Construct · 4 fields · 4 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, four constructs Nearest construct by meaningrichnesscompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to channel is richness.
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The abstract path a signal travels between a source and a receiver, together with the noise that corrupts it, treated as a mathematical object with a maximum error-free rate called its capacity. In Shannon's 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication the channel is defined only by the statistics that link its input to its output, and its capacity is the highest mutual information over all input distributions, measured in bits per symbol or bits per second. The referent is neither a wire nor a firm nor a cell but a probabilistic mapping; what matters is how much can be sent reliably, not what physical thing carries it. This is the meaning the other three borrow the word from, and the only one where the channel is a number derived from a coding theorem.[1]
The set of interdependent organizations, such as wholesalers, distributors, and retailers, through which a product passes on its way from a producer to a final buyer. In Coughlan, Anderson, Stern, and El-Ansary's Marketing Channels the channel is a governed structure of channel members who perform functions like carrying inventory, extending credit, and providing information, and the design problem is how to divide those functions and their rewards among the members. The referent is a network of firms and the flows between them, not a signal path or a cell membrane; the unit is a member of the chain, and the question is who does the work of getting goods to market, not how many bits get through. It keeps only the loose image of something passing along a route.[2]
A medium through which people in an organization exchange messages, ranked by how much understanding it can carry in a given time. Daft and Lengel, in their 1986 Management Science paper on media richness, order channels from face-to-face conversation down through the telephone, personal written notes, and formal reports, according to their capacity to give immediate feedback, carry multiple cues, use natural language, and convey personal feeling. The claim is that equivocal tasks need rich channels and routine ones do not. Here the referent is a communication medium chosen by managers, and richness is a property of the medium relative to a task, not a coding-theorem rate: a face-to-face talk is the richest channel yet has no defined capacity in bits.[3]
A pore-forming protein in a cell membrane that lets specific ions cross, opening and closing in response to voltage or binding, and so carrying the electric currents that underlie a nerve impulse. Hodgkin and Huxley's 1952 Journal of Physiology paper modelled the squid giant axon as separate sodium and potassium conductances that rise and fall with membrane voltage, and those voltage-gated conductances are what the word channel later named at the molecular level. The referent is a physical structure spanning a lipid bilayer, and its unit is a current or a conductance in siemens, measured under voltage clamp. It shares nothing with the other meanings but the picture of something passing through a passage; here the passage is real, made of protein, and the thing passing is charged atoms.[4]
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