WGBH's Teachers' Domain Rights Assessment

This rights assessment evaluates the feasibility of converting the contents of WGBH's free online educational resource collection Teachers' Domain (http://www.teachersdomain.org) to open content status. It employs a two-pronged approach -- (1) categorizing and determining licensing costs for the website's already-existing media assets, and (2) researching and identifying challenges and solutions to licensing issues.For this report, WGBH identified all of the media assets and elements (the pieces that comprise a given asset) within the Teachers' Domain science collections, researched the rights holders and licensing agreements associated with each one, and created a classification system to identify rights status. This made it possible to determine the action necessary to shift each asset toward open content status, and to estimate the associated costs (if any). This research also mapped the potential difficulties and the opportunities for progress in this area

Digital Humanities for Lifelong Learners

Digital Humanities for Lifelong Learners is a research project that will convene leading thinkers in the fields of lifelong learning, humanities education, public media and humanities archives, and multi-platform interactive technology in a series of in-person and virtual meetings and other activities, including online surveys. The key purpose is to research how best to create a significant library of high quality, digital humanities modules, drawn from WGBH's vast archive and other public media sources, for lifelong learners, especially those aged 65+. An initial day-long meeting, held at WGBH and including all project participants, will set the agenda for this six-month research initiative, resulting in a detailed white paper that addresses audience research findings, humanities content, rights, and distribution issues, and technical and design approaches, and charts next steps for this project, including future funding possibilities

Practicing Nostalgia: Time and Memory in Nabokov\u27s Early Russian Fiction

Nabokov\u27s earliest Russian fiction reveals his lifelong preoccupation with time and his complex strategies for preserving heightened moments of experience. Dissatisfied with the brevity of involuntary (Proustian) recall, his émigré protagonists strive to inhabit their Russian past more fully through a painstaking process of aesthetic re-creation. Beginning with a handful of vivid recollections, the hero of Mary gradually fabricates a past that is more intensely real than the original. Nabokov\u27s most mature characters, however, recognize the solipsistic danger and utility of living in a vanished mental paradise. Turning to the present, they find unexpected beauty in the arrangement of ordinary objects in Berlin. In order both to intensify these perceptions and to memorialize them, the heroes of Torpid Smoke and A Guide to Berlin adopt a remarkable strategy: projecting themselves into an imagined future, they view the scene before them as if it were already a memory. This ocular adjustment endows the perceived objects with a radiance, fixity, and relief that they would acquire (and lose) only in a moment of extraordinary recall; but this act simultaneously preserves the impression indelibly when it becomes part of the actual past. In short, by anticipating and accelerating time\u27s destructive movement, by practicing nostalgia for the past while it is yet present, these individuals arrest the process of forgetting

Reliable THz Communications for Outdoor based Applications- Use Cases and Methods

Future (beyond 5G) wireless networks will demand high throughput and low latency and would benefit from greenfield, contiguous, and wider bandwidth, all of which THz spectrum can provide. Although THz has been envisioned to be deployed in an indoor setting, with proper enforcement and planning, we can draw a limited number of use cases for outdoor THz communication. THz can provide high capacity and ultra-high throughput but at the cost of high path loss and sensitivity to device orientation/mobility.. We identify scenarios where the use of the THz spectrum for an outdoor setting is justified and their critical operating parameters. We further categorize the applications based on the relative mobility between the access point (AP) and user equipment (UE). We present an approach for deploying THz on an outdoor framework by presenting preliminary technical parameter analysis for scenarios, like wireless backhaul, high-speed kiosks, and the aerial base station (ABS). Our preliminary analysis shows that the application for each of these scenarios is limited based on multiple parameters, such as distance, device mobility, device orientation, user geometry, antenna gain, and environment settings, which requires separate consideration and optimization.Comment: To appear in IEEE CCNC 2020. The document has 4 pages, 13 figures, and 1 tabl

Would you like your Internet with or without video?

According to Cisco's VNI forecast, "consumer Internet video traffic will be 85 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2020, up from 76 percent in 2015," and the majority of this traffic will be entertainment-oriented video. Many might view this as the (near) realization of the promised convergence of digital broadband delivery platforms that has been coming since first generation broadband services started becoming available in the mid-1990s. A question we should ask is whether this is the Internet we want? Even if one concludes that the marriage between entertainment media and the Internet is a foregone conclusion, it is worthwhile to consider what this may mean for the design, regulation, and economics of the Internet. In this paper, we critically examine the proposition that the conventional wisdom that convergence toward “everything over IP,” or even stronger, “everything over the Internet,” is efficient, inevitable, or desirable may be wrong. Convergence means different things in technical, economic, and policy terms. Building a single network that is optimized for 80% entertainment video traffic might disadvantage other services. Moreover, the economics of media entertainment are distinct from, and potentially in conflict with, the economics motivating many of the usage cases most often cited as justification for viewing the Internet as an essential infrastructure. Finally, separately managing the traffic for Internet and video services may be advantageous in addressing regulatory agenda items such as performance measurement, set-top boxes, universal service, OVD reclassification, and Internet interconnection. While most of the traffic may share the same physical (principally, wired) conduit into homes, it may be more efficient and flexible to segregate traffic into multiple logically distinct networks; and doing so may facilitate technical, market, and regulatory management of the shared resources

Polar Air Traffic Control

Air Traffic Control (ATC) operations over Continental US (CONUS) are becoming challenged due to increasing traffic loads vying for limited communications channels. Nevertheless, the CONUS situation is much better than what exists in the oceanic airspace