CRASH: A real-time 3D game engine designed to make game development easy

Developing games on top of commercial game engines is difficult because the projects are too large to quickly understand. We present Crash: an alternative solution to game development that empowers developers to begin working on a game with very little introduction to the project by building a small, extensible, and modular game engine. Design patterns such as dependency injection and interface-based development encourage simple, understandable code and empower developers to divert their efforts toward the playable components of their games

Matrix Gene Splicing and Emergence of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza

Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) is a continual threat to the commercial poultry industry. In the past 40 years there have been five outbreaks of HPAI in North America. Rapid responses to these outbreaks have been crucial in preventing HPAI from becoming endemic in North America. The three worst outbreaks of HPAI in North America occurred in 1983-84, 2014-15, and 2021-23. The most recent outbreak was the worst North American HPAI outbreak in recorded history and will likely result in endemicity. Here we described the three worst recorded HPAI outbreaks in North America. The first of these outbreaks occurred in 1983-1984 and resulted in culling of almost 17 million chickens, turkeys, and guinea fowl. We demonstrated that the 1980s Pennsylvania linage was unique regarding their M gene splicing. These viruses were capable of producing messenger RNA 4 (mRNA4), which had direct implications in the emergence of virulent viruses from this lineage. The avirulent viruses expressed mRNA4 at high levels. We demonstrated that there was strong selection for virulent viruses with weaker mRNA4 splice donor sites. On at least three separate and independent occasions these viruses decreased their mRNA4 expression. Two of these incidents resulted in the emergence of virulent isolates. We demonstrate that a combination of mutations in the M gene coupled with a single amino acid change point mutation were necessary for these viruses to emerge as virulent. We then compared the two North American HPAI outbreaks from the Asian originating goose/Guangdong (Gs/GD) lineage. This lineage has invaded North America on two separate occasions. In 2014-15 these viruses came from Russia and into Alaska and down the Pacific coast of the United States and reassorted with circulating viruses in wild birds. This outbreak resulted in culling of 50.5 million commercial birds. However, rapid response and stamping out procedures were essential in preventing endemicity. In 2021 viruses from the Gs/GD lineage invaded North America. Similar to the 2014-15 outbreak, these viruses originated from Eurasia, but differed in the flyway used to enter North America. Once in North America these viruses reassorted with circulating influenza A viruses in wild bird populations. In our study we used viruses isolated from wild birds and characterized the genotypes and phenotypes of these emergent reassortant viruses. We demonstrated that after these viruses acquired North American wild bird gene segments, they became neuroinvasive and highly virulent in mammalian animal models. To date, this outbreak has resulted in culling almost 60 million commercial poultry. Our results determined that these viruses, although virulent in mammals, retained mostly avian characteristics. We then assessed the risk of the 2021-23 HPAI outbreak to the poultry industry, wild bird populations, and public health. Current vaccine strategies against emerging HPAI strains requires generating reverse genetics (RG) entirely from complementary DNA (cDNA). One of the more common systems utilizes eight plasmids where the cDNA of all eight viral genomic segments is cloned into the bidirectional expression vector pHW2000. This vector encodes the human RNA polymerase I promoter in the reverse direction and the human cytomegalovirus RNA polymerase II promoter in the forward direction. Additionally, it has a T7 promoter with no functional role in cloning viral RNA or generating reverse genetics viruses. During the cloning process leaky expression of flu transcripts in the transformed bacteria occurs from the cytomegalovirus and T7 promoters. Leaky expression of deleterious transcripts puts mutational pressure on the cDNA insert and has become a widespread problem in the field. Here, we demonstrate that mutating the T7 promoter improves plasmid stability and transformation. Generation of RG candidate vaccine strains are now easier with improved efficacy and decreased leaky bacterial expression. This improved plasmid known as pPW2000 can now be used to clone cDNA of emergent viruses and for increased response times when reassortants or novel HPAI strains emerge in nature and threaten public health

Crystallized intelligence and openness to experience: Drawing on intellectual-investment theories to predict job performance longitudinally

Various approaches to conceptualizing and measuring intelligence have been utilized throughout history. Despite the plethora of intelligence theories, the field of industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology has been largely dominated by the psychometric tradition of intelligence and Spearman\u27s general factor theory of intelligence (g). Moreover, other approaches to intelligence (e.g., the developmental perspective) have generally been ignored by I-O psychology. This is puzzling given the widespread acceptance among I-O psychologists of intelligence\u27s substantial and increasing importance in the modern workplace. Supported by a vast amount of research, g has often been recognized as the single best predictor of job performance. However, traditional measures of g have reached a plateau in terms of predictive validity for work-related criteria. Although g is not the sole determinate of job performance, failing to incorporate advancements from other fields (e.g., developmental psychology, cognitive psychology) is a potential limitation to continued improvement of job-performance prediction. One modern approach to intelligence that holds promise for improving our prediction of performance in the workplace is known collectively as the intellectual-investment theories, which posit that intellectual development is partially influenced by investment traits (e.g., Openness to Experience) that guide how, where, and when individuals invest their cognitive ability

