Scaffolding Novices to Leverage Auditory Awareness Cues in First-Person Shooters

Today's digital games require the mastery of many different skills. This is accomplished through play itself -- sometimes experientially and other times by using explicit guidance provided by the game designer. Multiplayer games, due to their competitive nature, provide fewer opportunities for designers to guide players into mastering particular skills, and so players must learn and master skills experientially. However, when novices compete against better players -- as they would if they were new to the game -- they can feel overwhelmed by the skill differential. This may hinder the ability of novices to learn experientially, and more importantly, may lead to extended periods of unsatisfying play and missed social play opportunities as they struggle to improve in a competitive context. A game genre that suffers from this problem is the multiplayer first-person shooter (FPS), in which the skill difference between new players and experts who have reached a high level of expertise can be quite large. To succeed in a FPS, players must master a number of skills, the most obvious of which are navigating a complex 3D environment and targeting opponents. To target opponents in a 3D environment, you must also be able to locate them -- a skill known as "opponent location awareness". With the goal of helping novices learn the skill of opponent location awareness, we first conducted an experiment to determine how experts accomplish this important task in multiplayer FPS games. After determining that an understanding of audio cues -- and how to leverage them -- was critical, we designed and evaluated two systems for introducing this skill of locating opponents through audio cues -- an explicit stand-alone training system, and a modified game interface for embedded training. We found that both systems improved accuracy and confidence, but that the explicit training system led to more audio cues being recognized. Our work may help people of disparate skill be able to play together, by scaffolding novices to learn and use a strategy commonly employed by experts

Failure assessment of lightly reinforced floor slabs. I: Experimental investigation

This paper is concerned with the ultimate behavior of lightly reinforced concrete floor slabs under extreme loading conditions. Particular emphasis is given to examining the failure conditions of idealized composite slabs which become lightly reinforced in a fire situation as a result of the early loss of the steel deck. An experimental study is described which focuses on the response of two-way spanning floor slabs with various materials and geometric configurations. The tests enable direct assessment of the influence of a number of key parameters such as the reinforcement type, properties, and ratio on the ultimate response. The results also permit the development of simplified expressions that capture the influence of salient factors such as bond characteristics and reinforcement properties for predicting the ductility of lightly reinforced floor slabs. The companion paper complements the experimental observations with detailed numerical assessments of the ultimate response and proposes analytical models that predict failure of slab members by either reinforcement fracture or compressive crushing of concrete. © 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers

Systematic performance measurement for university libraries in Vietnam

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Level Up: Supporting In-Game Skill Development

Video games are challenging and complex. They require players to master a diverse set of skills to succeed. Through play, players acquire and eventually master these skills, transitioning from novice to expert through skill development. Making progress and performing well in a game is directly tied to a player's ability to master in-game skills, so players are strongly motivated to get better at the games they play. Games can do a good job of supporting a new player's learning, but too often they leave a player to work out for themselves how to improve and get better at the game. The problem is that game designers do not always know how to support skill development in their games. To solve this problem, we need to better understand how skill learning occurs in games, as well as explore specific new approaches for supporting skill learning in games. Games are not the only context in which skill development and high performance is important --- the field of human performance already explores this in detail and provides many theories to apply to this new domain. Inspired by these theories I explore different ways of supporting players’ learning at two different stages of skill development. First, I explore how early learning can be supported through the use of guidance and explore how later learning can be supported by modifying practice. Testing out the effects of guidance by providing new players with different levels of navigation guidance and evaluating how well they were able to learn the environment, I found that guidance improved a player's immediate performance and allowed them to complete tasks within the game more effectively. I evaluated the idea of modifying practice by applying spaced practice (having players take breaks when playing) in two different games, as well as by adding checkpoints to a side-scrolling platform game. I found that having players take breaks improved players' immediate performance and allowed them to make more progress within the game and that a variety of break lengths were effective. I found that checkpoints allowed players to make progress in the game and learn the game just as effectively as when checkpoints were not present. Overall, this research adds to our understanding of how skill development occurs in games and provides some concrete examples of how support methods used in other contexts (such as in sports) can be applied to digital gaming

Internationalisation, cultural distance and country characteristics: a Bayesian analysis of SME's financial performance

Relying on the accounting data of a panel of 403 Italian manufacturing SMEs collected over a period of 5 years, we find results suggesting that multinationality per se does not impact on the economic performance of international small and medium sized firms. It is the characteristics of the country selected i.e. the political hazard, the financial stability and the economic performance that significantly influence SMEs financial performance. The management implication for small and medium sized firms selecting and entering new geographic markets is significant, since our results show that for SMEs it is the market selection process that really matters and not the degree of multinationality

Prospective Phase II trial of drug-eluting bead chemoembolization for liver transplant candidates with hepatocellular carcinoma and marginal hepatic reserve.

Purpose: To determine whether chemoembolization using drug-eluting beads (DEB-TACE) is safe and effective for liver transplantation candidates with liver-limited hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) without vascular invasion and baseline hepatic dysfunction. Materials and methods: Seventeen adult liver transplantation candidates (median age 66 years, range 58-73 years; 13 men) with HCC were treated with DEB-TACE as a part of Stage 1 of a prospective single-institution Phase II trial. All patients had marginal hepatic reserve based on at least one of the following criteria: ascites (n=14), bilirubin between 3 and 6 mg/dL (n=5), AST 5-10 times upper normal limit (n=1), INR between 1.6 and 2.5 (n=4), portal vein thrombosis (n=2), and/or portosystemic shunt (n=2). Primary study objectives were safety and best observed radiographic response. Results: Thirty-seven DEB-TACE procedures were performed. Objective response rate and disease control rate were 63% and 88%, respectively. HCC progression was observed in 12 patients. Median time to progression was 5.6 months (range 0.9-13.6 months). Within 1 month following DEB-TACE, 13 patients (76%) developed grade 3 or 4 AE attributable to the procedure. Four patients (all within Milan Criteria) were transplanted (2.7-6.9 months after DEB-TACE), and 12 patients died (1.8-32 months after DEB-TACE). All deaths were due to liver failure that was either unrelated to HCC (n=5), in the setting of metastatic HCC (n=5), or in the setting of locally advanced HCC (n=2). Mortality rate at 1 month was 0%. Conclusions: DEB-TACE achieves tumor responses but carries a high risk of hepatotoxicity for liver transplant candidates with HCC and marginal hepatic reserve

Targeting the choroid plexus-CSF-brain nexus using peptides identified by phage display.

Drug delivery to the central nervous system requires the use of specific portals to enable drug entry into the brain and, as such, there is a growing need to identify processes that can enable drug transfer across both blood-brain and blood-cerebrospinal fluid barriers. Phage display is a powerful combinatorial technique that identifies specific peptides that can confer new activities to inactive particles. Identification of these peptides is directly dependent on the specific screening strategies used for their selection and retrieval. This chapter describes three selection strategies, which can be used to identify peptides that target the choroid plexus (CP) directly or for drug translocation across the CP and into cerebrospinal fluid

Fermi Surface of The One-dimensional Kondo Lattice Model

We show a strong indication of the existence of a large Fermi surface in the one-dimensional Kondo lattice model. The characteristic wave vector of the model is found to be $k_F=(1+\rho )\pi /2$, $\rho$ being the density of the conduction electrons. This result is at first obtained for a variant of the model that includes an antiferromagnetic Heisenberg interaction $J_H$ between the local moments. It is then directly observed in the conventional Kondo lattice $(J_H=0)$, in the narrow range of Kondo couplings where the long distance properties of the model are numerically accessible.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure