878 research outputs found
Designing multiplayer games to facilitate emergent social behaviours online
This paper discusses an exploratory case study of the design of games that facilitate spontaneous social interaction and group behaviours among distributed individuals, based largely on symbolic presence 'state' changes. We present the principles guiding the design of our game environment: presence as a symbolic phenomenon, the importance of good visualization and the potential for spontaneous self-organization among groups of people. Our game environment, comprising a family of multiplayer 'bumper-car' style games, is described, followed by a discussion of lessons learned from observing users of the environment. Finally, we reconsider and extend our design principles in light of our observations
The roots of "Western European societal evolution". A concept of Europe by JenĆ SzƱcs
JenĆ SzƱcs wrote his essay entitled Sketch on the three regions of Europe in the early 1980s in Hungary. During these years, a historically well-argued opinion emphasising a substantial difference between Central European and Eastern European societies was warmly received in various circles of the political opposition. In a wider European perspective SzƱcs used the old âliberty toposâ which claims that the history of Europe is no other than the fulfillment of liberty. In his Sketch, SzƱcs does not only concentrate on questions concerning the Middle Ages in Western Europe. Yet it is this stream of thought which brought a new perspective to explaining European history. His picture of the Middle Ages represents well that there is a way to integrate all typical Western motifs of post-war self-definition into a single theory. Mainly, the âliberty motifâ, as a sign of âEuropeanismâ â in the interpretation of BibĂłâs concept, Anglo-saxon Marxists and Weberâs social theory â, developed from medieval concepts of state and society and from an analysis of economic and social structures. SzƱcsâs historical aspect was a typical intellectual product of the 1980s: this was the time when a few Central European historians started to outline non-Marxist aspects of social theory and categories of modernisation theories, but concealing them with Marxist terminology
Cosmological Multi-Black Hole Solutions
We present simple, analytic solutions to the Einstein-Maxwell equation, which
describe an arbitrary number of charged black holes in a spacetime with
positive cosmological constant . In the limit , these
solutions reduce to the well known Majumdar-Papapetrou (MP) solutions. Like the
MP solutions, each black hole in a solution has charge equal
to its mass , up to a possible overall sign. Unlike the limit,
however, solutions with are highly dynamical. The black holes move
with respect to one another, following natural trajectories in the background
deSitter spacetime. Black holes moving apart eventually go out of causal
contact. Black holes on approaching trajectories ultimately merge. To our
knowledge, these solutions give the first analytic description of coalescing
black holes. Likewise, the thermodynamics of the solutions is
quite interesting. Taken individually, a black hole is in thermal
equilibrium with the background deSitter Hawking radiation. With more than one
black hole, because the solutions are not static, no global equilibrium
temperature can be defined. In appropriate limits, however, when the black
holes are either close together or far apart, approximate equilibrium states
are established.Comment: 15 pages (phyzzx), UMHEP-380 (minor referencing error corrected
Cambodian Higher Education Governance: The Politics of Global Summitry and Clientelism
This chapter uses the concepts of âglobal summitryâ and âclientelismâ to theorize higher education governance in Cambodia. After reviewing the history of higher education since the 1960s, the chapter analyzes the countryâs experiences amid regional attempts to harmonize standards, degree structures, quality assurance systems, and credit systems in Southeast Asia. Rather than explicit intervention into Cambodiaâs higher education sector as has been historically common, the contemporary order transmits policy and governance practices through various regional and international forums, creating a seemingly homogenous system of higher education. External influence through global summitry, however, must be paired with a recognition of the prevalence of clientelism. By exploring the case of the Accreditation Council of Cambodia, higher education governance is shown to reproduce the engrained system of clientelism, empowering elites and contributing further to systems of informal patronage. The chapter concludes with recent (up to April 2016) developments in higher education governance, offering some observations and obstacles for future development in the sector
Smart, social, flexible and fun: Escaping the flatlands of virtual learning environments
© 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. This paper describes the development of intelligent, social, flexible and game-based pedagogic approaches and their applications in Virtual Learning Environment based Education. Applications of computer science technologies and techniques can enable, facilitate and change educational approaches, allowing scalable approaches that can address both individual student needs whilst managing large â sometimes-massive - cohort sizes. The benefits of these information systems include supporting the wide range of contexts met in education, in terms of individual needs and specific subject and curriculum requirements. Technologies and approaches that are considered range from the representation of knowledge and the use of intelligent systems, the use of social computing, through to the enabling opportunities of ubicomp and the practical application of game mechanics (gamification). This paper concludes with practical illustrations in the context of undergraduate computer science didactics
Entrepreneurial sons, patriarchy and the Colonels' experiment in Thessaly, rural Greece
Existing studies within the field of institutional entrepreneurship explore how entrepreneurs influence change in economic institutions. This paper turns the attention of scholarly inquiry on the antecedents of deinstitutionalization and more specifically, the influence of entrepreneurship in shaping social institutions such as patriarchy. The paper draws from the findings of ethnographic work in two Greek lowland village communities during the military Dictatorship (1967â1974). Paradoxically this era associated with the spread of mechanization, cheap credit, revaluation of labour and clear means-ends relations, signalled entrepreneurial sonsâ individuated dissent and activism who were now able to question the Patriarchâs authority, recognize opportunities and act as unintentional agents of deinstitutionalization. A âdifferentâ model of institutional change is presented here, where politics intersects with entrepreneurs, in changing social institutions. This model discusses the external drivers of institutional atrophy and how handling dissensus (and its varieties over historical time) is instrumental in enabling institutional entrepreneurship
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Developing the concept of society: Institutional domains, regimes of inequalities and complex systems in a global era
This article develops the concept of society to meet the challenge of cross-border and global processes. Global processes have made visible the inadequacy of interpreting the concept of society as if it were a nation-state, since there is a lack of congruence of institutional domains (economy, polity, civil society, violence) and regimes of inequality (class, gender, ethnicity). The article engages with two strands of intellectual heritage in sociological analysis of society as a macro concept: the differentiation of institutions and the relations of inequality. The concepts of society and societalisation are developed by hybridising these two approaches rather than selecting only one or the other. To achieve this, the concept of system is developed by drawing on complexity science. This enables the simultaneous analysis of differentiated institutional domains (economy, polity, violence, civil society) and multiple regimes of inequality without reductionism. In turn, this facilitates the fluent theorisation of variations in the temporal and spatial reach of social systems
Euroregions: Institutional Entrepreneurship in the European Union
This is chapter from the book, Globalization, regionalization, and cross-border regions
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