Search results for ""author alexander""

Finally a comprehensive overview of speech quality in VoIP from the user's perspective! Speech Quality of VoIP is an essential guide to assessing the speech quality of VoIP networks, whilst addressing the implications for the design of VoIP networks and systems. This book bridges the gap between the technical network-world and the psychoacoustic world of quality perception. Alexander Raake’s unique perspective combines awareness of the technical characteristics of VoIP networks and original research concerning the perception of speech transmitted across them. Starting from the network designer’s point of view, the different characteristics of the network are addressed, and then linked to features perceived by users. This book provides an overview of the available knowledge on the principal, relevant aspects of speech and speech quality perception, of speech quality assessment, and of transmission properties of telephone and VoIP networks, and of the related perceptual features and resulting speech quality. Discussing new research into the specific time-varying degradations VoIP brings along, but also the considerable potential of quality improvement to be achieved with wideband speech transmission, Alexander Raake demonstrates how network and service characteristics impact on the users perception of quality. Speech Quality of VoIP: Offers an insight into speech quality of VoIP from a user's perspective. Presents an overview of different modelling approaches and a parametric network-planning model for quality prediction in VoIP networks. Draws on innovative new research on the quality degradation characteristic of VoIP. Explains in detail how telephone speech quality can be greatly enhanced with VoIP’s wideband speech transmission capability. Assesses the vast collection of references into the technical and scientific literature related to VoIP quality. Illustrates concepts throughout with mathematical models, algorithms and simulations. Speech Quality of VoIP is the definitive guide for researchers, engineers and network planners working in the field of VoIP, Quality of Service, and speech communication processing in telecommunications. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students on telecommunication and networking courses will also find this text an invaluable resource.

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Exorbitant Enlightenment compels us to see eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture in new ways. This book reveals a constellation of groundbreaking pre-1790s Anglo-German relations, many of which are so radical so exorbitant that they ask us to fundamentally rethink the ways we grasp literary and intellectual history, especially when it comes to Enlightenment and Romanticism. Regier presents two of the great, untold stories of the eighteenth century. The first story uncovers a forgotten Anglo-German network of thought and writing in Britain between 1700 and 1790. From this Anglo-German context emerges the second story: about a group of idiosyncratic figures and institutions, including the Moravians in 1750s London, Henry Fuseli, and Johann Caspar Lavater, as well as the two most exorbitant figures, William Blake and Johann Georg Hamann. The books eight chapters show how these authors and institutions shake up common understandings of British literary and European intellectual history and offer a very different, much more counter-intuitive view of the period. Through their distinctive conceptions of language, Blake and Hamann articulate in different yet deeply related ways a radical critique of instrumental thought and institutional religion. They also argue for the irreducible relation between language and the sexual body. In each case, they push against some of the most central cultural and philosophical assumptions, then and now. The book argues that, when taken seriously, these exorbitant figures allow us to uncover and revise some of our own critical orthodoxies.

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For millennia, cavalry was the premier combat arm. Horses gave armies mobility and speed; often cavalry charges, either on the enemy’s flanks and into his rear or through his center, led to the decision in a battle. This book analyzes the use of mounted troops from prehistoric times to recent conflicts in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In contrast to many military history treatises that seek to identify a decline of cavalry over time in favor of modern infantry, Alexander Querengässer argues that only modern motor vehicles were able to replace cavalry. The book examines the many historical uses of cavalry, analyzing conditions for its employment, the role of geographic and climatic factors in its use, and developments in equipment and tactics. More than two hundred contemporary illustrations round out the volume.

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With the outbreak of the Hussite Revolution in 1419, Bohemia found itself opposed by a superior force of European crusader armies. German knighthood was experiencing its last heyday. But the Bohemian heretics’ army, under the leadership of energetic commanders like Jan Zizka, developed tactics with which they won one battle after another. The employment of the defensive Wagenburg (“wagon castle”) and intensive use of the first cannon as field artillery brought them many successes. The Hussites were the first soldiers since Roman times to employ all the available branches in coordination on the battlefield. This book highlights not just the history of the conflicts, but also the weapons and military branches, organization and tactics of the Hussite armies.

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