Entanglements of creative agency and digital technology : a sociomaterial study of computer game development

Digital technology, with its distinctive characteristics that result from the fundamental process of digitalization that underpins it, is seen as fundamentally altering processes of creativity. However, we currently have limited understanding of creativity in relation to the development of digital technology. Computer game development, with its combination of esthetic, affective and cultural use features and highly sophisticated digital technologies, is a valuable setting for investigating these issues. In this paper, we explore how computer games are shaped through the interplay between the creative intentions of developers and the digital technologies involved in their production and playing. Drawing on in-depth studies conducted at three leading computer game development studios and a leading producer of the software system used in game development, this paper shows how the game developers' creative ideas for imagined novel game-playing experiences relate to a) the development of relevant digital technologies, and b) the emergence of new game development practices. The article goes on to propose a view of creativity as an on-going flow that, following an initial ‘creative impulse’, ripples through the sociomaterial entanglements of a particular setting, reconfiguring them in the process and spreading out in time and space in often unexpected ways

Bimodal coupling of ripples and slower oscillations during sleep in patients with focal epilepsy.

OBJECTIVE: Differentiating pathologic and physiologic high-frequency oscillations (HFOs) is challenging. In patients with focal epilepsy, HFOs occur during the transitional periods between the up and down state of slow waves. The preferred phase angles of this form of phase-event amplitude coupling are bimodally distributed, and the ripples (80-150 Hz) that occur during the up-down transition more often occur in the seizure-onset zone (SOZ). We investigated if bimodal ripple coupling was also evident for faster sleep oscillations, and could identify the SOZ. METHODS: Using an automated ripple detector, we identified ripple events in 40-60 min intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings from 23 patients with medically refractory mesial temporal lobe or neocortical epilepsy. The detector quantified epochs of sleep oscillations and computed instantaneous phase. We utilized a ripple phasor transform, ripple-triggered averaging, and circular statistics to investigate phase event-amplitude coupling. RESULTS: We found that at some individual recording sites, ripple event amplitude was coupled with the sleep oscillatory phase and the preferred phase angles exhibited two distinct clusters (p \u3c 0.05). The distribution of the pooled mean preferred phase angle, defined by combining the means from each cluster at each individual recording site, also exhibited two distinct clusters (p \u3c 0.05). Based on the range of preferred phase angles defined by these two clusters, we partitioned each ripple event at each recording site into two groups: depth iEEG peak-trough and trough-peak. The mean ripple rates of the two groups in the SOZ and non-SOZ (NSOZ) were compared. We found that in the frontal (spindle, p = 0.009; theta, p = 0.006, slow, p = 0.004) and parietal lobe (theta, p = 0.007, delta, p = 0.002, slow, p = 0.001) the SOZ incidence rate for the ripples occurring during the trough-peak transition was significantly increased. SIGNIFICANCE: Phase-event amplitude coupling between ripples and sleep oscillations may be useful to distinguish pathologic and physiologic events in patients with frontal and parietal SOZ

Ripples of Gratitude: The Flow-on Effects of Practicing Gratitude in the Classroom Environment

This research explores God’s call to gratitude, summarizes current research on the benefits of gratitude, identifies key gratitude disciplines/practices, and utilizes a conceptual framework to study gratitude in the context of educational settings. In contribution to the relatively recent discussion on gratitude, especially in the education field, the researchers explored the effects when pre-service teachers practice an inner attitude of gratitude and intentionally express gratitude in the classroom setting. This study expands the current educational research of gratitude by incorporating three primary gratitude practices – the State of Preparedness, gratitude language, and gratitude journaling – and examining both personal benefits and flow-on effect toward the teaching-learning process. Fourteen pre-service elementary school teachers were invited to practice gratitude during nine weeks of their full-time fieldwork placements. Participants experienced personal benefits such as enhanced well-being, strengthened relationships, and heightened cognitive skills. Ripples of gratitude were observed as positive flow-on effects in their classrooms: a more positive and calmer classroom atmosphere, better behaved students, and students more willing to focus effort towards learning. Pre-service teachers also experienced a flow-on effect towards themselves through increased resiliency when facing adversity and greater satisfaction in teaching. These findings are significant for the field of education as the power of gratitude can foster positive transformation through promoting engaged environments and strengthened relationships for both teacher and student

