Talk:signalling event

Deletion debate

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An event that acts as a signal? SemperBlotto 07:06, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

The definition is really bad. Hard to comment unless I can understand it. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:42, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

At least the current definition seems to be wrong. AFAIK, in telecommunication a signalling (or signaling) event is defined as the change of the state of the communication channel, each state representing a symbol that is to be transmitted. To give an everyday example, the change of a traffic light from green to yellow is a signaling event. The number of signalling events per unit of time was earlier used as a measure for the speed of the channel. More specifically, the unit baud is defined as 1 signaling event per second. Later, when it was discovered that one signaling event can convey several bits (like several traffic lights flashing at a time), a new measure "bits per second" or bps was introduced.

The term is also used at least in linguistics (of which I understood too little to even try to explain the term in my own words) and molecular biology. I cannot claim that I'd have understood everything that I read, but it looks to me that a signaling event in biology is an instance of one organ sending a "signal" (which appears to be a chemical one in many instances) to another organ, which triggers some sort of activity in the receiving organ. Typical for a biological signaling event is that the response of the receiving organ turns off the primary signal. I wasn't able to locate a definition, though, but the meaning seems to be very clear for the biologists, who write scientific articles about signaling events without bothering with defining the term. There's even a "Handbook of cell signaling" for those who got interested.

I don't know whether this helps to solve the RFD issue, but at least I found some interesting reading for a while. --Hekaheka 19:50, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Keeping for no consensus. Mglovesfun (talk) 20:36, 9 March 2010 (UTC)