Westminster Serious Games Platform (wmin-SGP) a tool for real-time authoring of roleplay simulations for learning

The use of serious games in education and their pedagogical benefit is being widely recognized. However, effective integration of serious games in education depends on addressing two big challenges: the successful incorporation of motivation and engagement that can lead to learning; and the highly specialised skills associated with customised development to meet the required pedagogical objectives. This paper presents the Westminster Serious Games Platform (wmin-SGP) an authoring tool that allows educators/domain experts without games design and development technical skills to create bespoke roleplay simulations in three dimensional scenes featuring fully embodied virtual humans capable of verbal and non-verbal interaction with users fit for specific educational objectives. The paper presents the wmin-SGP system architecture and it evaluates its effectiveness in fulfilling its purpose via the implementation of two roleplay simulations, one for Politics and one for Law. In addition, it presents the results of two types of evaluation that address how successfully the wmin-SGP combines usability principles and game core drives based on the Octalysis gamification framework that lead to motivating games experiences. The evaluation results shows that the wmin-SGP: provides an intuitive environment and tools that support users without advanced technical skills to create in real-time bespoke roleplay simulations in advanced graphical interfaces; satisfies most of the usability principles; and provides balanced simulations based on the Octalysis framework core drives. The paper concludes with a discussion of future extension of this real time authoring tool and directions for further development of the Octalysis framework to address learning.

Defining Key Inventors: A Comparison of Fuel Cell and Nanotechnology Industries

This paper defines the notion of key inventors — those whose patenting is simultaneously highly productive and also widely cited. By implication, key inventors should be the leaders in any developing new field and we investigate the validity of the notion through an exploration of two emerging technological fields: fuel cell and nanotechnology. The nature of the two groups is compared to discuss the differences between the technological groups.

Film as an archive for colonial photographs: activating the past in the present

This practice-led research looks at the ways in which the colonial archive, and the colonial photographic archive in particular, can be reconstructed to produce new critical histories. The research argues for the potential of the moving image as a tool for re-staging colonial archives, as a means of generating responsible ways of looking at, and of engaging with our troubled collective pasts. In my practice I mix the photographic archive of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company(which became BP) with my family’s photographs from Iran, and with the documentation and narrativization of my encounter with both of these sets of materials, within the moving image. Through this process I address questions about the nature of the photographic archive and the search for historical meaning within it; the question of the researcher’s position within the archive and within the history she produces; and I investigate the affective power of colonial photographs within film and the experience of untimeliness which they produce. While addressing problems associated with the failure of photographic archives to offer access to any stable, transparent meaning, I show how engaging with slippages of meaning can produce other kinds of historical knowledge. But I also argue that attending to the impression of the ‘real’ produced by the colonial photograph as it appears within film, makes the past felt in the present tense, in ways that draw attention to the responsibility of being an onlooker in a situation of injustice. In addition I show how registering the place and time of the researcher within the new filmic archive in motion produces an effective means of imaginative time travel and a lively experience of history.

Next generation e-learning platform: virtual laboratory simulations

Bioscience subjects require a significant amount of training in laboratory techniques to produce highly skilled science graduates. Many techniques which are currently used in diagnostic, research and industrial laboratories require expensive equipment for single users; examples of which include next generation sequencing, quantitative PCR, mass spectrometry and other analytical techniques. The cost of the machines, reagents and limited access frequently preclude undergraduate students from using such cutting edge techniques. In addition to cost and availability, the time taken for analytical runs on equipment such as High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) does not necessarily fit with the limitations of timetabling. Understanding the theory underlying these techniques without the accompanying practical classes can be unexciting for students. One alternative from wet laboratory provision is to use virtual simulations of such practical which enable students to see the machines and interact with them to generate data. The Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of Westminster has provided all second and third year undergraduate students with iPads so that these students all have access to a mobile device to assist with learning. We have purchased licences from Labster to access a range of virtual laboratory simulations. These virtual laboratories are fully equipped and require student responses to multiple answer questions in order to progress through the experiment. In a pilot study to look at the feasibility of the Labster virtual laboratory simulations with the iPad devices; second year Biological Science students (n=36) worked through the Labster HPLC simulation on iPads. The virtual HPLC simulation enabled students to optimise the conditions for the separation of drugs. Answers to Multiple choice questions were necessary to progress through the simulation, these focussed on the underlying principles of the HPLC technique. Following the virtual laboratory simulation students went to a real HPLC in the analytical suite in order to separate of asprin, caffeine and paracetamol. In a survey 100% of students (n=36) in this cohort agreed that the Labster virtual simulation had helped them to understand HPLC. In free text responses one student commented that "The terminology is very clear and I enjoyed using Labster very much”. One member of staff commented that “there was a very good knowledge interaction with the virtual practical”.

