How Does The ?surround-sound? :: essays research papers

How does the â€Å"surround-sound† technique work?   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Surround Sound which was introduced by Dolby Laboratories Inc to position sound around the audience so that the effects within movies would make them feel as though they were really there. The use of directional sound from different points in the room according to their depth, sharpness and clarity was the main goal. Starting off from a standard called Dolby Stereo, two separate channels were introduced, both left and right, so that other speakers could in turn double-up to provide a multitude of left and right channels all around the audience. The input of a effects channel (later called Surround channel) was implemented so that a sense of ambience and spatiality could be experienced from the audience. This surround channel was positioned behind and to the left and right of the audience provided the sound depth that the audio engineers were looking for.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  This then gave way to a standard, which was known as Dolby Surround, soon followed by Dolby Surround – Pro Logic. This standard incorporated the original two channels for sound, but had an in-built decoder so that the surround channel, and also a center channel (positioned to the direct front of the audience) could be played back to enhance this surround feeling. A many number of speakers could be connected up to enhance the feeling associated with the different types of audio sources, and in turn provide more depth and realism to the audio source.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Dolby Digital was incorporated into the home cinema as well as movie theatres to provide the ultimate audio reproductive source. The use of individual speaker components positioned around the audience comprising of a front left, front right, surround left, surround right, center, and subwoofer speaker were given their own audio input. This was called Dolby Digital 5.

Surfing, Duke Energy, and the Coastal Alliance :: Personal Narrative Environment Essays

Surfing, Duke Energy, and the Coastal Alliance On my way out to the beach I still had no idea what I was going to do for my fifth essay. As my surfing buddy and I exited the freeway and entered the town of Morro Bay I saw three giant gleaming smoke stacks surfacing over the top of the hill. As we got closer to the beach the three smoke stacks gave way to a massive power plant that was a mere fifty feet from the water’s edge. It was surrounded by a fifteen foot cement wall and cameras everywhere. I thought what a perfect topic for my paper. As we parked and started to suit up I noticed there was an abundance of strange looking birds all around us. My friend explained to me that the whole area is an estuary preserve that protects endangered bird species. With the towering Morro Rock looming overhead we began to wade into the surf. After I made it out past the break I turned around and saw a giant sign against the harbor wall that said â€Å"Welcome to Morro Bay† with the towering smoke stacks grasping hold of the tiny harbor like three long fingers. By the time we were done surfing I was determined to research this area further. Not just for this paper, but the fact that there was no way that the power plant is helping the estuary or the ocean. After having the opportunity to surf Morro Bay, I felt it my responsibility to protect these waters so that future generations might enjoy it. It turns out that there is a huge controversy going on because Duke Energy is attempting to get a permit to remodel the entire power plant. The official Duke Energy website starts off by saying that remodeling projects are going to begin shortly. I noticed that the plant was nearly fifty years old so it seemed logical that the plant needs renovation, but I was not convinced so I read on. Already treading on thin ice the writer tried to insert a little blurb about seawater intake at the end of the paragraph.

