A system to measure the mass of a projectile launched from an exploding foil gun Final report

Device to measure mass of projectile launched from exploding foil gun for application to design of protective armor for spacecraf

Towards environments that have a sense of humor

Humans have humorous conversations and interactions. Nowadays our real life existence is integrated with our life in social media, videogames, mixed reality and physical environments that sense our activities and that can adapt appearance and properties due to our activities. There are other inhabitants in these environments, not only human, but also virtual agents and social robots with which we interact and who decide about their participation in activities. In this paper we look at designing humor and humor opportunities in such environments, providing them with a sense of humor, and able to recognize opportunities to generate humorous interactions or events on the fly. Opportunities, made possible by introducing incongruities, can be exploited by the environment itself, or they can be communicated to its inhabitants

The football fan and the pub: An enduring relationship

This paper draws on qualitative interviews with a sample of English football fans to explore their relationship with one enduring site for fandom practice, the pub. In doing so, the work discusses the significance of structuration processes as a means of explaining the transcendent nature of this relationship across time and space. The findings complement existing ethnographic observations to illustrate that a progressive and multifaceted relationship exists between the institution (the pub) and its customers (football fans), based on historical reference to fan culture, emotive connection to the pub as a football space, associated sociability and the perception of cultural stability

Critical Comedy: Satire, absurdity and Ireland’s economic crash

Satirical humour increasingly plays a part in the public sphere, particularly in anglophone countries, and quite remarkably so during Ireland's economic crash. While this satire is ostensibly and avowedly critical, irreverently satirising figures of authority and hegemonic discourses, it is argued that the consequences of critical comedy do not necessarily emancipate, but do inculcate critical sensibility and a world-image of politics as irredeemably absurd. Drawing on the works of Bakhtin on carnival and satire, Bergson on laughter and Billig on ridicule, a selection of representative mainstream Irish satire is interpreted as not only discursively positing politicians and public figures as corrupt, stupid and self-serving, but also, more importantly, positing ‘the people’ as gullible and uncritical. Hence, the overall consequence of satire and critical discourse is the diffusion of generalised cynicism which takes the public sphere as a theatre of absurdity

Mischief humor in smart and playable cities

In smart cities we can expect to witness human behavior that is not be different from human behavior in present-day cities. There will be demonstrations, flash mobs, and organized events to provoke the smart city establishment. Smart cities will have bugs that can be exploited by hackers. Smart cities can also offer their data to civic hackers, who may create useful applications for city dwellers. Humor is an important aspect of our daily activities and experiences. In this chapter, we explore how humor can become part of smart and playable cities. We do this by investigating the role of humor in game environments. In games, we have accidental humor, for example because of bugs, and we have humor that occurs because a gamer wants it to happen. This latter type of humor can be produced by looking for bugs, by not following the rules of the game, or by intentionally creating situations that lead to humorous events in the game. This may certainly include humor at the expense of others. We investigate how such views of game humor can find analogues in the humor that may appear and be created in smart and playable cities