8,776 research outputs found
To boldly go:an occam-π mission to engineer emergence
Get PDFFuture systems will be too complex to design and implement explicitly. Instead, we will have to learn to engineer complex behaviours indirectly: through the discovery and application of local rules of behaviour, applied to simple process components, from which desired behaviours predictably emerge through dynamic interactions between massive numbers of instances. This paper describes a process-oriented architecture for fine-grained concurrent systems that enables experiments with such indirect engineering. Examples are presented showing the differing complex behaviours that can arise from minor (non-linear) adjustments to low-level parameters, the difficulties in suppressing the emergence of unwanted (bad) behaviour, the unexpected relationships between apparently unrelated physical phenomena (shown up by their separate emergence from the same primordial process swamp) and the ability to explore and engineer completely new physics (such as force fields) by their emergence from low-level process interactions whose mechanisms can only be imagined, but not built, at the current time
A study on exploiting commercial digital games into school context
Get PDFDigital game-based learning is a research field within the context of technology-enhanced learning that has attracted significant research interest. Commercial off-the-shelf digital games have the potential to provide concrete learning experiences and allow for drawing links between abstract concepts and real-world situations. The aim of this paper is to provide evidence for the effect of a general-purpose commercial digital game (namely, the “Sims 2-Open for Business”) on the achievement of standard curriculum Mathematics educational objectives as well as genera l educational objectives as defined by standard taxonomies. Furthermore, students’ opinions about their participation in the proposed game-supported educational scenario and potential changes in their attitudes toward math teaching and learning in junior high school are investigated. The results of the conducted research showed that: (i) students engaged in the game-supported educational activities achieved the same results with those who did not, with regard to the subject matter educational objectives, (ii) digital game- supported educational activities resulted in better achievement of the genera l educational objectives, and (iii) no significant differences were observed with regard to students’ attitudes towards math teaching and learning
The rhythms of shipboard life: work, hierarchy, occupational culture and multinational crews
Get PDFSeveral words repeatedly crop up when you ask a seafarer working in the international cargo fleet to describe a life at sea: ‘boring’, is one; ‘lonely’ is another; and the word ‘sacrifice’ is used very frequently as well. Most contemporary seafarers are recruited from developing economies where well-paid opportunities for work ashore are scarce and, if they can be found at all, are only available to highly skilled or qualified personnel. As a result, the money that can be earned at sea by both officers and ratings is often unparalleled and this encourages people to seek work as a seafarer when they are young. It also keeps many of them coming back to sea as they get older (as described so vividly by Baum-Talmor in Chap. 5) despite having come to grips with some of the rather unglamorous aspects of the job
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