Alternative Archaeological Representations within Virtual Worlds

Traditional VR methods allow the user to tour and view the virtual world from different perspectives. Increasingly, more interactive and adaptive worlds are being generated, potentially allowing the user to interact with and affect objects in the virtual world. We describe and compare four models of operation that allow the publisher to generate views, with the client manipulating and affecting specific objects in the world. We demonstrate these approaches through a problem in archaeological visualization

Stigmatized Discretion: A Survey of the Impact of Stigma Associated With Substance Use Disorder on the Hiring of Teachers in Recovery

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effect of stigma associated with substance use disorder (SUD) on the hiring of teacher-applicants in recovery. The ongoing opioid epidemic has dealt many disastrous blows to the United States, particularly in the Appalachian region of the country. As the coal industry was declining in the 1990s and 2000s, prescription opioids flooded the state of West Virginia, bringing with them a dwindling economy and a rise in crime rates, unemployment, and overdoses. Recent legislation has helped in pharmaceutical accountability/regulation and recovery options for individuals suffering from SUD. As more people in recovery are reintegrating into society, they face barriers due to the stigma associated with SUD. Identifying employers’ specific concerns about employing or supervising individuals in recovery has been the subject of several recent studies (Becton et al., 2017; Becton et al., 2020; Wright McDougal, 2015), and this investigation into the education arena has expanded that research trend. The non-experimental, descriptive study was conducted by administering a modified version of the Employer Perspectives and Willingness Questionnaire to a non-random, convenience population of P-12 school administrators and human resources directors in all 55 districts of WV. This study identified top concerns administrators and human resources directors have regarding hiring people in recovery. The information was gathered by analyzing how employers’ personal experience with SUD influences the degree of stigma they may possess. Although there is SUD-related stigma in this field, there are also people who are supportive if certain protections for all stakeholders are in place. It was also revealed that there exists a need for more professional development regarding SUD for education administrators and human resources directors

How do experts think child poverty should be measured in the UK? An analysis of the Coalition Government’s consultation on child poverty measurement 2012-13

This paper examines responses to a 2012-13 government consultation on child poverty measurement. It explores what these responses tell us about attitudes towards the child poverty indicators in the Child Poverty Act 2010, and about the extent of support for a broader approach to measurement. The study was motivated by the amendments to the Child Poverty Act put forward by the Conservative Government in 2015. Using a Freedom of Information request, we gained access to 251 of the 257 consultation responses, which came from individuals and organisations with a wide range of expertise, including academics, local authorities, frontline services and children’s charities. Our analysis finds strong support for the original suite of measures and near universal support for keeping income at the heart of poverty measurement; poverty is understood primarily to be a relative lack of material resources, with income widely believed to be the best proxy measure. While there is considerable support for capturing information around other dimensions, these are generally seen as causes or consequences of poverty, or as broader life chance measures, not as measures of child poverty itself. The paper also considers the government’s published summary of the consultation responses, and discusses differences between the government’s interpretation and our own

Lid tectonics. Preface

The idea that plate tectonics may not have operated deep in Earth's Precambrian past has a long legacy. What predated plate tectonics is unknown, and advances in data – from geochemical, geological and tectonic, to paleomagnetic, as well as modelling approaches, and planetary science, have the potential to contribute significantly to the debate. To contrast with the activity of plate tectonics, in this issue we use the term ‘lid tectonics’ to encapsulate a variety of envisaged regimes – from stagnant, sluggish, plutonic-squishy, or heat pipe – which are characterized by comparatively subdued tectonic signatures

On Similarities between Inference in Game Theory and Machine Learning

In this paper, we elucidate the equivalence between inference in game theory and machine learning. Our aim in so doing is to establish an equivalent vocabulary between the two domains so as to facilitate developments at the intersection of both fields, and as proof of the usefulness of this approach, we use recent developments in each field to make useful improvements to the other. More specifically, we consider the analogies between smooth best responses in fictitious play and Bayesian inference methods. Initially, we use these insights to develop and demonstrate an improved algorithm for learning in games based on probabilistic moderation. That is, by integrating over the distribution of opponent strategies (a Bayesian approach within machine learning) rather than taking a simple empirical average (the approach used in standard fictitious play) we derive a novel moderated fictitious play algorithm and show that it is more likely than standard fictitious play to converge to a payoff-dominant but risk-dominated Nash equilibrium in a simple coordination game. Furthermore we consider the converse case, and show how insights from game theory can be used to derive two improved mean field variational learning algorithms. We first show that the standard update rule of mean field variational learning is analogous to a Cournot adjustment within game theory. By analogy with fictitious play, we then suggest an improved update rule, and show that this results in fictitious variational play, an improved mean field variational learning algorithm that exhibits better convergence in highly or strongly connected graphical models. Second, we use a recent advance in fictitious play, namely dynamic fictitious play, to derive a derivative action variational learning algorithm, that exhibits superior convergence properties on a canonical machine learning problem (clustering a mixture distribution)

