English: its role as the language of comity in an employment programme for Canadian immigrants.

This study explores the experiences of a culturally and linguistically diverse group of immigrant adult students as they attended a 12-week employment preparation course for newcomers to Canada. The main aim of the course was to equip the immigrants with knowledge and skills, including English for employment purposes, which are necessary to be competitive in the labour market. Using ethnographic methods, mainly participant observation with audio recording, to collect data, this paper analyses the communicative strategies that this group of multilingual speakers and their Canadian teachers deployed to discursively construct a ‘heterotopia’ defined here as ‘intensely affective spaces that redefine the experiential feeling of being and becoming’. Analysis of transcribed audio recordings reveals that despite differences in communication conventions and sociocultural backgrounds, the research participants from Congo, Haiti, India, Bangladesh, Jordan and the Philippines managed to establish a socially cohesive team that emphasises shared relational identity and in-group membership. The findings show how they creatively mobilised previously acquired pragmatic strategies and resources from their L1 to suit the demands of the ongoing interaction in English. It is suggested that language teaching in the context of preparing immigrants for labour market integration entails a pedagogical approach that foregrounds the affordances of English not only as the language of employment but perhaps more importantly as the ‘language of comity’. It is therefore suggested that the teaching of the host country’s language should focus less on grammatical correctness and focus more on providing the adult learners with opportunities to activate existing pragmatic resources and strategies which have to do with establishing rapport and friendly relations.

A decentralized batch-based group key management potocol for mobile Internet of Thngs (DBGK).

It is anticipated that constrained devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) will often operate in groups to achieve collective monitoring or management tasks. For sensitive and mission-critical sensing tasks, securing multicast applications is therefore highly desirable. To secure group communications, several group key management protocols have been introduced. However, the majority of the proposed solutions are not adapted to the IoT and its strong processing, storage, and energy constraints. In this context, we introduce a novel decentralized and batch-based group key management protocol to secure multicast communications. Our protocol is simple and it reduces the rekeying overhead triggered by membership changes in dynamic and mobile groups and guarantees both backward and forward secrecy. To assess our protocol, we conduct a detailed analysis with respect to its communcation and storage costs. This analysis is validated through simulation to highlight energy gains. The obtained results show that our protocol outperforms its peers with respect to keying overhead and the mobility of members.

A rewarding experience? Exploring how crowdfunding is affecting music industry business models.

This paper provides an exploratory study of how rewards-based crowdfunding affects business model development for music industry artists, labels and live sector companies. The empirical methodology incorporated a qualitative, semi-structured, three-stage interview design with fifty seven senior executives from industry crowdfunding platforms and three stakeholder groups. The results and analysis cover new research ground and provide conceptual models to develop theoretical foundations for further research in this field. The findings indicate that the financial model benefits of crowdfunding for independent artists are dependent on fan base demographic variables relating to age group and genre due to sustained apprehension from younger audiences. Furthermore, major labels are now considering a more user-centric financial model as an innovation strategy, and the impact of crowdfunding on their marketing model may already be initiating its development in terms of creativity, strength and artist relations.