Columbia University Law School professor Tim Wu’s temporary appointment as a special advisor to the Federal Trade Commission’s policy office has created considerable consternation in the communications industry, as reported in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. Wu is the author of a powerful and eminently readable book, The Master Switch, which tells the story of what he calls “The Cycle,” ...

The SpeechDat-Car project included in the 4 framework of the European Community's Language Engineering Programme, started in April 1998 with a duration of 30 months. It is a common initiative of car manufacturers, telephone communications operators, companies active in voice operated services and Universities that aims at collecting a set of speech databases in nine different languages to suppo...

With the tremendous growth in popularity and bandwidth of the Internet, VoIP technology has emerged that allows phone calls to be routed over Internet infrastructure rather than the traditional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) infrastructure. The issues faced by law enforcement authorities concerning VoIP are very different from that of traditional telephony. Wiretapping is not applicab...

A new algorithm for finding a maximum clique in an undirected graph is described. An approximate coloring algorithm has been improved and used to provide bounds to the size of the maximum clique in a basic algorithm which finds a maximum clique. This basic algorithm was then extended to include dynamically varying bounds. The resulting algorithm is significantly faster than the comparable algor...

This natural-history approach to investigating media reports concerning health can reveal the complex process whereby health research becomes news. Using television and newspaper reports of a press event taken from a larger project, this article examines the inception and mediation of obesity research in the Canadian news media. By exploring questionnaire data, a media release, telephone interv...

Online learning is the latest in a long list of social technologies that have been introduced to improve distance learning by adding various augmentations, substitutions, or blending of new pedagogical approaches and technologies. Technologies utilized for distance and online learning include: correspondence courses, physical mail, and printed matter; telephone and/or audio recordings; televisi...

With the level of synchronicity now available to virtually anyone with access to a telephone and a computer, one would expect that the technology that revolutionized the way businesses communicate, would also find its way into distance education programs. However, due to the current commitment to educational convenience that has been institutionalized in asynchronous distance education programs...

Hynek Hermansky, Eric A. Wan, and Carlos Avendano Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology Department of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics P.O. Box 91000, Portland, OR 97291 ABSTRACT Finite Impulse Response (FIR) Wiener-like lters are applied to time trajectories of cubic-root compressed short-term power spectrum of noisy speech recorded over cellular telephone communications....

This paper describes the design and implementation of an SMS transmission system using the PDU (Protocol Data Unit) mode of a GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) modem. The system may be used in several applications: telemetry or remote control, using short messages from a standard GSM mobile phone, and in other application circuits. In order to perform these applications, coding and ...

By creating a single market and introducing competition and the de facto global standard, GSM, the European Union (EU) achieved economies of scale and has been the world's leader in the mobile communications sector. A number of interrelated issues surrounding the third-generation (3G) system have recently become visible, however. The first indication is the high 3G spectrum license prices mobil...