Music in Video Games

Through decades of evolution of video games industry, the audio element has become an inseparable part of the video game experience. However, for different game genres, the literature is still sparse regarding how background music (BGM) fits a game well in terms of being compatible and reciprocal. This report explores the function of game music and what makes the BGM an irreplaceable part of the gameplay experience. To achieve our goal, an experiment was prepared to evaluate how BGM influences people’s perceptions toward the game. By providing video game clips with switched BGM to subjects and surveying their perceptions and feelings of consistency between the clips and BGM, we were able to gain insight into how music may affect people’s gameplay experience

Quantum Statistical Mechanics of Dissolving Vortices

The quantum partition function for dissolving Abelian Higgs vortices is calculated explicitly, using spectral data for the Beltrami Laplacian on the $N$-vortex moduli space $\mathbb{CP}^N$ with a scaled Fubini--Study metric. From the partition function, the pressure of the vortex gas is derived. There are three asymptotic regimes -- High, Intermediate and Low Temperature. The phase crossover from Intermediate to Low Temperature is modelled by a Bessel function. In the Low Temperature regime the free energy is not extensive but is proportional to $N^2$.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Show Me The Money, Sooner! How Faster Payments Boost Gig Workers’ Efforts and Productivity

Despite their astounding growth in recent years, online gig platforms face key challenges to increase gig workers\u27 working commitment. In this study, we investigate how a higher payout frequency may stimulate workers\u27 commitment to work, improve the work quality, and engender heterogeneous impacts across different workers. Drawing on the expectancy theory and using detailed data from a multinational streaming platform, we explore a quasi-natural experiment. Leveraging an exogenous shock of a financial system upgrade, we employ the propensity score matching (PSM) technique with a difference-in-differences (DID) approach to demonstrate that a shorter payout cycle increased gig workers\u27 efforts at work. Moreover, a shorter payout cycle increased the quality of work. The positive impact was more pronounced for workers with a shorter tenure and for those who had a higher commitment to work before the treatment. Our results help gig platforms understand how to design payout schemes to motivate gig workers

Skin friction and heat transfer in hypersonic transitional and turbulent boundary layers

The decompositions of the skin-friction and heat transfer coefficients based on the two-fold repeated integration in hypersonic transitional and turbulent boundary layers are analyzed to explain the generations of the wall skin friction and heat transfer. The Reynolds analogy factor slightly increases as the wall temperature decreases, especially for the extremely cooled wall. The integral analysis is applied to explain the overshoot behaviours of the skin-friction and heat transfer coefficients in hypersonic transitional boundary layers. The overshoot of the skin-friction coefficient is mainly caused by the drastic change of the mean velocity profiles, and the overshoot of the heat transfer coefficient is primarily due to the viscous dissipation. In the hypersonic turbulent boundary layers, the skin-friction and heat transfer coefficients increase significantly as the wall temperature decreases. The effects of the mean velocity gradients and the Reynolds shear stress contribute dominantly to the wall skin friction, and have weak correlations with the wall temperature, except for the strongly cooled wall condition. The strongly cooled wall condition and high Mach number can enhance the effect of the Reynolds shear stress, and weaken the impact of the mean velocity gradients. Furthermore, the magnitudes of the dominant relative contributions of the mean temperature gradients, pressure dilatation, viscous dissipation and the Reynolds heat flux to the heat transfer coefficient increase as the wall temperature increases in the hypersonic turbulent boundary layers

Show Me The Money, Sooner! How Faster Payments Boost Gig Workers\u27 Efforts and Productivity

Despite their astounding growth in recent years, online gig platforms face key challenges to increase gig workers\u27 working commitment. This study aims to examine the impact of a fundamental organizational design element payout frequency, which refers to the intervals at which workers access the funds they have earned. Drawing on expectancy theory, we argue that a higher payout frequency enhances both the quantity and quality of gig work. To investigate this, we analyze proprietary data from a quasi-natural experiment that involved an unexpected reduction in the payout cycle for gig workers in a specific geographic region. By employing propensity score matching and a difference-in-differences approach, we demonstrate that a shorter payout cycle led to an increase in the effort among the impacted gig workers and also resulted in improved work quality. These findings contribute to our understanding of effectively motivating and managing gig workers, ultimately influencing customer engagement on platforms

Phase Transition in Extended Thermodynamics Triggers Sub-shocks

Extended thermodynamics commonly uses polynomial moments to model non-equilibrium transportation, but faces a crisis due to sub-shocks, which are anomalous discontinuities in gas properties when predicting shock waves. The cause of sub-shocks is still unclear, challenging the validity of extended thermodynamics. This paper reveals, for the first time, that sub-shocks arise from intrinsic limitations of polynomials leading to a discontinuous phase transition. Therefore extended thermodynamics necessitates alternative moments beyond polynomials to avoid sub-shocks.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Relay Selection Considering Successive Packets Transmission in Cooperative Communication Networks

Relay selection has been regarded as an effective method to improve the performance of cooperative communication system. However, frequent operation of relay selection can bring enormous control message overhead and thereby decrease the performance of cooperative communication. To reduce the relay selection frequency, in this paper, we propose a relay selection scheme to choose the best relay with considering successive packets transmission. In this scheme, according to the length of data packet, data transmission rate and the estimated channel state information (CSI), the best relay is selected to maximize the number of successive packets transmission under the condition that the given symbol-error-rate (SER) is kept. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed relay selection scheme can support the operation of successive packets transmission in cooperative wireless networks and that the maximum number of successive packets transmission is affected by the different network parameters, i.e., data transmission rate, packet length and Doppler frequency at one relay node