Pwning Level Bosses in MATLAB: Student Reactions to a Game-Inspired Computational Physics Course

We investigated student reactions to two computational physics courses incorporating several videogame-like aspects. These included use of gaming terminology such as "levels," "weapons," and "bosses"; a game-style point system linked to course grades; a self-paced schedule with no deadlines; a mastery design in which only entirely correct attempts earn credit, but students can retry until they succeed; immediate feedback via self-test code; an assignment progression from "minions" (small, focused tasks) to "level bosses" (integrative tasks); and believable, authentic assignment scenarios. Through semi-structured interviews and course evaluations, we found that a majority of students considered the courses effective and the game-like aspects beneficial. In particular, many claimed that the point system increased their motivation; the self-paced nature caused them to reflect on their self-discipline; the possibility and necessity of repeating assignments until perfect aided learning; and the authentic tasks helped them envision using course skills in their professional futures.Comment: Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 2014 Physics Education Research Conference (PERC

Heavy Quark Production at HERA

Heavy flavour production is one of the key components of the HERA II physics programme. While most of the results presented use leptons or the reconstruction of charmed mesons to identify heavy flavour production, both the H1 and ZEUS experiments now have working microvertex detectors that are being used more and more. In this talk I will summarise a selection of the recent results obtained by the two collaborations.Comment: 10 pages, 18 figures, to appear in the Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Hyperons, Charm and Beauty Hadrons (BEACH2008), 22-28 June 2008, University of South Carolina, Columbi

Version 4 of the CRU TS monthly high-resolution gridded multivariate climate dataset

CRU TS (Climatic Research Unit gridded Time Series) is a widely used climate dataset on a 0.5 degrees latitude by 0.5 degrees longitude grid over all land domains of the world except Antarctica. It is derived by the interpolation of monthly climate anomalies from extensive networks of weather station observations. Here we describe the construction of a major new version, CRU TS v4. It is updated to span 1901-2018 by the inclusion of additional station observations, and it will be updated annually. The interpolation process has been changed to use angular-distance weighting (ADW), and the production of secondary variables has been revised to better suit this approach. This implementation of ADW provides improved traceability between each gridded value and the input observations, and allows more informative diagnostics that dataset users can utilise to assess how dataset quality might vary geographically

Baptist identity in ecumenical context : a critical exposition of the 1987 Statement on Baptist Principles of the Baptist Union of South Africa

Bibliography: pages 342-359.Baptist Identity In Ecumenical Context is, essentially, an exposition of the 1987 statement on Baptist Principles of the Baptist Union of South Africa. The Statement has had no critical reflection given it to date and therefore this study is a new contribution to the growing corpus of material on Baptist theology in South Africa. The thesis explains the identity of South African Baptists using the key word discipleship. Though not stated as such, the1987 Statement on Baptist Principles is an expression of discipleship. Discipleship is described and critically analysed in the thesis as community, its sign as baptism, ministry is discipleship expressed in society, and freedom is the term given to denote the focus on religious liberty and the separation of church from the state, as well as indicating the church's prophetic role. Drawing from the rich heritage of Anabaptist and English Baptist history and theology, and reflecting on other evangelical and ecumenical theological writings, the thesis shows the value of 'discipleship' as the motif for Baptists in the contemporary South African setting. The thesis invites South African Baptists to re-discover this motif both in the context of their own tradition and in their relations with other Christian churches

Intelligent Cinematic Camera Control for Real-Time Graphics Applications

E-sports is currently estimated to be a billion dollar industry which is only growing in size from year to year. However the cinematography of spectated games leaves much to be desired. In most cases, the spectator either gets to control their own freely-moving camera or they get to see the view that a specific player sees. This thesis presents a system for the generation of cinematically-pleasing views for spectating real-time graphics applications. A custom real-time engine has been built to demonstrate the effect of this system on several different game modes with varying visual cinematic constraints, such as the rule of thirds. To create the cinematic views, we encode cinematic rules as cost functions that are fed into a non-linear least squares solver. These cost functions rely on the geometry of the scene, minimizing residuals based on the 3D positions and 2D reprojections of the geometry. The final cinematic view is found by altering camera position and angle until a local minimum is met. The system was evaluated by comparing video output from a traditional rigidly constrained camera and the results of our algorithm’s optimally solved views. User surveys are then used to qualitatively evaluate the system. The results of these surveys do not statistically find a preference between the cinematic views and the rigidly constrained views. In addition, we present performance and timing considerations for the system, reporting that the system can operate within modern expectations of latency when enough constraints are placed on the non-linear least squares solver