Empirical Evaluation of Boundary Policies for Wavelet-Based Image Coding

The wavelet transform has become the most interesting new algorithm for still image compression. Yet there are many parameters within a wavelet analysis and synthesis which govern the quality of a decoded image. In this paper, we discuss different image boundary policies and their implications for the decoded image. A pool of gray-scale images has been wavelet-transformed with different settings of the wavelet filter bank and quantization threshold and with three possible boundary policies. Our empirical evaluation is based on three benchmarks: a first judgement regards the perceived quality of the decoded image. The compression rate is a second crucial factor. Finally, the best parameter settings with regard to these two factors is weighted with the cost of implementation. Contrary to the new standard JPEG-2000, where mirror padding is implemented, our investigation proposes circular convolution as the boundary treatment

Videoconferencing Offers More than Audio and Video – Making Creative Animation Artists Collaborate between Remote Offices

For more than forty years, since videoconferencing was introduced for telecommunication, researchers and market analysts have been predicting a new era of communication, that distance might soon become insignificant in human communication, and forecasting a virtualisation of work places and communities. Today, the shortcomings of telecommunication systems have been acknowledged: people still travel to meet each other face to face in order to improve the perception of sharing time and space, the establishment of common ground, awareness and presence perception. However, this paper suggests that for specialised purposes in confined environments, technology does indeed offer the promise to allow people collaborate intensively over a distance. We present a user study about how creative digital animation artists collaborate in a current co-located situation in the digital media production industry before we enter a discussion of hardware choices and user control interface design for the purpose of creating a non-intrusive, spontaneity-enabling high-quality videoconferencing system between their workspaces

Affine Bruhat order and Demazure products

We give new descriptions of the Bruhat order and Demazure products of affine Weyl groups in terms of the weight function of the quantum Bruhat graph. These results can be understood to describe certain closure relations concerning the Iwahori-Bruhat decomposition of an algebraic group. As an application towards affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties, we present a new formula for generic Newton points.Comment: 58 pages; Version 2 has some references update

Generic Newton points and cordial elements

We describe the generic $\sigma$-conjugacy classes associated with the Iwahori-Bruhat decomposition of a reductive group. As an application, we classify cordial elements as introduced by Mili\'cevi\'c-Viehmann.Comment: 45 pages. Version 2 has its introduction completely rewritten and has a different, more logical setup in the beginning of Section

Affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties via the double Bruhat graph I: Semi-infinite orbits

We introduce a new language to describe the geometry of affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties in affine flag varieties. This first part of a two paper series develops the definition and fundamental properties of the double Bruhat graph by studying semi-infinite orbits. This double Bruhat graph was originally introduced by Naito-Watanabe to study periodic $R$-polynomials. We use it to describe the geometry of many affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties, overcoming a previously ubiquitous regularity condition.Comment: 42 pages; comments appreciate

Brief for the Kansas Independent Oil & Gas Association as Amicus Curiae

Is the letter of the rule against perpetuities (the Rule) more important than its public policy? The Appellants in this case recklessly petition the Court to apply the Rule to a commonly used form of mineral reservation for the first time in the reservation’s nearly 100 years of use. They contend the Rule should apply even though it would cloud or nullify the property interests of countless unrepresented parties, spur a spate of litigation, remove a useful form of mineral ownership from commerce, and disrupt oil and gas development across Kansas—all in contravention of the Rule’s policy of making land more likely to be developed. Kansas courts have long rejected applying the Rule at the expense of its policy. This case does not provide a compelling reason to change course. The Kansas Independent Oil and Gas Association (KIOGA) represents the interests of over 1,400 members involved in the development of crude oil and natural gas in Kansas. KIOGA’s members, who include oil and gas producers, attorneys, landmen, and abstractors, have long assumed reservations of defeasible term mineral interests, like those in the present case, are valid under the Rule because they promote the development of oil and gas and create a future interest that parties in commerce regard as immediately vested. For as long as these reservations have existed, parties in Kansas have purchased leases, paid royalties, and probated estates on this assumption. KIOGA urges the Court not to apply the Rule and upend this long-accepted practice. In this brief, KIOGA will describe the commonness of the interests at stake, illustrate some of the practical consequences of applying the Rule to them, and demonstrate the commercial function these interests serve in the development of oil and gas

