Sound for Fantasy and Freedom

Sound is an integral part of our everyday lives. Sound tells us about physical events in the environ- ment, and we use our voices to share ideas and emotions through sound. When navigating the world on a day-to-day basis, most of us use a balanced mix of stimuli from our eyes, ears and other senses to get along. We do this totally naturally and without effort. In the design of computer game experiences, traditionally, most attention has been given to vision rather than the balanced mix of stimuli from our eyes, ears and other senses most of us use to navigate the world on a day to day basis. The risk is that this emphasis neglects types of interaction with the game needed to create an immersive experience. This chapter summarizes the relationship between sound properties, GameFlow and immersive experience and discusses two projects in which Interactive Institute, Sonic Studio has balanced perceptual stimuli and game mechanics to inspire and create new game concepts that liberate users and their imagination

Designing monetary and Fiscal policy rules in a New Keynesian model with rule-of-thumb consumers

This paper develops a small New Keynesian model augmented with a steady state level of public debt and a share of rule-of-thumb consumers (ROTC henceforth) as in Gali' et al. (2004; 2007). The paper focuses on the consequences for the design of monetary and fiscal rules, of the bifurcation generated by the presence of ROTC on the demand side of the economy, in the absence of Ricardian equivalence. We find that, when fiscal policy follows a balanced budget rule, the amount of ROTC determines whether an active and/or a passive monetary policy in the sense of Leeper (1991) guarantees determinacy. When short run public debt assets are introduced, the amount of ROTC determines whether equilibrium determinacy requires a mix of active (passive) monetary policy and a passive (active) fiscal policy or a mix where policies are both active or passive. This set of equilibria has the potential to explain the empirical evidence on the U.S. postwar data on monetary and fiscal policy interactions.Rule-of-thumb consumers, monetary-?scal iteractions, balanced budget rule, Taylor principle, active-passive policy mix

The Sustainability of European Health Care Systems: Beyond Income and Ageing

During the last thirty years health care expenditure (HCE) has been growing much more rapidly than GDP in all OECD countries. Against this background, we look at the determinants of HCE growth in Europe, explicitly taking into account the role of income, ageing population, life habits, technological progress, as well as institutional and budgetary variables. Our results confirm that the current trend of increasing HCE is rooted in a set of differentiated factors. Income levels lead to higher HCE, and the magnitude of the estimated elasticity poses serious concerns about long-term sustainability of current trends. All in all, HCE growth appears to be driven by structural factors that cannot be easily compressed if not through rationing. The key challenge for many European Governments seems to be the design of pluralistic systems, where a well-balanced mix of public and private financing can realize a balance between sustainability and access.health care expenditure; sustainability; ageing population; income elasticity; welfare

A Balanced Energy Plan for the Interior West

Describes a Balanced Energy Plan for the Interior West region of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. Part of the Hewlett Foundation Energy Series

A theoretical model for design in Management science : the paradigm shift in the design profession for management as a constraint to management science as an opportunity

Design Management has changed greatly since 1990 Peter Gorb definition .The purpose of this paper is to synthetize the various models of Design Management and to explain their limits in front of the paradigm shift of the design profession, changing “from an activity based profession to a knowledge based profession” professor Yjro Sotamaa- UIAH The territory of design in Management science will be developed in detail with the limits of these diverging forces. The converging model of Design value management based not on practices but on management science models will be explained with its proactive force. Finally ,this value model will be applied enhancing its pertinence in the emerging “design leadership” trend and consequently the potential for a “design thinking “ input in front of the new challenges of contemporary managers : sense building, complexity , innovation , Socially Responsible Organizations

Process performance measurement support : a critical analysis

Design development processes, within engineering disciplines, lack the necessary mechanisms in identifying the specific areas where improved design development performance may be obtained. In addition, they lack the means to consider and align the goals and respective performance levels of related development activities with an organisation's overall goals and performance levels. Current research in organisational performance behaviour, formalised through performance frameworks and methodologies, has attempted to identify and focus upon those critical factors which impinge upon a wealth creation system while attempting to, simultaneously, remain representative of organisational functions, processes, people, decisions and goals. Effective process improvements remain conditional upon: the ability to measure the potential performance gains which may result from an improvement initiative; the ability to understand existing process dynamics and in turn understand the subsequent impact of some change to a system/process; and, the ability to identify potential areas for improvement. The objective of this paper is to discuss some of the management techniques, which are purported to support various process performance concerns and perspectives, and present the major factors that remain unsupported in identifying, measuring and understanding design process performance

UniverCity Connections: Report From the Stakeholders

Outlines the development, vision, and community initiatives of UniverCity Connections, a collaboration between Colorado State University, Fort Collins, and others convened by the foundation. Describes the task groups' focus areas, goals, and strategies

Personalised service? Changing the role of the government librarian

Investigates the feasibility of personalised information service in a government department. A qualitative methodology explored stakeholder opinions on the remit, marketing, resourcing and measurement of the service. A questionnaire and interviews gathered experiences of personalised provision across the government sector. Potential users were similarly surveyed to discuss how the service could meet their needs. Data were analysed using coding techniques to identify emerging theory. Lessons learned from government librarians centred on clarifying requirements, balancing workloads and selective marketing. The user survey showed low usage and awareness of existing specialist services, but high levels of need and interest in services repackaged as a tailored offering. Fieldwork confirmed findings from the literature on the scope for adding value through information management advice, information skills training and substantive research assistance and the need to understand business processes and develop effective partnerships. Concluding recommendations focus on service definition, strategic marketing, resource utilisation and performance measurement

RPPM : Rapid Performance Prediction of Multithreaded workloads on multicore processors

Analytical performance modeling is a useful complement to detailed cycle-level simulation to quickly explore the design space in an early design stage. Mechanistic analytical modeling is particularly interesting as it provides deep insight and does not require expensive offline profiling as empirical modeling. Previous work in mechanistic analytical modeling, unfortunately, is limited to single-threaded applications running on single-core processors. This work proposes RPPM, a mechanistic analytical performance model for multi-threaded applications on multicore hardware. RPPM collects microarchitecture-independent characteristics of a multi-threaded workload to predict performance on a previously unseen multicore architecture. The profile needs to be collected only once to predict a range of processor architectures. We evaluate RPPM's accuracy against simulation and report a performance prediction error of 11.2% on average (23% max). We demonstrate RPPM's usefulness for conducting design space exploration experiments as well as for analyzing parallel application performance