Ola de la Vida:a social play game

Ola de la Vida (ODLV) is a three-player cooperative game which was produced over the course of 48 hours within Global Game Jam in January 2017, at the Abertay University Jam Site.The Game is a playful intervention (an objects or events which seek to bring people together through play) that aims to invite players to form temporary relationships with their co-players through physical contact, collaboration and coaching during play in a co-located context (i.e. where all players are present in the same play space). The game also seeks to expand the play experience beyond the three players to the wider audience by inviting spectatorship through play as performance.The game was designed by Mona Bozdog, Lynn Parker, Danny Parker, and Alex Pass. Since its inception, it has undergone significant development to enhance its usability (through tutorials) and its features to enhance the development of a community of play, including the introduction of clear player scores and high scores for the game. Lynn Parker contributed to the design of physical interactions within the game, the enhancement of usability through tutorials and scores and the creation of digital art for the game in partnership with Alex Pass.Ola De La Vida as a practice as research work offers design insight into use of spectatorship to create a temporary community around a game and to enhance the facilitation of discussion between active players, previous players, spectators, and semi-spectators. The work builds on the varying levels of participation in play, proposing semi-spectatorship: where players are active in a game but have a critical distance afforded to them by the design of the game which offers them and their co-players (where appropriate) potential benefits in play

Pencil-Beam Surveys for Trans-Neptunian Objects: Novel Methods for Optimization and Characterization

Digital co-addition of astronomical images is a common technique for increasing signal-to-noise and image depth. A modification of this simple technique has been applied to the detection of minor bodies in the Solar System: first stationary objects are removed through the subtraction of a high-SN template image, then the sky motion of the Solar System bodies of interest is predicted and compensated for by shifting pixels in software prior to the co-addition step. This "shift-and-stack" approach has been applied with great success in directed surveys for minor Solar System bodies. In these surveys, the shifts have been parameterized in a variety of ways. However, these parameterizations have not been optimized and in most cases cannot be effectively applied to data sets with long observation arcs due to objects' real trajectories diverging from linear tracks on the sky. This paper presents two novel probabilistic approaches for determining a near-optimum set of shift-vectors to apply to any image set given a desired region of orbital space to search. The first method is designed for short observational arcs, and the second for observational arcs long enough to require non-linear shift-vectors. Using these techniques and other optimizations, we derive optimized grids for previous surveys that have used "shift-and-stack" approaches to illustrate the improvements that can be made with our method, and at the same time derive new limits on the range of orbital parameters these surveys searched. We conclude with a simulation of a future applications for this approach with LSST, and show that combining multiple nights of data from such next-generation facilities is within the realm of computational feasibility.Comment: Accepted for publication in PASP March 1, 2010

Organizing the Party for victory over reaction: Report delivered at the National Conference of the Communist Party

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/prism/1098/thumbnail.jp

Tension over Terms: Root, Stem, and Affix in Greek and Hebrew

Undergraduat

Trans-Neptunian Space and the Post-Pluto Paradigm

The Pluto system is an archetype for the multitude of icy dwarf planets and accompanying satellite systems that populate the vast volume of the solar system beyond Neptune. New Horizons' exploration of Pluto and its five moons gave us a glimpse into the range of properties that their kin may host. Furthermore, the surfaces of Pluto and Charon record eons of bombardment by small trans-Neptunian objects, and by treating them as witness plates we can infer a few key properties of the trans-Neptunian population at sizes far below current direct-detection limits. This chapter summarizes what we have learned from the Pluto system about the origins and properties of the trans-Neptunian populations, the processes that have acted upon those members over the age of the solar system, and the processes likely to remain active today. Included in this summary is an inference of the properties of the size distribution of small trans-Neptunian objects and estimates on the fraction of binary systems present at small sizes. Further, this chapter compares the extant properties of the satellites of trans-Neptunian dwarf planets and their implications for the processes of satellite formation and the early evolution of planetesimals in the outer solar system. Finally, this chapter concludes with a discussion of near-term theoretical, observational, and laboratory efforts that can further ground our understanding of the Pluto system and how its properties can guide future exploration of trans-Neptunian space.Comment: Review chapter in "The Pluto System After New Horizons" University of Arizona Press, 2021. https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/the-pluto-system-after-new-horizon

Characteristics of gamma radiation fields in subterranean structures for radiation protection and decision making

2022 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.The threat of a CBRN attack or accident within subterranean space presents unique challenges for decision makers and emergency planners due to the operational constraints imposed by the physical environment. Radiological exposure device threat scenarios have not previously been explored for vulnerable subsurface infrastructure, like mass transit tunnels. It is important to investigate the impact that radiation exposure devices could have in these types of environments because radiation fields from gamma ray emitting sources behave peculiarly in well shielded and confined spaces where radiation scattering is substantial. This project began with benchmark measurements of a Cs-137 source in several different well shielded, small scale tunnel geometries as a proof of concept study demonstrating the complexity of radiation fields in such environments. Follow on calculations utilizing the radiation transport code, MCNP®, confirmed that the high scattering environment results in apparent radiation streaming down the length of the tunnel, where the calculated dose rates are higher than observed in a free field at equivalent distances. The tunnel material also proved important for the impact of radiation scattering, implying that there is an optimization between the probability of scattering and self-absorption in walls. Other simulated tunnel geometries confirmed the presence of scatter and increased radiation dose rates beyond the line-of-sight of the source, where virtually no transmission is expected through the tunnel materials. The final part of this project was implementing the modeling techniques into real world threat scenarios for subterranean infrastructure. Two models of a full sized underground roadway were completed using two known radiological exposure device threat materials, Cs-137 and Co-60. Both models resulted in similarly shaped radiation fields and confirmed that the near wall of a crossing roadway offered lower radiation dose rates than the far wall upon approach. These findings could prove useful to decision makers facing a subsurface infrastructure CBRN incident and could lead to the development of tools that can be implemented into emergency preparedness framework