La dramatización de los números

Ya hace unos años A.K. Dewdney en su libro 200% de nada, se hacia eco de los curiosos usos sociales de los números donde se exagera la precisión de los mismos, en casos donde no tiene sentido (1.234.567 manifestantes, 345.674 peces en el lago, 14 horas 45 minutos 34 segundos andan- do,...), con vistas a dar una versión “mas científica” de la información que se desea transmitir. A este fenómeno lo bautizó Dewdney como “dramadigits”. Una conocida historia de John Allen Paulos es la del vigilante de un museo de ciencias naturales que estando ante un gran esqueleto de dinosaurio fue preguntado por unos visitantes sobre la antigüedad de aquellos restos y contestó con una sorprendente precisión: “90.000.006 años”. Extrañados los visitantes sobre los 6 años pidieron explicaciones al paciente guarda y éste respondió “cuando llegué aquí me dijeron que el dinosaurio tenia 90.000.000 de años y de esto ya hace 6 años”. En este clip me gustaría compartir algunas historias cuyo común denominador es este extraño sentido de la precisión.

Emergent self-organisation of wireless sensor networks

This paper describes a protocol for dynamically configuring wireless sensor nodes into logical clusters. The concept is to be able to inject an overlay configuration into an ad-hoc network of sensor nodes or similar devices, and have the network configure itself organically. The devices are arbitrarily deployed and have initially have no information whatsoever concerning physical location, topology, density or neighbourhood. The Emergent Cluster Overlay (ECO) protocol is totally self-configuring and has several novel features, including nodes self-determining their mobility based on patterns of neighbour discovery, and that the target cluster size is specified externally (by the sensor network application) and is not directly coupled to radio communication range or node packing density. Cluster head nodes are automatically assigned as part of the cluster configuration process, at no additional cost. ECO is ideally suited to applications of wireless sensor networks in which localized groups of sensors act cooperatively to provide a service. This includes situations where service dilution is used (dynamically identifying redundant nodes to conserve their resources).

Rats, floods and flowers: London's Gothicized nature

AUTHOR's OVERVIEW This chapter attempts a definition of London eco-gothic, beginning with an ecocritical reading of the ubiquitous London rat. Following Dracula, popular London gothic has been overrun, from the blunt horror-schlock of James Herbert’s 1970s Rats series to China Miéville’s King Rat. Maud Ellman’s elegant discussion of the modernist rat as a protean figure associated with a ‘panoply of fears and fetishes’, underlines how the rat has always featured in anti-urban discourse: as part of racist representations of immigration; as an expression of fear of disease and poverty; or through a quasi-supernatural anxiety about their indestructible and illimitable nature which makes them a staple feature of post-apocalyptic landscapes. Even so, the London rat is a rather more mundane manifestation of urban eco-gothic than the ‘city wilderness’ metaphors common to representations of New York or Los Angles as identified by eco-critic Andrew White. London’s gothic noses its way out through cracks in the pavements, grows from seeds in suburban gardens or accumulates through the steady drip of rainwater. However, I will suggest, in texts such as Maggie Gee’s The Flood and P. D. James’ Children of Men, London eco-gothic becomes less local and familiar as it responds to global environmental crisis with more dramatic tales of minatorial nature.

Halfway to heaven

When some 700 people throng the auditorium at Earl’s Court to hear a debate about whether eco houses are ugly, then a frustrated tree-hugger like myself may feel that we are halfway to heaven, not that I plan to share my Elysium with Germaine Greer in ranting mode if I can avoid it.

Making sense of game based user data: learning analytics in applied games

Digital learning games are useful educational tools with high motivational potential. With the application of games for instruction there comes the need of acknowledging learning game experiences also in the context of educational assessment. Learning analytics provides new opportunities for supporting assessment in and of educational games. We give an overview of current learning analytics methods in this field and reflect on existing challenges. An approach of providing reusable software assets for interaction assessment and evaluation in games is presented. This is part of a broader initiative of making available advanced methodologies and tools for supporting applied game development.

Towards Data Management Planning Support for Research Data

Görzig, H., Engel, F., Brocks, H., Vogel, T. & Hemmje, M. (2015, August). Towards Data Management Planning Support for Research Data. Paper presented at the ASE International Conference on Data Science, Stanford, United States of America.

Evaluation of Serious Games: A Holistic Approach

Digital games constitute a major emerging technology that is expected to enter mainstream educational use within a few years. The highly engaging and motivating character of such games bears great potential to support immersive, meaningful, and situated learning experiences. To seize this potential, meaningful quality and impact measurements are indispensible. Although there is a growing body of evidence on the efficacy of games for learning, evaluation is often poorly designed, incomplete, biased, if not entirely absent. Well-designed evaluations demonstrating the educational effect as well as the return on investment of serious games may foster broader adoption by educational institutions and training providers, and support the development of the serious game industry. The European project RAGE introduces a comprehensive and multi-perspective framework for serious game evaluation, which is presented in this paper.

