The Dollar General: Continuous Custom Gesture Recognition Techniques At Everyday Low Prices

Humans use gestures to emphasize ideas and disseminate information. Their importance is apparent in how we continuously augment social interactions with motion—gesticulating in harmony with nearly every utterance to ensure observers understand that which we wish to communicate, and their relevance has not escaped the HCI community\u27s attention. For almost as long as computers have been able to sample human motion at the user interface boundary, software systems have been made to understand gestures as command metaphors. Customization, in particular, has great potential to improve user experience, whereby users map specific gestures to specific software functions. However, custom gesture recognition remains a challenging problem, especially when training data is limited, input is continuous, and designers who wish to use customization in their software are limited by mathematical attainment, machine learning experience, domain knowledge, or a combination thereof. Data collection, filtering, segmentation, pattern matching, synthesis, and rejection analysis are all non-trivial problems a gesture recognition system must solve. To address these issues, we introduce The Dollar General (TDG), a complete pipeline composed of several novel continuous custom gesture recognition techniques. Specifically, TDG comprises an automatic low-pass filter tuner that we use to improve signal quality, a segmenter for identifying gesture candidates in a continuous input stream, a classifier for discriminating gesture candidates from non-gesture motions, and a synthetic data generation module we use to train the classifier. Our system achieves high recognition accuracy with as little as one or two training samples per gesture class, is largely input device agnostic, and does not require advanced mathematical knowledge to understand and implement. In this dissertation, we motivate the importance of gestures and customization, describe each pipeline component in detail, and introduce strategies for data collection and prototype selection

The Effects of Gesture Presentation in Video Games

As everyday and commonplace technology continues to move toward touch devices and virtual reality devices, more and more video games are using gestures as forms of gameplay. While there is much research focused on gestures as user interface navigation methods, we wanted to look into how gestures affect gameplay when used as a gameplay mechanic. In particular, we set out to determine how different ways of presenting gestures might affect the game\u27s difficulty and flow. We designed two versions of a zombie game where the zombies are killed by drawing gestures. The first version of the game is a touchscreen-based game where the gestures are drawn in 2D space on the screen while the second version utilizes 3D space to draw gestures in virtual reality. We performed two studies comparing gestures presented as symbols and names, one study using the two-dimensional touchscreen game and one using the VR version. We found that presenting gestures by name increases the game\u27s difficulty in the 2D version of the game. Flow was unchanged by gesture presentation but flow increased with difficulty in our 2D game. We were unable to affirm these same results with any significance in the VR version of the game. We discuss the implications of our results and provide insights to help game designers make more informed decisions about gesture implementations as gameplay elements in video games

"Unspoken sermons": Christian preaching in British fiction, 1979-2004

Declining church attendance in pluralist Britain indicates that the Christian sermon, once a vibrant literary genre, has become an increasingly unfamiliar form to most readers and writers of fiction. Yet, as this thesis will argue, fictional sermons are still successfully used by novelists. The thesis examines sermons in three genres, and representing three Christian traditions, the Roman Catholic, Anglican and Free Church. The genres discussed are chronicles, as represented by Antonia Byatt and David Lodge, historical novels written by Geraldine Brooks and Jane Rogers and fiction by John Murray and Michael Arditti sited in specific religious, spiritual or ecclesiastical environments. The thesis develops an analytical toolkit, based mainly on rhetorical narratology and cognitive poetics, to examine the current status of fictional sermons. Five case studies follow. The first discusses issues of authority and inspiration in texts, preachers and preaching. The second considers how novelists communicate religious experience, particularly experiences of epiphany and conversion. The third describes contemporary novels' portraits of the troubled preacher. The fourth analyses the language used by novelists in their sermons and the fifth studies how sermons construct discourse communities and religious community. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the significance of memory, imagination and embodiment as agents by which readers - and hearers of actual sermons - are enabled to respond to suasory speech and engage with its proposed alternative world. The thesis is intended as a contribution to the study of religion and literature, to discourse analysis, to homiletical theory and practice and to criticism of contemporary literature

