On the QoS of IPTV and Its Effects on Home Networks

In Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) systems, Quality-of-Service (QoS) is a critical factor for user satisfaction. In this paper, we first propose a queueing model for IPTV systems and discuss how to ensure the QoS of IPTV. We then use the model to analyze the effects of IPTV traffic on other applications in home networks. We find that TCP congestion control may not work well under this circumstance and propose a new approach to improve the performance of TCP. We also verify our results through ns2 simulations

Profit VS Non-Profit Business Based on P2P Lending: A Cross-Country Multiple Case Study

People-to-People (P2P) lending allows individuals to lend and borrow directly among each other online. Previous research mainly focuses on a single P2P lending marketplace – Prosper.com. This paper uses a multiple-case study approach to explore four P2P lending marketplaces. The study provides in-depth explanations on how different P2P lending marketplaces operate in different business models and in different countries. Our study thus extends current understanding about different operation models of P2P lending marketplaces, and suggests how future research should be done to cover more P2P lending platforms. We also contribute to the literature by indicating the interesting research questions originated from the cross-case analysis

The Roles of Social Capital in Online P2P Lending Markets Under Different Cultures: A Comparison of China and America

Online P2P (People-to-People or Peer-to-Peer) lending has very rapid development since it was appeared in 2005. In order to mitigate asymmetric information between borrowers and lenders, some online P2P market allows members building their social networks (such as Prosper, CommunityLend, PPDai etc). By empirical analyzing the transaction data of Prosper (largest P2P market in US) and PPDai (largest P2P market in China), the paper verifies that the social capital systems have a positive influence on borrower’s loan performance on the markets. However, on both markets, the loan interest rate mainly dependents on borrower’s hard information rather than their social capital. Furthermore, it concludes that borrower’ social network in PPDai is much more useful and effective than in Prosper by comparing the empirical results, which could be helpful for the credit system development of Chinese online P2P lending markets based on the conclusions

Queueing Properties of Feedback Flow Control Systems,”

Abstract In this paper, we consider a network with both controllable and uncontrollable flows. Uncontrollable flows are typically generated from applications with stringent QoS requirements and are given high priority. On the other hand, controllable flows are typically generated by elastic applications and can adapt to the available link capacities in the network. We provide a general model of such a system and analyze its queueing behavior. Specially, we obtain a lower bound and an asymptotic upper bound for the tail of the workload distribution at each link in the network. These queueing results provide us with guidelines on how to design a feedback flow control system. Simulation results show that the lower bound and asymptotic upper bound are quite accurate and that our feedback control method can effectively control the queue length in the presence of both controllable and uncontrollable traffic. Finally, we describe a distributed strategy that uses the notion of Active Queue Management (AQM) for implementing our flow control solution

Queueing Properties of Feedback Flow Control Systems,”

Abstract In this paper, we consider a network with both controllable and uncontrollable flows. Uncontrollable flows are typically generated from those applications with stringent QoS requirements and are given a high priority. On the other hand, controllable flows are typically generated by elastic applications and can adapt to the available link capacities in the network. We provide a general model of such a system and analyze its queueing behavior. Specially, we obtain a lower bound and an asymptotic upper bound for the tail of the workload distribution at each link in the network. These queueing results provide us with guides on how to design a feedback flow control system. Simulation results show that the lower bound and asymptotic upper bound are in fact quite accurate and that our feedback control method can effectively control the queue length in the presence of both controllable and uncontrollable traffic

A bony-crested Jurassic dinosaur with evidence of iridescent plumage highlights complexity in early paravian evolution

The Jurassic Yanliao theropods have offered rare glimpses of the early paravian evolution and particularly of bird origins, but, with the exception of the bizarre scansoriopterygids, they have shown similar skeletal and integumentary morphologies. Here we report a distinctive new Yanliao theropod species bearing prominent lacrimal crests, bony ornaments previously known from more basal theropods. It shows longer arm and leg feathers than Anchiornis and tail feathers with asymmetrical vanes forming a tail surface area even larger than that in Archaeopteryx. Nanostructures, interpreted as melanosomes, are morphologically similar to organized, platelet-shaped organelles that produce bright iridescent colours in extant birds. The new species indicates the presence of bony ornaments, feather colour and flight- related features consistent with proposed rapid character evolution and significant diversity in signalling and locomotor strategies near bird origins

StoryAnalogy: Deriving Story-level Analogies from Large Language Models to Unlock Analogical Understanding

Analogy-making between narratives is crucial for human reasoning. In this paper, we evaluate the ability to identify and generate analogies by constructing a first-of-its-kind large-scale story-level analogy corpus, \textsc{StoryAnalogy}, which contains 24K story pairs from diverse domains with human annotations on two similarities from the extended Structure-Mapping Theory. We design a set of tests on \textsc{StoryAnalogy}, presenting the first evaluation of story-level analogy identification and generation. Interestingly, we find that the analogy identification tasks are incredibly difficult not only for sentence embedding models but also for the recent large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and LLaMa. ChatGPT, for example, only achieved around 30% accuracy in multiple-choice questions (compared to over 85% accuracy for humans). Furthermore, we observe that the data in \textsc{StoryAnalogy} can improve the quality of analogy generation in LLMs, where a fine-tuned FlanT5-xxl model achieves comparable performance to zero-shot ChatGPT.Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 2023 main conferenc