekeeping look like in Mali from the residents’ perspective. Given the theoretical importance domestic perceptions of peacekeepers, these interviews offer crucial insights into the plausibility of localized peace enforcement theory. There are distinct advantages of studying the Malian case, which the chapter describes in a brief overview of international interventions by the UN and France from 2012 to 2024.
This chapter explains how UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs) have changed over time, paying particular attention to how UN PKO mandates have evolved to address communal disputes. It begins with a general overview of UN PKOs over time. The chapter then briefly reviews the academic research on international interventions, which offers robust evidence that peacekeepers bolster peace and stability after conflict. However, this scholarship has not sufficiently examined whether (or how) UN PKOs limit communal violence. Communal disputes are a critical source of instability, violence, and disorder around the world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Conflict from such disputes has killed nearly 250,000 people in the region since the turn of the century, more than violence from governments or rebel groups. And the problem is getting worse. Given that climate change, global migration patterns, and the growth of violent extremism will likely exacerbate communal disputes in the coming years, it is vital to understand how UN peacekeepers can help resolve them. The chapter discusses what distinguishes communal violence from other forms of intrastate violence before concluding with a summary of local-level UN PKOs designed to address communal disputes.
Chapter 3 presents localized peace enforcement theory. It first discusses the challenges facing individuals involved in a communal dispute. Reflecting on these obstacles to peaceful dispute resolution, the chapter outlines a formal micro-level theory of dispute escalation between two individuals from different social groups who live in the same community. It explains how international intervention shapes escalation dynamics. The chapter then shifts the focus to local perceptions of intervener impartiality, which the theory posits are a key determinant of whether a UN intervention succeeds in preventing the onset of violence. The identifies the importance of multilateralism, diversity, and the nonuse of force as critical factors shaping local perceptions and, as a result, UN peacekeeping effectiveness. Critically, the theory does not suggest that UN peacekeepers will always succeed, or that all kinds of UN peacekeepers will succeed. Indeed, perceptions of UN peacekeepers vary depending on the troop-contributing country and the identity of the civilians involved in the dispute. The chapter closes with a discussion of the most important hypotheses derived from the theory.