The healthcare literature sometimes cites Medicare as a negative determinant of hospital profitability. However, a review of Florida acute care short-term general hospital data revealed a subset of profitable hospitals with high percentages of their revenue structure comprised of Medicare reimbursements. Some investigators might contend that these hospitals are just better managed; that hospital profitability is not related to patient mix or payer source. Although good management enhances financial health, there are perhaps other reasons why certain hospitals can become profitable with Medicare as their primary revenue source. Research findings indicate there is wide geographic variability shown for per-capita volumes of discretionary procedures reimbursed by Medicare, and broad variations in Medicare spending per enrollee for general acute care short-term hospitalizations. It was also found that many of the hospitals performing higher rates of discretionary procedures and showing the ability to make a profit with Medicare are investor owned. The focus of this study, covering years 2000-2005, was to examine two strategies using discretionary procedures under Medicare that Florida investor owned hospitals may employ to increase profitability and maintain long-term financial health. Part 1 of the study examined the association between long-term financial viability, measured by the total assets divided by total liabilities (TATL) ratio (the reciprocal of the debt ratio) and percentages per hospital of two discretionary cardiac and orthopedic procedure variables, reimbursed by conventional Medicare. A positive association was found between the TATL ratio and these variables, as well as significant marginal effects in the association between the TATL ratio and interaction terms for hospital ownership (where investor owned = 1 and not-for-profit = 0) and the discretionary cardiac procedure variable and ownership and the discretionary orthopedic procedure variable. Part 2 used total charges as the dependent variable for patient discharges reimbursed by Medicare HMO. It was found that investor owned hospitals generally assess significantly higher charges than not-for-profits for discretionary CABG and valve replacement procedures for patients with equivalent levels of medical services and hospitalization. It was also found that charges significantly increase for both investor-owned and not-for-profit hospitals located in the southern region of Florida.

Background: The widespread use of social media has offered brands a great opportunity to engage with their customers and promote sales. In China’s mobile gaming market, the huge user base of social media marketing provides companies with an excellent opportunity to develop their brand image and cultivate further awareness. However, the research regarding social media marketing’s influence on mobile game’s brand equity is still limited from a literary perspective. Purpose: Firstly, the research aims to identify the factors of social media marketing that influencing mobile game companies’ brand equity. Secondly, this research will evaluate the importance of identified impact factors. Method: In order to investigate the research subjects and answer research question properly, the positivism research paradigm has been implemented in this research. In addition, the deductive reasoning approach is applied to formulate and test hypotheses to generate reliable results with a high level of generalization and prediction. The theoretical foundation of this research has been formulated through the frame of reference. Then, the quantitative research methods were applied to the collection and analysis of the data. The primary data has been collected through a survey and the samples have been randomly selected. The main method for the data analysis was regression analysis. Conclusion: In general, the research has demonstrated that social media marketing is a useful tool to develop brand equity for mobile game companies in the Chinese consumer market. Brand popularity and information quality are considered the most important influential factors of social media marketing on mobile game company’s brand equity in China.

In this study I use critical discourse analysis on two different social platforms, Reddit and Battlefields own social platform, where I look for discourses around gamers and masculinity. I use the R.W Connells theories around hegemonic masculinity and E.K Sedgwicks theories around Homosociality to read my material. What I found was that even though a lot of research has found that it is quite balanced between the sexes who uses digital games, the social picture is still that it is something that men use and take part of, and part of why people still look at gamers as men is because a lot of women don’t feel welcomed in the community.

Thesis advisor: Maia McAleavey / My dissertation explores how nineteenth-century novelists imagined rational thinking as a cognitive resource distributed through physical, social, national, and even imperial channels. Scholars studying nineteenth-century discourses of mind frequently position rational thinking as the normalized given against those unconscious and irrational modes of thought most indicative of the period's scientific discoveries. My project argues, in contrast, that writers were just as invested in exploring rational thinking as multivalent procedure, a versatile category of mental activity that could be layered into novelistic representations of thinking by "thinking with games": that is, incorporating forms of thinking as discussed by popular print media. By reading novels alongside historical gaming practices and gaming literatures and incorporating the insights of twenty-first century cognitive theory, I demonstrate that novelists Maria Edgeworth, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Rudyard Kipling experimented with models of gaming to make rational thinking less abstract and reveal its action across bodies, objects, and communities. If Victorian mind-sciences uncovered "thinking fast," games prioritized "thinking slow," a distinction described by psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his recent book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2013). Scenes of games often slow thinking down, allowing the author to expose the complex processes of rational, cognitive performance. Furthermore, such scenes register the expanded perspective of recent cognitive literary studies such as those by Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine, which understand thinking, at least in part, as externalized and social. In effect, by reading scenes of thinking along the lines proposed by strategic gaming, I demonstrate how novels imagined social possibilities for internal processing that extend beyond the bounds of any individual's consciousness. Of course, games easily serve as literary tropes or metaphors; but analyzing scenes of gaming alongside games literature underscores how authors incorporated frameworks of teachable, social thinking from gaming into their representations of rational consciousness. For strategy games literature, better play required learning how to read the minds of other players, how to turn their thinking inside out. The nineteenth-century novel's relationship to games is best understood, I suggest, within the landscape of popular games literature published at its side - sometimes literally. An article on "Whistology" appears just after an installment of The Woman in White in Dickens's All the Year Round; the Cornhill Magazine published a paean to "Chess" amid the serialization of George Eliot's Romola. As a genre, strategy manuals developed new techniques for exercising the cognitive abilities of their readers and, often along parallel lines, so do the novels I discuss. Prompting the reader to think like a game player often involved recreating the kinds of dynamic, active thinking taught by games literature through the novel's form. My dissertation explores how authors used such forms to train their readers in habits of memory, deduction, and foresight encouraged by strategy gaming. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

