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Gameful and playful design aspire to make existing activities and systems more engaging by infusing them with the engaging qualities of games and toys. One such quality is make-believe, the constitution of fictional “as ifs”. While frequently evoked, actual work on make-believe in gameful and playful design has remained quite scarce and scattered. This chapter therefore draws on neighbouring fields to break out five major design aspects of make-believe: theming; storification; scripting, ruling, and framing; role-play; and their integration in unified experiences. For each, the chapter presents explanatory theories; psychological and behavioural effects; design elements and strategies used to evoke said effects; and existing empirical studies. The chapter closes in summarizing how and why playful make-believe design differs from current gamification in form (often artistic one-offs) and technology (often audio); and what limitations future research should try to overcome.

Aesthetic evaluation of computer generated patterns is a growing filed with several challenges. This paper focuses on the quantitative evaluation of order and complexity in multi-state two-dimensional 2D cellular automata CA. CA are known for their ability to generate highly complex patterns through simple and well defined local interaction of rules. It is suggested that the order and complexity of 2D patterns can be quantified by using mean information gain. This measure, also known as conditional entropy, takes into account conditional and joint probabilities of the elements of a configuration in a 2D plane. A series of experiments is designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the mean information gain in quantifying the structural order and complexity, including the orientation of symmetries of multi-state 2D CA configurations.

Virtual learning environments (VLEs) are widely adopted in higher education to facilitate online methods of content delivery for the lecturers, to enable online submission for the students and to provide course management tools for the administration team. There are a variety of software solutions to choose from, modelled according to heterogeneous needs and functionalities. Despite the existence of clear organisational, pedagogical and technological goals, the procurement and implementation of a VLE is a complex task with significant challenges. We present the case study of a university which went through the process of procuring a new VLE. We examine the usability of each VLE utilising the System Usability Scale (SUS) and capture further feedback from the stakeholders by applying the Interactive Management (IM) methodology. The first part of the research focuses on the three VLEs remaining in contention during the final stages of the procurement process. The results of the usability evaluations are analysed, explained and compared. The second part of the study (Vertesi A, Dogan H, Stefanidis A, Ashton G, Drake W: Usability evaluation of a virtual learning environment: a university case study. In: 15th international Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA), 21–23 October 2018, Budapest, Hungary, 2018) examines the selected and implemented VLE 6 months after its initiation. A usability test was carried out again on this VLE to examine changes since its launching. Additional feedback was collected from the stakeholders to support the fine-tuning process after the implementation. According to the evaluation of each user group, all the three VLEs performed below the average usability expectation. Generally, students evaluated the usability of the VLEs higher than the academics and administration staff. The usability scores of the students’ evaluation from different courses and years show remarkable differences. The ranked and categorised feedback given by the stakeholders highlights the importance of planning, training and communication prior to and during the implementation process. Usability and learnability play important roles according to the feedback.

The ability to predict correctly the future remaining life time of components is of paramount importance to improve the safety and reliability of systems and networks via an effective maintenance policy. However, simplifications and assumptions are usually adopted to compensate lack of data, imprecision and vagueness, which cannot be justified completely and may, thus lead to biased results. To overcome these issues, an imprecise probabilities approach is proposed for reliability analysis and risk-based maintenance strategy. A novel efficient computational approach is proposed for identifying robust maintenance strategies. The optimal solution is obtained through only one reliability assessment based on Advanced Line Sampling and reusing the outcome of maintenance activities in a force Monte Carlo approach. The proposed methodology remove the huge computational cost of reliability-base optimization making the analysis of industrial size problem feasible. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated by identifying the optimal maintenance policy of buried pipelines and it is shown how this approach can improve the current industrial practice.

This chapter reports on and discusses an extensive interview conducted by the authors with the head of pre-sales at a hardware and software re-seller. The Pre-Sales division of the reseller provides advice based on end-to-end solution for IT infrastructure and technology management. Within the team there is expertise spanning a plethora of specifically defined technology areas to support end customers in the decision making process on their capital expenditure in IT equipment. Areas include Software licensing, Server infrastructure development, data storage and management, systems security, and networking infrastructure (and more). The business of being a re-seller may not initially strike the reader as being relevant to cybersecurity in general, and socio-technical matters at all, but we discovered the rather vital role that such an intermediary performs through their added value and corporate ethics. Specifically, this reseller’s team of customer service agents provide advice and referral to colleagues and end customers for subject-matter expertise as well, naturally, for opportunities to up-sell – specifically with that important core of any economy: Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (hereafter SMEs) - usually defined as companies with up to 250 employees. In other words, the business both responds to requests for solutions from existing customers (pull) and actively engages with customers to grow awareness about, for example, security risks in order to sell products and services (push). The authors – drawing on a background of research in corporate resilience and SMEs (with a commercial background in the IT sector) were interested to learn from an individual with his finger very firmly on the pulse of SME cyber-security awareness, just what his view was on the general level of cyber-security awareness amongst SMEs and what his company offered in the way of assistance.

