Virtual Property, Real Concerns

The status of digital property protection, especially in virtual worlds, is uncertain to say the least. These are the issues that I will review in this note. In section II, I will discuss the foundations of virtual worlds and their growth from pre-computer roots to present day sprawling universes. This background will provide a foundation for novices in the virtual world realm and an anchor for the important role that these games play in the lives of not only young Americans, but people of all ages and nationalities around the world. Part III will discuss the critical characteristics of virtual property. The conjunction between virtual property and physical property-such as exclusivity, persistence, transferability and transformative properties-create the value in virtual property that makes protection of the property important. With virtual property characteristics described, I will discuss various examples of just how critical this virtual property has become, not only to the lives of individuals, but to society in general, and what protections are currently in place, such as licensing agreements. This will set the stage for the remainder of the note. Part IV will describe several common theories on virtual property rights, including the Lockean Labor Theory, Personality Theory, Utilitarianism, and the idea of treating virtual property as intangible real property. The merits and shortcomings of these various theories will be discussed. Part V will discuss current implementations of virtual property protection, including physical protection through code and some actual and current legal frameworks-both within the United States and abroad-that are currently available to gainers and virtual world developers. Finally, Part VI will discuss some practical considerations of any system that intends to extend protection to virtual property and the inherent dangers of applying virtual property protection with a broad brush. I propose a new solution to protecting user rights in property through a hybrid of natural protection. The protection is layered and built on the extension of an existing framework that is made up of the same software code that already controls virtual worlds. The software creates a high-level boundary of allowable behavior. In areas where software cannot properly protect, such as in areas of fraud or theft, the current legal-property regime takes over-much as it does with tangible property. Courts can apply standard property law while overlaying the virtual world rules and the social norms within virtual world. In this way, property can be protected even in virtual worlds where certain kinds of theft are part of the game play

A Unified Approach to High-Gain Adaptive Controllers

It has been known for some time that proportional output feedback will stabilize MIMO, minimum-phase, linear time-invariant systems if the feedback gain is sufficiently large. High-gain adaptive controllers achieve stability by automatically driving up the feedback gain monotonically. More recently, it was demonstrated that sample-and-hold implementations of the high-gain adaptive controller also require adaptation of the sampling rate. In this paper, we use recent advances in the mathematical field of dynamic equations on time scales to unify and generalize the discrete and continuous versions of the high-gain adaptive controller. We prove the stability of high-gain adaptive controllers on a wide class of time scales

Disrupting Eurocentric Education through a Social Justice Curriculm

This paper will illustrate the project conducted to disrupt Eurocentric education through a social justice curriculum. Eurocentric education has silenced and misconstrued the history and truth of marginalized communities. There is a need for curriculums that challenge the dominant narrative and help students of color acknowledge the triumphs and challenges their people face. This curriculum was created to assist students of color towards the process of developing critical consciousness and self-awareness. Through Critical Race Theory and other frameworks we were able to conduct a series of workshops. Through these workshops youth began a process of self-awareness and critical consciousness through self, societal and global awareness through the centralization of race as a result of being engaged, well-delivered content and a beneficial learning environment

Project Gondwana: Jugaribe-SB-24

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Non-stationary extreme models and a climatic application

In this paper, we study extreme values of non-stationary climatic phenomena. In the usually considered stationary case, the modelling of extremes is only based on the behaviour of the tails of the distribution of the remainder of the data set. In the non-stationary case though, it seems reasonable to assume that the temporal dynamics of the entire data set and that of extremes are closely related and thus all the available information about this link should be used in statistical studies of these events. We try to study how centered and normalized data which are closer to stationary data than the observation allows easier statistical analysis and to understand if we are very far from a hypothesis stating that the extreme events of centered and normed data follow a stationary distribution. The location and scale parameters used for this transformation (the central field), as well as extreme parameters obtained for the transformed data enable us to retrieve the trends in extreme events of the initial data set. Through non-parametric statistical methods, we thus compare a model directly built on the extreme events and a model reconstructed from estimations of the trends of the location and scale parameters of the entire data set and stationary extremes obtained from the centered and normed data set. In case of a correct reconstruction, we can clearly state that variations of the characteristics of extremes are well explained by the central field. Through these analyses we bring arguments to choose constant shape parameters of extreme distributions. We show that for the frequency of the moments of high threshold excesses (or for the mean of annual extremes), the general dynamics explains a large part of the trends on frequency of extreme events. The conclusion is less obvious for the amplitudes of threshold exceedances (or the variance of annual extremes) – especially for cold temperatures, partly justified by the statistical tools used, which require further analyses on the variability definition

Bahadur representation of sample quantiles for functional of Gaussian dependent sequences under a minimal assumption

We obtain a Bahadur representation for sample quantiles of nonlinear functional of Gaussian sequences with correlation function decreasing as $k^{-\alpha}$ for some $\alpha > 0$. This representation is derived under a mimimal assumption