As an increasing position of the world’s communication moves towards the cloud and wireless solutions the requirement for good throughput and low delay increases. One step towards meeting higher requirements is the move from 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) to 5G New Radio (NR). In order to utilize the potential of 5G NR, software needs to be improved. With the goal to lower the delay for delay critical applications and services when using 5G NR this thesis studies a new scheduler inspired by Earliest Deadline First (EDF) as a soft real-time system scheduler. This new scheduler called Real-Time Inspired Hybrid Scheduler (RTIHS) is proposed where two different schedulers are used depending on if the network traffic is delay critical or not. Delay critical traffic is served by the new Deadline Inspired Scheduler (DIS) scheduler and other traffic by a traditional Round Robin (RR) scheduler. The transmissions that are delay critical are prioritized differently with the use of a constant that has two functions. To determine if the transmission is in time or not, and how close the transmission is to the fixed deadline. Up until the deadline the priority of that transmission is increased with a factor that is affected by how close the current time is to the deadline. If the deadline has been missed the priority is, however, decreased with respect to how much it missed the deadline.RTIHS is implemented and tested in a state-of-the-art system simulator where services such as;Cloud Gaming (CG), Video on Demand (VoD), and web browsing are evaluated. An already existing technology named Low Latency Low Loss Scalable Throughput (L4S) is included in the evaluations to investigate how RTIHS scales. The performance of RTIHS is then compared to a Delay Scheduler(DS) and a RR scheduler that act as the baseline. The results show that RTIHS performs better for CG in terms of delay and nominal rate than the baseline, especially when the network is under high load. Using RTIHS compared to a DS shows an average increase of nominal rate by roughly 6 % and an average decrease of delay by 16 % for the average users. At the same time RTIHS does show higher delay and lower throughput for services such as VoD and web browsing, making its performance for those service worse than the baseline, especially when the network load is high. With the same comparison as before, RTIHS shows an average 17 % higher delay for web browsing and 1 % lower requested video rate than the DS for the average users. This is due to how the evaluated services are prioritized with the limited resources available. Since RTIHS prioritizes CG more, less resources remain for the other services. The baseline is not as biased towards CG and therefore has a lower nominal rate and higher delay for said service but better for the other services in comparison. Activating L4S mitigates the underwhelming performance of RTIHS for VoD and web browsing further improves the performance for CG. This is also true for the baseline which increases performance for CG and further increases the performance for other services with a small amount. With L4S activated the average increase of nominal rate in CG for RTIHS compared to the DS is 13 % for the average users and the average delay decrease is 9 %. Meanwhile the average requested video rate for RTIHS is less than 1 % lower than that of the DS for the average users and the delay for web browsing is 10 % higher than the DS for the average users.

The purpose of this study was to examine how problematic media use (technoference, internet gaming disorder symptoms, and pornography use) predicted later partner relationship outcomes, operating through the mediator of attachment behaviors. Participants (N = 1039) were from Waves II–IV of the Couple Relationships and Transition Experiences (CREATE) study, a nationally representative quantitative study on marriage relationships across the United States. Both spouses completed surveys reporting problematic media use, attachment behaviors, and relationship outcomes at three separate time points each spaced a year apart. In order to test the hypotheses, three longitudinal actor-partner interdependence models with indirect paths were estimated, with each model corresponding to one type of problematic media use. Results indicated that at the cross-sectional level, all three types of problematic media use had significant indirect actor and partner effects, where problematic media use predicted relationship outcomes through the intervening variable of attachment behaviors. Longitudinally, wife technoference directly negatively predicted later partner attachment behaviors, but there were no full indirect paths of Wave II problematic media to Wave IV relationship outcomes through the intervening variable of Wave III attachment behaviors. Implications of these findings and future directions are discussed.