Architecture as a Political Tool for Change

Red LocationArchitecture as a Political Tool for Change Could you speak about the context of the project-Port Elizabeth as a Port City and New Brighton as a Township? Port Elizabeth sits on the East Coast ofSouth Africa and interestingly enough it was one of the first topographic points to be discovered by the Portuguese, on their geographic expeditions to the East. The metropolis sits on a big bay called Algoa Bay and offers great entree to the backwoods of South Africa. It was truly given form in colonial footings by the 1820 Settlers but in the 20thcentury became the Centre of car industry of Africa and most of the world’s major auto makers had assembly lines in Port Elizabeth. So it is a tough minded industrial town. You could state it is much like a company town, a spot like Detroit. It is a topographic point that ne'er had any industry to back up it, other than a port and the motor auto industry. In the last portion of the 20thcentury it was the site of a great trade of internal battle, chiefly led by the trade brotherhoods, which were mostly responsible for the ruin of apartheid. You could state that the autumn of the apartheid authorities was made touchable by the opposition mounted within the state and it was the trade brotherhoods in Port Elizabeth who mostly shaped that. So it is an industrial town with a strong and proud trade brotherhood history. It has had its ups and downs like all industrial metropoliss have had. The context of New Brighton so, is that it provides most of the labor for the car industry. The people who live there are ferociously proud. Obviously trade unionism and trade brotherhood civilization is really much portion of the manner they see the universe and Red Location is an of import Centre in New Brighton. It is in a sense one of the few sites of battle in the state where trade unionism is really strongly marked. The metropolis was best characterized by the early work of Athol Fugard, which were all set in Port Elizabeth. The plants truly dealt with a tough sort of urban Centre, where people struggled for endurance and managed to do sense of lives that were truly devastated by apartheid, and assorted other things. It is a great metropolis but it is a metropolis that has ever had an unsure hereafter. The people are truly great, because most of them have merely known adversity, so they don’t have the same sort of outlook that people from Johannesburg, Cape Town or Durban might hold. They are much more down to earth and much more able to set up with less, with a batch more temper. I think it is one of the nicest metropoliss to work in. What is the significance of Red Location? Red Location was the first settled urban black community in the whole of South Africa, and it came approximately, oddly plenty through the Boer War. The edifices that comprised Red Location in 1902 really came from an Afrikaner concentration cantonment. At the terminal of the Boer War, the barracks were dismantled and were so taken to Red Location and re-assembled to originally suit a battalion of British soldiers, who shortly moved out. The first African black households so moved in. So it is historically of import because it was the first African black community in the state. And for this ground it really became the Centre of the rational and cultural life of New Brighton, which grew to a community of, what is today, approximately half a million people. You had great figures like George Pemba, the creative person, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba and Ernest Malgas among others who are really of import people in our history who came from New Brighton. It was besides a site of battle. In the late 1940s the battle against apartheid intensified, many of the leaders of that battle came from New Brighton and peculiarly the Red Location country. Thingss like the first resistance, armed MK cell existed in Red Location. The first inactive opposition against the base on balls Torahs was mounted in Red Location, led by Raymond Mhlaba, which took topographic point at the Red Location railroad station. So there were a figure of important events that truly mark Red Location as a national site of battle. What for me is most interesting is this really self-contradictory inversion, where you have a set of infinites [ the barracks ] which were constructed for the captivity of Afrikaner adult females and kids. They were efficaciously concentration cantonments. About 30 five 1000 Afrikaner adult females and kids died in those concentration cantonments. Then after the Boer War they were re-assembled in a black country, where black households lived. So with the rise of Afrikaner patriotism, you have Afrikanders, efficaciously incarcerating black people, in assorted different ways, in the same set of infinites. So those edifices have gone through a figure of different battles. And in a manner it is a strong metaphor for this state, that in a manner, everyone in this state has fought for their freedom at one phase or another. So the thought with Red Location was that it would be the ideal topographic point for a museum, which would cover truly with rapprochement. Where you could convey together the histories of the Afrikaner people and the histories of the black African people and show that they both suffered in different ways at different times, under different groups and governments. So it was in a manner about speaking about a existent signifier of rapprochement. It wasn’t merely one group against another. So the alone conditions of Red Location lent itself fabulously for a museum. Second Ernest Malgas, Raymond Mhlaba and Govan Mbeki wanted to happen some manner to maintain the memory of Red Location alive so that future coevalss would be able to understand what people had suffered, under apartheid. So in a self-contradictory move, we thought, what better topographic point in Port Elizabeth than to utilize Red Location as the new cultural Centre of the metropolis. You have the site of battle that you so conveying people from different parts of the metropolis, to prosecute in cultural activities, where you have a museum which negotiations about all these different battles of a whole scope of different people. And that is how the whole thought was born, which is a antic manner of believing about spacial transmutation. It truly reaches deep into the manner in which