The ODO project: a Case Study in Integration of Multimedia Services

Recent years have witnessed a steady growth in the availability of wide-area multi-service networks. These support a variety of traffic types including data, control messages, audio and video. Consequently they are often thought of as integrated media carriers. To date, however, use of these networks has been limited to isolated applications which exhibit very little or no integration amongst themselves. This paper describes a project which investigated organisational, user interfacing and programming techniques to exploit this integration of services at the application level

How to Extract the Geometry and Topology from Very Large 3D Segmentations

Segmentation is often an essential intermediate step in image analysis. A volume segmentation characterizes the underlying volume image in terms of geometric information--segments, faces between segments, curves in which several faces meet--as well as a topology on these objects. Existing algorithms encode this information in designated data structures, but require that these data structures fit entirely in Random Access Memory (RAM). Today, 3D images with several billion voxels are acquired, e.g. in structural neurobiology. Since these large volumes can no longer be processed with existing methods, we present a new algorithm which performs geometry and topology extraction with a runtime linear in the number of voxels and log-linear in the number of faces and curves. The parallelizable algorithm proceeds in a block-wise fashion and constructs a consistent representation of the entire volume image on the hard drive, making the structure of very large volume segmentations accessible to image analysis. The parallelized C++ source code, free command line tools and MATLAB mex files are avilable from http://hci.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/software.phpComment: C++ source code, free command line tools and MATLAB mex files are avilable from http://hci.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/software.ph

Settlement in modern network-based payment infrastructures – description and prototype of the E-Settlement model

Payment systems are undergoing rapid and fundamental changes stimulated largely by technological progress especially distributed network technology and real-time processing. Internet and e-commerce will have a major impact on payment systems in the future. User demands and competition will speed up developments. Payment systems will move from conventions that were originally paper-based to truly network-based solutions. This paper presents a solution – E-Settlement – for improving interbank settlement systems. It is based on a decentralised approach to be fully integrated with the banks’ payment systems. The basic idea is that central bank money, the settlement cover, is transferred as an encrypted digital stamp as part of the interbank payment message. The future payment systems would in this model operate close to the Internet/e-mail concept by sending payment messages directly from the sending bank’s account/payment server to the system of the receiving bank with immediate final interbank settlement without intervening centralised processing. Payment systems would become more efficient and faster and the overall structure would be come straightforward. The E-Settlement and network-based system concept could be applied with major benefits for correspondent banking, ACH and RTGS processing environments. In order to assess this novel idea the Bank of Finland built a prototype of the E-Settlement model. It consist of a group of emulated banks sending payments to each other via a TCP/IP network under the control of a central bank as the liquidity provider and an administration site monitoring the system security. This paper contains an introduction to network-based payment systems and E-Settlement, the specifications of the E-Settlement model and the description, results and experiences of the actual E-Settlement prototype.network-based payment systems; settlement systems; interbank settlement; payment system integration

The National Directory of New Hires

[Excerpt] The National Directory of New Hires is a database that contains personal and financial data on nearly every working American, as well as those receiving unemployment compensation. Contrary to its name, the National Directory of New Hires includes more than just information on new employees. It is a database that includes information on (1) all newly hired employees, compiled from state reports (and reports from federal employers), (2) the quarterly wage reports of existing employees (in Unemployment Compensation (UC)-covered employment), and (3) unemployment compensation claims. The National Directory of New Hires was originally established to help states locate noncustodial parents living in a different state so that child support payments could be withheld from that parent’s paycheck. Since its enactment in 1996, the National Directory of New Hires has been extended to several additional programs and agencies to verify program eligibility, prevent or end fraud, collect overpayments, or assure that program benefits are correct. Although the directory is considered very effective, concerns about data security and the privacy rights of employees remain a part of debates regarding expanded access to the National Directory of New Hires

Indigenous affairs: a quick guide to key internet links

Provides links to key resources for Indigenous affairs in Australia, including information on \u27Closing the Gap\u27 agreements, funding, geography, and government agencies. Summary This Quick Guide provides links to: the Council of Australian Government (COAG) key agreements under ‘Closing the Gap’ a listing of Australian Government departments with responsibility for Indigenous affairs and their key programmes statistics and funding a map of ‘Aboriginal Australia’ directories of Indigenous organisations and businesses key organisations outside Government departments state, territory and local government websites and overseas websites

2009-10 statistics derived from ILR data for the monitoring and allocation of funding in FECs

"This document describes: how we used 2009-10 Data Service learner data to inform 2011-12 funding allocations how we used 2009-10 learner data to monitor returns made to HEFCE the responses required from colleges to these monitoring processes." - Page 2

An information retrieval approach to ontology mapping

In this paper, we present a heuristic mapping method and a prototype mapping system that support the process of semi-automatic ontology mapping for the purpose of improving semantic interoperability in heterogeneous systems. The approach is based on the idea of semantic enrichment, i.e., using instance information of the ontology to enrich the original ontology and calculate similarities between concepts in two ontologies. The functional settings for the mapping system are discussed and the evaluation of the prototype implementation of the approach is reported. \ud \u

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions: A Needed Force in Alaska?

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are official, temporary bodies used for communities to come to terms with past violence, promote education and awareness of historic trauma, and to provide recognition and closure for victims and successors. By bringing past issues to light, such commissions promote healing and allow these communities to move forward. Although the Commission on Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa after the Apartheid-era is best known, several similar commissions have been established throughout the globe and within the United States. This paper compares commissions from South Africa, El Salvador, South Korea, and Canada with those that have been established in the United States to examine whether such a commission would be useful in Alaska to address current social problems in the state