Electronic sport or esport is a trend that involves playing competitive video games professionally. Traditional sports and esport have been compared to each other because of their similarities. Esport has grown in terms of viewership. Every year more spectators get interested and the number rises. One popular genre played in esports is MOBA. It stands for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. Two teams face each other, and the goal is to destroy the enemy’s base with the help of their selected character, in-game mechanics and objectives. There are several focus points to highlight for the spectator. Hence, a dedicated spectator interface in the esports scene helps understand the progression of the game while watching. Developers might want to market their MOBA game into the esports scene, but it is hard to know what spectators want within the interface. This study investigates the major factors to consider when designing a spectator interface for a gaming genre; multiplayer online battle arena games (MOBA) in a competitive setting. The methods used to achieve the results were literature studies that include spectatorship, cognitive theories, and game interface theories. Analysing a popular MOBA game spectator interface and redesigned the interface of a game named League of Legends. Redesigns will go through an iterative process with the help of feedback, using questionnaires and interviews on the target group. Results discovered factors that could provide the spectator with a better viewing experience and contributed to producing a guideline for designers. The study concluded the guideline could help future work or contribute to previously established guidelines for general competitive games. However, further investigations are required to explore and validate the proposed guidelines in practice. / Elektronisk sport eller esport är en trend som handlar om att spela tävlingsinriktade videospel professionellt. Traditionella sporter och esport har ofta jämförts med varandra på grund av likheterna. Esport har vuxit enormt när det gäller tittarskap. Varje år blir fler åskådare intresserade och antalet stiger. En populär genre som spelas i esports heter MOBA. Det står för Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. Två lag möter varandra och målet är att förstöra fiendens bas med hjälp av spelmekanik och spelmål. Det finns flera fokuspunkter som ska visas för åskådaren. Därför används ett dedikerat åskådargränssnitt i esport-scenen för att hjälpa förstå spelets utveckling medan åskådaren tittar på. Utvecklare vill möjligtvis marknadsföra sitt MOBA-spel i esport-scenen, men det kan vara svårt att veta vad åskådarna vill ha inom gränssnittet. Denna studie undersöker de viktigaste faktorerna som ska beaktas när man utformar ett åskådargränssnitt för en spelgenre; flerspelarspel online (MOBA) i en tävlingsinriktad miljö. Metoderna för att uppnå resultaten var litteraturstudier som inkluderar åskådarskap, kognitiva teorier och spelgränssnittsteorier. Analys av ett populärt MOBA-spel åskådargränssnitt och redesignade gränssnittet för spelet som heter League of Legends. Det omformade gränssnittet kommer att gå igenom en iterativ process med hjälp av feedback med hjälp av frågeformulär och intervjuer på målgruppen. Resultaten upptäckte faktorer som kunde ge åskådaren en bättre

Studien undersöker föräldrars syn på problematiskt spelande hos barn och ungdomar och därigenom vilka aspekter föräldrar anser problematiska samt vilka strategier de anser centrala i hanteringen av fenomenet. Ovanstående syfte besvaras med hjälp av teorin om disciplinering samt teorin om problembarnet och det goda föräldraskapet. Dokumentstudien, som utgörs av en innehållsanalys av diskussionsforum på nätet, utmynnade i teman kring förväntningar på föräldrarollen och föräldrars relation till barnet, barnets ansvar över vardagslivet samt barnets utveckling. Studien påvisar en förändring i föräldrars definition av problematiskt spelande mellan två olika tidsnedslag. Skillnaden innebär att barn inom det senare tidsnedslaget har kommit att ses mer som aktörer kring spelande, vilket även gjorde att föräldrars reglering blev mer liberal. Vidare skedde även en förändring i synen på spelande som aktivitet eftersom detta normaliserades i det senare tidsnedslaget samtidigt som spelproblematik sågs mer som en sjukdom. Slutligen kunde föräldrars syn på spelproblematik härledas till föreställningar om gott föräldraskap och normala barn, vilka bestämdes utifrån interaktioner mellan föräldrar på diskussionsforumen. Dessa fynd belyser vikten av att föräldrars syn och hantering av spelproblematik blir fortsatt beforskade för att bättre kunna hantera en komplex problematik hos barn och unga i framtiden.

Mgr. Jan Froněk, disertační práce, Katedra andragogiky a personálního řízení FF UK v Praze Abstract The dissertation thesis presents varieties of games and simulations in the field of adult education and specializes particularly in role-play and simulation classifications, with the emphasis on presenting case examples of the applications of the methods. To reach the objectives of the dissertation, first of all resources analysis had been made (both scientific resources and practical toolkits). Then the acquired knowledge was reframed into a terminological framework that had existed before, yet had not been defined specifically enough and explicitly for the field of adult education. The second pillar of the thesis represents a survey that was conducted among adult educators. The thesis consists of six main chapters: it is introduced by a general chapter on games, plays and their characteristics and definition (also from adult educator's perspective). A chapter on simulation and gaming classification follows (Chap. 2), from which the largest part of this work is drawn: a detailed categorization of role-play (Chap. 3) and simulation (Chap. 4) varieties. Some of the Czech as well as international simulation and gaming organisations are mentioned (Chap. 5). In the 6th chapter, results from a survey are...

Rounded objects, such as spheroids, are frequently found throughout the Fremont region. Because little information is known about these spheroids, this comprehensive analysis of spheroids contributes to definitions of and variation among Fremont spherical objects. I analyzed over 400 Fremont spheroids recording the size, weight, stone type, and other quantifiable aspects for each spheroid. The provenience of spheroids highlights some of the patterns and variability within the Fremont world. I also compare ethnographic accounts of purposes of spheroids in hopes to develop a better understanding of the function of these objects.