people feel about their universes if you confront them with all these different histories. So that was the purpose that lay behind it and we are now seeking to do that into a concrete world. Could you describe the cardinal thoughts for the Museum and how the histories of Red Location or South Africa were represented in the Memory Boxes? The thought of the memory boxes was bound up with the inquiry of how to do a museum in modern-day South Africa that would be directed towards, a populace that may hold ne'er been into a museum before. How could youre-describe the modern-day museum that would be accessible to a populace that might hold no construct what a museum is? And that’swherethe thought of the memory box came from. It is something that we all know. It is boundup with the thought of stand foring the yesteryear and which goes all the manner back to the Boer War concentration camp.One of the jobs with the concentration cantonments was that while, thirty five 1000 Afrikaner adult females and kids died an equal figure of black adult females and kids besides died in the camps.At the terminal of the Boer War, Emily Hobhouse wanted to do a memorial that would memorialize the agony of adult females and kids in the war. The Afrikaner patriots so, got clasp of that thought and they removed any mention toblack adult females and kids and made the Vrouemonument, which became this powerful symbol in the rise of Afrikaner patriotism. So they efficaciously rewrote history and excluded black adult females and kids in order to fulfill their peculiar nationalist involvement. So I didn’t want the Red Location museum to reiterate the same thing for black people, where the museum would state the narrative of the black people subverting the white people and so it would merely be a narrative about black triumph over white people. Therewere many white voices that had to be heard and there were many adult females that were involved. So I wanted to travel off from the meta-narrative, because when you tell a individual history you exclude excessively much, which is what the Afrikaner patriots did. So the memory box became a manner of interrupting up narrative of history into a series of episodes which are bound up about subjects to make with battle instead than a series of additive events. So it was both a political thought and a spacial thought. The new edifices within the precinct, and peculiarly the Museum, have a really distinguishable architectural linguistic communication. How did the physical and or political context of Red Location give signifier and form to the edifices? There were two things which I thought were of import. Firstly it was 1998 and the whole inquiry of what constituted public architecture and how public edifices be represented in the state was up for inquiry. There was, in a sense a antic chance, for this new beginning of doing new civic architecture and realising that, at that point in clip, the linguistic communication of the civic architecture of the yesteryear would be inappropriate for doing civic edifices of the hereafter. One of the most interesting exercisings of that clip was the Constitutional Court, which truly had to make with a edifice which was a mixture of a whole batch of different things. And, in a manner, one could state that was a really clear representation of the thought that we are a really assorted heterogenous society and that the public edifices we make should reflect that. That was one attack. I took a more political attack and truly wanted to give look to the epic histrions of the trade brotherhoods. In most parts of the universe the saw-tooth roof is seen as a symbol of topographic points where people are exploited and I thought possibly in South Africa there could be a different reading of it-that it could read as a topographic point where the battle was fought and won and that it could be a topographic point imbued with virtuousness. This thought was proved to be effectual in three ways. First that it was a omnipresent signifier found throughout South Africa, it was symbolically associated with trade unionism and thirdly it was an effectual manner of ventilating and conveying visible radiation into the edifices. So for the competition I designed seven or so edifices, and decided that the linguistic communication which would keep the edifices together, would be the thought of conveying visible radiation in through the roof, but the roof signifier would be changed and adjusted to accommodate the programmatic demands of the infinite below. The edifices have an inexplicit relationship to the street, made touchable through the interaction of people with the frontages. Could you elaborate on this? Well the urban scheme was to make an ten, a cross-road, which is the most straightforward signifier of taging an urban infinite. One of the things I didn’t want to make was to make public unfastened infinite, because public infinite has to turn and organize itself over clip, you can’t do it immediately. But it seemed to me that the best public infinite in South Africa is the street and the manner in which life happens along its borders. So what we did at Red Location was to reenforce the thought of street and where we make bigger infinites we merely created indentures in the edifices which come straight off the street. This is nevertheless a comparatively new thought for public edifices in South Africa. The metropolis has for a long clip held the position that all public edifices had to be behind fencings. We confronted them on this and they were good plenty to give us the spell in front. And it has worked. Other than the uneven scratch here or at that place, the edifices have been good looked after by the people. So it seems to be a reasonably good scheme for doing public edifices. For me the most successful move we made was the diagonal cut across the forepart of the museum because people really travel right into the infinite of the museum even though it is outside it still becomes portion of their day-to-day lives. They are really straightforward thoughts, it is non rocket scientific discipline, but we seem to hold lost these things as designers because we make things excessively complicated, we move excessively far off from what is so obvious to us. Then on a smaller graduated table the thought was to line the walls of the edifices with seating, shadiness and trees. One of the loveliest things I