Streamlined And Accurate Gesture Recognition With Penny Pincher

Penny Pincher is a recently introduced template matching $-family gesture recognizer that exhibits competitive accuracy with even just one template. However, our recognizer is also able to rapidly compare a candidate gesture against numerous templates in a short amount of time, as compared to other recognizers, in order to achieve higher accuracy within a given time budget. Penny Pincher achieves this goal by reducing the template matching process to merely addition and multiplication; by avoiding translation, scaling, and rotation; and by avoiding calls to expensive geometric functions. In an evaluation compared against four other$-family recognizers, in three of our six datasets, Penny Pincher achieves the highest accuracy of all recognizers reaching 97.5%, 99.8%, and 99.9% user independent recognition accuracy, while remaining competitive with the three remaining datasets. Further, when a time constraint is imposed, our recognizer always exhibits the highest accuracy, realizing a reduction in recognition error of between 83% and 99% in most cases as Penny Pincher is able to process five times as many templates in the same amount of time as its closest competitor. Further, in this extended work, we also evaluate the effectiveness of Penny Pincher in a stressful setting using a video game prototype that makes heavy use of gestures, so that rushed and malformed gesture articulation is more likely. Our evaluation was conducted with a 24 participant between-subject user study of Protractor and Penny Pincher. Training data and in-game data collected during the user study was further used to evaluate several $-family recognizers. Again we find that our recognizer is on par with or better than the others, reducing the recognition error by as much as 5.8% to 10.4% with just a small number of templates per gesture

Play, Performance, and Participation: Boundary Negotiation and Critical Role

Critical Role is a livestreamed spectacle of play, in which eight professional voice actors come together once a week for a session of the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons. This show first launched in 2015, and, after one hundred and fifteen episodes spanning nearly four hundred and fifty hours of content, reached the conclusion of its first major narrative arc in October 2017. In this time, the show has attracted a dedicated fanbase of thousands. These fans, known as “Critters”, not only produce creative fanworks, but also undertake massive projects of archiving, timekeeping, transcribing and curating Critical Role. The main project of this thesis is to argue that Critical Role facilitates an ecosystem of ideas, where ideas change hands quickly and fluidly – and, in doing so, it has caused familiar boundaries between author and audience to blur or even collapse. In some cases, this blurring allows for incredible collaborations between fans and performers; at its most challenging, the collapse of familiar author-audience dynamics creates unfamiliar conflicts with no obvious solution. Using Erving Goffman’s model of interactional frame analysis, this thesis will isolate different areas of challenge, collapse, and change. First, it will demonstrate how the dynamics of traditional tabletop roleplaying transform when the roleplayers are put before an audience. The Critical Role cast must negotiate double identities as both players and performers. This thesis will then transition to the behaviour of the audience. The act of watching Critical Role requires a keen understanding of the different frames at work inside the show, and fans have done a considerable amount of work to help each other understand these frames. Finally, this thesis will establish the concept of the fan frame. Both Critters and cast members consider themselves fans in some way. While familiarity with fan culture helps these two groups understand each other, it also creates conflict when the values of fans do not line up with the demands of online content production

Censorship of the press in South Africa during the Angolan War: a case study of news manipulation and suppression

During the Angolan War of 1975-6, whilst South African troops were actively engaged on the side of the Unita/FNLA alliance, news media in South Africa were prohibited from disclosing information about the country's role in the war. Under Section 118 of the Defence Amendment Act of 1967, no information about SA troop movements or plans could be published without the permission of the Minister of Defence or his nominees. This case study shows how the Government used the Defence Act to censor certain news while releasing other news which suited its political outlook and objectives. The study documents the history of the Defence Act and of the military-press liaison machinery which grew out of it. The introduction defines propaganda as a technique of ideological control designed to supplement the control of society by means of repression. The study sets in context the Government's propaganda strategy before, during and after the Angolan War, arguing that the structures of white domination, including the newspaper industry, are being drawn into the Government's scheme of total co-ordination to fight a total war

