There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Thirty-three brothels in rural and small-town Nevada, which contain between 225 and 250 prostitutes, are legal or openly tolerated and strictly controlled by state statute, city and county ordinances, and local rules. Twenty-two of the brothels are in places with populations between 500 and 8,000, and the remaining eleven are in rural areas. The legal and quasi-legal restrictions placed on prostitutes severely limit their activities outside brothels. These restrictions in conjunction with historical inertia, perceived benefits of crime and venereal disease control, and the good image of madams contribute to widespread positive local attitudes toward brothel prostitution. Interactions between clients and prostitutes in brothel parlors are also restricted and limited to a few basic types which are largely determined by entrepreneurial philosophy. KEY WORDS : Nevada, Political geography, Prostitution, Restricted activity spaces.

ANNALS of the Association of American Geographers

Emerging mega-trends (e.g., mobile, social, cloud, and big data) in information and communication technologies (ICT) are commanding new challenges to future Internet, for which ubiquitous accessibility, high bandwidth, and dynamic management are crucial. However, traditional approaches based on manual configuration of proprietary devices are cumbersome and error-prone, and they cannot fully utilize the capability of physical network infrastructure. Recently, software-defined networking (SDN) has been touted as one of the most promising solutions for future Internet. SDN is characterized by its two distinguished features, including decoupling the control plane from the data plane and providing programmability for network application development. As a result, SDN is positioned to provide more efficient configuration, better performance, and higher flexibility to accommodate innovative network designs. This paper surveys latest developments in this active research area of SDN. We first present a generally accepted definition for SDN with the aforementioned two characteristic features and potential benefits of SDN. We then dwell on its three-layer architecture, including an infrastructure layer, a control layer, and an application layer, and substantiate each layer with existing research efforts and its related research areas. We follow that with an overview of the de facto SDN implementation (i.e., OpenFlow). Finally, we conclude this survey paper with some suggested open research challenges.

A Survey on Software-Defined Networking

Interaction ritual chains

Television broadcasters are beginning to combine social micro-blogging systems such as Twitter with television to create social video experiences around events. We looked at one such event, the first U.S. presidential debate in 2008, in conjunction with aggregated ratings of message sentiment from Twitter. We begin to develop an analytical methodology and visual representations that could help a journalist or public affairs person better understand the temporal dynamics of sentiment in reaction to the debate video. We demonstrate visuals and metrics that can be used to detect sentiment pulse, anomalies in that pulse, and indications of controversial topics that can be used to inform the design of visual analytic systems for social media events.

http://dmrussell.net/CHI2010/docs/p1195.pdf

Characterizing debate performance via aggregated twitter sentiment

Due to the increased popularity of augmented and virtual reality experiences, the interest in capturing the real world in multiple dimensions and in presenting it to users in an immersible fashion has never been higher. Distributing such representations enables users to freely navigate in multi-sensory 3D media experiences. Unfortunately, such representations require a large amount of data, not feasible for transmission on today’s networks. Efficient compression technologies well adopted in the content chain are in high demand and are key components to democratize augmented and virtual reality applications. Moving Picture Experts Group, as one of the main standardization groups dealing with multimedia, identified the trend and started recently the process of building an open standard for compactly representing 3D point clouds, which are the 3D equivalent of the very well-known 2D pixels. This paper introduces the main developments and technical aspects of this ongoing standardization effort.

