Applied Behavior Analysis has experienced an increase need for practitioners at all certification levels. Most recently, a demand for the paraprofessional-level certification, the Registered Behavior Technician™ (RBT®), is being driven by state licensure and health insurance reform. This has subsequently led to pressure to quickly train paraprofessionals to work with at-need clients. While this growth is favorable for the field it means that agencies are often at odds with balancing quality and breadth of knowledge, which can negatively impact clients’ lives. Furthermore, outside of basic minimum training standards, the behavior analytic governing bodies do not currently regulate RBT trainings the way they do for higher levels of certification, leaving it up to training supervisors to determine competency. In a series of experiments, some of the concerns with respect to RBT training will be addressed. The first will determine if an online curriculum is feasible for training RBT candidates to a level of proficiency for conceptual and practical knowledge. The second thread of research will examine if Acceptance and Commitment Training can lead to gains in RBT performance. Implications for the findings as well as future directions are discussed.

Applications with 3D graphics often utilize high-resolution image textures to enhance re-alism. Image textures are stored as large files, which can result in significant storage spaceallocation for the application. Furthermore, image textures are also disadvantaged becausethey are static and lack flexibility. These issues could be addressed through the use of pro-cedurally generated textures, referred to as procedural textures. The thesis explored andinvestigated the feasibility of implementing procedural textures in Configura’s 3D interiordesign software CET. A procedural texture was implemented that showcased many posi-tive attributes of procedural textures, including: reduced storage space requirements, un-limited resolution, and versatile customization. To accomplish this, an iterative approachwas used as the methodology, where the procedural texture was gradually incorporatedinto CET. The procedural texture later underwent a performance evaluation. The resultsshowed that traditional textures allocate an order of magnitude more storage space thanthe procedural approach. Despite this, renderings times in CET remained similar. In tworendering tests, the procedural texture was measured to be 9% faster in the first test, and 3.4% slower in the second test. In conclusion, procedural texture have many benefits thatcompanies such as Configura could take advantage of.

Temporary postponement of criminal procedure Abstract The diploma thesis deals with the procedural institute of temporary postponement of criminal procedure. This procedural instrument is one of few exceptions from the principal of legality, which is the topic of the first chapter. The following chapter introduces historical development as this institute is quite new in the Czech criminal law. The following chapter focuses on current regulation of this institute, which can be applied in various situations. There is also a description of specific institute of temporary postponement in this chapter, which is connected to the institute of not pressing the charges against the suspect. This institute brings some problematic aspects for application, which are analysed with a purpose of finding a solution. The following chapter deals with diversions in criminal procedure including the characteristics of this category with each one being briefly described. The practical part of the thesis is dedicated to comparison between temporary postponement and diversions in criminal procedure, based on the definitions and characteristics. The goal of this thesis is to analyze temporary postponement of criminal procedure and compare it with similar procedural instruments to find out, if it can be described as a diversion in...

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Procedural generation techniques are able to quickly and cheaply produce large areas of terrain. However, these techniques produce results that are not easily directable and often require artists to edit the results by hand to achieve the desired layout. This paper proposes a sketch-based system for controlling fractal terrain that allows for a wide variety of terrain feature types. Artists sketch features rather than constrained points or elevations. The system is interactive, provides quick on-demand previews of the terrain, and allows for iterative design modifications. Interaction between features is handled in a realistic fashion. An arbitrary vertex insertion order midpoint displacement algorithm is also described which provides the necessary flexibility and constraints for the terrain generation system.

Justice research in the field of social psychology has focused primarily on situations involving legal proceedings, dispute resolution, and hierarchal relationships within organizations. This study extends the work of social psychologist Tom Tyler and others to a planning context by demonstrating that participants in a planning process use group-value criteria in addition to control over decisions and decision making processes and the favorability of outcomes to define reactions to their experiences. While certain aspects of the case study from which survey interviews were conducted limited the ability to replicate specific results of the 1989 Tyler study used as a model for this analysis, the major suppositions were confirmed. The results indicate that the group-value issues of standing, trust, and neutrality explain more variance in participant judgments of procedural justice, distributive justice, affect toward officials and fairness of officials than do control or outcome favorability. The results also demonstrate the dominance of standing and trust over all other concerns in participant assessments of procedural and distributive justice and the fairness of officials.

Role-playing games (RPGs) rely on interesting and varied experiences to maintain player attention. These experiences are often provided through quests, which give players tasks that are used to advance stories or events unfolding in the game. Traditional quests in video games require very specific conditions to be met, and for participating members to advance them by carrying out pre-defined actions. These types of quests are generated with perfect knowledge of the game world and are able to force desired behaviors out of the relevant non-player characters (NPCs). This becomes a major issue in massive multiplayer online (MMO) when other players can often disrupt the conditions needed for quests to unfold in a believable and immersive way, leading to the absence of a genuine multiplayer RPG experience. Our proposed solution is to dynamically create quests from real-time information on the unscripted actions of other NPCs and players in a game. This thesis shows that it is possible to create logical quests without global information knowledge, pre-defined story-trees, or prescribed player and NPC behavior. This allows players to become involved in storylines without having to perform any specific actions. Results are shown through a game scenario created from the Panoptyk Engine, a game engine in early development designed to test AI reasoning with information and the removal of the distinction between NPC and human players. We focus on quests issued by the NPC faction leaders of several in-game groups known as factions. Our generated quests are created logically from the pre-defined personality of each NPC leader, their memory of previous events, and information given to them by in-game sources. Long-spanning conflicts are seen to emerge from factions issuing quests against each other; these conflicts can be represented in a coherent narrative. A user study shows that players felt quests were logical, that players were able to recognize quests were based on events happening in the game, and that players experienced follow-up consequences from their actions in quests.

