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"Kavanagh, William"
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Thor : epic collection. Worldengine
Visionary writer Warren Ellis and superstar artist Mike Deodato Jr. unite to change everything for a Thunder God forsaken by his father and left mortal in Manhattan. Death is coming for Thor - and Ragnarok may not be far behind! But can he find solace - and renewed vigor - in the arms of the Enchantress? And together, can they save the World Tree, Yggdrasil? Then, William Messner-Loebs takes over with Deodato in bringing an epic chapter of Asgard's saga to a close! Thor joins Captain America and his Avengers comrades in battle with the Zodiac before facing the climactic twilight of the gods alongside his hammer brother Red Norvell! Prepare to bid farewell to a legend!
Book
Border encounters
Among the tremendous changes affecting Europe in recent decades, those concerning political frontiers have been some of the most significant. International borders are being opened in some regions while being redefined or reinforced in others. The social relationships of those living in these borderland regions are also changing fundamentally. This volume investigates, from a local, ground-up perspective, what is happening at some of these border encounters: face-to-face interactions and relations of compliance and confrontation, where people are bargaining, exchanging goods and information, and maneuvering beyond state boundaries. Anthropological case studies from a number of European borderlands shed light on the questions of how, and to what extent, the border context influences the changing interactions and social relationships between people at a political frontier.
eBook
Using Probabilistic Model Checking to Balance Games
In this thesis, we consider problem areas in game development and use probabilistic model checking to address them. In particular, we address the problem of multiplayer game balancing and introduce an approach called Chained Strategy Generation (CSG). This technique uses model checking to generate synthetic player data representing a game-playing community moving between effective strategies. The results of CSG mimic the metagame, an ever-evolving state of play describing the players' collective understanding of what strategies are effective. We expand upon CSG with optimality networks, a visualisation that compares game material and can be used to show that a game exhibits certain qualities necessary for balance. We demonstrate our approach using a purpose-built mobile game (RPGLite). We initially balanced RPGLite using our technique and collected data from real world players via the mobile app. The application and its development are described in detail. The gathered data is then used to show that the model checking did lead to a well-balanced game. We compare the analysis performed from model checking to the gameplay data and refine the baseline qualities of a balanced game which model checking can be used to guarantee. We show how the collected data via the mobile app can be used in conjunction with the prior model checking to calculate action-costs - the difference between the value of the action chosen and the best action available. We use action-costs to evaluate player skill and to consider other factors of the game.
Dissertation
Breakout Group Allocation Schedules and the Social Golfer Problem with Adjacent Group Sizes
The current pandemic has led schools and universities to turn to online meeting software solutions such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. The teaching experience can be enhanced via the use of breakout rooms for small group interaction. Over the course of a class (or over several classes), the class will be allocated to breakout groups multiple times over several rounds. It is desirable to mix the groups as much as possible, the ideal being that no two students appear in the same group in more than one round. In this paper, we discuss how the problem of scheduling balanced allocations of students to sequential breakout rooms directly corresponds to a novel variation of a well-known problem in combinatorics (the social golfer problem), which we call the social golfer problem with adjacent group sizes. We explain how solutions to this problem can be obtained using constructions from combinatorial design theory and how they can be used to obtain good, balanced breakout room allocation schedules. We present our solutions for up to 50 students and introduce an online resource that educators can access to immediately generate suitable allocation schedules.
Journal Article
Proximity and Asymmetry on the Portuguese-Spanish Border
The social sciences, or at least those that, like anthropology, are less concerned with always being ‘scientific’, will at times accept that certain things that may seem at first sight to be purely anecdotal and unimportant may yet be capable of revealing crucial aspects of social reality. I suggest that the following is such an example.
The story has it that in preparation for a visit by the Spanish prime minister to a Lisbon school, the headmaster briefed the pupils to answer, when asked what Spain meant for the Portuguese, that ‘Spaniards are our friends’. ‘No, headmaster’, piped up one
Book Chapter
Identidades en la frontera luso-española: permanencias y transformaciones después de Schengen
Para intentar comprender el impacto del tratado de Schengen en la construcción y recreación de las identidades de las gentes que viven en un sector de la frontera luso-española, específicamente en la parte de la frontera donde se encuentran las regiones de Trás-os-Montes del norte de Portugal y la comunidad autónoma española de Galicia, es necesario examinar, e intentar interconectar, tres elementos a) las teorías manejadas por los científicos sociales sobre los conceptos de “identidad” y de “fronteras”; b) las ideas (y estereotipos) del “Otro” por parte de los portugueses y de los españoles a través de la historia, desde la fundación de Portugal en el siglo XII, y c) la etnografía, en sus dos sentidos, como producto y como proceso, realizada en las poblaciones (tanto en las aldeas como en las ciudades) de la frontera luso-española antes y después de la implementación del tratado de Schengen.
Journal Article
Identities on the Portuguese-Spanish border: permanence and transformation after Schengen
ABSTRACT IN SPANISH: Para intentar comprender el impacto del tratado de Schengen en la construcción y recreación de las identidades de las gentes que viven en un sector de la frontera luso-española, específicamente en la parte de la frontera donde se encuentran las regiones de Trás-os-Montes del norte de Portugal y la comunidad autónoma española de Galicia, es necesario examinar, e intentar interconectar, tres elementos: a) las teorias manejadas por los cientificos sociales sobre los conceptos de \"identidad\" y de \"fronteras\"; b) las ideas (y estereotipos) del \"Otro\" por parte de los portugueses y de los españoles a través de la historia, desde la fundación de Portugal en el siglo XII, y c) la etnografia, en sus dos sentidos, como producto y como proceso, realizada en las poblaciones (tanto en las aldeas como en las ciudades) de la frontera luso-española antes y después de la implementación del tratado de Schengen. // ABSTRACT IN ENGLISH: In order to understand the construction and re-creation of identities of those who live on a section of the Portuguese-Spanish border, specifically that part of the frontier where the northern Portuguese region of Trás-os-Montes meets the Spanish region of Galicia, this essay examines and attempts to interconnect three elements: the theories used by social scientists concerning the concepts of 'identity' and of 'borders'; the ideas (and stereotypes) of the 'Other' held by the Portuguese and the Spaniards throughout their history since the founding of Portugal in the twelfth century; and the ethnography, in both senses of product and of process, carried out by the author over the past two decades in villages and towns on the Luso-Spanish frontier, both before and after the Schengen Agreement.
Journal Article
Villagers of Sierra de Gredos
The 130 villagers of Navalguijo in the Sierra de Gredos of Central Spain live in a village perched high in the mountains and they face an extreme climate with very cold winters and hot summers. The soil is acid and poor, and the steep slopes and short growing season mean that agriculture cannot provide a living. Collectively the villagers own summer pastures high in the mountains, and individually they hold smaller autumn pastures. With access to winter pastures across the mountains in the region of Extremadura, they are able to maintain a large herd of beef cattle, which form their main source of wealth and which are their dearest possessions. To make this film, the crew joined the village men on their trek to Extremadura, when they drive their cattle down the mountains. This cattle drive is a mixture of hard work and holiday, with passing round of leather wine bottles, story-telling and evening stopovers at favourite inns punctuating the long march. This film portrays a society whose ideals of village co-operation and the rigid and efficient organisation of tasks have given the village a strong sense of identity over generations. It remains to be seen if this sense of identity survives the breakdown of their isolation from the outside world as tourists discover 'hidden Spain' and better communications and roads bring increasing contact with the rest of the country.
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