Observing trans-Planckian ripples in the primordial power spectrum with future large scale structure probes

We revisit the issue of ripples in the primordial power spectra caused by trans-Planckian physics, and the potential for their detection by future cosmological probes. We find that for reasonably large values of the first slow-roll parameter epsilon (> 0.001), a positive detection of trans-Planckian ripples can be made even if the amplitude is as low as 10^-4. Data from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and the proposed future 21 cm survey with the Fast Fourier Transform Telescope (FFTT) will be particularly useful in this regard. If the scale of inflation is close to its present upper bound, a scale of new physics as high as 0.2 M_Planck could lead to observable signatures.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figures, uses iopart.cls; v2: 21 pages, added references, to appear in JCA

Earth-like sand fluxes on Mars

Strong and sustained winds on Mars have been considered rare, on the basis of surface meteorology measurements and global circulation models, raising the question of whether the abundant dunes and evidence for wind erosion seen on the planet are a current process. Recent studies showed sand activity, but could not determine whether entire dunes were moving—implying large sand fluxes—or whether more localized and surficial changes had occurred. Here we present measurements of the migration rate of sand ripples and dune lee fronts at the Nili Patera dune field. We show that the dunes are near steady state, with their entire volumes composed of mobile sand. The dunes have unexpectedly high sand fluxes, similar, for example, to those in Victoria Valley, Antarctica, implying that rates of landscape modification on Mars and Earth are similar

SARAS: a precision system for measurement of the Cosmic Radio Background and signatures from the Epoch of Reionization

SARAS is a correlation spectrometer purpose designed for precision measurements of the cosmic radio background and faint features in the sky spectrum at long wavelengths that arise from redshifted 21-cm from gas in the reionization epoch. SARAS operates in the octave band 87.5-175 MHz. We present herein the system design arguing for a complex correlation spectrometer concept. The SARAS design concept provides a differential measurement between the antenna temperature and that of an internal reference termination, with measurements in switched system states allowing for cancellation of additive contaminants from a large part of the signal flow path including the digital spectrometer. A switched noise injection scheme provides absolute spectral calibration. Additionally, we argue for an electrically small frequency-independent antenna over an absorber ground. Various critical design features that aid in avoidance of systematics and in providing calibration products for the parametrization of other unavoidable systematics are described and the rationale discussed. The signal flow and processing is analyzed and the response to noise temperatures of the antenna, reference termination and amplifiers is computed. Multi-path propagation arising from internal reflections are considered in the analysis, which includes a harmonic series of internal reflections. We opine that the SARAS design concept is advantageous for precision measurement of the absolute cosmic radio background spectrum; therefore, the design features and analysis methods presented here are expected to serve as a basis for implementations tailored to measurements of a multiplicity of features in the background sky at long wavelengths, which may arise from events in the dark ages and subsequent reionization era.Comment: 49 pages, 17 figure

On arbitrary-level IIR and FIR filters

A recently published method for designing IIR (infinite-impulse-response) digital filters with multilevel magnitude responses is reinterpreted from a different viewpoint. On the basis of this interpretation, techniques for extending these results to the case of finite-impulse-response (FIR) filters are developed. An advantage of the authors' method is that, when the arbitrary-level filter is implemented, its power-complementary filter, which may be required in specific applications, is obtained simultaneously. Also, by means of a tuning factor (a parameter of the scaling matrix), it is possible to generate a whole family of arbitrary-level filters

Design of nonuniform near allpass complementary FIR filters via a semi-infinite programming technique

In this paper, we consider the problem of designing a set of nonuniform near allpass complementary FIR filters. This problem can be formulated as a quadratic semi-infinite programming problem, where the objective is to minimize the sum of the ripple energy for the individual filters, subject to the passband and stopband specifications as well as to the allpass complementary specification. The dual parameterization method is used for solving the linear quadratic semi-infinite programming problem