Motivational factors of Australian mobile gamers

Mobile games are a fast growing industry, overtaking all other video game platforms with year on year increases in revenue. Many studies have been conducted to explore the motivations of why video games players play their selected games. However very little research has focused on mobile gamers. In addition, Australian studies on the topic are sparse. This paper aimed to discover what motivates a mobile gamer from the perspective of the initial motivational factors attracting them to a mobile game, and the motivational factors that provide interest to continue playing and thereby increase game longevity. A survey was conducted online for Australian participants, which attracted 123 respondents. The survey was formulated by focusing on the 12 key subcomponents as motivational factors of the Gamer Motivational Profile v2 model devised by Quantic Foundry. It was discovered that mobile gamers are a completely different breed of gamer in contrast to the general video gamer. Strategy and challenge which are subcomponents of mastery proved popular among all mobile gamers, while destruction and excitement, subcomponents of action, were often the least motivating factors of all. With the newly discovered data, perhaps mobile game developers can pursue the correct avenues of game design when catering to their target audience

Slices of the Kerr ergosurface

The intrinsic geometry of the Kerr ergosurface on constant Boyer-Lindquist (BL), Kerr, and Doran time slices is characterized. Unlike the BL slice, which had been previously studied, the other slices (i) do not have conical singularities at the poles (except the Doran slice in the extremal limit), (ii) have finite polar circumference in the extremal limit, and (iii) for sufficiently large spin parameter fail to be isometrically embeddable as a surface of revolution above some latitude. The Doran slice develops an embeddable polar cap for spin parameters greater than about 0.96.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures; v.2: minor editing for clarification, references added, typos fixed, version published in Classical and Quantum Gravit

An approximate solution technique for the constrained search path moving target search problem

A search is conducted for a target moving in discrete time among a finite number of cells according to a known Markov process. The searcher must choose one cell in which to search in each time period. The set of cells from which he can choose is a function of the cell chosen in the previous time period. The problem is to find a searcher path, i.e., a sequence of search cells, that minimizes the probability of not detecting the target in a fixed number of time periods. The problem is formulated as a nonlinear program and solved for a local optimum by a simple implementation of the convex simplex methodNaval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA.http://archive.org/details/approximatesolut15eaglNaval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA.NAApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Avatars:the other side of Proteus's mirror : a study into avatar choice regarding perception

The trend for online interactions, can be regarded as being ‘anti-so-cially social’, meaning that a great deal of time is spent playing, working and socializing with the internet serving as the communication conduit. Within that Virtual Social Environment very deep relationships are formed and maintained without the parties ever having met each other face-to-face. Raising the question how much does the physical appearance of an avatar influence the perception of the person behind it? Are relationships informed by appearance even in the vir-tual world and what implications does that have for second language acquisition? This paper leads to a small-scale research project where a selection of avatars with various racially identifiable characteristics were used to identify which av-atars a second language speaker would feel more at ease interacting with in the target language. The resultant research aims to test three hypotheses regarding preferred avatar choice for second language users based solely on perceptions

Refraction at Media with Negative Refractive Index

We show that an electromagnetic (EM) wave undergoes negative refraction at the interface between a positive and negative refractive index material. Finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulations are used to study the time evolution of an EM wave as it hits the interface. The wave is trapped temporarily at the interface and after a long time, the wave front moves eventually in the negative direction. This explains why causality and speed of light are not violated in spite of the negative refraction always present in a negative index material.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

Efficacy of REACH Forgiveness across Cultures

Across cultures, most people agree that forgiveness is a virtue. However, culture may influence how willing one should be to forgive and how one might express forgiveness. At a university in the United States, we recruited both foreign-extraction students and domestic students (N = 102) to participate in a six-hour REACH Forgiveness intervention. We investigated the efficacy of the intervention overall as well as whether foreign-extraction and domestic students responded differently to treatment. Forgiveness was assessed using two measures—decisional forgiveness and emotional forgiveness. The six-hour REACH Forgiveness intervention improved participants’ ratings of emotional forgiveness, but not decisional forgiveness, regardless of their culture. Thus, the REACH Forgiveness intervention appears equally efficacious for participants from different cultural backgrounds when conducted in the United States with college students

Fast calibrated additive quantile regression

We propose a novel framework for fitting additive quantile regression models, which provides well calibrated inference about the conditional quantiles and fast automatic estimation of the smoothing parameters, for model structures as diverse as those usable with distributional GAMs, while maintaining equivalent numerical efficiency and stability. The proposed methods are at once statistically rigorous and computationally efficient, because they are based on the general belief updating framework of Bissiri et al. (2016) to loss based inference, but compute by adapting the stable fitting methods of Wood et al. (2016). We show how the pinball loss is statistically suboptimal relative to a novel smooth generalisation, which also gives access to fast estimation methods. Further, we provide a novel calibration method for efficiently selecting the 'learning rate' balancing the loss with the smoothing priors during inference, thereby obtaining reliable quantile uncertainty estimates. Our work was motivated by a probabilistic electricity load forecasting application, used here to demonstrate the proposed approach. The methods described here are implemented by the qgam R package, available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN)