Value Creation in a QoE Environment

User behavior of multimedia services currently undergoes strong changes. This is reflected in several recent trends, e.g. the increase of rich media content consumption, preferences for more individual and personalized services and the higher sensitivity of end users for quality issues. These changes will eventually lead to strong changes in network traffic characteristics: rising congestion in peak times and less availability of bandwidth for the individual user. As a result, the quality as perceived by the end-user will decrease if network operators and service providers do not anticipate the required changes for the network. Measurable network requirements such as available video and speech quality, security and reliability are addressed by technologies that are commonly summed up in the Quality of Service (QoS) concept. However, the end-users' perception of quality is only reflected in the wider concept of Quality of Experience (QoE). This takes the measurable network requirements into account as well as customer needs, wants and preferences. For the implementation of QoE technologies several network components need to be added or changed resulting in high capital expenditures. Yet, it is not clear if these costs can be compensated with efficiency increases. Thus, new revenue streams for the network operator are necessary to incentivize investments in QoE technologies. In this paper we address four new value creation models that can serve as basis for more elaborated business models for network operators and other actors. We show how interest in QoE of the user, the content provider, the service provider and the advertiser induces new revenue streams. These models are embedded in five possible future QoE scenarios that reveal regulation, end user quality sensibility and end-to-end support as major issues for the future. --Business Models,Quality of Experience (QoE),Quality of Service (QoS),Value Creation

Fraunhofer line discriminator Final report

Airborne Fraunhofer line discriminato

Isomonodromic deformatiion with an irregular singularity and hyperelliptic curve

In this paper, we extend the result of Kitaev and Korotkin to the case where a monodromy-preserving deformation has an irregular singularity. For the monodromy-preserving deformation, we obtain the $\tau$-function whose deformation parameters are the positions of regular singularities and the parameter $t$ of an irregular singularity. Furthermore, the $\tau$-function is expressed by the hyperelliptic $\Theta$ function moving the argument \z and the period \B, where $t$ and the positions of regular singularities move $z$ and \B, respectively.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figure

Zeros of the Jimbo, Miwa, Ueno tau function

We introduce a family of local deformations for meromorphic connections on the Riemann sphere in the neighborhood of a higher rank (simple) singularity. Following a scheme introduced by Malgrange we use these local models to prove that the zeros of the tau function introduced by Jimbo, Miwa and Ueno occur precisely at those points in the deformation space at which a certain Birkhoff-Riemann- Hilbert problem fails to have a solution.Comment: 59 page

Deformations of Fuchsian Systems of Linear Differential Equations and the Schlesinger System

We consider holomorphic deformations of Fuchsian systems parameterized by the pole loci. It is well known that, in the case when the residue matrices are non-resonant, such a deformation is isomonodromic if and only if the residue matrices satisfy the Schlesinger system with respect to the parameter. Without the non-resonance condition this result fails: there exist non-Schlesinger isomonodromic deformations. In the present article we introduce the class of the so-called isoprincipal deformations of Fuchsian systems. Every isoprincipal deformation is also an isomonodromic one. In general, the class of the isomonodromic deformations is much richer than the class of the isoprincipal deformations, but in the non-resonant case these classes coincide. We prove that a deformation is isoprincipal if and only if the residue matrices satisfy the Schlesinger system. This theorem holds in the general case, without any assumptions on the spectra of the residue matrices of the deformation. An explicit example illustrating isomonodromic deformations, which are neither isoprincipal nor meromorphic with respect to the parameter, is also given

Seasonal and interannual variations in total ozone revealed by the Nimbus-4 backscattered ultraviolet experiment

The first two years of Backscattered Ultraviolet (BUV) ozone data from the Nimbus-4 spacecraft were reprocessed. The seasonal variations of total ozone for the period April 1970 to April 1972 are described using daily zonal means to 10 deg latitude zones and a time-latitude cross section. In addition, the BUV data are compared with analyzed Dobson data and with IRIS data also obtained from the Nimbus-4 spacecraft. A harmonic analysis was performed on the daily zonal means. Amplitudes, days of peaks, and percentage of variance were computed for annual and semi-annual waves and for higher harmonics of an annual period for the two years. Asymmetries are found in the annual waves in the two hemispheres, with a subtle interannual difference which may be due to changes in the general circulation. A significant semi-annual component is detected in the tropics for the first year, which appears to result from influences of the annual waves in the two hemispheres

Status of the tiger beetle Cicindela hirticollis Say (Coleoptera: Cicindelidae) in New York City and on Long Island, New York, USA

Coastal species are under considerable threat from recreational activities and climate change. The tiger beetle Cicindela hirticollis Say (Coleoptera: Cicindelidae) was recorded historically from 30 locations along the shores of New York City and Long Island, New York. We conducted surveys for extant populations of this species at 40 sites from 1989 to 2010. Adults of C. hirticollis were found at 13 beaches. Only four sites had 40 or more adults of C. hirticollis active at the time the beach was surveyed. No beetles were detected on the large coastal beaches that were formerly occupied by this species. Many coastal beaches of New York receive heavy human foot and vehicle traffic and are therefore unlikely to provide suitable habitat for C. hirticollis without a shift in beach management that recognizes the potential of some beaches as wilderness systems capable of supporting the full array of beach-dependent species

Ten Years of Solar Change as Monitored by SBUV and SBUV/2

Observations of the Sun by the Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet (SBUV) instrument aboard Nimbus 7 and the SBUV/2 instrument aboard NOAA-9 reveal variations in the solar irradiance from 1978, to 1988. The maximum to minimum solar change estimated from the Heath and Schlesinger Mg index and wavelength scaling factors is about 4 percent from 210 to 260 nm and 8 percent for 180 to 210 nm; direct measurements of the solar change give values of 1 to 3 percent and 5 to 7 percent, respectively, for the same wavelength range. Solar irradiances were high from the start of observations, late in 1978, until 1983, declined until early 1985, remained approximately constant until mid-1987, and then began to rise. Peak-to-peak 27-day rotational modulation amplitudes were as large as 6 percent at solar maximum and 1 to 2 percent at solar minimum. During occasional intervals of the 1979 to 1983 maximum and again during 1988, the dominant rotational modulation period was 13.5 days. Measurements near 200 to 205 nm show the same rotational modulation behavior but cannot be used to track long-term changes in the Sun because of uncertainties in the characterization of long-term instrument sensitivity changes