232 research outputs found
Intrinsic fantasy: motivation and affect in educational games made by children
The concept of intrinsic fantasy has been considered central to the aim of usefully applying the positive affect of computer games to learning. Games with intrinsic fantasy are defined as having “an integral and continuing relationship with the instructional content being presented”, and are claimed as “more interesting and more educational” than extrinsic fantasy games [1]. Studies of children making educational games have shown they usually create extrinsic games for curriculum learning content. In this study, children were encouraged to create non-curriculum games, more easily distanced from the extrinsic preconceptions of formal schooling. Forty, 7-11 year olds took part in this study (17 boys and 23 girls), designing and making their own games at an after-school club. Despite non-curriculum learning content, no more intrinsic games were created than in previous studies. The children failed to create their own pedagogical models for non-curriculum content and did not see the educational value of intrinsic fantasy games. The implications for transfer and learning in intrinsic games are discussed whilst the definition of intrinsic fantasy itself is questioned. It is argued that the integral relationship of fantasy is unlikely to be the most critical means of improving the educational effectiveness of digital games
Contemporary Forms of Slavery in Bolivia
This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.ASI_2006_OSR_Bolivia_Contemporary_forms.pdf: 171 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020
Safe Explicable Robot Planning
Human expectations stem from their knowledge of the others and the world.
Where human-robot interaction is concerned, such knowledge about the robot may
be inconsistent with the ground truth, resulting in the robot not meeting its
expectations. Explicable planning was previously introduced as a novel planning
approach to reconciling human expectations and the optimal robot behavior for
more interpretable robot decision-making. One critical issue that remains
unaddressed is safety during explicable decision-making which can lead to
explicable behaviors that are unsafe. We propose Safe Explicable Planning
(SEP), which extends explicable planning to support the specification of a
safety bound. The objective of SEP is to find a policy that generates a
behavior close to human expectations while satisfying the safety constraints
introduced by the bound, which is a special case of multi-objective
optimization where the solution to SEP lies on the Pareto frontier. Under such
a formulation, we propose a novel and efficient method that returns the safe
explicable policy and an approximate solution. In addition, we provide
theoretical proof for the optimality of the exact solution under the
designer-specified bound. Our evaluation results confirm the applicability and
efficacy of our method for safe explicable planning
Исследование механизма формирования абстрактного концепта : на примере концепта "ENVY"
Выявляются закономерности и особенности структурирования абстрактного концепта социально-бытийной направленности "envy". При анализе исследуемого концепта учитывается не только лингвистический, но и экстралингвистический аспекты, а именно: философский, психологический и социально теологически
The microeconomics of bullionism : arbitrage, smuggling and silver outflows in Spain in the early 18th century
In the Early Modern period, there was a systematic flow of precious metals from the American colonies to Spain and Portugal and, from there, throughout the world. In this paper, I use newly discovered data on the black market for silver in Cadiz to reconstruct a picture of Castilian smuggling and international silver flows in the Age of Bullionism (1729-1741). The arbitrage equation shows persistent violations of the silver-point that made arbitrage systematically profitable until devaluation pegged the exchange rate to the arbitrated parity. Market structure explains the persistent violations. The Cadiz shadow price was lower than the international market price because bullionist regulations configured an oligopsonistic structure. The price gap was the reason for the Castilian silver outflows to EuropeBullionism, Capital controls, Silver outflows, Silver-point mechanism, Smuggling, Oligopsony, Arbitrage
Conciliating conservation and development in an Amazonian Biosphere Reserve, Ecuador ?
Biosphere reserves are protected areas with extraordinary natural and cultural values, conceived as places for reconciliation between conservation and development. The Sumaco Biosphere Reserve (SBR), located in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon basin is the home of local indigenous communities which have lived in this area for centuries carrying out different subsistence activities (e.g. shifting cultivation, hunting, fishing, and home gardening). During the past decades, tourism initiatives have been implemented as strategies to promote environmental conservation and socio-economic development. In this research, the principal aspects of the management and governance of tourism was examined, as well as its contribution to biodiversity conservation and development. In-depth semi-structured interviews were used to get qualitative information from the main stakeholders. The study shows that tourism is perceived as an important sustainable alternative to mining, oil extraction and hydroelectric projects, which are currently seen as the main threats to conservation in the area. However, tourism in the Sumaco area also faces some problems, which are related to the lack of adequate management and governance strategies, the worst among them being illegality and informality triggering uncontrolled competition, lowering of prices, and decrease in the quality of services. Altogether, these factors could ultimately lead to the overall decline of the destination. To improve the sustainable development of tourism, more efforts on coordination between different sectors (e.g. environment, mining and oil, and tourism) and levels of governments (local, regional, and national) are needed
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