A New Associate’s Field Guide to Partner Compensation

This article surveys three broad models of income and expense allocation regarding law firm compensation for partners: the true partnership model; the modified partnership model; and the eat-what-you-kill model. The goal is for young lawyers to understand the fundamental differences among these compensation models even as there are myriad ways to allocate income and expenses

Getting Past Possession: Subsurface Property Disputes as Nuisances

Property rights in the subsurface of land are adapting to accommodate modern activities like massive hydraulic fracturing (fracing). Property rights will need to continue adapting if they are to accommodate other developing activities like large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS). Courts and commentators rarely approach the nature of subsurface property directly. They tend instead to discuss appropriate standards for tort liability when disputes arise—for example when artificial fissures from a frac treatment extend into and drain oil or gas from a neighbor’s land. The case law and literature generally approach unauthorized subterranean invasions as trespasses. Because the tort of trespass is designed to protect possession, its application indicates a view of subsurface property as possessory (or corporeal) in nature. Despite calling subsurface invasions “trespasses,” courts rarely impose liability for, or enjoin, invasions themselves. They instead find liability only for interferences with existing or foreseeable uses of the affected land. Leading scholars likewise advocate for a standard of subsurface “trespass” that would privilege encroachments that are societally valuable and award compensation only for resulting harm to existing uses of the property. The cases and literature thus nominally apply trespass but modify the tort from a property rule into a liability rule resembling the tort of nuisance. This article is the first to examine unauthorized subsurface encroachments as nuisances, rather than trespasses, and to assert that such encroachments do not implicate possession. Drawing on geology, doctrine, and property theory, this article interrogates the assumption that subsurface property is possessory. It analyzes prominent subsurface “trespass” cases involving waste disposal, enhanced oil recovery, fracing, natural gas storage, slant-hole wells, tunneling, and horizontal drilling to demonstrate that these disputes are already being resolved under nuisance-like principles. It argues that express application of nuisance law is doctrinally correct and would improve courts’ reasoning, harmonize disparate results, and efficiently allocate costs of subsurface activities. The article then discusses how viewing subsurface invasions as nuisances would remove legal barriers to implementation of new and emerging climate change mitigating technologies that utilize subsurface pore space, such as CCS

Ad Coelum and the Design of Property Rights

This Article seizes on a specific doctrinal discussion in Eric Claeys’s Natural Property Rights to argue for the importance of understanding property doctrines in the context of a system of interconnecting rules and standards and not in isolation. The ad coelum doctrine provides that land ownership entails ownership of the suprajacent airspace as well as the underlying subsurface. As Claeys’s discussion highlights, scholars disagree about the significance of ad coelum both conceptually, as to what function the rule serves in defining and allocating property, and normatively. It is only by viewing ad coelum in the context of how it interacts with various other doctrines—as a cog in a complex machine that serves larger purposes—that a comprehensive conceptual and normative account of the doctrine emerges. Natural Property Rights presents such an account of ad coelum and many other doctrines by attending to both the details of property law’s rules and the body of property law as a system with a larger purpose. In this way, Claeys’s Natural Property Rights is praiseworthy for its approach

The Curious Policy Implications of In re SemCrude: Do Crude Oil Markets Need a Volcker Rule?

In the summer of 2008 the nation\u27s largest and fastest growing midstream crude oil purchaser, SemCrude, declared bankruptcy. SemCrude\u27s demise was not the result of a bear market but of its taste for risky options trading. The bankruptcy pitted the competing liens of thousands of unpaid oil and gas producers and royalty owners who sold their crude oil to SemCrude at the wellhead against those of SemCrude\u27s lenders and the claims of downstream purchasers. The Bankruptcy Court for the Federal District of Delaware found none of the producers\u27 lien rights to be perfected under applicable law and awarded priority to SemCrude\u27s lenders. Producers and royalty owners were left holding the bag. This article hopes to frame the issue as a problem of systemic market risk like what ailed the financial sector preceding the 2007 financial crisis. As with the financial crisis, this problem may be solvable partly by restricting speculation by midstream crude oil and natural gas purchasers similar to how regulators restrict speculation by federally insured banks under § 619 of the Dodd-Frank Act, known as the Volcker rule