Streamlined and accurate gesture recognition with Penny Pincher

Penny Pincher is a recently introduced template matching $-family gesture recognizer that exhibits competitive accuracy with even just one template. However, our recognizer is also able to rapidly compare a candidate gesture against numerous templates in a short amount of time, as compared to other recognizers, in order to achieve higher accuracy within a given time budget. Penny Pincher achieves this goal by reducing the template matching process to merely addition and multiplication; by avoiding translation, scaling, and rotation; and by avoiding calls to expensive geometric functions. In an evaluation compared against four other$-family recognizers, in three of our six datasets, Penny Pincher achieves the highest accuracy of all recognizers reaching 97.5%, 99.8%, and 99.9% user independent recognition accuracy, while remaining competitive with the three remaining datasets. Further, when a time constraint is imposed, our recognizer always exhibits the highest accuracy, realizing a reduction in recognition error of between 83% and 99% in most cases as Penny Pincher is able to process five times as many templates in the same amount of time as its closest competitor. Further, in this extended work, we also evaluate the effectiveness of Penny Pincher in a stressful setting using a video game prototype that makes heavy use of gestures, so that rushed and malformed gesture articulation is more likely. Our evaluation was conducted with a 24 participant between-subject user study of Protractor and Penny Pincher. Training data and in-game data collected during the user study was further used to evaluate several $-family recognizers. Again we find that our recognizer is on par with or better than the others, reducing the recognition error by as much as 5.8% to 10.4% with just a small number of templates per gesture

Woomera’s women : rolls and roles of film : camera operators on the Anglo-Australian rocket range 1947-1970.

With the aftermath of World War II and the onset of the Cold War, Australia hosted with the UK one of the few global centres dedicated to the research, development and testing of rockets, jets and other long-range weapons, including Britain’s atomic warheads. By the mid 1950s a new purpose-built town had been constructed in the Australian desert, named “Woomera”, with a population of 7,000 at its peak. No expense was spared in establishing the testing grounds, laboratories and infrastructure – which included a security cleared film laboratory and production facilities at Salisbury near Adelaide – to support the Anglo-Australian Joint Project’s research and experimentation. This dissertation examines pioneering work undertaken by women at Woomera and Salisbury within the context of Australia’s broader social history. Women’s roles at Woomera were initially expected to be traditional – supportive wives and mothers. My research features the women who undertook new roles operating the sophisticated kinetheodolites and Vinten cameras that filmed and tracked the rocket firings, and the women referred to as “computers” who assisted in the pre- and post-production process, including data evaluation. Previous studies of Woomera (e.g., Morton, 1989, Southall 1962) exclude any detailed mention of this industrial phenomenon – women as camera operators and data analysts/computers. My dissertation addresses this significant gap in the literature as the first systematic oral history of these secret Cold War undertakings. The gendered aspects, political economy and unique cohort of this research radically challenges the normative assumptions concerning Australian women and workplaces during what is commonly perceived of as a conservative era. Recent scholarship (e.g., Shetterly 2016) in the United States and the United Kingdom has highlighted work of female mathematicians during World War II and the space race. Given the age of these trailblazing women, it is timely that due attention be given to Australia’s “hidden figures”

Perspectives from the Ranching Culture in the 1990's : Addressing Mythological and Environmental Concerns

Ideals of freedom, independence, and land ownership helped form and perpetuate the mythology of ranching in the United States. However, stereotypes emerged as a result of distortion from the media and the move away from the land. Social philosophies changed regarding the environment, land use, and the health and safety of the food supply in the late 20th century. In relation to the mythology, stereotype, and social theory regarding the ranching culture, this research seeks to clarify the fundamental principles, business philosophy, lifestyle, and values of men and women raising beef as a food product on both public and private lands in the 1990's. The mythology surrounding ranchers and cowboys are the result of three historical periods in the United States; however, the last 100 years have had the most profound effect in developing stereotypes. In this survey, 42 ranchers in Lake County, Oregon and Modoc County, California describe the challenges, satisfactions, and the partnership with Nature that is part of their livelihood in the harsh, high desert environment of eastern Oregon and northeastern California. The low ratio of private ground in these counties creates a dependency on use of public lands for grazing. This use if often stereotyped as "welfare ranching," without computation for other variables that make it comparable with private leasing. Historically, the Taylor Grazing Act authorizes fee grazing between ranchers and the U.S. government, but current philosophy has shifted its view of free enterprise on public lands, terming it "resource extraction." Although ranching is high in risk and low in economic return, ranchers stay in the business because they value freedom, hard work, family cohesiveness, and the interaction with Nature and the land. The future of ranching is challenged by environmental policy, government agency relations, public opinion, the high cost of land and production, and a lack of unity in the beef industry. To survive, ranchers need to unify, sharpen communication skills, provide education about ranching practices to the public, and become service-oriented as an organization to change stereotype and meet the social criteria of the next century