Introduction MATTHEW THOMAS PAYNE; NINA B. HUNTEMANN
How to Play Video Games,
03/2019, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
When we think of games we often think of words like play, and fun, and pleasure. But to play games is to willingly invite frustration into our lives. The feeling is a common one. You stare blankly at ...a weekend crossword puzzle convinced that the missing word is just out of reach. You restart a boss fight in the hope that it will be less menacing this time. You leap to your death again, and again, and again, barely missing a ledge in pursuit of a hard-to-reach collectible item. The scenarios differ, but the feeling is the same. So too
The summer can be a cruel time for avid gamers. Year after year, video game publishers schedule their big-budget titles for release just in time for the holiday season. Firms depend on increased ...seasonal spending to drive the sales of their big-budget franchise favorites, helping to secure returns on considerable investments. The upshot of this release strategy is that new blockbusters and anticipated sequels often do not hit store shelves until the fall at the earliest. Thus, gamers and game buyers have few major titles to look forward to during gaming's long summer months. There is, however, one brief and gleaming moment of over-hyped relief during this time: E3.
This dissertation examines how commercially successful military-themed video games produced after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks are crafted, marketed, and played with the goal of ...understanding the interlocking technological, cultural, and social practices that contribute to their interactive pleasures. The systematic inquiry into the production and experience of media pleasure carries with it vexing questions about how such affect is created and how it is situated within broader cultural fields. This interdisciplinary project accordingly utilizes multiple methods including close textual readings of seminal games, a critical discourse analysis of marketing materials, and an ethnography and focus group of a war gaming fan community to track how these sites of practice give post-9/11 military-themed gameplay its distinctive experiential character and cultural import. The case studies examined herein reveal that the affective dimensions of militarized gameplay are intimately linked to the political and cultural forces undergirding their production, marketing, and reception, and that the games industry mobilizes anxieties about terrorism to entice gamers into virtually striking back against foreign aggressors.
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Nanopore sequencers can be used to selectively sequence certain DNA molecules in a pool by reversing the voltage across individual nanopores to reject specific sequences, enabling enrichment and ...depletion to address biological questions. Previously, we achieved this using dynamic time warping to map the signal to a reference genome, but the method required substantial computational resources and did not scale to gigabase-sized references. Here we overcome this limitation by using graphical processing unit (GPU) base-calling. We show enrichment of specific chromosomes from the human genome and of low-abundance organisms in mixed populations without a priori knowledge of sample composition. Finally, we enrich targeted panels comprising 25,600 exons from 10,000 human genes and 717 genes implicated in cancer, identifying PML-RARA fusions in the NB4 cell line in <15 h sequencing. These methods can be used to efficiently screen any target panel of genes without specialized sample preparation using any computer and a suitable GPU. Our toolkit, readfish, is available at https://www.github.com/looselab/readfish .
Abstract
We study the population properties of merging binary black holes in the second LIGO–Virgo Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog assuming they were all formed dynamically in gravitationally ...bound clusters. Using a phenomenological population model, we infer the mass and spin distribution of first-generation black holes, while self-consistently accounting for hierarchical mergers. Considering a range of cluster masses, we see compelling evidence for hierarchical mergers in clusters with escape velocities ≳100 km s
−1
. For our most probable cluster mass, we find that the catalog contains at least one second-generation merger with 99% credibility. We find that the hierarchical model is preferred over an alternative model with no hierarchical mergers (Bayes factor
>
1400
) and that GW190521 is favored to contain two second-generation black holes with odds
>
700
, and GW190519, GW190602, GW190620, and GW190706 are mixed-generation binaries with
>
10
. However, our results depend strongly on the cluster escape velocity, with more modest evidence for hierarchical mergers when the escape velocity is ≲100 km s
−1
. Assuming that all binary black holes are formed dynamically in globular clusters with escape velocities on the order of tens of km s
−1
, GW190519 and GW190521 are favored to include a second-generation black hole with odds
>
1
. In this case, we find that 99% of black holes from the inferred total population have masses that are less than 49
M
⊙
, and that this constraint is robust to our choice of prior on the maximum black hole mass.
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