International Ultramarine Corps

The International Ultramarine Corps, formerly the Ultramarine Corps, is a fictional team of superheroes published by DC Comics. They first appeared in DC One Million #2 (November 1998), and were created by Grant Morrison and Howard Porter.

History

The Corps was created by the U.S. as a government-sponsored group of superhumans to rival the more independent Justice League. Led by General Wade Eiling, the original members of the team were Flow, 4-D, Pulse 8 and Warmaker One. During a fight with the JLA, the UMC realised that Eiling was dangerously insane and that they were on the wrong side; they then sided with the League against their leader.

Having developed a mistrust of governments, the Corps subsequently declared themselves independent of any and all nations and built a free-floating city in which to dwell, which they named Superbia and set in the air above the ruins of Montevideo. They put out a call to other disaffected superheroes to join them in their city, and received a number of responses from around the globe, although the total population and demographics of Superbia are unknown.

Traffic flow (computer networking)

In packet switching networks, traffic flow, packet flow or network flow is a sequence of packets from a source computer to a destination, which may be another host, a multicast group, or a broadcast domain. RFC 2722 defines traffic flow as "an artificial logical equivalent to a call or connection."RFC 3697 defines traffic flow as "a sequence of packets sent from a particular source to a particular unicast, anycast, or multicast destination that the source desires to label as a flow. A flow could consist of all packets in a specific transport connection or a media stream. However, a flow is not necessarily 1:1 mapped to a transport connection." Flow is also defined in RFC 3917 as "a set of IP packets passing an observation point in the network during a certain time interval."

Conceptual description

A flow can be uniquely identified by the following parameters within a certain time period:

Rapping

Rapping (or emceeing,MCing,spitting bars,or rhyming) is "spoken or chanted rhyming lyrics". The components of rapping include "content", "flow" (rhythm and rhyme), and "delivery". Rapping is distinct from spoken-word poetry in that it is performed in time to a beat. Rapping is often associated with and a primary ingredient of hip-hop music, but the origins of the phenomenon can be said to predate hip-hop culture by centuries. It can also be found in alternative rock such as that of Cake, gorrilaz and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Rapping is also used in Kwaito music, a genre that originated in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is composed of hip-hop elements.

Rapping can be delivered over a beat or without accompaniment. Stylistically, rap occupies a gray area between speech, prose, poetry, and singing. The word (meaning originally "to hit") as used to describe quick speech or repartee predates the musical form. The word had been used in British English since the 16th century. It was part of the African-American dialect of English in the 1960s meaning "to converse", and very soon after that in its present usage as a term denoting the musical style. Today, the terms "rap" and "rapping" are so closely associated with hip-hop music that many use the terms interchangeably.

M*A*S*H (TV series)

M*A*S*H is an American television series developed by Larry Gelbart, adapted from the 1970 feature film MASH (which was itself based on the 1968 novel MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors, by Richard Hooker). The series, which was produced in association with 20th Century Fox Television for CBS, follows a team of doctors and support staff stationed at the "4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital" in Uijeongbu, South Korea during the Korean War. The show's title sequence features an instrumental version of "Suicide Is Painless", the theme song from the original film. The show was created after an attempt to film the original book's sequel, M*A*S*H Goes to Maine, failed. The television series is the most well-known version of the M*A*S*H works, and one of the highest-rated shows in U.S. television history.

The series premiered in the U.S. on September 17, 1972, and ended February 28, 1983, with the finale, "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen", becoming the most-watched and highest-rated single television episode in U.S. television history at the time, with a record-breaking 125 million viewers (60.2 rating and 77 share), according to the New York Times. It had struggled in its first season and was at risk of being cancelled. Season two of M*A*S*H placed it in a better time slot (airing after the popular All in the Family); the show became one of the top 10 programs of the year and stayed in the top 20 programs for the rest of its run. It is still broadcast in syndication on various television stations. The series, which depicted events occurring during a three-year military conflict, spanned 256 episodes and lasted 11 seasons.

Delta-sigma modulation

Delta-sigma (ΔΣ; or sigma-delta, ΣΔ) modulation is a method for encoding analog signals into digital signals as found in an ADC. It is also used to transfer high bit-count low frequency digital signals into lower bit-count higher frequency digital signals as part of the process to convert digital signals into analog.

In a conventional ADC, an analog signal is integrated, or sampled, with a sampling frequency and subsequently quantized in a multi-level quantizer into a digital signal. This process introduces quantization error noise. The first step in a delta-sigma modulation is delta modulation. In delta modulation the change in the signal (its delta) is encoded, rather than the absolute value. The result is a stream of pulses, as opposed to a stream of numbers as is the case with PCM. In delta-sigma modulation, the accuracy of the modulation is improved by passing the digital output through a 1-bit DAC and adding (sigma) the resulting analog signal to the input signal, thereby reducing the error introduced by the delta-modulation.