1,986 research outputs found
Psyche as a Playable Construct in Video Games
The aim of this master’s thesis called Psyche as a Playable Construct in Video Games is to explore how the human mind is reflected in video games and how thus the psyche becomes a playable environment. This study also analyzes whether video games as a medium can promote self-reflection and empathy by portraying the psyche and developing narratives around this theme. These set objectives are achieved by performing medium-specific multimodal discourse analysis of three case studies, as well as comparative game analysis. The purpose is to discover how the psyche nowadays becomes an accessible, interactive, and embodied virtual environment through various modern modes of expression. In addition to the topic of the psyche as a game setting the research also looks at the reflection of the psyche in the theories of psychoanalysts, the principles of creating playable virtual spaces and mental landscapes, and the unique manner of video games in representing phenomena. This thesis includes a review of relevant scholarship into game studies, psychoanalysis and multimodal discourse, as well as an examination of three video games of different scales and genres, all of which render the human psyche psyche a playable construct: Nevermind (2015), When the Darkness comes (2019) and Psychonauts 2 (2021). By showing distinctive approaches to representing the psyche and interaction with it, this research highlights the enormous potential of video games to offer their users experiences that cannot be delivered through any other channel. As well, my thesis demonstrates how game design reflects scientific discoveries about the psyche to the present day: as independent but influenceable; chaotic and multi-layered but deterministic. It also proposes future research suggestions in this context on how likely are games set in the human mind to promote compassion, empathy, and self-analysis in a wide audience.Master's Thesis in Digital CultureDIKULT350MAHF-DIKU
Complicated objects: artifacts from the Yuanming Yuan in Victorian Britain
The 1860 spoliation of the Summer Palace at the close of the Second Opium War by British and French troops was a watershed event within the development of Britain as an imperialist nation, which guaranteed a market for opium produced in its colony India and demonstrated the power of its armed forces. The distribution of the spoils to officers and diplomatic corps by campaign leaders in Beijing was also a sign of the British Army’s rising power as an instrument of the imperialist state. These conditions would suggest that objects looted from the site would be integrated into an imperialist aesthetic that reflected and promoted the material benefits of military engagement overseas and foregrounded the circumstances of their removal to Britain for campaign members and the British public.
This study mines sources dating to the two decades following the war – including British newspapers, auction house records, exhibition catalogs and works of art – to test this hypothesis. Findings show that initial movements of looted objects through the military and diplomatic corps did reinforce notions of imperialist power by enabling campaign members to profit from the spoliation through sales of looted objects and trophy displays. However, material from the Summer Palace arrived at a moment when British manufacturers and cultural leaders were engaged in a national effort to improve the quality of British goods to compete in the international marketplace and looted art was quickly interpolated in this national conversation. Ironically, the same “free trade” imperatives that motivated the invasion energized a new design movement that embraced Chinese ornament.
As a consequence, political interpretations of the material outside of military collections were quickly joined by a strong response to Chinese ornament from cultural institutions and design leaders. Art from the Summer Palace held a prominent place at industrial art exhibitions of the postwar period and inspired new designs in a number of mediums. While the availability of Chinese imperial art was the consequence of a military invasion and therefore a product of imperialist expansion, evidence presented here shows that the design response to looted objects was not circumscribed by this political reality. Chinese ornament on imperial wares was ultimately celebrated for its formal qualities and acknowledged links to the Summer Palace were an indicator of good design, not a celebration of victory over a failed Chinese state. Therefore, the looting of the Summer Palace was ultimately an essential factor in the development of modern design, the essence of which is a break with Classical ornament
RAPHAEL: Text-to-Image Generation via Large Mixture of Diffusion Paths
Text-to-image generation has recently witnessed remarkable achievements. We
introduce a text-conditional image diffusion model, termed RAPHAEL, to generate
highly artistic images, which accurately portray the text prompts, encompassing
multiple nouns, adjectives, and verbs. This is achieved by stacking tens of
mixture-of-experts (MoEs) layers, i.e., space-MoE and time-MoE layers, enabling
billions of diffusion paths (routes) from the network input to the output. Each
path intuitively functions as a "painter" for depicting a particular textual
concept onto a specified image region at a diffusion timestep. Comprehensive
experiments reveal that RAPHAEL outperforms recent cutting-edge models, such as
Stable Diffusion, ERNIE-ViLG 2.0, DeepFloyd, and DALL-E 2, in terms of both
image quality and aesthetic appeal. Firstly, RAPHAEL exhibits superior
performance in switching images across diverse styles, such as Japanese comics,
realism, cyberpunk, and ink illustration. Secondly, a single model with three
billion parameters, trained on 1,000 A100 GPUs for two months, achieves a
state-of-the-art zero-shot FID score of 6.61 on the COCO dataset. Furthermore,
RAPHAEL significantly surpasses its counterparts in human evaluation on the
ViLG-300 benchmark. We believe that RAPHAEL holds the potential to propel the
frontiers of image generation research in both academia and industry, paving
the way for future breakthroughs in this rapidly evolving field. More details
can be found on a project webpage: https://raphael-painter.github.io/.Comment: Technical Repor
