It’s All About Games: Enterprise And Entrepreneurialism In Digital Games.

This article aims to contrast benign notions of ‘free’ and ‘creative’ work in the context of labour market conditions and employment relationships. Empirical research reveals the exploitative and precarious nature of work in the experiences of self-employed digital game developers and charts the responses of developers to unstable and insecure working conditions. Building on work by Pongratz and Voß (2003), Haunschild and Eikhof (2009), and Bergvall-Kåreborn and Howcroft (2013), this study finds that a typical response to increasing instability in the labour market is to adopt more enterprising and entrepreneurial behaviour in order to find work. This article illustrates the consequences for developers by highlighting examples of self-exploitation, which is fuelled by a passion for work and is where entrepreneurial practices lead to long working hours, unpaid work and a blurring of work-life boundaries

Some contributions to Ricean and complex-valued modeling of functional MRI time series

Although it is well-known that data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments are complex-valued as a result of Fourier reconstruction, the vast majority of statistical analyses focus only on the magnitudes of these complex-valued measurements and discard the phase information. Moreover, most magnitude-only analyses rely on a Gaussian-approximation to the Ricean-distributed magnitudes, which is not (even approximately) valid at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). As a result, we advocate use of the entire complex-valued data in statistical modeling and extend the complex-valued-data model in Rowe and Logan (2004) by applying AR(p) dependence to the real and imaginary errors. Based on this complex-valued model, we develop a likelihood-ratio test (LRT) for detecting activated brain voxels (or volume elements) which outperforms an LRT based on a Gaussian-assumed AR(p) magnitude-only model for simulated and experimental data. For existing fMRI datasets with unrecoverable phase information, we advocate Ricean modeling of the magnitude data; to this end, we compare the performance of activation tests based on Ricean and Gaussian magnitude-only models. In addition, we develop tests based on an AR(p) Ricean model that augments the observed magnitude data with missing phase data in an EM algorithm framework. Somewhat surprisingly, the Ricean-based activation tests perform similarly to their Gaussian-based counterparts, even at low SNRs, which further supports the use of complex-valued data

Thermoresponsive poly(N-vinylcaprolactam) as stationary phase for aqueous and green liquid chromatography

Poly(N-vinylcaprolactam) (PVCL) connected to aminopropyl silica is a new stationary phase for temperature responsive liquid chromatography (TR-LC). PVCL shows a transition from hydrophilic to hydrophobic interaction between 30 and 40 degrees C. The synthesis is described in detail. The temperature responsive characteristic of the phase is illustrated with a mixture of steroids using pure water as mobile phase. An increase in retention is observed when raising the temperature. H-u plots at different temperatures were constructed. Below the lower critical solution temperature (LCST), no optimal velocity could be measured because of substantial resistance to mass transfer. Above the LCST, u (opt) was ca. 0.3 mm s(-1) with reduced plate heights from 4 at 45 degrees C to 3 at 65 degrees C. The temperature responsive nature of the polymer is lost in green chromatography with ethanol as modifier in concentrations above 5%

Private Pete Fights Illiteracy at Fort Ontario: The Men in Charge

From June of 1943 to February of 1944, the 1210th Special Training Unit at Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York taught pre-basic military training to thousands of illiterate, slow learning, and non-English-speaking soldiers in the United States Army. The training center at Fort Ontario conducted programs in disciplinary barracks, specialized military, technical, academic and vocational education.https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/celebration_posters_2023/1049/thumbnail.jp

Kentucky Soldiers At The Battles Of Frenchtown And The River Raisin Massacre

Research on The War of 1812 has been sporadic over the last two hundred years. In spite of the two centuries which have passed, significant gaps in the scholarship remain. Most individuals recognize that Kentucky troops played a major role in the war, but their participation and the number of casualties they suffered remains speculative. American newspaper accounts of the period, written with an eye to sell more copies, may not be accurate as they historically over inflated the number of dead. At the same time, British accounts have a tendency to downplay the numbers of American troops involved for their own political reasons. Working with Dr. Adrian Mandzy on an ongoing research project about the War of 1812, we focused our attention on the number of Kentucky troops involved in the January 1813 River Raisin Massacre and the October 1813 Battle of the Thames. Using pension requests, the published 1891 Kentucky National Guard Adjutant Generals Report, and a document found within the Draper Manuscript Collection (documents collected by Lyman Draper in the mid-19th century), we were able to calculate the approximate numbers of Kentuckians who fought and died at this engagement. Once we complete our research, we hope to publish our findings in the Journal of America’s Military Past.https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/celebration_posters_2021/1028/thumbnail.jp

Identifying Activity

Identification of active constraints in constrained optimization is of interest from both practical and theoretical viewpoints, as it holds the promise of reducing an inequality-constrained problem to an equality-constrained problem, in a neighborhood of a solution. We study this issue in the more general setting of composite nonsmooth minimization, in which the objective is a composition of a smooth vector function c with a lower semicontinuous function h, typically nonsmooth but structured. In this setting, the graph of the generalized gradient of h can often be decomposed into a union (nondisjoint) of simpler subsets. "Identification" amounts to deciding which subsets of the graph are "active" in the criticality conditions at a given solution. We give conditions under which any convergent sequence of approximate critical points finitely identifies the activity. Prominent among these properties is a condition akin to the Mangasarian-Fromovitz constraint qualification, which ensures boundedness of the set of multiplier vectors that satisfy the optimality conditions at the solution.Comment: 16 page

Poster - Private Pete Fights Illiteracy at Fort Ontario: The Men in Charge

A poster created by history students from Morehead State University for display at Fort Ontario Historic Site in March of 2023.https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/stu_1210th_fort_ontario/1097/thumbnail.jp