Text and Graph Based Approach for Analyzing Patterns of Research Collaboration: An analysis of the TrueImpactDataset

Patterns of scientific collaboration and their effect on scientific production have been the subject of many studies. In this paper, we analyze the nature of ties between co-authors and study collaboration patterns in science from the perspective of semantic similarity of authors who wrote a paper together and the strength of ties between these authors (i.e. how frequently have they previously collaborated together). These two views of scientific collaboration are used to analyze publications in the TrueImpactDataset (Herrmannova et al., 2017) (Herrmannova et al., 2017), a new dataset containing two types of publications – publications regarded as seminal and publications regarded as literature reviews by field experts. We show there are distinct differences between seminal publications and literature reviews in terms of author similarity and the strength of ties between their authors. In particular, we find that seminal publications tend to be written by authors who have previously worked on dissimilar problems (i.e. authors from different fields or even disciplines), and by authors who are not frequent collaborators. On the other hand, literature reviews in our dataset tend to be the result of an established collaboration within a discipline. This demonstrates that our method provides meaningful information about potential future impacts of a publication which does not require citation information

Research Collaboration Analysis Using Text and Graph Features

Patterns of scientific collaboration and their effect on scientific production have been the subject of many studies. In this paper we analyze the nature of ties between co-authors and study collaboration patterns in science from the perspective of semantic similarity of authors who wrote a paper together and the strength of ties between these authors (i.e. how much have they previously collaborated together). These two views of scientific collaboration are used to analyze publications in the TrueImpactDataset [11], a new dataset containing two types of publications - publications regarded as seminal and publications regarded as literature reviews by field experts. We show there are distinct differences between seminal publications and literature reviews in terms of author similarity and the strength of ties between their authors. In particular, we find that seminal publications tend to be written by authors who have previously worked on dissimilar problems (i.e. authors from different fields or even disciplines), and by authors who are not frequent collaborators. On the other hand, literature reviews in our dataset tend to be the result of an established collaboration within a discipline. This demonstrates that our method provides meaningful information about potential future impacts of a publication which does not require citation information

Citations and Readership are Poor Indicators of Research Excellence: Introducing TrueImpactDataset, a New Dataset for Validating Research Evaluation Metrics

In this paper we show that citation counts and Mendeley readership are poor indicators of research excellence. Our experimental design builds on the assumption that a good evaluation metric should be able to distinguish publications that have changed a research field from those that have not. The experiment has been conducted on a new dataset for bibliometric research which we call TrueImpactDataset. TrueImpactDataset is a collection of research publications of two types -- research papers which are considered seminal work in their area and papers which provide a survey (a literature review) of a research area. The dataset also contains related metadata, which include DOIs, titles, authors and abstracts. We describe how the dataset was built and provide overview statistics of the dataset. We propose to use the dataset for validating research evaluation metrics. By using this data, we show that widely used research metrics only poorly distinguish excellent research

The Millennium Galaxy Catalogue: The connection between close pairs and asymmetry; implications for the galaxy merger rate

We compare the use of galaxy asymmetry and pair proximity for measuring galaxy merger fractions and rates for a volume limited sample of 3184 galaxies with -21 < M(B) -5 log h < -18 mag. and 0.010 < z < 0.123 drawn from the Millennium Galaxy Catalogue. Our findings are that: (i) Galaxies in close pairs are generally more asymmetric than isolated galaxies and the degree of asymmetry increases for closer pairs. At least 35% of close pairs (with projected separation of less than 20 h^{-1} kpc and velocity difference of less than 500 km s^{-1}) show significant asymmetry and are therefore likely to be physically bound. (ii) Among asymmetric galaxies, we find that at least 80% are either interacting systems or merger remnants. However, a significant fraction of galaxies initially identified as asymmetric are contaminated by nearby stars or are fragmented by the source extraction algorithm. Merger rates calculated via asymmetry indices need careful attention in order to remove the above sources of contamination, but are very reliable once this is carried out. (iii) Close pairs and asymmetries represent two complementary methods of measuring the merger rate. Galaxies in close pairs identify future mergers, occurring within the dynamical friction timescale, while asymmetries are sensitive to the immediate pre-merger phase and identify remnants. (iv) The merger fraction derived via the close pair fraction and asymmetries is about 2% for a merger rate of (5.2 +- 1.0) 10^{-4} h^3 Mpc^{-3} Gyr^{-1}. These results are marginally consistent with theoretical simulations (depending on the merger time-scale), but imply a flat evolution of the merger rate with redshift up to z ~1.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, emulateapj format. ApJ, accepte