Software developers spend more time on reading than writingcode. Comprehensible code therefore has the potential tosignificantly improve software development andmaintenance by lowering the time needed for understandingexisting code. Previous research suggest that the choice ofProgramming paradigm may affect code comprehension. Thepresent study evaluates if a positive effect of ReactiveProgramming on comprehension can be attested incomparison to Procedural Programming. We let human testsubjects solve bugs in code-snippets of commonfunctionalities implemented either according to ReactiveProgramming or Procedural Programming in the Javalanguage and RxJava, its ReactiveX implementation. Thecomprehensibility of the code is measured by the test subjects’time consumption, with lower values indicating highercomprehensibility and higher values lowercomprehensibility.Within this study we also study the effect of prior knowledgeof reactive programming, and background in programming,on the results, by having test subjects from two groups: (1)software students with experience in Reactive Programming,and (2) experienced software developers and engineers withless experience in Reactive Programming.All tests took part in a tool of our design, the CodeComparator.Our results show that reactive puzzles are solved faster,suggesting higher comprehensibility, although highdispersion in solvability time, especially for the proceduralsolutions, make it difficult to assess the validity of this timedifference. The positive effect is notable in the student groupwhereas we cannot conclude if the other group solves reactiveor procedural puzzles faster

Unlike other domains of cognition, the acquisition of procedural skills (e.g., the "how to" of memory) is spared by age. However, the consolidation (i.e., the transformation from labile memory to long-term storage) of this type of memory is compromised by age. Optimal memory consolidation for procedural skills is dependent on sleep. Sleep is also negatively impacted by normal, healthy aging. Recent research has identified the neural markers of the lost benefit of sleep for reduced memory consolidation with age. While this is relatively well-established for procedural memory, and for cognitively simple motor skills, the impact of age-related changes in sleep on cognitively complex procedural memory consolidation (i.e., novel cognitive strategies required for "problem-solving skills") remains to be investigated. Furthermore, reduced capacity to solve problems with age has serious mental health-related consequences, including increased depression and suicide attempts, as well as disability in depressed, cognitively impaired older adults. Moreover, problem-solving therapy has been found to improve quality of life in older adults. As such, the aims of these series of studies were to investigate: 1) the behavioural consequences of age on sleep-dependent memory consolidation, 2) identify the electrophysiological markers during sleep of the lost benefit of sleep, 3) identify the age-related changes in brain structure and how this relates to and behavioural outcomes and sleep, and, 4) identify the impact of age on sleep-dependent consolidation of the memory trace for problem-solving skills. Using an innovative combination of EEG, MRI, and behavioural testing in healthy young and older adults, these series of studies revealed novel insights into the breakdown of the normal processes that occur during sleep that support memory. The main objective of this thesis is to identify the neural markers of the very earliest signs under optimal conditions of age-related cognitive decline for problem-solving skills. Investigating the neurophysiological and behavioral consequences of age-related changes in sleep, and their impact on problem-solving skills, will help reveal therapeutic targets for future research that will improve quality of life for seniors. Furthermore, this research will ultimately lead to the development of early interventions targeting sleep that could delay or lessen the severity of the onset of clinically significant cognitive impairment; as those who sleep better, may also age better cognitively.

Målet med studien var att undersöka skalning av tidsåtgång och minnesanvändning utifrån tre stycken algoritmer som procedurellt genererar banor. De algoritmerna som används är Binary Space Partitioning (BSP), Shortest Path (SP) och Delaunay Triangulation (DT). Skalningen utvärderas genom att se hur tidsåtgången och minnesanvändningen påverkas då algoritmerna ska hantera större banor. Värdena för tid och minne sammanställdes sedan för att avgöra hur de skalade, till vilken grad de var användbara och vilken av algoritmerna som presterade bäst. Utvärderingen visade att BSP presterade bäst i båda kategorierna med relativt jämna värden. SP hade generellt väldigt spretiga tidsvärden. DT var långsammast av de tre algoritmerna i avseende på tid men presterade bättre än SP när det kom till minnesanvändning. Skalning av minne visade sig vara ett mindre problem än förväntat vilket inte är något problem för plattformar som inte är begränsade inbäddade system, exempelvis mikroprocessorer. Framtida studier hade kunnat testa andra algoritmer. / <p>Det finns övrigt digitalt material (t.ex. film-, bild- eller ljudfiler) eller modeller/artefakter tillhörande examensarbetet som ska skickas till arkivet.</p><p>There are other digital material (eg film, image or audio files) or models/artifacts that belongs to the thesis and need to be archived.</p>