Communications Media

If you were asked what station is currently orbiting 400 km above the Earth at 28 000 km/h you may be tempted to answer the International Space Station (ISS). This is of course correct but if you were to look with a good telescope behind the ISS (or tune in with the appropriate equipment) you may soon pick up a second station: a radio station.

On Friday 3 February, at 23:20 Central European Time the ISS Crew of Valery Tokarev and William McArthur are due to start an EVA from t

The Centre for Telecommunications Value-chain Research (CTVR) has been awarded the world’s first software-radio test licence. The licence will be used to investigate and develop more flexible ways of communicating to mobile devices, including ‘thinking radios’ and other cutting-edge communications systems.

Radio frequencies are valuable assets – particularly for mobile phone operators who have paid huge sums for them in the past – and as a result are very tightly regulated. Yet despite thei

Does media influence the allocation of disaster relief? Thomas Eisensee answers this question in his dissertation at The Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University.

Each year, around 150 natural disasters occur taking about 63,000 lives and affecting 125 million people.

– Given the huge losses involved, it is essential that disaster relief is provided to those most in need. It is crucial to understand whether media has a causal effect on the deci

The New Year got off to a multimedia start for the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), with the public launch of its new image DVD “Discovering, Funding, Growing”, presented on 16 January 2006 in Berlin. The DVD contains a 20-minute film as well as an interactive multimedia DVD-ROM section, which can be viewed on any computer. It complements the DFG’s existing range of publications and is intended both for members of the general public who have an interest in scien

Improving the integration of satellite networks with more traditional terrestrial telephone infrastructures, will help next generation telephony move from concept towards reality, as researchers are demonstrating.

Historically, we have been accustomed to using fixed-line infrastructures for traditional telecommunications, cellular networks for mobile services, and satellite architectures for high-capacity links and ‘one-to-many’ broadcasting. While more and more operators are

You like a certain song and want to hear other tracks like it, but don’t know how to find them? Ending the needle-in-a-haystack problem of searching for music on the Internet or even in your own hard drive is a new audio-based music information retrieval system.

Currently under development by the SIMAC project, it is a major leap forward in the application of semantics to audio content, allowing songs to be described not just by artist, title and genre but by their actual musical