Gaming the Network Poetic: Networking and Code in Art Games

Videogames have historically used networking either to connect players for competition or cooperation or to provide an ephemeral connection to allow the upload, comparison, or assessment of single-player achievement data. The majority of videogames take place on a screen and on established platforms each of which have physical, technical, and sociocultural constraints that dictate how a player will interact. Recent art games, such as those by Jason Rohrer and the Atari VCS games of Ian Bogost highlight experiments in a more focused use of the medium from concept to interaction, both between the player and the software but also foregrounding the code (both social codes and actual software) of the games. These artists are part of a growing movement of videogame creators that are involved not only as designers but also as cultural critics invested in the analysis of platforms and the distribution of their games. This thesis documents the development and exhibition of Gaming the Network Poetic, a series of five videogames developed by the author. This was itself an experiment in both the use of networking and in the exhibition of a cohesive art object incorporating these games. The work is then contextualized through the analysis of game-based art movements, the contemporary independent (or Indie ) games movement, and contemporary software/code-based art. Also, given that much of the theory around videogames is rooted in literary criticism, philosophy, and cultural history, these disciplines are also referenced throughout the discussion. Further, this thesis will address questions about the aesthetic, mechanical, and audience-related considerations of developing and installing videogames in a contemporary art space that shows mostly static work. What roles does the audience play in such an environment? How can videogames create meaning? How does one communicate emotion through a single videogame? How does the open networking of several videogames quickly add complexity, and how can that complexity be managed? What are the issues involved in choosing particular hardware and software platforms on which to present the work

Establishing a nurse-led thyroid cancer follow-up clinic

Thyroid cancer is a complex disease requiring management by a large multidisciplinary team. The number of patients with a diagnosis of thyroid cancer is significantly increasing year-on-year, and traditional models of consultant-led follow up are no longer sustainable. Although nurse-led cancer follow-up clinics are becomining increasingly common, thyroid cancer nurse-led follow-up clinics are rare. An excellent understanding of the disease, treatment and management of risk of disease recurrence is essential for safe patient care, and is discussed in this article. The clinic discussed uses the skill set of head and neck nurse specialists, including psychological support, coping strategies for long-term side effects of treatment and non-medical prescribing. A patient survey of the service revealed high levels of patient satisfaction and a desire to continue face-to-face consultations rather than telephone clinics

Representations of Binary Decision Rules by Generalized Decisiveness Structures

This paper is motivated by two apparently dissimilar deficiencies in the theory of social choice and the theory of cooperative games. Both deficiencies stem from what we regard as an inadequate conception of decisiveness or coalitional power. Our main purpose will be to present a more general concept of decisiveness and to show that this notion allows us to characterize broad classes of games and social choice procedures

Multicriterial ranking approach for evaluating bank branch performance

14 ranking methods based on multiple criteria are suggested for evaluating the performance of the bank branches. The methods are explained via an illustrative example, and some of them are applied to a real-life data for 23 retail bank branches in a large-scale private Turkish commercial bank

Processing second-order stochastic dominance models using cutting-plane representations

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the links below. Copyright @ 2011 Springer-VerlagSecond-order stochastic dominance (SSD) is widely recognised as an important decision criterion in portfolio selection. Unfortunately, stochastic dominance models are known to be very demanding from a computational point of view. In this paper we consider two classes of models which use SSD as a choice criterion. The first, proposed by Dentcheva and Ruszczyński (J Bank Finance 30:433–451, 2006), uses a SSD constraint, which can be expressed as integrated chance constraints (ICCs). The second, proposed by Roman et al. (Math Program, Ser B 108:541–569, 2006) uses SSD through a multi-objective formulation with CVaR objectives. Cutting plane representations and algorithms were proposed by Klein Haneveld and Van der Vlerk (Comput Manage Sci 3:245–269, 2006) for ICCs, and by Künzi-Bay and Mayer (Comput Manage Sci 3:3–27, 2006) for CVaR minimization. These concepts are taken into consideration to propose representations and solution methods for the above class of SSD based models. We describe a cutting plane based solution algorithm and outline implementation details. A computational study is presented, which demonstrates the effectiveness and the scale-up properties of the solution algorithm, as applied to the SSD model of Roman et al. (Math Program, Ser B 108:541–569, 2006).This study was funded by OTKA, Hungarian National Fund for Scientific Research, project 47340; by Mobile Innovation Centre, Budapest University of Technology, project 2.2; Optirisk Systems, Uxbridge, UK and by BRIEF (Brunel University Research Innovation and Enterprise Fund)

The Match Set of a Random Permutation Has the FKG Property

We prove a conjecture of Joag-Dev and Goel that if M = M(σ) = {i: σ(i) = i} is the (random) match set, or set of fixed points, of a random permutation σ of 1,2,…,n, then f(M) and g(M) are positively correlated whenever f and g are increasing real-valued set functions on 2{1,…,n}, i.e., Ef(M) g(M) ≥ Ef(M) Eg(M). No simple use of the FKG or Ahlswede-Daykin inequality seems to establish this, despite the fact that the FKG hypothesis is almost satisfied. Instead we reduce to the case where f and g take values in {0,1}, and make a case-by-case argument: Depending on the specific form of f and g, we move the probability weights around so as to make them satisfy the FKG or Ahlswede-Daykin hypotheses, without disturbing the expectations Ef, Eg, Efg. This approach extends the methodology by which FKG-style correlation inequalities can be proved

