The ecology of viruses has been studied only in a limited number of rivers and streams. In light of a recent re-appraisal of the global fluvial surface area, issues such as abundance and production, host mortality and the influence of suspended particles and biofilms are addressed. Viral life cycles, potential impacts of viruses on water biochemistry and carbon flow, and viral diversity are con...

We conduct and analyze two large surveys of hypothetical annuitization choices. We find that allowing individuals to annuitize a fraction of their wealth increases annuitization relative to a situation where annuitization is an "all or nothing" decision. Very few respondents choose declining real payout streams over flat or increasing real payout streams of equivalent expected present value. Hi...

This paper investigates the performance of an overloaded multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system with and without antenna selection. In the overloaded MIMO-OFDM system, even if only a small amount of feedback is available, performance can be improved by selecting the transmit antennas. Thus, this paper compares the performance of an overloa...

We report progress in the use of multi-stream spectro-temporal features for both small and large vocabulary automatic speech recognition tasks. Features are divided into multiple streams for parallel processing and dynamic utilization in this approach. For small vocabulary speech recognition experiments, the incorporation of up to 28 dynamically-weighted spectro-temporal feature streams along w...

Corruption in the health sector has been a “dirty secret” in the health policy and international development community, but recent global activities point to a day when it will no longer be neglected as a key determinant of health. To further explore next steps forward, this commentary applies the Kingdon’s multiple-streams framework (MSF) to assess what opportunities are available to mobilize ...

Data streaming applications are becoming more and more common due to the rapid development in the areas such as sensor networks, multimedia streaming, and on-line data mining, etc. These applications are often running in a decentralized, distributed environment. The requirements for processing large volumes of streaming data at real time have posed many great design challenges. It is critical t...

This work addresses the design of optimal linear transmit filters for the Multiple Input-Multiple Output (MIMO) Broadcast Channel (BC) when several spatial streams are allocated to each user. We also consider that the Channel State Information (CSI) is perfect at the receivers but is only partial at the transmitter. A statistical model for the partial CSI is assumed and exploited for the filter...

With the expansion of digital photographic content stored online and concurrent proliferation of capturing devices, the management and visualization of personal photo collections have become very challenging tasks. In order to gain insight into novel ways of handling and representing large personal photo collections, this paper presents results of a user experience study into novel visualizatio...

This paper describes an algorithm, called Dynamic Window-Constrained Scheduling (DWCS), designed to meet the service constraints on packets from multiple, network-bound media streams with different performance objectives. Using only two attributes, a deadline and a loss-tolerance per packet stream, DWCS: (1) can limit the number of late packets over finite numbers of consecutive packets in loss...

Achieving statistical gains when multiplexing video streams, as in a video-on-demand (VOD) scenario, is difficult because of the stringent QOS demands and the selfsimilar nature of the traffic. This paper explores, through empirical simulation, the QOS, network utilization, and statistical characteristics of the aggregate traffic resulting from multiple independent MPEG video streams. In additi...