Hispanic Hallyu: Comparing Boys Over Flowers Directed By Jeon Ki-Sang With Latino Telenovelas

The term hallyu, meaning Korean wave, was originally coined in the 1990s to describe the proliferation of South Korean popular culture throughout the world. This project focuses specifically on Hispanic populations within North and South America where--despite lack of geographical or cultural proximity to South Korea--Korean movies, dramas, and music have obtained widespread popularity. With respect to K-dramas, this project juxtaposes thematic elements between the K-drama Boys over Flowers directed by Jeon Ki-Sang and Latino telenovelas to determine if K-drama popularity can be ascribed to similarities in motifs between K-dramas and telenovelas

Cloud for Gaming

Cloud for Gaming refers to the use of cloud computing technologies to build large-scale gaming infrastructures, with the goal of improving scalability and responsiveness, improve the user's experience and enable new business models.Comment: Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games. Newton Lee (Editor). Springer International Publishing, 2015, ISBN 978-3-319-08234-

Online gaming addiction: the role of sensation seeking, self-control, neuroticism, aggression, state anxiety and trait anxiety

Research into online gaming has steadily increased over the last decade, although relatively little research has examined the relationship between online gaming addiction and personality factors. This study examined the relationship between a number of personality traits (sensation seeking, self-control, aggression, neuroticism, state anxiety, and trait anxiety) and online gaming addiction. Data were collected over a 1-month period using an opportunity sample of 123 university students at an East Midlands university in the United Kingdom. Gamers completed all the online questionnaires. Results of a multiple linear regression indicated that five traits (neuroticism, sensation seeking, trait anxiety, state anxiety, and aggression) displayed significant associations with online gaming addiction. The study suggests that certain personality traits may be important in the acquisition, development, and maintenance of online gaming addiction, although further research is needed to replicate the findings of the present study

Presence of Meaning in Life Improves Response to Others’ Self-Promotion

Self-promotion is prevalent and aversive. We observe that people who think their life is meaningful tend to experience less negative emotional responses to others’ self-promotional attempts. A simple intervention involving a reflection on the presence of meaning in one’s life significantly improves recipients’ responses to others’ self-promotion

Modulated structures in electroconvection in nematic liquid crystals

Motivated by experiments in electroconvection in nematic liquid crystals with homeotropic alignment we study the coupled amplitude equations describing the formation of a stationary roll pattern in the presence of a weakly-damped mode that breaks isotropy. The equations can be generalized to describe the planarly aligned case if the orienting effect of the boundaries is small, which can be achieved by a destabilizing magnetic field. The slow mode represents the in-plane director at the center of the cell. The simplest uniform states are normal rolls which may undergo a pitchfork bifurcation to abnormal rolls with a misaligned in-plane director.We present a new class of defect-free solutions with spatial modulations perpendicular to the rolls. In a parameter range where the zig-zag instability is not relevant these solutions are stable attractors, as observed in experiments. We also present two-dimensionally modulated states with and without defects which result from the destabilization of the one-dimensionally modulated structures. Finally, for no (or very small) damping, and away from the rotationally symmetric case, we find static chevrons made up of a periodic arrangement of defect chains (or bands of defects) separating homogeneous regions of oblique rolls with very small amplitude. These states may provide a model for a class of poorly understood stationary structures observed in various highly-conducting materials ("prechevrons" or "broad domains").Comment: 13 pages, 13 figure

Haptic search with the Smart Suction Cup on adversarial objects

Suction cups are an important gripper type in industrial robot applications, and prior literature focuses on using vision-based planners to improve grasping success in these tasks. Vision-based planners can fail due to adversarial objects or lose generalizability for unseen scenarios, without retraining learned algorithms. We propose haptic exploration to improve suction cup grasping when visual grasp planners fail. We present the Smart Suction Cup, an end-effector that utilizes internal flow measurements for tactile sensing. We show that model-based haptic search methods, guided by these flow measurements, improve grasping success by up to 2.5x as compared with using only a vision planner during a bin-picking task. In characterizing the Smart Suction Cup on both geometric edges and curves, we find that flow rate can accurately predict the ideal motion direction even with large postural errors. The Smart Suction Cup includes no electronics on the cup itself, such that the design is easy to fabricate and haptic exploration does not damage the sensor. This work motivates the use of suction cups with autonomous haptic search capabilities in especially adversarial scenarios

Initial Analysis of Data-Driven Haptic Search for the Smart Suction Cup

Suction cups offer a useful gripping solution, particularly in industrial robotics and warehouse applications. Vision-based grasp algorithms, like Dex-Net, show promise but struggle to accurately perceive dark or reflective objects, sub-resolution features, and occlusions, resulting in suction cup grip failures. In our prior work, we designed the Smart Suction Cup, which estimates the flow state within the cup and provides a mechanically resilient end-effector that can inform arm feedback control through a sense of touch. We then demonstrated how this cup's signals enable haptically-driven search behaviors for better grasping points on adversarial objects. This prior work uses a model-based approach to predict the desired motion direction, which opens up the question: does a data-driven approach perform better? This technical report provides an initial analysis harnessing the data previously collected. Specifically, we compare the model-based method with a preliminary data-driven approach to accurately estimate lateral pose adjustment direction for improved grasp success

Microcooling Channel Effect on a Monopropellant Microelectromechanical System Thruster Performance

AS MICROELECTROMECHANICAL system fabrication technology advances, the aerospace industry, in pursuing smaller, faster, and cheaper satellites, sees several opportunities for effective satellite operations. Miniature satellites with 1–10 and 10–100 kg masses are called nanosatellites and microsatellites, respectively; and they offer the advantages of faster and cheaper operation. With formation flight using several small satellites, the revisit time can be drastically improved, and almost real-time Earth observation is expected to be possible in the near future.This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MSIP) (no. NRF-2015R1A2A1A15055373)