A Qualitative case study of an NCAA division III female tennis player\u27s self-regulation prior to, during, and after a singles tennis match

To gain an in depth understanding of the self-regulatory techniques and strategies used by a tennis player prior to, during, and after a singles match, an NCAA Division III female tennis player (n=1) was purposefully selected for the present case study. [This is an excerpt from the abstract. For the complete abstract, please see the document.

Discrimination in the Provision of Social Services to the Poor: A Field Experimental Study

This paper uses an experimental field approach to investigate the pro-social preferences and behavior of social services providers and the behavior of potential beneficiaries in Bogota, Colombia. Field experiments were conducted using games including a newly designed Distributive Dictator Game in order to examine traits and mechanisms guiding pro-sociality. Replicating the patterns of previous studies, individuals showed a preference for fair outcomes, positive levels of trust and reciprocity, and willingness to punish unfair outcomes. The results provide evidence that the poor trigger more pro-social behavior from all citizens, including public servants, but the latter display strategic generosity. Additional observations include a bias in favor of women and households with more dependents, but discriminatory behavior against stigmatized groups.

Discrimination in the provision of social services to the poor: a field experimental study

We use an experimental field approach to understand better the pro-social preferences andbehavior of both individuals involved in the provision of social services (public servants) and the behavior of those potential beneficiaries, the poor. We conducted field experiments using the Dictator, Ultimatum, Trust and Third Party Punishment games, and a newly designed Distributive Dictator Game. With these, we want to understand the traits and mechanisms that guide pro-sociality including altruism, reciprocal altruism, reciprocity, trust, fairness, inequity aversion, and altruistic (social) punishment. We recruited in Bogotá, Colombia more than 500 public servants and beneficiaries from welfare programs associated with health, education, childcare and nutrition. The overall results replicate the patterns of previous studies with these experimental designs, that is, individuals showed a preference for fair outcomes, positive levels of trust and reciprocity, and willingness to punish -at a personal cost, unfair outcomes if against themselves or if against third parties. By using more information about our participants we were able however to explain the observed variations in these behaviors. The results provide evidence that the poor trigger more pro-social behavior from all citizens including public servants, but the latter show more strategic generosity by graduating their pro-social behavior towards the poor depending on attributes of the beneficiaries or recipients of offers in these games. We observed a bias in favor of women and households with more number of dependents, but discriminatory behavior against particularly stigmatized groups in society such as ex-combatants from the political conflict, or street recyclers2.Distributive dictator game, Dictator Game, Ultimatum game, Trust Game, Third-Party Punishment game, pro-social behavior, public officials, field experiments.

Attentional and anxiety measures of Division I and III soccer athletes

This study examined the differences between attentional styles and anxiety measures for Division I and III soccer players. [This is an excerpt from the abstract. For the complete abstract, please see the document.

QuakeTM: Parallelizing a complex serial application using transactional memory

'Is transactional memory useful?' is the question that cannot be answered until we provide substantial applications that can evaluate its capabilities. While existing TM applications can partially answer the above question, and are useful in the sense that they provide a first-order TM experimentation framework, they serve only as a proof of concept and fail to make a conclusive case for wide adoption by the general computing community. This work presents QuakeTM, a multiplayer game server; a complex real life TM application that was parallelized from the serial version with TM-specific considerations in mind. QuakeTM consists of 27,600 lines of code spread among 49 files and exhibits irregular parallelism and coarse-grain transactions with large read and write sets. In spite of its complexity, we show that QuakeTM does scale, however more effort is needed to decrease the overhead and the abort rate of current software transactional memory systems. We give insights into development challenges, suggest techniques to solve them and provide extensive analysis of transactional behavior of QuakeTM, with an emphasis and discussion of the TM promise of making parallel programming easy.Postprint (published version

Applying quantitative models to evaluate complexity in video game systems

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 41).This thesis proposes a games evaluation model that reports significant statistics about the complexity of a game's various systems. Quantitative complexity measurements allow designers to make accurate decisions about how to manage challenge, keeping in mind the player's physical and mental resources and the amount/type of actions the game requires players to act upon. Managing the operational challenge is critical to keeping players in a state of enjoyment, the primary purpose of video games. This thesis first investigates the relationship between enjoyment and complexity through the concept of Flow. From there it examines the properties of GOMS that are useful to analyzing videogames using Tetris as a case study, and then it examines and dissects the shortcomings of a direct usability approach and offers solutions based on a strategy game example. A third case study of the idle worker scenario in strategy games is detailed to further corroborate the usefulness of applying a GOMS based analysis to videogames. Using quantitative measurements of complexity, future research can aggressively tackle difficulty and challenge precisely, mitigate complexity to widen market appeal, and even reveal new genre possibilities.by Matthew Tanwanteng.M.Eng

Learning sequences of rules using classifier systems with tags

IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. Tokyo, 12-15 October 1999.The objective of this paper was to obtain an encoding structure that would allow the genetic evolution of rules in such a manner that the number of rules and relationship in a classifier system (CS) would be learnt in the evolution process. For this purpose, an area that allows the definition of rule groups has been entered into the condition and message part of the encoded rules. This area is called internal tag. This term was coined because the system has some similarities with natural processes that take place in certain animal species, where the existence of tags allows them to communicate and recognize each other. Such CS is called a tag classifier system (TCS). The TCS has been tested in the game of draughts and compared with the classical CS. The results show an improving of the CS performance