Ambivalence, naturalness and normality in public perceptions of carbon capture and storage in biomass, fossil energy, and industrial applications in the United Kingdom

Carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) is a promising yet controversial climate change mitigation technology. While numerous studies have addressed perceptions of CCS in fossil energy applications, less attention has been paid to how other applications of the technology may be viewed by lay groups. This article reports on findings from a twoday deliberative focus group held near Drax power station; a coal-biomass co-firing power plant in the north of England. In so doing we adopt a broad, psycho-socially inspired conception of perceived naturalness in order to explore how perceptions of CCS in biomass, fossil fuel, and industrial applications are formed in the context of a range of potential technologies for supporting low carbon energy system transitions. In particular, we explore how perceptions of naturalness and interdependency shaped perceptions of different CCS applications. Our analysis illustrates how perceptions of CCS as threatening, uncanny disruptions to natural systems may shift when re-contextualised to include concerns relating to the intermittency of renewable energy, or be ameliorated through perceptions of industrial and bioenergy applications as supporting natural and economic interdependencies

Deep seated magmas and their mantle roots: introduction

In the last decade there has been a considerable effort to better understand the joint evolution of mafic and ultramafic magmatic systems and their deep mantle roots, through integrated petrological and thermo-barometric studies. Magma generation is regarded as the result of complex processes including melting, creation of channels for melt transfer, and interaction with the wall-rocks. Complexities in magmatic systems involve metasomatism and the creation of metasomatic fronts, branching and splitting of magma volumes during their evolution, and variable compositional development during transfer to upper crystallizing horizons. Intrusions and formation of intermediate magmatic chambers in the upper mantle Moho or in the lower crust are often accompanied by melt differentiation according to Assimilation-Fractional-Crystallization processes (AFC). Splitting of polybaric magmatic systems brings the appearance of a wide spectrum of melt compositions. Each magmatic plume leaves its own tracers in the mantle, and can erase signs of preceding mantle magmatic events. Commonly, petrologists may focus on individual magmatic processes through the study of mantle rocks and mantle xenoliths, but there have been recent efforts to produce complex models that take into account the various aspects of such evolving magmatic system, particularly that take account of spatial and temporal changes. Such studies have also made links to modern and ancient geodynamics, and to questions of continental growth, structure of the mantle and modification of the sub-continental lithospheric mantle (SCLM)

Zircon U–Pb–Hf constraints from Gongga Shan granites on young crustal melting in eastern Tibet

The Gongga Shan batholith is a complex granitoid batholith on the eastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau with a long history of magmatism spanning from the Triassic to the Pliocene. Late Miocene–Pliocene units are the youngest exposed crustal melts within the entire Asian plate of the Tibetan Plateau. Here, we present in-situ zircon Hf isotope constraints on their magmatic source, to aid the understanding of how these young melts were formed and how they were exhumed to the surface. Hf isotope signatures of Eocene to Pliocene zircon rims (ɛHf(t) = –4 to +4), interpreted to have grown during localised crustal melting, are indicative of melting of a Neoproterozoic source region, equivalent to the nearby exposed Kangding Complex. Therefore, we suggest that Neoproterozoic crust underlies this region of the Songpan–Ganze terrane, and sourced the intrusive granites that form the Gongga Shan batholith. Localised young melting of Neoproterozoic lower or middle crust requires localised melt-fertile lithologies. We suggest that such melts may be equivalent to seismic and magnetotelluric low-velocity and high-conductivity zones or “bright spots” imaged across much of the Tibetan Plateau. The lack of widespread exposed melts this age is due either to the lack of melt-fertile rocks in the middle crust, the very low erosion level of the Tibetan plateau, or to a lack of mechanism for exhuming such melts. For Gongga Shan, where some melting is younger than nearby thermochronological ages of low temperature cooling, the exact process and timing of exhumation remains enigmatic, but their location away from the Xianshuihe fault precludes the fault acting as a conduit for the young melts. We suggest that underthrusting of dry granulites of the lower Indian crust (Archean shield) this far northeast is a plausible mechanism to explain the uplift and exhumation of the eastern Tibetan Plateau

How Do Tor Users Interact With Onion Services?

Onion services are anonymous network services that are exposed over the Tor network. In contrast to conventional Internet services, onion services are private, generally not indexed by search engines, and use self-certifying domain names that are long and difficult for humans to read. In this paper, we study how people perceive, understand, and use onion services based on data from 17 semi-structured interviews and an online survey of 517 users. We find that users have an incomplete mental model of onion services, use these services for anonymity and have varying trust in onion services in general. Users also have difficulty discovering and tracking onion sites and authenticating them. Finally, users want technical improvements to onion services and better information on how to use them. Our findings suggest various improvements for the security and usability of Tor onion services, including ways to automatically detect phishing of onion services, more clear security indicators, and ways to manage onion domain names that are difficult to remember.Comment: Appeared in USENIX Security Symposium 201