have seen take topographic point during summer eventides is outside the archive edifice. The seats that line the wall have a series of visible radiations above them and between them you have small dark infinites and I have seen about eight twosomes sitting in these darker pools, sitting at that place and spooning. This is like, their topographic point where they could acquire together, and I thought, this is merely the best thing that architecture could be-this topographic point where immature people can come to snuggle. The edifices have a house order, made explicit by the usage of the concrete frame. Be it the purpose to do the edifices adaptable or to suit multiple utilizations? That’s a slippery 1. It was ne'er the purpose to do the infinites adaptable or mutable. That said, the museum is really frequently non used as a museum. A batch of the people sing the museum are go toing talks, book launches and even wine tasting. So the museum has become something much more than a museum but has become a Centre for community engagement the place of black intellectuals. So I think if you make infinites that have a strong order and that order has a good proportion I think it can ever accommodate to alterations in usage over clip. I think when you have fragmented infinites, which are strictly shaped by programmatic usage it becomes about impossible to adapt.But built-in in the design of the edifices is an overarching order and a system of proportion that would impart themselves to other utilizations if need be. They can be kicked around, they are robust. What informed the stuff picks? In general footings, when 1 makes a edifice one is ever confronted with a million picks and you have to somehow bound yourself. What seems to do the most sense in making that is to merely utilize what is locally available. The metropolis has a authorization that all public edifices are required to hold a 50 % local labour constituent which meant that we had to plan edifices which were non overly-complex in their devising. We used concrete block which was made by the contractor. The pine is Tsitsikamma pine, which is a really beautiful wood from the nearby Tsitsikamma wood. The other thought is truly a didactic 1. To state to the people who live in Red Location that we must travel off from this thought of sing where you live as a 2nd rate topographic point, but instead that stuffs used in your environment are baronial stuffs and when used decently can truly be used to do rather beautiful things. So it is non about the stuffs itself but how one uses them. And so it empowers people, to gain that if they build out of concrete block and pine they can really do truly nice palisading systems. So it is non about demoing up the sort of poorness but instead working with what is omnipresent to the country and promoting it to give it a signifier of pride and regard. I frequently get asked by co-workers or other designers whether possibly people in Red Location would prefer the edifices to non be made with concrete block, pine and steel sheeting? But I have ne'er thought of it in that manner, so long as they are put together in a pleasing mode. We as in-between category citizens seem to transport those biass more than anyone else. On more micro graduated table there was a sense of seeking to happen a linguistic communication of stuffs that would reflect people’s relationship with them. So the material that people would touch would be made from soft warm stuffs and the material that they didn’t touch would be made out robust stuffs such as concrete, so where people would sit we would utilize lumber and line the walls with rug. So it was reasonably straightforward in that sense. The edifices are truly rather large, could you discourse this? One of the first unfavorable judgment we received about the museum was that it was excessively large and that the graduated table was incorrect. That it didn’t transport a human graduated table. I have ever been rather amused by that thought, because somehow the thought of human graduated table, is something that worlds can make. But it isn’t that. Human graduated table can be present in immense edifices, it is more about accomplishing the right proportions and composing of the parts. One of the jobs with townships is that they have excessively much of one sort of graduated table, there is no alleviation at all from these individual narrative edifices, so the thought of edifice large edifices in a township is great because you so acquire a apposition of graduated tables. But one ever has to convey the graduated table down through the composing of the elements. It is the same thought as a Gothic cathedral, which has a monumental graduated table and as you move closer and closer you see more and more item, until you can finally follow the lineation of a saint which has been carved out of rock, with your fingertips. It is that sort of grading of edifices which we don’t have any longer, which is my job with say the work of Frank Gehry, who I think is a great designer, but his edifices have no graduated table. One could construct them at half the size and it would read in the same manner. I think that comes from the computing machine because the computing machine doesn’t have a graduated table, and that’s a great job we face. Last, you work a batch by manus. What is the significance or importance of this, both in your personal work and for architecture as a whole? I think through the act of pulling. There is nil that the computing machine can make that can replicatethat sense ofcontrol that you have by pulling by manus. Whenyou draw by the manus you connect with your head and your bosom, and it is an action that you can command. It has immediate graduated table, because you have a splanchnic connexion between your manus and your encephalon. So I truly believe it is of import. I think it is get downing to be rediscovered, you see in architectural diaries that are get downing to print tonss of drawings by designers, which is good. It has besides got to make with a lesson I learnt from Pancho Guedes. He taught me that one should ne'er finish a drawing, but instead redraw and redraw and it is through the act of redrawing that the thought becomes more crystalline. I one time found Pancho redrawing a program he had worked on twenty old ages ago, and he was merely seeking to acquire it better and better, and that’s how you learn.

