Media-Rich Input Application Liability

Until recently, media-rich online interactions were mostly unidirectional: multimedia content was delivered by the service provider to the user. Input from the user came almost exclusively in the form of text. Even when searching the Internet for images or audio, a user typically entered text into a search engine. In addition, search engines indexed multimedia content by analyzing not the content itself but the text surrounding it. This is rapidly changing. With the rise of multimedia-capable smartphones and wireless broadband, applications that allow users to search using non-textual inputs are quickly becoming popular. These applications go much further than simply allowing content to be uploaded and shared, which is already common to Web 2.0 applications; they actually respond to the user based on the input media.[...] These applications represent a new and growing category that I term media-rich input applications (MRIAs).[...] There are three unique attributes of MRIAs that differentiate them from legacy web behavior and therefore require new analysis. First, unlike legacy search applications in which the service provider makes a copy and presents it to the user, MRIA behavior requires the user to make a copy and present it to the service provider. Thus, the image of the book cover in the previous example is digitized by the user and sent to Google; it is not copied by Google and sent to the user in response to a search. Second, the copied content is not necessarily from the Internet; in our example it is from a physical book. Third, some of these technologies create derivative works in a way that simple web searching and indexing does not. This Essay examines how these unique features of MRIAs interact with current copyright doctrine and how the lack of protection for users may discourage innovation by developers of this new and exciting technology. This Essay also proposes a new user safe harbor that balances the interests of users in using MRIAs with the interests of copyright owners in protecting their exclusive rights

Irreducibility and reducibility for the energy representation of the group of mappings of a Riemannian manifold into a compact semisimple Lie group

AbstractThe irreducibility of the energy representation of the group of smooth mappings from a Riemannian manifold of dimension d ⩾ 3 into a compact semisimple Lie group is proven. The nonequivalence of the representations associated with different Riemann structures is also proven for d ⩾ 3. The case d = 2 is examined and irreducibility and nonequivalence results are also given. The reducibility in the case d = 1 is pointed out (in this case the commutant contains a representation equivalent with the energy representation)

Factoriality of representations of the group of paths on SU(n)

AbstractFactoriality in the cyclic component of the vacuum for the energy representation of SU(n)-valued paths groups is proved. The main tool is a lemma concerning generic pairs of Cartan subalgebras in the Lie algebra su(n) of SU(n) groups

Quantum electrodynamics of relativistic bound states with cutoffs

We consider an Hamiltonian with ultraviolet and infrared cutoffs, describing the interaction of relativistic electrons and positrons in the Coulomb potential with photons in Coulomb gauge. The interaction includes both interaction of the current density with transversal photons and the Coulomb interaction of charge density with itself. We prove that the Hamiltonian is self-adjoint and has a ground state for sufficiently small coupling constants.Comment: To appear in "Journal of Hyperbolic Differential Equation

Rhythm in the speech of a person with right hemisphere damage: Applying the pairwise variability index

Although several aspects of prosody have been studied in speakers with right hemisphere damage (RHD), rhythm remains largely uninvestigated. This study compares the rhythm of an Australian English speaker with right hemisphere damage (due to a stroke, but with no concomitant dysarthria) to that of a neurologically unimpaired individual. The speakers' rhythm is compared using the pairwise variability index (PVI) which allows for an acoustic characterization of rhythm by comparing the duration of successive vocalic and intervocalic intervals. A sample of speech from a structured interview between a speech and language therapist and each participant was analysed. Previous research has shown that speakers with RHD may have difficulties with intonation production, and therefore it was hypothesized that there may also be rhythmic disturbance. Results show that the neurologically normal control uses a similar rhythm to that reported for British English (there are no previous studies available for Australian English), whilst the speaker with RHD produces speech with a less strongly stress-timed rhythm. This finding was statistically significant for the intervocalic intervals measured (t(8) = 4.7, p < .01), and suggests that some aspects of prosody may be right lateralized for this speaker. The findings are discussed in relation to previous findings of dysprosody in RHD populations, and in relation to syllable-timed speech of people with other neurological conditions