Cinema industry has chosen Digital Cinema Package (DCP) as encoding format for the distribution of digital films. DCP uses JPEG2000 for video compression. An efficient implementation of coding and decoding for this format is complex, however. Currently deployed equipment is expensive and has high maintenance costs, preventing art-house cinema theaters from acquiring it. Therefore, we conduct th...

An effort is underway to enable digital cinema distribution with new products and new standards covering a wide range of technology. Exhibitors, studios, equipment manufacturers, and others involved in this effort require a universal, long-term digital cinema standard. Complicating the drive toward a single standard, however, are two issues: 1) not all players have the same priorities in specif...

This paper studies the classical polling model under the exhaustive-service assumption; such models continue to be very useful in performance studies of computer/communication systems. The analysis here extends earlier work of the authors to the general case of nonzero switchover times. It shows that, under the standard heavy-traffic scaling, the total unfinished work in the system tends to a B...

Liver transplantation has become an extraordinarily valuable and useful operation, but one that is not perfect and that has not been exploited to anything like its full potential. Better immunosuppression may become available soon as exemplified by developments with the Japanese drug, FK506. Improved preservation with the UW solution is already here. With these advantages, liver transplantation...

Despite achieving and sustaining global measles vaccination coverage of about 80% over the past decade, worldwide measles remains the fifth leading cause of mortality among children aged <5 years. In May 2002, the United Nations Special Session on Children endorsed the goal of reducing measles deaths by half by 2005. Countries and World Health Organization (WHO) regions that adopted aggressive ...

"'I am 39 years old, married, with two children aged 18 years and 14 years. The younger was a very active baby, and when he was 18 months old I mentioned to the doctor that he was sleeping very little and though he did not seem tired in any way, I certainly was! After a course of vitamins I still felt worn out and this was when I was first prescribed Valium. "This was 1971; I was then 27 years ...

Life is held together on its various levels — cells, organs (e.g., the brain or immune system), organisms, societies and ecosystems — by general mechanisms of organization, mechanisms that also information technology will eventually have to exploit in order to overcome its complexity barrier. There are good reasons to believe that organization in all its forms can be understood by a common set ...