BILANGAN KROMATIK HARMONIS PADA GRAF PAYUNG, GRAF PARASUT, DAN GRAF SEMI PARASUT
This article discusses the harmonic coloring of simple graphs G, namely umbrella graphs, parachute graphs, and semi-parachute graphs. A vertex coloring on a graph G is a harmonic coloring if each pair of colors (based on edges or pair of vertices) appears at most once. The chromatic number associated with the harmonic coloring of graph G is called the harmonic chromatic number denoted XH(G). In this article, the exact values of harmonic chromatic numbers are obtained for umbrella graphs, parachute graphs, and semi-parachute graphs
“The future is blurry”: The (hydro)power relations of the Muskrat Falls Project
The Canadian Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project (MFP) has presented social, political, economic and wellbeing challenges to the province of Newfoundland and Labrador for over a decade. Despite significant public discussion on the economic issues associated with MFP, the lived experience of Inuit from the affected area has received less attention. This research aims to share Inuit perspectives in Rigolet, Nunatsiavut, the community anticipated to be most affected by the project, to inform health and social responses by government and grassroots organizations. Through a sociological approach guided by Indigenous research methodologies, this research employed culturally responsive and creative methods including semi-structured interviews, surveys, and participatory photography. The research found that participants positioned the MFP within the social and historical context of a previous (1960s-70s) hydroelectric project, the Upper Churchill Falls project, which shapes their contemporary questions and concerns. Participants also associate implementation of MFP with colonialism, as they feel they have not been adequately consulted or informed, a continuation of colonial hierarchies of knowledge. Rigolet residents also expressed uncertainty about the social, cultural, and health impacts of potential methylmercury contamination and wider environmental changes the project may cause. The power relations associated with the hydroelectric project has resulted in a ‘silencing’ of concerns over time, with some participants changing their diet because of contamination concerns for traditional foods critical to local diets, cultural practices, and connections to the land. Results of this study have important implications for public health and health risk communication strategies, as traditional foods and associated land-based activities are known to benefit Inuit physical, mental, and cultural health and wellbeing. Overall, the dissertation demonstrates how the MFP fits within a settler colonial structure within Canada, especially as Indigenous communities have been and continue to be sites for resource extraction. This system of exploitation contrasts with Inuit perspectives on the role and importance of the land and environment in social life and relationships. The research makes several recommendations for improving health risk communications, including the importance of: improved health risk communication; the delivery of clear scientific data; facilitating access to traditional foods; supporting safe ice and water travel; and improved consultation and environmental assessment processes
Current issues of the Russian language teaching XIV
Collection of papers “Current issues of the Russian language teaching XIV” is devoted to issues of methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language, to issues of linguistics and literary science and includes papers related to the use of online tools and resources in teaching Russian. This collection of papers is a result of the international scientific conference “Current issues of the Russian language teaching XIV”, which was scheduled for 8–10 May 2020, but due to the pandemic COVID-19 took place remotely
The Self The Soul and The World: Affect Reason and Complexity
This book looks at the affective-cognitive roots of how the human mind inquires into the workings of nature and, more generally, how the mind confronts reality. Reality is an infinitely complex system, in virtue of which the mind can comprehend it only in bits and pieces, by making up interpretations of the myriads of signals received from the world by way of integrating those with information stored from the past. This constitutes a piecemeal interpretation by which we assemble our phenomenal reality. In perceiving the complex world and responding to it, the mind invokes the logic of affect and the logic of reason, the former mostly innate and implicit, and the latter generated consciously in explicit terms with reference to mind-independent relations between entities in nature. It is a strange combination of affect and reason that enables us to make decisions and inferences, --- the latter mostly of the inductive type --- thereby making possible the development of theories. Theories are our tool-kits for explaining and predicting phenomena, guiding us along in our journey in life. Theories, however, are defeasible, and need to be constantly updated, at times even radically. In this, the self and the soul are of enormous relevance. The former is the affect-based psychological engine driving all our mental processes, while the latter is the capacity of the conscious mind to examine and reconstruct the self by modulating repressed conflicts. If the soul remains inoperative, all our theories become misdirected and a rot spreads inexorably all around us
Local Certification of Some Geometric Intersection Graph Classes
In the context of distributed certification, the recognition of graph classes
has started to be intensively studied. For instance, different results related
to the recognition of planar, bounded tree-width and -minor free graphs have
been recently obtained. The goal of the present work is to design compact
certificates for the local recognition of relevant geometric intersection graph
classes, namely interval, chordal, circular arc, trapezoid and permutation.
More precisely, we give proof labeling schemes recognizing each of these
classes with logarithmic-sized certificates. We also provide tight logarithmic
lower bounds on the size of the certificates on the proof labeling schemes for
the recognition of any of the aforementioned geometric intersection graph
classes
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