Devolution encompasses a range of quite different solutions in three countries (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), plus markedly smaller delegations of powers to London and some English cities and regions. There remain important issues around the stability and effectiveness of these arrangements, which were designed to meet specific demands for national or regional control and to bring government closer to citizens. Diana Stirbu and Patrick Dunleavy explore how far relations between Westminster and the key devolved institutions have been handled democratically and effectively.

Preclinical studies showed a relationship between high dominant frequency areas (HDFA) and wave fractionation, but evidence in patient who atrial fibrillation (AF) persists for long-term periods (persAF) it is not well defined. This study aims to assess the spatiotemporal organization characteristics at HDFAs is persAF and its impact after per standard pulmonary vein isolation (PVI). Eight persAF patients had a non-contact array catheter deployed into the left atrium to collect up to 2048 AF electrograms (AEG) for 15 s. AEGs were band-pass filtered (3-30 Hz) followed by ventricular farfield cancellation. DF between 4-10 Hz and its respective organization index (OI) were calculated (4 s with 50% overlap) to produce 3D DF and OI maps. HDFA defined as the regions within a 0.25 Hz drop from the highest DF were determined and their centre of gravity (CG) calculated. Highest DF sites showed a higher OI at their core when compared to the periphery (0.422±0.101 vs. 0.386±0.126, p=0.02) and increased again organization at sites distant from the HDFAs. Similarly, after PVI, OI remained higher as compared to their periphery (0.372±0.026 vs. 0.332±0.036, p=0.22), but with significant lower values when compared with baseline (p<0.0001). PersAF patients showed higher organization in the HDFAs core when compared with its periphery.

Decision-making for self-adaptation approaches need to address different challenges, including the quantification of the uncertainty of events that cannot be foreseen in advance and their effects, and dealing with conflicting objectives that inherently involve multi-objective decision making (e.g., avoiding costs vs. providing reliable service). To enable researchers to evaluate and compare decision-making techniques for self-adaptation, we present the RDMSim exemplar. RDMSim enables researchers to evaluate and compare techniques for decision-making under environmental uncertainty that support self-adaptation. The focus of the exemplar is on the domain problem related to Remote Data Mirroring, which gives opportunity to face the challenges described above. RDMSim provides probe and effector components for easy integration with external adaptation managers, which are associated with decision-making techniques and based on the MAPE-K loop. Specifically, the paper presents (i) RDMSim, a simulator for real-world experimentation, (ii) a set of realistic simulation scenarios that can be used for experimentation and comparison purposes, (iii) data for the sake of comparison.

This paper describes a learning-objective-centric workflow for modifying (‘mod-ding’) existing tabletop games for educational purposes. The workflow combines existing research for serious games design with novel systematic analysis tech-niques for learning and game mechanics and gameplay loops to improve the un-derstanding and rigour of the process. A detailed worked example applies the workflow to the development of a serious tabletop game with the educational goal of increasing knowledge and confidence of performing postgraduate literature re-views. Systematic application of the workflow to a real example supports the val-ue of this approach and provides a useful template for educators to follow for in-creasing the quality and feasibility of self-designed serious games.

Drawing on critical realism, complexity theory, and emergence, this chapter supports the call to re-imagine doctoral writing by arguing that academic writing in general is a complex open and emergent social system that can change. Several reasons to re-imagine doctoral writing are discussed. The first reason is that academic writings already exhibit considerable diversity. This suggests that the conditions of possibility for re-imagining them are already in place and provide a conceptual space from which to further imagine. Second, there are\ud epistemic reasons for re-thinking how we write, as evidenced by research on socio-semiotics. Several examples of doctoral writers\ud who have re-imagined their writing for epistemic reasons are given. To explain how change in social phenomena is possible and how it can continue to be justified, I draw on the theory of complex permeable open systems. These systems are emergent and, as such, allow us to think of social phenomena, such as writing, as non-reductive organic unities whose characteristics emerge from but cannot be reduced to any single constituent feature (such as grammar or lexis). By re-thinking academic writings in this way, we can provide a rationale to explain how they can continue to change. The chapter concludes by sharing the work of scholars engaged in re-imagining doctoral writings. The significance for writing studies is that critical realism offers a systematic and critical space within which to explain change\ud in social phenomena and provides a theoretical foundation for continuing to re-imagine conditions of possibility.