Interactive Video Delivery Services

Interactive Video Delivery Services Video-On-Demand Interactive Services Interactive video delivery services are a fundamental change in the TV interface  paradigm. They shift the delivery paradigm from carrying many simultaneous parallel  streams (channels) to one that carries concurrent accesses through separate channels into a  database. Traditionally, in a broadcast TV system, many stations broadcast their programs  simultaneously and the user selects a specific channel to view. As a result, a user is  restricted to a chronology of parallel and competing programming whereas, an interactive  system makes all programming available to its users without this restriction. There is no  temporal restriction. All programming becomes available any time to the user. Types of Interactive Services Based on the amount of interactivity allowed (adapted from [4]), interactive services can be classified into several categories. The user is a passive participant and has no control over the session in broadcast (No-VOD) services that are similar to broadcast TV. The user signs up and pays for specific programming, similar to existing CATV PPV services in pay-per-view (PPV) services. The users are grouped based on a threshold of interest in quasi video-on-demand (Q-VOD) services. By switching to a different group, users can perform rudimentary temporal control activities. The functions like forward and reverse are simulated by transitions in discrete time intervals (on the order of 5 minutes) in near video-on-demand (N-VOD) services. The multiple channels with the same programming skewed in time [5, 15] can provide this capability. The user has complete control over the session presentation in true video-on-demand (T-VOD) services. The user has full-function VCR (virtual VCR) capabilities including forward and reverse play, freeze, and random positioning. For T-VOD, only a single channel is necessary; multiple channels become redundant. Technological Inhibitors There are other inhibiting issues to the ubiquitous deployment of interactive multimedia applications than just technological issues. In the digital environment, information is readily copied, reproduced, and altered, jeopardizing the established markets of the information providers. To convince an information provider to accept an all-digital system, certain incentives like mechanisms like encryption to protect intellectual property rights – that will maintain their data and thus help them stay in business are needed. (The Internet does not copy data, people copy data.) System Components for Video-on-Demand 5A detailed analysis of these issues is beyond the scope of this paper. An interesting survey of the  intellectual property rights problem has been provided by Samuelson [14]. Hundreds (if not thousands) of users with different viewing preferences will access a VOD system simultaneously. The quality of each session must remain within specified bounds to achieve customer satisfaction. This ensures the quality of the system. We will survey the individual technologies in the context of an end-to-end architecture for a VOD system. A typical VOD scenario contains a local database and server connected to user homes  via a communications network. The user home consists of a network interface coupled to a  display [4]. The user interacts with the system via a mouse or a computer keyboard. Fig. 2 illustrates this architecture. user interface and display high-speed backbone local database local server home viewer network interface multimedia archive and distributor multimedia archive Figure 2: A Simple VOD Architecture Management of System Resources in VOD We identified some of the technical problems in designing a VOD system in the previous sections. A VOD system is required to support a large customer population and many movie titles. Most existing prototypes are constricted to laboratory or office environments and support at most a few hundred users and up to a hundred movies. Large scale commercial systems  should need to more closely match the per-user resource requirements and usage patterns to  achieve economic feasibility. In this section, we look over some of these problems and discuss  existing research in this area. Resource Reservation One of the fundamental problems in developing a VOD system is one of storage and network I/O  bandwidth management. The VOD system possesses a finite amount of resources measured in  terms of storage I/O and communication bandwidths. As various customers compete for the same  system resources, efficient schemes that ensure fairness of allocation have to be designed. The service provider wants to generate the maximum revenue from the offered services. A  balance between these two often opposing requirements is necessary to tap the potential  benefits of the system. The first step to solve this problem is the development of an  accurate system model. We use the model proposed in Fig 2 as the basis for the remainder  of this discussion. The end-to-end VOD system comprises of three basic components; the storage server,  the network, and the user interface. The metadata server provides an additional level of  complexity to the system model. The time dependency of continuous media requires the  VOD system to ensure that the data transmission mechanism can provide for strict deadlines.   