[1] The ionosphere’s total electron content (TEC) is a parameter widely used in studies of the near-Earth plasma environment. The scientific use of TEC appeared early in the artificial satellite era, and among its many contributions were fundamental insights into how the ionosphere responds to geomagnetic storms. While many excellent reviews of solar-terrestrial disturbances exist in the litera...

Successful empirical modeling of the topside ionosphere relies on the availability of good quality measured data. The Alouette, ISIS and Intercosmos-19 satellite missions provided large amounts of topside sounder data, but with limited coverage of relevant geophysical conditions (e.g., geographic location, diurnal, seasonal and solar activity) by each individual mission. Recently, methods for i...

[1] A new algorithm for retrieving the relative ionospheric satellite-to-satellite total electron content during Global Positioning System (GPS) radio occultations is proposed. The algorithm consists of a linear combination of the L1 and L2 excess phase data using precise orbit information of the transmitter and receiver. The combination eliminates the effects of refractive bending and dispersi...

This work studies the sudden increases in total electron content of the ionosphere caused by the very intense solar flare on July 14, 2000. Total electron content (TEC) data observed from a Global Positioning System (GPS) network are used to calculate the flare-induced TEC increment, dTECf, and variation rate, dTECf/dt. It is found that both dTECf/dt and dTECf are closely related with the solar...

Social networks offering unprecedented content sharing are rapidly developing over the Internet. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to both locate and manage content in these networks, particularly when they are implemented on current peer-to-peer technologies. In this paper, we describe Wayfinder, a peer-topeer file system that targets the needs of medium-sized content sharing communities. W...

Recommender systems typically leverage two types of signals to effectively recommend items to users: user activities and content matching between user and item profiles, and recommendation models in literature are usually categorized into collaborative filtering models, content-based models and hybrid models. In practice, when rich profiles about users and items are available, and user activiti...

This paper presents the most accurate empirical study to date to characterize and quantify the amount of content of various types that is transferred worldwide using BitTorrent, the dominant peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application. Using data we collected from the largest public BitTorrent tracker over 106 days between August 2010 and February 2011 and a new methodology, we find that for so...

[1] The elusive nature of the post-2004 upper ocean warming has exposed uncertainties in the ocean’s role in the Earth’s energy budget and transient climate sensitivity. Here we present the time evolution of the global ocean heat content for 1958 through 2009 from a new observationbased reanalysis of the ocean. Volcanic eruptions and El Niño events are identified as sharp cooling events punctua...

Women oxidize more fat as compared to men during endurance exercise and several groups have shown that the mRNA content of selected genes related to fat oxidation are higher in women (e.g. hormone sensitive lipase, beta-hydroxyacyl-CoA dehydrogenase, CD36). One of the possible mechanisms is that women tend to have a higher area percentage of type I skeletal muscle fibers as compared with men. C...