Domain Names as Internet Properties Essay

What are your long term plans for your domain name? Do you expect to convey the name and the goodwill associated with it to an interested buyer or bequeath it your heirs? Perhaps you intend to use the domain name to secure a loan for a business expansion or for your child’s college tuition. You may be in for a surprise. The intellectual property community asserts that domain names, as source indicators, are akin to trademarks. However, trademark law cannot be effectively grafted on to domain names because of the discrepancies over geographical boundaries and context-sensitive use. In order for a trademark registration to issue, the mark must be used in interstate commerce to identify the source of a class of goods or services. Identical trademarks can co-exist so long as they are associated with non-competing types of goods or services or are used in different geographic areas. Domain names are registered on a first-come, first-served basis. The first individual or company to complete the registration template for an available name gets the sole right to be associated with it. For a reasonable fee, currently hovering at $10 a year, the registrant can brand and propagate the name in a worldwide marketplace. The registrant receives the exclusive right to use that name for a website presence, global e-mail, and network file transfers. But every domain name must be unique, and it is this technical requirement that makes domain names potentially valuable resources which are substantively different from trademarks. Compaq Computer Corp paid $3. 35 million in July 1998 for rights to ALTAVISTA. COM, purchased from a California start-up called Alta Vista Technology. The transaction included existing traffic of a half million visitors a day who were already expecting to find the Alta Vista search engine at that domain name. As the price bar for domain names rises, NSI’s customers may resist being subject to the vagaries of the registrar’s feudal regime. Simple and unencumbered ownership endows the registrant with a type of predictable, if limited, sovereignty. Through legislation and judicial acknowledgment, registrants who meet certain individual responsibilities should be allowed a perpetually renewable and assignable right to enjoy this new source of wealth. Many domain names have become the cornerstone of multimillion-dollar business plans. In the fall of 1999, VirtualVineyard of Palo Alto, California, acquired Wine. Com of Napa, primarily for its domain name. While the $3. 3M-plus acquisition included an operating business, the CEO of Wine. Com estimated that about 70 percent of his company’s value was its name. The current controversies over domain names highlight the interplay of technology, law, economics and politics. Court opinions trail society’s changes and conundrums resulting from technology of recent vintage. Yet, nearly everyone agrees on one point: domain names are caught in a legal thicket. If domain names are property, then existing contracts such as NSI’s harsh Service Agreement must be rewritten. Although the implications of the Umbro decision are yet to be fully assessed, and NSI’s appeal remains to be heard, the magistrate recognized that each knotty domain name dispute before the court may be breaking new legal ground. References Unknown (1999). ‘Mortgages’ for domain names. BBC Sci/Tech News. Retrieved November 26, 2006 from http://news. bbc. co. uk/2/hi/science/nature/533455. stm Oppedahl, C. (1997). Remedies in Domain Name Lawsuits: How is a domain name like a cow? Patents. com. Retrieved November 26, 2006 from http://www. patents. com/pubs/jmls. htm

