A content analysis of interviews with players of massively multiplayer online role-play games (MMORPGs).

This paper explores the intrapersonal and interpersonal motivations involved in the playing of MMORPGs, and the impacts of gaming on online and offline relationships. Twenty-one participants completed an online synchronous interview in which they discussed their personal experiences of playing MMORPGs. An online survey was then developed to further explore the findings of the interviews and this was completed by 52 participants. A content-analysis of the interview transcripts showed that interpersonal factors (such as social communication and group cohesion) were the strongest motivators for game-playing, supporting previous research [1]. The interview data also showed that there tended to be conflict, rather than integration, between online and offline relationships, however the questionnaire data showed the opposite. This was a small-scale pilot study and a further larger study is planned which will investigate whether Social Identity Theory can be used to explain players’ perceptions of group and personal identity

Health Research Access to Personal Confidential Data in England and Wales: Assessing any gap in public attitude between preferable and acceptable models of consent

England and Wales are moving toward a model of ‘opt out’ for use of personal confidential data in health research. Existing research does not make clear how acceptable this move is to the public. While people are typically supportive of health research, when asked to describe the ideal level of control there is a marked lack of consensus over the preferred model of consent (e.g. explicit consent, opt out etc.). This study sought to investigate a relatively unexplored difference between the consent model that people prefer and that which they are willing to accept. It also sought to explore any reasons for such acceptance. A mixed methods approach was used to gather data, incorporating a structured questionnaire and in-depth focus group discussions led by an external facilitator. The sampling strategy was designed to recruit people with different involvement in the NHS but typically with experience of NHS services. Three separate focus groups were carried out over three consecutive days. The central finding is that people are typically willing to accept models of consent other than that which they would prefer. Such acceptance is typically conditional upon a number of factors, including: security and confidentiality, no inappropriate commercialisation or detrimental use, transparency, independent overview, the ability to object to any processing considered to be inappropriate or particularly sensitive. This study suggests that most people would find research use without the possibility of objection to be unacceptable. However, the study also suggests that people who would prefer to be asked explicitly before data were used for purposes beyond direct care may be willing to accept an opt out model of consent if the reasons for not seeking explicit consent are accessible to them and they trust that data is only going to be used under conditions, and with safeguards, that they would consider to be acceptable even if not preferable

New VLBA Identifications of Compact Symmetric Objects

The class of radio sources known as Compact Symmetric Objects (CSOs) is of particular interest in the study of the evolution of radio galaxies. CSOs are thought to be young (probably ~10^4 years), and a very high fraction of them exhibit HI absorption toward the central parsecs. The HI, which is thought to be part of a circumnuclear torus of accreting gas, can be observed using the VLBA with high enough angular resolution to map the velocity field of the gas. This velocity field provides new information on the accretion process in the central engines of these young sources. We have identified 9 new CSOs from radio continuum observations for the VLBA Calibrator Survey, increasing the number of known CSOs by almost 50%.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, for "Lifecycles of Radio Galaxies", eds. J. Biretta et al., New Astronomy Review

SAMP, the Simple Application Messaging Protocol: Letting applications talk to each other

SAMP, the Simple Application Messaging Protocol, is a hub-based communication standard for the exchange of data and control between participating client applications. It has been developed within the context of the Virtual Observatory with the aim of enabling specialised data analysis tools to cooperate as a loosely integrated suite, and is now in use by many and varied desktop and web-based applications dealing with astronomical data. This paper reviews the requirements and design principles that led to SAMP's specification, provides a high-level description of the protocol, and discusses some of its common and possible future usage patterns, with particular attention to those factors that have aided its success in practice.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for Virtual Observatory special issue of Astronomy and Computin

Quasiconformal homogeneity after Gehring and Palks

In a very influential paper Gehring and Palka introduced the notions of quasiconformally homogeneous and uniformly quasiconformally homogeneous subsets of Euclidean space. Their motivation was to provide a characterization of quasi-disks, i.e. domains which are quasiconformally homeomorphic to the unit disk. As a generalization, Bonfert-Taylor, Canary, Martin and Taylor initiated the study of uniformly quasiconformally homogeneous hyperbolic manifolds. In this paper, we review the theory of quasiconformally homogeneous subsets of Euclidean and uniformly quasiconformally homogeneous hyperbolic manifolds. We finish with a discussion of open problems in the theory.Comment: To be published in a volume of Computational Methods and Function Theory dedicated to the memory of Fred Gehrin