/pdf/emerging-mpeg-standards-for-point-cloud-compression-3ik60bpn8o.pdf

Emerging MPEG Standards for Point Cloud Compression

We present a generic and real-time time-varying point cloud codec for 3D immersive video. This codec is suitable for mixed reality applications in which 3D point clouds are acquired at a fast rate. In this codec, intra frames are coded progressively in an octree subdivision. To further exploit inter-frame dependencies, we present an inter-prediction algorithm that partitions the octree voxel space in $N \times N \times N$ macroblocks ( $N=8,16,32$ ). The algorithm codes points in these blocks in the predictive frame as a rigid transform applied to the points in the intra-coded frame. The rigid transform is computed using the iterative closest point algorithm and compactly represented in a quaternion quantization scheme. To encode the color attributes, we defined a mapping of color per vertex attributes in the traversed octree to an image grid and use legacy image coding method based on JPEG. As a result, a generic compression framework suitable for real-time 3D tele-immersion is developed. This framework has been optimized to run in real time on commodity hardware for both the encoder and decoder. Objective evaluation shows that a higher rate-distortion performance is achieved compared with available point cloud codecs. A subjective study in a state-of-the-art mixed reality system shows that introduced prediction distortions are negligible compared with the original reconstructed point clouds. In addition, it shows the benefit of reconstructed point cloud video as a representation in the 3D virtual world. The codec is available as open source for integration in immersive and augmented communication applications and serves as a base reference software platform in JTC1/SC29/WG11 (MPEG) for the further development of standardized point-cloud compression solutions.

/pdf/design-implementation-and-evaluation-of-a-point-cloud-codec-5fdcqpgyfx.pdf

Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Point Cloud Codec for Tele-Immersive Video

This paper investigates a number of techniques and services around a unifying concept: the secondary screen. Far too often television consumption is considered a passive activity. While there are specific genres and programs that immerse the viewer into the media experience, there are other times in which whilst watching television, people talk, scan the program guide, record another program or recommend a program by phone. This paper identifies four major usages of the secondary screen in an interactive digital television environment: control, enrich, share, and transfer television content. By control we refer to the decoupling of the television stream, optional enhanced content, and television controls. Moreover, the user can use the secondary screen to enrich or author media content by, for example, including personalized media overlays such as an audio commentary that can be shared with his peer group. Finally, the secondary screen can be used to bring along the television content. This paper reviews previous work on the secondary screen, identifies the key usages, and based on a working system provides the experiences of developing relevant scenarios as well as an initial evaluation of them.

/pdf/usages-of-the-secondary-screen-in-an-interactive-television-53tikm7dh4.pdf

Usages of the Secondary Screen in an Interactive Television Environment: Control, Enrich, Share, and Transfer Television Content

Social Television constitutes a fundamental shift in how people interact and socialize around television content. Websites are starting to combine streaming services with social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Media software like Boxee allows users to recommend and share favorite television programs, and friends can jointly watch television remotely as demonstrated by Motorola's Social TV. The purpose of this paper is to provide a structured overview of current developments in this emerging field. Current offerings can be categorized based on the social purpose: content selection and recommendation, communication, community building, and status update. The framework proposed in this article is useful for better understanding the current situation and for identifying future developments.

/pdf/past-present-and-future-of-social-tv-a-categorization-11rxrc2qi0.pdf

Past, present, and future of social TV: A categorization

In this paper, we look at how television genres can play a role in the use of social interactive television systems (social iTV). Based on a user study of a system for sending and receiving enriched video fragments to and from a range of devices, we discuss which genres are preferred for talking while watching, talking about after watching and for sending to users with different devices. The results show that news, soap, quiz and sport are genres during which our participants talk most while watching and are thus suitable for synchronous social iTV systems. For asynchronous social iTV systems film, news, documentaries and music programs are potentially popular genres. The plot structure of certain genres influences if people are inclined to talk while watching or not, and to which device they would send a video fragment. We also discuss how this impacts the design and evaluation of social iTV systems.

/pdf/the-implications-of-program-genres-for-the-design-of-social-497mdoa3ah.pdf

Pablo Cesar

Papers

Emerging MPEG Standards for Point Cloud Compression

Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Point Cloud Codec for Tele-Immersive Video

Usages of the Secondary Screen in an Interactive Television Environment: Control, Enrich, Share, and Transfer Television Content

Past, present, and future of social TV: A categorization

The implications of program genres for the design of social television systems