Keeping on Track: Using Basecamp to Manage a Classroom-As-Game-Studio

Keeping on Track: Using Basecamp to Manage a Classroom-As-Game-Studio Josh Fishburn Assistant Professor, Department of Interactive Multimedia The College of New Jersey [email protected] I\u27ve been teaching team-based, interdisciplinary game development courses for a few years, but this semester am teaching using new technology (the team project management software Basecamp) and envisioning myself in a new role (that of producer in a game company with several current projects). I set a goal that each team would publish their game (as a demo or complete product) by the end of the semester. As the producer, my job is to make sure that the games get out the door on time. To facilitate this, each student is expected to log at least six hours of work outside of class each week and specifically account for that time in a weekly report. During our weekly four-hour class meeting, I check in with each group, help to identify any blocks to their progress, coordinate playtesting of the games, and offer feedback (and pushback) when needed. Another notable feature of the course is that, borrowing from *learner-centered teaching* techniques, it focusses on one major collaborative project, with the rest of the points coming from a menu of assignment options from which students can choose to reach their desired maximum grade. A few questions that I’ve been interested in, for which I plan to get answers from students are: Does the weekly report, which is viewable to all students in the class, create an incentive to put meaningful work into the class between our physical meetings? How does this compare to your outside work for other classes? How would you explain any difference? Has Basecamp’s strengths as a team collaboration tool outweighed its weaknesses as a traditional course management tool? How has the course design (if at all) contributed to your feeling of ownership of your own direction and learning? For this presentation, I plan to compare the features of Basecamp with those of Instructure\u27s Canvas, the course management system that my campus uses. I’ll share my Basecamp setup for this class, features and structures that I’ve found particularly useful, and how I might have achieved a similar setup in Canvas. Finally, I’ll discuss what I’ve found to be best practices in the context of the questions above

Neural correlates of early deliberate emotion regulation: Young children\u27s responses to interpersonal scaffolding.

Deliberate emotion regulation, the ability to willfully modulate emotional experiences, is shaped through interpersonal scaffolding and forecasts later functioning in multiple domains. However, nascent deliberate emotion regulation in early childhood is poorly understood due to a paucity of studies that simulate interpersonal scaffolding of this skill and measure its occurrence in multiple modalities. Our goal was to identify neural and behavioral components of early deliberate emotion regulation to identify patterns of competent and deficient responses. A novel probe was developed to assess deliberate emotion regulation in young children. Sixty children (age 4-6 years) were randomly assigned to deliberate emotion regulation or control conditions. Children completed a frustration task while lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) activation was recorded via functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Facial expressions were video recorded and children self-rated their emotions. Parents rated their child\u27s temperamental emotion regulation. Deliberate emotion regulation interpersonal scaffolding predicted a significant increase in frustration-related LPFC activation not seen in controls. Better temperamental emotion regulation predicted larger LPFC activation increases post- scaffolding among children who engaged in deliberate emotion regulation interpersonal scaffolding. A capacity to increase LPFC activation in response to interpersonal scaffolding may be a crucial neural correlate of early deliberate emotion regulation

Sets Uniquely Determined by Projections on Axes I. Continuous Case

This paper studies sets S in Rn which are uniquely reconstructible from their hyperplane integral projections Pi(xi ;S) = ∬ . . . ∫ΧS ( {x1, . . . ,xi, . . . ,xn) dx1 . . . dxi - 1 dxi + 1 . . .dxn onto the n coordinate axes of Rn. It is shown that any additive set S = {x = (x1, . . .,xn) : ∑i = 1n fi(xi)≧0}, where each fi(xi) is a bounded measurable function, is uniquely reconstructible. In particular, balls are uniquely reconstructible. It is shown that in R2 all uniquely reconstructible sets are additive. For n≧3, Kemperman has shown that there are uniquely reconstructible sets in Rn of bounded measure that are not additive. It is also noted for n≧3 that neither of the properties of being additive and being a set of uniqueness is closed under monotone pointwise limits. A necessary condition for S to be a set of uniqueness is that S contain no bad configuration. A bad configuration is two finite sets of points T1 in Int(S) and T2 in Int(Sc), where Sc=Rn - S, such that T1 and T2 have the same number of points in any hyperplane xi = c for 1≦ i ≦n, and all c ∈ R2. We show that this necessary condition is sufficient for uniqueness for open sets S in R2. The results show that prior information about a density f in R2 to be reconstructed in tomography (namely if f is known to have only values 0 and 1) can sometimes reduce the problem of reconstructing f to knowing only two projections of f. Thus even meager prior information can in principle be of enormous value in tomography

Representations of Binary Decision Rules by Generalized Decisiveness Structures

This paper is motivated by two apparently dissimilar deficiencies in the theory of social choice and the theory of cooperative games. Both deficiencies stem from what we regard as an inadequate conception of decisiveness or coalitional power. Our main purpose will be to present a more general concept of decisiveness and to show that this notion allows us to characterize broad classes of games and social choice procedures