Completing the Connection: Achieving Universal Service Through Municipal Wi-Fi

The federal universal service scheme is designed to ensure that everyone has affordable access to advanced telecommunications and information services. Despite the development of cost-effective technologies that drastically reduce the cost of telephone services vis-à-vis the Internet and Wi-Fi networks, federal regulations generally prevent municipalities or private companies from providing wireless Internet access with universal service funds. Federal regulations have replaced technology costs, lack of business incentives, and consumer affordability as the primary barrier to universal service. Competitive neutrality, the pro-competitive and technology-neutral approach to universal service funding, must be fully embraced in order to empower local communities with the choice of technologies that best suits their residents in providing universal and affordable access to advanced telecommunications and information services

q-Deformation of the Krichever-Novikov Algebra

The recent focus on deformations of algebras called quantum algebras can be attributed to the fact that they appear to be the basic algebraic structures underlying an amazingly diverse set of physical situations. To date many interesting features of these algebras have been found and they are now known to belong to a class of algebras called Hopf algebras [1]. The remarkable aspect of these structures is that they can be regarded as deformations of the usual Lie algebras. Of late, there has been a considerable interest in the deformation of the Virasoro algebra and the underlying Heisenberg algebra [2-11]. In this letter we focus our attention on deforming generalizations of these algebras, namely the Krichever-Novikov (KN) algebra and its associated Heisenberg algebra.Comment: AmsTex. To appear in Letters in Mathematical Physic

A Comparison of Different Machine Transliteration Models

Machine transliteration is a method for automatically converting words in one language into phonetically equivalent ones in another language. Machine transliteration plays an important role in natural language applications such as information retrieval and machine translation, especially for handling proper nouns and technical terms. Four machine transliteration models -- grapheme-based transliteration model, phoneme-based transliteration model, hybrid transliteration model, and correspondence-based transliteration model -- have been proposed by several researchers. To date, however, there has been little research on a framework in which multiple transliteration models can operate simultaneously. Furthermore, there has been no comparison of the four models within the same framework and using the same data. We addressed these problems by 1) modeling the four models within the same framework, 2) comparing them under the same conditions, and 3) developing a way to improve machine transliteration through this comparison. Our comparison showed that the hybrid and correspondence-based models were the most effective and that the four models can be used in a complementary manner to improve machine transliteration performance