If these deadlines are missed, it is possible for the quality of the session to degrade. To ensure customer satisfaction, resources should be reserved along the entire data path of a connection on a per-session basis. The complexity of the resource reservation mechanism depends on the  application under consideration. Interactive services need the resource reservation to be made per-session along the entire data path, including at the source. A crucial factor which is affecting resource reservation is Quality-of-Service (QOS). The common interpretation of QOS is from a network perspective rather than a user or customer perspective. A more suitable view makes use of the two perspectives and yields two QOS characterizations (we can call them delivery quality and system QOS). A present  challenge is to identify the mapping from delivery quality to system QOS for a range of  system design parameters (e.g., data compression and network switching modes). User Traffic Characterization Although customers access the VOD system randomly, having a priori knowledge about  user access patterns can lead to a more efficient design. The system can make use of this information to manage network and storage bandwidths. As an example, if the traffic characteristics indicate that a movie is popular at a particular site, the system can replicate the movie locally to increase availability. The access pattern of users to the system will not be uniform over a given  24 hour period. Typically, one would expect the load to be low to moderate during the  daytime and to increase gradually through the evening and decrease again during the night. A hypothetical graph characterizing the access to a VOD database for a 24 hour period  is shown in Fig. 4. The access to the database is high during the evening hours, peaks at  around 9:00 PM, and is low-to-moderate during the day. This access pattern can be used for  designing schemes for various considerations like resource management; to update popularity tables, redistribute data, and reconfigure the system during off-peak hours. 0 5 10 15 20 time-of-day database-load Figure 4: A Schematic Daily-Access Model for a VOD System Similar models can be implemented and maintained for different geographical regions, movie categories, and individual titles. Such models are able to accommodate the differences in programming choices (e.g., children’s movies are more popular during the early evening hours) of different user groups. However, the complexity of these models, and their tractability is still to be established. Load Balancing An issue related directly to resource reservation is load balancing. The load balancing of VOD can be viewed as a combination of two sub-problems (i) The movie-storage  allocation problem and (ii) the resource location and connection establishment mechanism. Even though these problems are solved more easily individually, they are not independent  with respect to performance. From the perspective of a generic interactive  system, solving these issues is an open problem; however, simplifications can yield tractable solutions. As an example, if one assumes that a VOD system supports only stored data; i.e., movies  have to be digitized and stored before they can become available online, then the data  characteristics of a movie are well known in advance (e.g., the system has a priori knowledge  about the average bandwidth, burst rates, burst durations, etc.). This knowledge once available, can be used to simplify the design process. Making use of the metadata mechanism as described in Section 3 simplifies the task of management by decoupling the storage problem from the location problem.

Gerrymandering: United States House of Representatives and Election District Boundaries

Michael Effiom Prof. S. Sharifan Govt 2302-73058 March 4, 2013 Gerrymandering The main purpose of gerrymandering is to increase the number of legislative seats that can be won by the political party which is in charge of redrawing the district boundaries during that period of time, and to create â€Å"safe† seats for the party’s incumbent legislators which are seats in which the incumbent will always win re-election. Gerrymandering is the redrawing of election district boundaries to give an electoral advantage to a particular candidate or party. It has been recognized as a part of the American political landscape since 1812.The term derives from a redrawing of US Representative districts in Massachusetts before the 1812 elections, when Elbridge Gerry was governor. People said the district was reminiscent of a salamander and thus the term Gerry-mander was coined. The Constitution requires that representation in the House of Representatives be apportioned to states on the basis of population. So, every