Military objectives in cyber warfare

This Chapter discusses the possible problems arising from the application of the principle of distinction under the law of armed conflict to cyber attacks. It first identifies when cyber attacks qualify as ‘attacks’ under the law of armed conflict and then examines the two elements of the definition of ‘military objective’ contained in Article 52(2) of the 1977 Protocol I additional to the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the Protection of Victims of War. The Chapter concludes that this definition is flexible enough to apply in the cyber context without significant problems and that none of the challenges that characterize cyber attacks hinders the application of the principle of distinction.

Guiding public protest: assessing the propaganda model of China’s hybrid newspaper industry

This dissertation presents an account and analysis of published mainland Chinese media coverage surrounding three major events of public protest during the Hu-Wen era (2003-2013). The research makes a qualitative analysis of printed material drawn from a range of news outlets, differentiated by their specific political and commercial affiliations. The goal of the research is to better understand the role of mainstream media in social conflict resolution, a hitherto under-studied area, and to identify gradations within the ostensibly monolithic mainland Chinese media on issues of political sensitivity. China’s modern media formation displays certain characteristics of Anglophone media at its hyper-commercialised, populist core. However, the Chinese state retains an explicit, though often ambiguous, remit to engage with news production. Because of this, Chinese newspapers are often assumed to be one-dimensional propaganda ‘tools’ and, accordingly, easily dismissed from analyses of public protest. This research finds that, in an area where political actors have rescinded their monopoly on communicative power, a result of both policy decisions and the rise of Internet-based media platforms, established purveyors of news have acquired greater latitude to report on hitherto sensitive episodes of conflict but do so under the burden of having to correctly guide public opinion. The thesis examines the discursive resources that are deployed in this task, as well as reporting patterns which are suggestive of a new propaganda approach to handling social conflict within public media. Beside the explicitly political nature of coverage of protest events, the study sheds lights on gradations within China’s complex, hybrid media landscape both in terms of institutional purpose and qualitative performance.

Feeling Bodies in Marketing: Aesthetics, Emotions and Gender

Gender is deeply embedded in marketing ideology, and it continues to be a topic of concern in the marketing academy. There is little attention paid by marketers, however, to related studies in other fields on aesthetic labour and emotional labour in relation to gender issues, despite the commonalities and intersections between them. This article seeks to incorporate aesthetic labour and emotional labour into the gender and marketing discussion. It concludes by calling for greater critical awareness of gender as a dominant motif in our ideologies, discourses and practices in marketing, offering suggestions for empirical research into this important topic.

A Space of One's Own: Women's Magazine Consumption Within Family Life

This is a study of women's magazine consumption in the home. It explores issues of time and space, and addresses the importance the women who took part in the study place on magazine consumption in their lives, given the 'juggling' lifestyles experiences by most of them. The study reveals family life to be a landscape within which these women carve out what they perceive as valuable and rare time and space for themselves. The authors argue that in contemporary life women's magazines play a key part in the quest for me-time and time away from others, in both a tangible and experiential sense.

Magners Man: Irish Cider, Representations of Masculinity and the "Burning Celtic Soul"

In this paper we go in search of the Celtic Soul, tracking its historical intertwining with, and relation to, Irish masculinity, from Ireland's pre-colonial past to its colonial days and finally to its postcolonial present. We argue that the Celtic soul manifests itself, with great success, in the Magners Irish Cider advertising campaign. As a key part of our analysis we also illustrate how representations of the Irish Celt serve as a means of enabling young male consumers to reconcile the many tensions and contradictions they are experiencing over what it means to perform ideals of masculinity in contemporary western culture.