The transition to digital in the TV broadcasting industry is already gradually being performed while the complete digital switchover seems now possible to be accomplished within the near future. This article describes and analyses this phenomenon and the role of MPEG-21 may play in it. MPEG-21 is the ISO/IEC standard currently under development in MPEG (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11). Unlike preceding...

Food webs of habitats as diverse as lakes or desert valleys are known to exhibit common "food-web patterns", but the detailed mechanisms generating these structures have remained unclear. By employing a stochastic, dynamical model, we show that many aspects of the structure of predatory food webs can be understood as the traces of an evolutionary history where newly evolving species avoid direc...