For a breeder, understanding the inheritance of a trait that is controlled by several genes and influenced by the environment can be a nightmare. Suppose, for example, that you are trying to breed apricot Poodles, but instead of getting only a single shade, your litters always have a variety of shades from pale to dark apricot. You might blame it on variable expressivity, which is just a conven...

Popular acceptance of the mp3 digital music standard has greatly increased the complexity of organizing and playing large music collections. Existing digital music systems do not adequately support exploration of a collection, nor do they cater to multi-user interaction in a social setting. In this paper, we present the design of a ubiquitous system that utilizes spatial visualization to suppor...

Alice Chik, City University of Hong Kong The relationship between digital game play and second language (L2) learning is a particularly tricky issue in East Asia. Though there is an emerging presence of Chinese online games, many more young people are playing the Englishor Japanese-language versions of the most popular commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) video games. In other words, most Chinese ga...

We present a novel model of decision-making in social tasks for virtual humans. The model considers multiple valuations of the available choices in a decision set according to individual and social factors such as own utility, total group utility, and relative utility. Cultural differences are incorporated using Hofstede’s dimensional model of culture and affect the decision making process by c...

Many emotionally disturbed children who have been maltreated and are legally 12 separated from their parents or primary caregivers live in group homes and receive compulsory 13 education. Such institutions provide various special intervention programs. Taiko, a Japanese style 14 of group drumming, is one such program because playing drums in a group may improve 15 children’s emotional well-bein...

Science suggests ways to promote growth while preventing disaster Behold the American teenager, a lump in a hoodie who's capable of little more than playing "Grand Theft Auto," raiding the liquor cabinet, and denting the minivan, thanks to a brain so unformed that it's more like a kindergartner's than a grown-up's. That's the message that seemed to emerge from the past decade's neuroscientific ...

play provides opportunities for exploration, experimentation, and manipulation that are essential for constructing knowledge and contributes to the development of representational thought. during play, children examine and refine their learning in light of the feedback they receive from the environment and other people. it is through play that children develop their imaginations and creativity....