Enter the Circle: Blending Spherical Displays and Playful Embedded Interaction in Public Spaces

Public displays are used a variety of contexts, from utility driven information displays to playful entertainment displays. Spherical displays offer new opportunities for interaction in public spaces, allowing users to face each other during interaction and explore content from a variety of angles and perspectives. This paper presents a playful installation that places a spherical display at the centre of a playful environment embedded with interactive elements. The installation, called Enter the Circle, involves eight chair-sized boxes filled with interactive lights that can be controlled by touching the spherical display. The boxes are placed in a ring around the display, and passers-by must “enter the circle” to explore and play with the installation. We evaluated this installation in a pedestrianized walkway for three hours over an evening, collecting on-screen logs and video data. This paper presents a novel evaluation of a spherical display in a public space, discusses an experimental design concept that blends displays with embedded interaction, and analyses real world interaction with the installation

Deep cover HCI: the ethics of covert research

No abstract available

GlobalFestival: Evaluating Real World Interaction on a Spherical Display

Spherical displays present compelling opportunities for interaction in public spaces. However, there is little research into how touch interaction should control a spherical surface or how these displays are used in real world settings. This paper presents an in the wild deployment of an application for a spherical display called GlobalFestival that utilises two different touch interaction techniques. The first version of the application allows users to spin and tilt content on the display, while the second version only allows spinning the content. During the 4-day deployment, we collected overhead video data and on-display interaction logs. The analysis brings together quantitative and qualitative methods to understand how users approach and move around the display, how on screen interaction compares in the two versions of the application, and how the display supports social interaction given its novel form factor

The Impact of a Phased Retirement Program: A Case Study

Phased retirement has been discussed as a means for increasing labour supply for people of older active age. The idea is that instead of leaving a full-time job early for full-time retirement, an employee should reduce the working time either in the same job or by changing jobs, and stay on in the labour market. In this paper we analyze the factors that influence the decision to take up a part-time pension and continue working at the same work place at reduced hours. We do this by using a unique data set from one employer in the governmental sector in Sweden, Stockholm University. The pension scheme is a special part-time pension scheme introduced for state employees in 2003. Employees 61 years and older can apply for a part-time pension up to the age of 65. The employers decide if they will accept or reject the application. They may also encourage employees to apply or discourage them from doing so. We have a data set covering all employees of the age groups who are eligible and a rich data set with information on the employees and also on the units (departments) who in practice decide if an application should be accepted or not. We find that both the effects on pension wealth of taking a part-time pension, and the economic situation of the department are important for the propensity for becoming a part-time pensioner. Also individual characteristics such as gender, age, earnings and occupation are important.part-time work, part-time pension, older workers, labour supply

On Incentives for Sustainable Investments

There is a trend among institutional investors to split their assets between index-managers and specialists. The specialist mandates are typically delegated to specialist asset managers, who are assumed to generate "alpha", take on large risks and whose remuneration is performance based. In this paper, we will study how the optimal behavior of the specialist manager will depend on the remuneration structure.Incentives; portfolio choice; sustainable investments; value function

Influence of ground substrate on establishment of reindeer lichen after artificial dispersal

Methods to improve the recovery of reindeer lichen after soil disturbance or overgrazing are being sought for areas where reindeer are herded. The effects of four substrates – mineral soil, moss, twigs and pine bark – on the establishment of lichen fragments after total removal of the vegetation were thus studied in a middle-aged pine stand and a clear-cut, both located in a lichen-rich pine-heath. Cladina mitis fragments of two sizes were manually dispersed in 1 m2 quadrats and their movements from their respective dispersal points were registered after one year. The natural re-establishment of lichens in the quadrats was monitored over three years by using digital pictures. In the forest stand, no significant differences were detected in either the fragment movement or the lichen establishment between the different substrates, but the fragment size had positive effects on both parameters. In the clear-cut, the moss substrate was the most suitable not only for the artificially dispersed lichens to fasten to, but also for the natural settlement of lichens from the surrounding lichen mat. More lichen thalli fastened to the bark and twigs substrates than to the mineral soil, but the settlement of lichens from the surrounding was greater on bare mineral soil substrate. The results indicate that artificial dispersal of lichen thalli on an appropriate substrate could be a successful strategy for promoting lichen recovery

Tong-il: some observations on a central problem in the psychology of religion

Tong-il is the Korean title of a movement known in the West as The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, or the Union Church. God has formed Tong-il as an instrument of purification and renewal, bringing a new truth telling all men about the purpose of life, the responsibility of man, the way to establish a world of brotherhood and love and make the world into one family. This truth will raise Christianity to a higher dimension and give it the power and zeal which it needs to achieve God's purpose at the time of the second Advent. Tong-il works to renew Christianity, but its ultimate goal is to unite all religions, with its founder as a centre