Comparing city planing,green policy between city of beijing China and Assignment

Comparing city planing,green policy between city of beijing China and city of Seoul, Korea. providing suggestions to Seoul Metropolitan Government - Assignment Example The city planning and the green policies enacted by the Seoul Metropolitan Government are meant to address these challenges. This paper explores the city planning measures and green policies enacted by Seoul Metropolitan Government and makes suggestions on how they could be improved. The paper then briefly explores Beijing’s city plans and green policies and draws lessons that could be learned by the Seoul Metropolitan Government to help improve Seoul. Seoul has had a series of urban plans since it started flourishing in the 1960s. Like most cities, the population has continuously been growing during this period. As people move towards the city, the space has continuously become a determining factor necessitating measures to be put in place so as to ensure right planning that supports sustainable development and growth of the city (SMG, 2006). The first plan was implemented between 1972 and 1981 and was geared towards growing the city’s facilities and infrastructure. The second plan was enacted between 1982 and 1991 and the thematic issue was distribution network. The third city plan was implemented between 1992 and 1999 and was geared towards the local development. The current Seoul’s city plan started being implemented in 2000 and is to be implemented until 2020. The current city plan is geared towards increasing Seoul’s international competitiveness (SMG, 2013). Seoul’s fourth city plan is known as the Master Plan. It has taken a different approach towards urban development. The Master Plan represents a paradigm shift from the traditional growth-driven models which focus on quantitative growth to a growth-management model which focuses on qualitative growth (SMG, 2013). The previous growth models that were implemented by Seoul Metropolitan Government were designed to achieve rapid growth. This was understandable given the fact that Seoul still had untapped potential and had not reached its optimal growth level. But now, faced with

How has information communications technology (ICT) changed the way Essay

How has information communications technology (ICT) changed the way students communicate & learn - Essay Example With civilization, humans have leveraged on technology to enhance their communication and learning. It is no wonder Bray (2007) acknowledge that in the current century, Internet and mobile technology have transformed the interaction, working and learning among humans. Just as other sectors of the economy have invested immensely in ICT in the modern world, the education sector has also invested in ICT in the recent years. Acknowledging this trend, the World Bank (2013) attributes this to the general ability of ICT to empower teachers and learners thus positively impacting on educational achievement. ICT promotes communication and learning among students thus presenting immense benefits. First, ICT enhances international collaboration among students. Bray (2007) observes that ICT is the reason for a more social modern society. Student tutors easily mentor students from other countries, the same way students from different countries effectively share educational information leveraging on ICT capabilities as documented by UNESCO Institute for Statistics, UIS (2014). This practice enhances and diversifies the scope of learning. Furthermore, ICT makes learning materials more available. The World Bank Group (2013) refers to access of information as the main use of ICT with regards to education. Indeed, UIS (2014) affirms the availability of open source textbooks and even teacher guides on the Internet. This enables students to easily access the required learning resources. Finally, ICT supports learning objectives. One of such objectives includes the acquisition of up-to-date informa tion that would make students resourceful in a practical work set-up. According to the World Bank Group (2013), ICT has enabled teachers to access relevant, timely and continuous professional development. This enables them to explore new knowledge base, developing new

Solar Water Heaters Project Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Solar Water Heaters Project - Essay Example All that the people have to do is install a solar water heating system and they are good to go. The other objective is provision of clean, environmentally friendly and renewable energy that is sustainable for the development of all in society as well as a major contribution to environmental conservation. The aim of the project is to formulate an action plan for the successful installation of about 150 solar water heating systems in Acton area. 3.0 Current Situation and problem/Opportunity Statement It is evident that our actions now have a huge impact on the environment in the future. The continuous use of fossil fuels has produced tones of toxic gases like carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide all of which have adverse effects on the ozone layer and the environment in general. ... atter how simple play a significant role to the conservation or degradation of the environment and normal life as we know it and hence there are massive campaigns to go green by adopting to alternative sources of energy that are environmentally friendly and cost efficient at the same time. Solar energy is one of the known and widely utilized alternative energy that is renewable and free from nature. The other is natural gas. This is truly a win-win situation for all the stakeholders and an effort to reverse the current harsh conditions by conserving our environment for a better future. 4.0 Critical Assumptions and Constraints As much as there is growing awareness of the need to find and use alternative sources of energy, in this case solar energy through the solar water heaters, many people are still reluctant to adapting to this mode of energy. This project requires strong participation and cooperation from a wide variety of people so that people can be educated on the benefits of u sing solar water heaters. This project is capital intensive because of procurement and installation of the solar water heater system and customers view it to be expensive at first but the truth is that this cost is recovered over time as the electricity and gas costs go down considerably to make up for the installation and maintenance cost. 5.0 Analysis of Options and Recommendation To properly address this opportunity a massive awareness program should be carried out in Acton area to intensify the usefulness and benefits of using solar water heaters in residential places as well as in industries. Secondly a market research to identify potential and willing customers has to be done so as to ensure that all the 150 units will be sold out. 6.0 Budget Estimate and Financial Analysis A good