ten years we count up the number of people living in each state and making sure that each state gets at least one House member, divide up the rest of the seats among the states equally.States with large populations get a bigger amount of house seats smaller states get just the one. A variety of Supreme Court cases, however, have applied the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause to the process of drawing legislative districts resulting in a requirement that each district have roughly the same population. So after each Census, states and localities have to redraw their district lines to ensure that the districts are roughly equal. This process redrawing of district lines has been blamed for almost every problem in American politics. The redistricting process therefore became a target for political reformers.In 2008, Californians enacted Prop. 11 and created the Citizens Redistricting Commission (CRC). State legislators would no longer be able to pick their own constituents. An independent commission would be in charge of drawing the lines for the Assembly and Senate. In 2010, the CRC’s mandate was expanded to include House districts as well. The party in control of redistricting can weaken its opposition by â€Å"packing† or â€Å"cracking†. Packing is to concentrate as many voters of the opposition party into a single electoral district to reduce their influence in voting in other districts.In some cases, this may be done to obtain representation for a community of common interest thus creating i. e. a minority group (Blacks or Hispanics) what is called a majority-minority district. Cracking is the spreading out of opposition voters across numerous â€Å"safe† districts which will dilute their voting percentage and its effect on the outcome. If representatives are required to be residents of their districts, redistricting may redraw the boundary to exclude his/her house, or draw them into a d istrict where they will lose the next election.Gerrymandering is a very serious problem. Effective gerrymanders can have significant policy implications. In California, for example, it makes a difference whether there are 23 or 24 Republicans in the Senate. If there are 23, Republicans can’t stop Democratic efforts to raise taxes. If there are 24, Republicans can. By pre-determining election outcomes, gerrymandering makes actual voting less consequential, and therefore it should discourage voter turnout, but because of a lack of awareness on the subject voter turnout is not significantly affected.Any variations in voter turnout mostly depend on voter age, income, education, race and ethnicity. Since ballots include many races for offices in various regions, some of which may genuinely be closely-contested, one or two â€Å"foregone conclusions† on the ballot will not diminish voter interest in other races. An effective way of combating gerrymandering is to follow the e xample of California and enact something similar to prop. 11 which will give the responsibility of redrawing the district line to independent non-partisan groups.This will remove partisan machinations from the drawing process and remove the unfair advantage that incumbents have over challengers to their seats. Sources Cited * Humphreys. M. 2009. â€Å"Can compactness constrain the Gerrymander? † http://www. columbia. edu/~mh2245/papers1/gerry. pdf * Smith, Kieth. â€Å"On Gerrymandering and Its Effects. † Web log post. Political Science at University of the Pacific. Pacificpoliticalscience. wordpress. com, 2 Nov. 2011. Web. 04 Mar. 2013.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald and His Work Essay - 735 Words

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald and His Work By the time F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925, he had already amassed an impressive literary resume. From his first commercial publication of the short story, Babes in the Woods at age 23 to The Sensible Thing at age 28, Fitzgerald published fourteen short stories, one play, two collections of short stories, and two novels. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, made Fitzgerald a celebrity. The second, The Beautiful and the Damned, was serialized in Metropolitan Magazine. Few American writers published as many well-received short stories in the fiction market as Fitzgerald during this time. After publication of†¦show more content†¦Fitzgeralds maternal grandfather also represented high asperations. He immigrated from Ireland during the pre-Civil War era and became a wealthy, wholesale grocer in St. Paul. Although situated economically in an upper middle class, Fitzgerald developed bonds to upper class friends during his childhood, and aspired to experience the kinds of opportunties they enjoyed. The quest to achieve seems to have dominated Fitzgerald since early adolescence. Like many of his friends who attended prep schools in the East, Fitzgerald attended a Catholic prep school in New Jersey between1911-13 where he met Father Sigourney Fay. Fay encouraged his ambitions for personal distinction and achievement. After the death of his maternal grandmother, his familys sizeable inheritance allowed Fitzgerald to attend Princeton University the following year. He reportedly remarked at this time to his friend, Edmund Wilson, I want to be the greatest writer who ever lived, dont you? (Connors 1) During his senior year, Fitzgerald joined the Army, and thinking he would die in the war, rapidly wrote a novel, The Romantic Egotist. He later revised it as This Side of Paradise. 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Spelman College Acceptance Rate, SAT/ACT Scores, GPA

