Introducing mokap: A novel approach to creating serious games

In this paper we introduce Mokap, a novel authoring and development toolset for serious games. Mokap aims to address two specific challenges: provide support for early development stage design and facilitate involvement of domain experts. More specifically, on the one hand, it aims to make serious game authoring possible for people with no technical background. On the other hand, Mokap provides explicit support for activities related to analysis and design, especially useful during the early stages of development. In this sense, Mokap aims to facilitate the transition from the designers' board to the programmers' environment and also to enhance communication between the different roles of the development team. Developed as an open source environment, Mokap is oriented to mobile devices (tablets and smartphones), a kind of technology most educational stakeholders are familiar with. We present the main design concepts behind Mokap, along with some technical insight into the platform and the description of the game Listen With Lemur as a case study

Exotic smooth structures and symplectic forms on closed manifolds

We give a short proof of the (known) result that there are no Kaehler structures on exotic tori. This yields a negative solution to a problem posed by Benson and Gordon. W discuss the symplectic version of the problem and analyze results which yield an evidence for the conjecture that there are no symplectic structures on exotic tori.Comment: AMSLaTeX, 16 pages, a new version. A survey of the symplectic version of the problem is adde

Comparison of the benefits of cochlear implantation versus contra-lateral routing of signal hearing aids in adult patients with single-sided deafness: study protocol for a prospective within-subject longitudinal trial

Background Individuals with a unilateral severe-to-profound hearing loss, or single-sided deafness, report difficulty with listening in many everyday situations despite having access to well-preserved acoustic hearing in one ear. The standard of care for single-sided deafness available on the UK National Health Service is a contra-lateral routing of signals hearing aid which transfers sounds from the impaired ear to the non-impaired ear. This hearing aid has been found to improve speech understanding in noise when the signal-to-noise ratio is more favourable at the impaired ear than the non-impaired ear. However, the indiscriminate routing of signals to a single ear can have detrimental effects when interfering sounds are located on the side of the impaired ear. Recent published evidence has suggested that cochlear implantation in individuals with a single-sided deafness can restore access to the binaural cues which underpin the ability to localise sounds and segregate speech from other interfering sounds. Methods/Design The current trial was designed to assess the efficacy of cochlear implantation compared to a contra-lateral routing of signals hearing aid in restoring binaural hearing in adults with acquired single-sided deafness. Patients are assessed at baseline and after receiving a contra-lateral routing of signals hearing aid. A cochlear implant is then provided to those patients who do not receive sufficient benefit from the hearing aid. This within-subject longitudinal design reflects the expected care pathway should cochlear implantation be provided for single-sided deafness on the UK National Health Service. The primary endpoints are measures of binaural hearing at baseline, after provision of a contra-lateral routing of signals hearing aid, and after cochlear implantation. Binaural hearing is assessed in terms of the accuracy with which sounds are localised and speech is perceived in background noise. The trial is also designed to measure the impact of the interventions on hearing- and health-related quality of life. Discussion This multi-centre trial was designed to provide evidence for the efficacy of cochlear implantation compared to the contra-lateral routing of signals. A purpose-built sound presentation system and established measurement techniques will provide reliable and precise measures of binaural hearing. Trial registration Current Controlled Trials http://www.controlled-trials.com/ISRCTN33301739 (05/JUL/2013

