Triple Play Time

Abstract: Digital convergence thrusts telephony, television and the internet into the socalled 'triple play' offerings, creating new forms of rivalry between cable operators and telephone companies. Markets participants feel compelled to enter new industries to survive, even though their core competencies are limited to their primary market. The outcome of triple play competition is likely to depend on the speed of the development of new technologies and the adaptation of the regulatory environment. In the short run, telephone companies will enjoy an advantage attributable to switching costs. However, this advantage will erode as younger subscribers switch to telephony on the internet.triple play; bundling; digital convergence; broadband access; television and telephone

That\u27s My Mom

With a dab of flour on her nose and a twinkle in her eyes the not too plump little woman stepped to the front of the stage. The scene was the auditorium of the local synagogue. The occasion was a meeting of the Sisterhood of the congregation. The program was a baking demonstration by Mrs. David Hollander. Mrs. Hollander was to show the ladies the fine art of making Viennese flaky cookies

The development of structural adhesive systems suitable for use with liquid oxygen Summary report, 1 Mar. - 30 Nov. 1967

Structural adhesives prepared from fluorinated polyurethanes for use with liquid oxyge

Asymptotic efficiency of two nonparametric competitors of Wilcoxon's two sample test

Asymptotic efficiency of two nonparametric competitors of Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon U tes

Phase diagram for a copolymer in a micro-emulsion

In this paper we study a model describing a copolymer in a micro-emulsion. The copolymer consists of a random concatenation of hydrophobic and hydrophilic monomers, the micro-emulsion consists of large blocks of oil and water arranged in a percolation-type fashion. The interaction Hamiltonian assigns energy $-\alpha$ to hydrophobic monomers in oil and energy $-\beta$ to hydrophilic monomers in water, where $\alpha,\beta$ are parameters that without loss of generality are taken to lie in the cone $\{(\alpha,\beta) \in\mathbb{R}^2\colon\,\alpha \geq |\beta|\}$. Depending on the values of these parameters, the copolymer either stays close to the oil-water interface (localization) or wanders off into the oil and/or the water (delocalization). Based on an assumption about the strict concavity of the free energy of a copolymer near a linear interface, we derive a variational formula for the quenched free energy per monomer that is column-based, i.e., captures what the copolymer does in columns of different type. We subsequently transform this into a variational formula that is slope-based, i.e., captures what the polymer does as it travels at different slopes, and we use the latter to identify the phase diagram in the $(\alpha,\beta)$-cone. There are two regimes: supercritical (the oil blocks percolate) and subcritical (the oil blocks do not percolate). The supercritical and the subcritical phase diagram each have two localized phases and two delocalized phases, separated by four critical curves meeting at a quadruple critical point. The different phases correspond to the different ways in which the copolymer can move through the micro-emulsion. The analysis of the phase diagram is based on three hypotheses of percolation-type on the blocks. We show that these three hypotheses are plausible, but do not provide a proof.Comment: 100 pages, 16 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1204.123

A general smoothing inequality for disordered polymers

This note sharpens the smoothing inequality of Giacomin and Toninelli for disordered polymers. This inequality is shown to be valid for any disorder distribution with locally finite exponential moments, and to provide an asymptotically sharp constant for weak disorder. A key tool in the proof is an estimate that compares the effect on the free energy of tilting, respectively, shifting the disorder distribution. This estimate holds in large generality (way beyond disordered polymers) and is of independent interest.Comment: 14 page

Intermittency in a catalytic random medium

In this paper, we study intermittency for the parabolic Anderson equation $\partial u/\partial t=\kappa\Delta u+\xi u$, where $u:\mathbb{Z}^d\times [0,\infty)\to\mathbb{R}$, $\kappa$ is the diffusion constant, $\Delta$ is the discrete Laplacian and $\xi:\mathbb{Z}^d\times[0,\infty)\to\mathbb {R}$ is a space-time random medium. We focus on the case where $\xi$ is $\gamma$ times the random medium that is obtained by running independent simple random walks with diffusion constant $\rho$ starting from a Poisson random field with intensity $\nu$. Throughout the paper, we assume that $\kappa,\gamma,\rho,\nu\in (0,\infty)$. The solution of the equation describes the evolution of a ``reactant'' $u$ under the influence of a ``catalyst'' $\xi$. We consider the annealed Lyapunov exponents, that is, the exponential growth rates of the successive moments of $u$, and show that they display an interesting dependence on the dimension $d$ and on the parameters $\kappa,\gamma,\rho,\nu$, with qualitatively different intermittency behavior in $d=1,2$, in $d=3$ and in $d\geq4$. Special attention is given to the asymptotics of these Lyapunov exponents for $\kappa\downarrow0$ and $\kappa \to\infty$.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009117906000000467 in the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org