Spelman College is a  historically black womens college with an acceptance rate of 39%. Located near downtown Atlanta, Spelman shares resources with the Atlanta University Center, a consortium of HBCUs including  Clark Atlanta University,  Morehouse College,  and Morehouse School of Medicine. Spelman has a strong liberal arts focus and an 11-to-1 student/faculty ratio. Considering applying to Spelman College? Here are the admissions statistics you should know, including average SAT/ACT scores and GPAs of admitted students. Acceptance Rate During the 2017-18 admissions cycle, Spelman College had an acceptance rate of 39%. This means that for every 100 students who applied, 39 students were admitted, making Spelmans admissions process competitive. Admissions Statistics (2017-18) Number of Applicants 9,451 Percent Admitted 39% Percent Admitted Who Enrolled (Yield) 15% SAT Scores and Requirements Spelman College requires that all applicants submit either SAT or ACT scores. During the 2017-18 admissions cycle, 70% of admitted students submitted SAT scores. SAT Range (Admitted Students) Section 25th Percentile 75th Percentile ERW 560 630 Math 520 590 ERW=Evidence-Based Reading and Writing This admissions data tells us that most of Spelmans admitted students fall within the top 35% nationally on the SAT. For the evidence-based reading and writing section, 50% of students admitted to Spelman scored between 560 and 630, while 25% scored below 560 and 25% scored above 630. On the math section, 50% of admitted students scored between 520 and 590, while 25% scored below 520 and 25% scored above 590. Applicants with a composite SAT score of 1220 or higher will have particularly competitive chances at Spelman College. Requirements Spelman does not require the SAT writing section. Note that Spelman participates in the scorechoice program, which means that the admissions office will consider your highest score from each individual section across all SAT test dates. ACT Scores or Requirements Spelman College requires that all applicants submit either SAT or ACT scores. During the 2017-18 admissions cycle, 55% of admitted students submitted ACT scores. ACT Scores and Requirements Section 25th Percentile 75th Percentile English 21 27 Math 20 25 Composite 22 26 This admissions data tells us that most of Spelmans admitted students fall within the top 37% nationally on the ACT. The middle 50% of students admitted to Spelman received a composite ACT score between 22 and 26, while 25% scored above 26 and 25% scored below 22. Requirements Spelman does not require the ACT writing section. Note that Spelman does not provide information regarding their ACT superscore policy. GPA In 2018, the average high school GPA of Spelmans incoming freshman class was 3.73. This data suggests that most successful applicants to Spelman College have primarily A grades. Self-Reported GPA/SAT/ACT Graph Spelman College Applicants Self-Reported GPA/SAT/ACT Graph. Data courtesy of Cappex. The admissions data in the graph is self-reported by applicants to Spelman College. GPAs are unweighted. Find out how you compare to accepted students, see the real-time graph, and calculate your chances of getting in  with a free Cappex account.. Admissions Chances Spelman College, which accepts fewer than 40% of applicants, has selective admissions. However, Spelman has a holistic admissions process involving other factors beyond your grades and test scores. A strong application essay and glowing letters of recommendation can strengthen your application, as can participation in meaningful extracurricular activities and a rigorous course schedule. Note that Spelman College has an Early Decision application program for students who are sure the college is their first choice school. Students with particularly compelling stories or achievements can still receive serious consideration even if their test scores are outside Spelmans average range. In the graph above, the blue and green dots represent accepted students. You can see that most successful applicants had averages in the B range or higher, SAT scores of about 1000 or higher (ERWM), and ACT composite scores of 20 or higher. If You Like Spelman College, You May Also Like These Schools Emory UniversityDuke UniversityFlorida State UniversityYale UniversityMount Holyoke CollegeScripps CollegeBrooklyn College All admissions data has been sourced from the National Center for Education Statistics and Spelman College Undergraduate Admissions Office.