Hip disorders and osteoarthritis: focus on health-related quality of life, assesssment and intervention

The overall aims of this work were to investigate the consequences of hip disorders and hip osteoarthritis (OA) on health-related quality of life (HRQL) physical function and self-efficacy. The condition, hip OA, is often associated with significant pain and has a strong impact on physical function and quality of life. The prevalence of hip disorders were 32% and among the individuals reporting hip disorders 86% experienced pain, 32% stiffness and 20% weakness and 92% of those with hip disorders also reported disorders in other joints. In individuals with hip OA, better physical function and better self-efficacy were associated with higher perceived health-related quality of life. A new instrument for assessing movement quality, the Body Awareness Movement Quality (BAS MQ)was examined. The inter-rater reliabiliy and validity were acceptable in a group of individuals with hip OA. Eighty-nine individuals with hip OA were randomized either to Tai Chi for Arthritis, Hip School or a control group. Within group-differences showed a significant improvement between baseline and the 6- months follow-up in physical function in both intervention group and the Tai Chi group also improved significantly in self-efficacy. No significant differences, regarding physical function, self-efficacy or HRQL, were seen at 6-or 12 months follow-up whwn comparing the groups

Meditation and perception: some notes on the psychology of religious mysticism

The study of mysticism must be carried on with more attention paid to the meditative techniques used by mystics and to the problems of perception. In this paper the author presents some remarks on the difference between Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross, and then mentions some recent studies of meditation and some problems of perception. If meditative techniques have become of great importance in psychotheraphy, the organismic approach of the "mindcurers" and their results will permit us to complete phenomenological descriptions of mystic conscious states with more exact information of their physiological conditions. In this way "mystical experiences" in general can be seen as results of meditative techniques and we need not regard "an hysterical predisposition" of the subject as their necessary condition

Q-learning and Deep Q-learning in OpenAI Gym CartPole classic control environment

Abstract. This thesis focuses on the basics of reinforcement learning and the implementation of Deep Q-learning, also referred to as Deep Q-network, to emphasize the artificial neural network, and Q-learning to the CartPole-v0 classic control learning environment. This work also presents the idea of a Markov Decision process, standard algorithms, and some basic information about the OpenAI Gym toolkit. DQN is a deep learning version of regular Q-learning, the crucial difference being the use of a neural network and experience replay. Cartpole-v0 can be considered an easy learning problem, especially for DQN, since the number of states and specific actions is relatively low. The learning results between Q-learning and DQN were examined by comparing the convergence and stability of rewards, the cumulative reward gain, and how quickly the Cartpole-v0 learning environment was solved. While it is tough to determine which implementation solved the CartPole-v0 problem better, it can be concluded that while DQN is often seen as the more advanced and complicated version of regular Q-learning, it did not perform better than Q-learning.Q-oppiminen ja Syvä Q-oppiminen OpenAI Gym CartPole-säätöympäristössä. Tiivistelmä. Tämä työ keskittyy esittelemään vahvistusoppimisen perusteita, sekä vertailemaan oppimista Q-oppimisen ja syvän Q-oppimisen välillä CartPole-v0 säätöympäristössä. Työ käsittelee myös Markovin päätöksentekoprosessia ja niissä käytettäviä algoritmeja. Tärkein ero syvän Q-oppimisen ja Q-oppimisen välillä on se, että syvä Q-oppiminen käyttää neuroverkkoa ja muistista oppimista tavallisen Q-oppimisessa käytetyn Q-taulukon sijaan. CartPole-v0 oppimisympäristöä voidaan pitää helppona oppimisympäristönä erityisesti syvä Q-oppimiselle, sillä CartPole-oppimisympäristössä mahdollisten tilojen määrä on verrattain pieni. Oppimista implementaatioiden välillä vertailtiin tarkastelemalla palkintojen suppenemista ja vakautta, palkintojen kumulatiivista arvoa ja oppimisympäristön ratkaisunopeutta. Syvää Q-oppimista pidetään tavallisen Q-oppimisen monimutkaisempana muotona, ja se pärjääkin yleensä paremmin monimutkaisemmissa ympäristöissä, joissa tilojen määrä kasvaa erittäin suureksi. Etukäteen on mahdotonta sanoa, kumpi implementaatio oppii kohdeympäristön tehokkaammin. Syvä Q-oppiminen oppii vaikeita ympäristöjä paljon tehokkaammin kuin tavallinen Q-oppiminen, kun taas Q-oppiminen oppii vähätilaisia ympäristöjä tehokkaammin, koska sen ei tarvitse käyttää muistista oppimista, joka hidastaa harjoitusprosessia