6,028 research outputs found
Facilitating open plot structures in story driven video games using situation generation
Story driven video games are rising in popularity, along with the players desire to make meaningful choice within the plot and therefore become more involved and immersed within the experience. This paper investigates the problems which arise from implementing interactive narrative within video games and potential techniques to solve those problems. The main focus of the study was the situation generation technique, used to maintain the continuity within open, emergent plot structures, using behaviour trees as a means to implement and traverse plot sequences. The ISGEngine was developed during the course of this study in order to implement and evaluate the situation generation technique
The Output Cost of Disinflation in Traditional and Vector Autoregressive Models
macroeconomics, vector autoregressive model, disinflation
The Politics of the Imagination: A life of F.R. Scott
The task of a biographer is a challenging one at best. And when the subject is one who has achieved distinction in many fields the difficulties are magnified many times. Better, perhaps, to settle for a Festschift where colleagues and friends in fields in which the subject has excelled join together to pay their separate tributes. So in the case of Frank Scott and his biographer, Sandra Djwa. She is a professor of literature and has achieved recognition for the work she has done on the writings and life of E.J. Pratt. It was undoubtedly Frank Scott, the distinguished Canadian poet, who originally became the focus of her attraction. But ER. Scott was also distinguished as a creative political thinker, an expert in constitutional law, an active exponent of human rights, and a Canadian nationalist who, looking ahead, could say: the world is my country
Commentary : missing targets on drugs-related deaths, and a Scottish paradox
The 10-year drug strategy for England and Wales was published in February 2008. It dropped drugs-related deaths (DRDs) as a key performance indicator. Scotland retained a necessary strong focus on DRDs. Scotland's DRDs numbered 1006 in 2000–02 and 1009 in 2003–05. The previous Scottish administration's claim that its number of current injectors had decreased substantially between 2000 and 2003 implied, paradoxically, that their DRD rate would have to have increased. Worse was to come: Scotland's DRDs had increased to 876 in 2006 + 2007. We analyse UK's DRDs by sex and age-group to reveal temporal trends (2000–02 versus 2003–05 versus 2006 + 2007) with different public health and epidemiological implications. We also address the above Scottish paradox and assess, by age-group, how consistent Scotland's 876 DRDs in 2006 + 2007 are with Scottish injectors’ DRD rate in 2003–05 of around 1 per 100 injector-years. Public health success in the UK in reducing DRDs at younger ages should not be overshadowed by the late consequence in terms of older-age DRDs of UK's injector epidemics; in the early 1980s in Scotland, and late 1980s in England and Wales. Targets for reducing DRDs should pay heed to UK's injector epidemics
The Use of Acoustoelastic Measurements to Characterize the Stress States in Cracked Solids
The theory of acoustoelasticity predicts that a plane longitudinal acoustic wave passing through a solid which is already in a deformed state will propagate with a velocity (v) which is different from the (v0) of the same wave propagating through the undeformed medium. It may be shown that Δv/v0 = (v-v0)/v0 = B(σ1+σ2) where σ1 and σ2 are the principal stress in the plane normal to the wave propagation direction and B is the acoustoelastic constant. Wave transit time measurements allow the relative velocity change Δv/v0 to be determined, so that contours of constant principal stress sum (σ1+σ2) may be mapped by acoustically scanning a stressed solid. We have used the technique described above to characterize the states of stress in cracked and notched aluminum panels. A method for extracting crack stress intensity factors from the acoustic data is proposed and illustrated for center-cracked panel specimens. The results indicate that the technique may offer a promising method for nondestructive testing and evaluation
Decoding Neural Activity to Assess Individual Latent State in Ecologically Valid Contexts
There exist very few ways to isolate cognitive processes, historically
defined via highly controlled laboratory studies, in more ecologically valid
contexts. Specifically, it remains unclear as to what extent patterns of neural
activity observed under such constraints actually manifest outside the
laboratory in a manner that can be used to make an accurate inference about the
latent state, associated cognitive process, or proximal behavior of the
individual. Improving our understanding of when and how specific patterns of
neural activity manifest in ecologically valid scenarios would provide
validation for laboratory-based approaches that study similar neural phenomena
in isolation and meaningful insight into the latent states that occur during
complex tasks. We argue that domain generalization methods from the
brain-computer interface community have the potential to address this
challenge. We previously used such an approach to decode phasic neural
responses associated with visual target discrimination. Here, we extend that
work to more tonic phenomena such as internal latent states. We use data from
two highly controlled laboratory paradigms to train two separate
domain-generalized models. We apply the trained models to an ecologically valid
paradigm in which participants performed multiple, concurrent driving-related
tasks. Using the pretrained models, we derive estimates of the underlying
latent state and associated patterns of neural activity. Importantly, as the
patterns of neural activity change along the axis defined by the original
training data, we find changes in behavior and task performance consistent with
the observations from the original, laboratory paradigms. We argue that these
results lend ecological validity to those experimental designs and provide a
methodology for understanding the relationship between observed neural activity
and behavior during complex tasks
Phase transitions in BaTiO from first principles
We develop a first-principles scheme to study ferroelectric phase transitions
for perovskite compounds. We obtain an effective Hamiltonian which is fully
specified by first-principles ultra-soft pseudopotential calculations. This
approach is applied to BaTiO, and the resulting Hamiltonian is studied
using Monte Carlo simulations. The calculated phase sequence, transition
temperatures, latent heats, and spontaneous polarizations are all in good
agreement with experiment. The order-disorder vs.\ displacive character of the
transitions and the roles played by different interactions are discussed.Comment: 13 page
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XMM-Newton Observations of the Ultraluminous Nuclear X-ray Source in M33
We present observations with XMM-Newton of M33 X-8, the ultraluminous X-ray
source (L_{0.5-10 keV} ~ 2x10^39 erg/s) closest to the centre of the galaxy.
The best-fit model is similar to the typical model of Galactic black holes in
very high state. Comparison with previous observations indicates that the
source is still in a very high state after about 20 years of observations. No
state transition has been observed even during the present set of XMM-Newton
observations. We estimate the lower limit of the mass of the black hole >6
M_sun, but with proper parameters taking into account different effects, the
best estimate becomes 12 M_sun. Our analysis favours the hypothesis that M33
X-8 is a stellar mass black hole candidate, in agreement with the findings of
other authors. In addition, we propose a different model where the high
luminosity of the source is likely to be due to orientation effects of the
accretion disc and anisotropies in the Comptonized emission.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication on A&A Main Journal. A
bug in the introduction has been corrected (a citation
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