The effect of time manipulation on immersion in digital games

Many empirical studies look into identifying factors that influence the quality of experience in video games. In this paper, we present research into the effect of playing time and players’ perception of the time on their immersion in the game. We invited 20 participants to play a puzzle game Bejeweled 2 for 7 min. They played the game in two conditions, namely, correct time (timer was programmed to be exactly 7 min) and wrong time (the countdown was set to be for 6 min, but was presented as a 7 min timer to the player). Players’ immersion scores were measured after the game using the IEQ. The results show no significant difference in immersion scores between the two conditions and participants’ comments also revealed that they perceived no difference in playing time between the conditions. This suggests that there is a dissociation between gaming time and subjective experience of gaming. Further research is required to investigate the relationship between playing time and positive gaming experiences

Pembinaan konstruk instrumen penilaian pasca penghunian untuk perumahan bertingkat yang dibina menggunakan kaedah Sistem Binaan Berindustri (IBS)

Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) is an activity of the building evaluation process with a focus on quality, operational performance and satisfaction of the occupants. The POE is important to evaluate completed and occupied buildings to identify weaknesses and potential for future improvement. To date, there have been various variations of POE instruments and tools to evaluate occupied buildings. However, the POE instrument for assessing high-rise housing constructed using the industrialized building system (IBS) method has not been developed specifically. In this regard, this study aims to discuss the construction of an effective POE instrument to measure the quality and performance of high-rise housing built using the IBS method. For this purpose, the 3 round Delphi method was adapted by involving 15 experts selected based on their background and experience related to IBS. The results of a three-round Delphi study found that 33 out of all sub-constructs were dropped because of low mean scores (<4.2 in two rounds) while 75 sub-constructs were identified as final items. The results of the Delphi study also found that all 10 constructs were 1) Spatial; 2) Design and aesthetics; 3) Physical; 4) Building materials; 5) Quality of work; 6) Comfort and well-being; 7) Environment and health; 8) Maintenance; 9) Value and 10) Cost is the most significant construct for developing PPP instruments. Accordingly, an effective Post-Occupancy Assessment Instrument for measuring the quality, performance and value of a home built using the IBS method should include all of these constructs

Distribution system simulator

In a series of tests performed under the Department of Energy auspices, power line carrier propagation was observed to be anomalous under certain circumstances. To investigate the cause, a distribution system simulator was constructed. The simulator was a physical simulator that accurately represented the distribution system from below power frequency to above 50 kHz. Effects such as phase-to-phase coupling and skin effect were modeled. Construction details of the simulator, and experimental results from its use are presented

Exploring the design space of HEVC inverse transforms with dataflow programming

This paper presents the design space exploration of the hardware-based inverse fixed-point integer transform for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). The designs are specified at high-level using CAL dataflow language and automatically synthesized to HDL for FPGA implementation. Several parallel design alternatives are proposed with trade-off between performance and resource. The HEVC transform consists of several independent components from 4x4 to 32x32 discrete cosine transform and 4x4 discrete sine transform.This work explores the strategies to efficiently compute the transforms by applying data parallelism on the different components. Results show that an intermediate version of parallelism, whereby the 4x4 and 8x8 are merged together, and the 16x16 and 32x32 merged together gives the best trade-off between performance and resource. The results presented in this work also give an insight on how the HEVC transform can be designed efficiently in parallel for hardware implementation

Learning to become evidence based social workers: student views on research education and implementation in practice

Professional guidelines for social workers in relation to research use in practice, present social workers as consumers, rather than producers of research evidence. This approach aligns with a growing emphasis on the use of evidence-based practice within social work. This paper reports on a small mixed methods study with a cohort of BA social work students (N = 38) with two aims: 1) to understand the experiences of students learning research at undergraduate level and 2) to explore how their learning and placement experiences interact and influence their development as ‘research-minded’ practitioners of the future. Descriptive statistics of the quantitative data and thematic analysis of focus groups are presented. Our findings support the existing literature relating to social work students attitudes to research, including feelings of anxiety and perceptions of difficulty, while also viewing it as important to their careers. We also found that within placement settings, students encounter negative, often dismissive views of research and experience little in the way of role-modelling of evidence-based practice. We consider these findings in light of the promotion of EBP in UK social work, and how this may influence our teaching of research and evidence use to future student cohorts