In Search of Identity of Generation ‘89. On the Backroads of Hypercreativity

Próba charakterystyki pokolenia po ’89 okazuje się problematyczna ze względu na brak wspólnego mianownika historycznego; dotąd nie można mówić o wytworzeniu jakiejkolwiek ponadjednostkowej tożsamości. Cechy przypisywane młodemu pokoleniu, takie jak: biegłość technologiczna, elastyczność na rynku i tzw. kreatywność są cechami powierzchownymi. Ciągła ich obecność w dyskursie jest utrudnieniem w krystalizowaniu się tożsamości grupy rówieśniczej, jak i indywidualizmu jednostek. Jest to specyficzne pokolenie, które nadal nie posiada tożsamości, bowiem jednostki wspólnie istnieją wyłącznie jako grupa konsumencka. Genezą problemu zdaje się bezkrytyczny stosunek do rynku. Kreatywność, którą rzekomo odznacza się to pokolenie nie spełnia podstawowej definicji – sam brak postawy innowacyjnej charakteryzuje przede wszystkim środowisko młodych twórców.The attempt to characterize the generation ‘89 is problematic because it lacks a common denominator in history. We are not able to talk about representatives of this generation as the group with superindividual identity. Young people are technologically proficient, flexible in labour market and ‘creative’ – but these characteristics are superficial. Their presence in discourse is an impediment to forming peer group identity or the identity of an individual. Generation born after 1989 – called the pictorial generation – is a specific case of youths without identity because individuals operate together only as a consumer group. The reason might be their uncritical approach to the market. Creativity of ‘the pictorials’ do not meet the definition of creativity – even in youths’ art communities

Self-reported benefits from successive bilateral cochlear implantation in post-lingually deafened adults: randomised controlled trial. Beneficios auto-reportados en la implantación coclear bilateral consecutiva en adultos ensordecidos postlingüísticos: prueba aleatoria controlada

Adult users of unilateral Nucleus CI24 cochlear implants with the SPEAK processing strategy were randomised either to receive a second identical implant in the contralateral ear immediately, or to wait 12 months while they acted as controls for late-emerging benefits of the first implant. Twenty four subjects, twelve from each group, completed the study. Receipt of a second implant led to improvements in self-reported abilities in spatial hearing, quality of hearing, and hearing for speech, but to generally non-significant changes in measures of quality of life. Multivariate analyses showed that positive changes in quality of life were associated with improvements in hearing, but were offset by negative changes associated with worsening tinnitus. Even in a best-case scenario, in which no worsening of tinnitus was assumed to occur, the gain in quality of life was too small to achieve an acceptable cost-effectiveness ratio. The most promising strategies for improving the cost-effectiveness of bilateral implantation are to increase effectiveness through enhanced signal processing in binaural processors, and to reduce the cost of implant hardware

Criteria of candidacy for unilateral cochlear implantation in postlingually deafened adults I: Theory and measures of effectiveness

Objectives: The objectives of this study were to distinguish the equivalent-effectiveness, health-economic, and actuarial approaches to specifying criteria of candidacy for medical interventions; to apply the equivalent-effectiveness approach to unilateral cochlear implantation for postlingually deafened adults; and to determine whether the criterion should take age at implantation and duration of profound deafness into account. Design: The study was designed as a prospective cohort study in 13 hospitals with four groups of severely-profoundly hearing-impaired subjects distinguished by their preoperative ability to identify words in sentences when aided acoustically. The groups represent a progressive relaxation of criteria of candidacy: Group I (N = 134) scored 0% correct without lipreading and did not improve their lipreading score significantly when aided; group II (N = 93) scored 0% without lipreading but did improve their lipreading score significantly when aided; group III (N = 53) scored 0% without lipreading when the to-be-implanted ear was aided but between 1% and ~50% when the other ear was aided. Group IV (N = 31) scored between 1% and ~50% without lipreading when the to-be-implanted ear was aided. Measures of speech intelligibility, health utility, and otologically relevant quality of life were obtained before surgery and 9 mo after surgery from each subject. Measures of effectiveness were calculated as the difference between 9-mo and preoperative scores. Results: Effectiveness differed only slightly between groups. Effectiveness was not strongly associated with age at the time of implantation. Greater effectiveness was associated with implantation in the ear with the shorter duration of profound deafness. Cochlear implantation was least effective when the preoperative audiological status of the better-hearing ear was good and the duration of profound deafness of the implanted ear was long. As a result, effectiveness was not significant for the subsets of groups III and IV, who were given implants in ears that had been profoundly deaf for more than 30 yr. Conclusions: The effectiveness of cochlear implantation differs little between groups of candidates who score zero with acoustic hearing aids before surgery and groups who score up to ~50% correct, thereby justifying a relaxation of the criterion of candidacy to embrace some members of the latter groups. The criterion should be based not only on preoperative speech intelligibility but also on duration of profound deafness in the to-be-implanted ear