Amplifying applied game development and uptake

The established (digital) leisure game industry is historically one dominated by large international hardware vendors (e.g. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo), major publishers and supported by a complex network of development studios, distributors and retailers. New modes of digital distribution and development practice are challenging this business model and the leisure games industry landscape is one experiencing rapid change. The established (digital) leisure games industry, at least anecdotally, appears reluctant to participate actively in the applied games sector (Stewart et al., 2013). There are a number of potential explanations as to why this may indeed be the case including ; A concentration on large-scale consolidation of their (proprietary) platforms, content, entertainment brand and credibility which arguably could be weakened by association with the conflicting notion of purposefulness (in applied games) in market niches without clear business models or quantifiable returns on investment. In contrast, the applied games industry exhibits the characteristics of an emerging, immature industry namely: weak interconnectedness, limited knowledge exchange, an absence of harmonising standards, limited specialisations, limited division of labour and arguably insufficient evidence of the products efficacies (Stewart et al., 2013; Garcia Sanchez, 2013) and could, arguably, be characterised as a dysfunctional market. To test these assertions the Realising an Applied Gaming Ecosystem (RAGE) project will develop a number of self contained gaming assets to be actively employed in the creation of a number of applied games to be implemented and evaluated as regional pilots across a variety of European educational, training and vocational contexts. RAGE is a European Commission Horizon 2020 project with twenty (pan European) partners from industry, research and education with the aim of developing, transforming and enriching advanced technologies from the leisure games industry into self-contained gaming assets (i.e. solutions showing economic value potential) that could support a variety of stakeholders including teachers, students, and, significantly, game studios interested in developing applied games. RAGE will provide these assets together with a large quantity of high-quality knowledge resources through a self-sustainable Ecosystem, a social space that connects research, the gaming industries, intermediaries, education providers, policy makers and end-users in order to stimulate the development and application of applied games in educational, training and vocational contexts. The authors identify barriers (real and perceived) and opportunities facing stakeholders in engaging, exploring new emergent business models ,developing, establishing and sustaining an applied gaming eco system in Europe.

Towards Cloud-Based Knowledge Capturing Based on Natural Language Processing

Paper presented at the Cloud Forward Conference 2015, October 6th-8th, Pisa

ReaderBench: An Integrated Cohesion-Centered Framework

Dascalu, M., Stavarache, L.L., Dessus, P., Trausan-Matu, S., McNamara, D.S., & Bianco, M. (2015). ReaderBench: An Integrated Cohesion-Centered Framework. In G. Conole, T. Klobucar, C. Rensing, J. Konert & É. Lavoué (Eds.), 10th European Conf. on Technology Enhanced Learning (pp. 505–508). Toledo, Spain: Springer.

D9.1 - RAGE Dissemination Plan

This Dissemination Plan aims to guide and support the efforts of each and all RAGE partners in convincing Applied Games stakeholders to use the outputs of the Project. This is a live document as it will be periodically updated, enhanced and completed along the entire RAGE project lifecycle.

D9.2 - RAGE website

This deliverable comprises the general description of the RAGE project public website – referred also as the RAGE website, accessible at http://www.rageproject.eu. The RAGE website main objectives are to raise awareness about the project activities as well as to incentivise engagement from targeted stakeholder communities. It integrates social media networks such as Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn and has been developed using Wordpress as Content Management System (CMS). The RAGE website is constantly monitored for content management and technical support purposes.

D10.1 - Quality Assurance Handbook

The purpose of this Quality Assurance Handbook (QAH) is to present and describe quality standards and procedures to be applied in the internal management and execution of the Research and Innovation Action 644187 RAGE (Realising and Applied Gaming Eco-system). This document is based on the terms and conditions established in the Grant Agreement (nº 644187) signed by the European Commission and the project coordinator, and its Annexes as well as the RAGE Consortium Agreement specifications and requirements

D10.2 - Research Data Management Plan, version 1.0

This document is the first out of three iterations of the DMP that will be formally delivered during the project. Version 2 is due in month 24 and version 3 towards the end of the project. The DMP thus is not a fixed document; it evolves and gains more precision and substance during the lifespan of the project. In this first version we describe the planned research data sets related to the RAGE evaluation and validation activities, and the fifteen principles that will guide data management in RAGE. The former are described in the format of the EU data management template, and the latter in terms of their guiding principle, how we propose to implement them, and when they will be implemented. This document is thus first of all relevant to WP5 and WP8 members.

What serious game studios want from ICT research: identifying developers’ needs

Although many scholars recognise the great potential of games for teaching and learning, the EU-based industry for such “serious” games” is highly fragmented and its growth figures remain well behind those of the leisure game market. Serious gaming has been designated as a priority area by the European Commission in its Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. The RAGE project, which is funded as part of the Horizon 2020 Programme, is a technology-driven research and innovation project that will make available a series of self-contained gaming software modules that support game studios in the development of serious games. As game studios are a critical factor in the uptake of serious games, the RAGE projects will base its work on their views and needs as to achieve maximum impact. This paper presents the results of a survey among European game studios about their development related needs and expectations. The survey is aimed at identifying a baseline reference for successfully supporting game studios with advanced ICTs for serious games.