Sailboat operation must account for a variety of environmental factors, including wind, tidal currents, shore features and atmospheric conditions. We introduce the first method of rendering an augmented reality scene for sailing, using various visual techniques to represent environmental aspects, such as particle cloud animations for the wind and current. The visual content is provided using a hardware/software system that gathers data from various scattered sources on a boat (e.g. instruments), processes the data and broadcasts the information over a local network to one or more displays that render the immersive 3D graphics. Current technology provides information about environmental factors via a diverse collection of displays which render data collected by sensors and instruments. This data is typically provided numerically or using rudimentary abstract graphical representations, with minimal processing, and with little or no integration of the various scattered sources. My goal was to build the first working prototype of a system that centralizes collected data on a boat and provides an integrated 3D rendering using a unified AR visual interface. Since this research is the first of its kind in a few largely unexplored areas of technological interest, I found that the most fruitful method to evaluate the various iterations of different components was to employ an autobiographical design method. Sailing is the process of controlling various aspects of boat operation in order to produce propulsion by harnessing wind energy using sails. Devising a strategy for safe and adequate sailboat control relies upon a solid understanding of the surrounding environment and its behaviour, in addition to many layers of know-how pertaining to employing the acquired knowledge. My research is grouped into three distinct, yet interdependent parts; first, a hardware and software system that collects data with the purpose of processing and broadcasting visual information; second, a graphical interface that provides information using immersive AR graphics; and last, an in-depth investigation and discussion of the problem and potential solutions from a design thinking perspective. The scope of this investigation is broad, covering aspects from assembling mechanical implements, to building electronics with customized sensing capabilities, interfacing existing ship's instruments, configuring a local network and server, implementing processing strategies, and broadcasting a WebGL-based AR scene as an immersive visual experience. I also performed a design thinking investigation that incorporates recent research from the most relevant fields of study (e.g. HCI, visualization etc.) with the ultimate goal of integrating it into a conceptual system and a taxonomy of relevant factors. The term interdisciplinary is most accurate in denoting the nature of this body of work. At the time of writing, there are two major players that are starting to develop AR-based commercial products for marine navigation: Raymarine (an AR extension of their chart-based data) and Mitsubishi (AR navigation software for commercial/industrial shipping). I am not aware of any marine AR visualization that is targeted at environmental awareness for sailboats through visualization (wind, tidal currents etc.) and my research constitutes the first documented and published efforts that approached this topic. / Graduate

This thesis investigates the impact of finetuning the LLaMA 33B language model on partisan news datasets, revealing negligible changes and underscoring the enduring influence of pretraining datasets on model opinions. Training nine models across nine distinct news datasets spanning three topics and two ideologies, the study found consistent demographic representation, predominantly favoring liberal, college-educated, high-income, and non-religious demographics. Interestingly, a depolarizing effect emerged from partisan news finetuning, suggesting that intense exposure to topic-specific information might lead to depolarization, irrespective of ideological alignment. Despite the exposure to contrasting viewpoints, LLaMA 33B maintained its common sense reasoning ability, showing minimal variance on evaluation metrics like Hellaswag accuracy, ARC accuracy, and TruthfulQA MC1 and MC2. These results might indicate robustness in common sense reasoning or a deficiency in synthesizing diverse contextual information. Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates the resilience of high-performing language models like LLaMA 33B against targeted ideological bias, demonstrating their continued functionality and reasoning ability, even when subjected to highly partisan information environments.

Master of Philosophy (MPhil) / Informationist Science Fiction theory provides a way of analysing science fiction texts and narratives in order to demonstrate on an informational basis the uniqueness of science fiction proper as a mode of fiction writing. The theoretical framework presented can be applied to all types of written texts, including non-fictional texts. In "Informationist Science Fiction Theory and Informationist Science Fiction" the author applies the theoretical framework and its specific methods and principles to various contemporary science fiction works, including works by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Vernor Vinge. The theoretical framework introduces a new informational theoretic re-framing of existing science fiction literary theoretic posits such as Darko Suvin's novum, the mega-text as conceived of by Damien Broderick, and the work of Samuel R Delany in investigating the subjunctive mood in SF. An informational aesthetics of SF proper is established, and the influence of analytic philosophy - especially modal logic - is investigated. The materialist foundations of the metaphysical outlook of SF proper is investigated with a view to elucidating the importance of the relationship between scientific materialism and SF. SF is presented as The Fiction of Veridical, Counterfactual and Heterogeneous Information.

Master of Philosophy (MPhil) / Informationist Science Fiction theory provides a way of analysing science fiction texts and narratives in order to demonstrate on an informational basis the uniqueness of science fiction proper as a mode of fiction writing. The theoretical framework presented can be applied to all types of written texts, including non-fictional texts. In "Informationist Science Fiction Theory and Informationist Science Fiction" the author applies the theoretical framework and its specific methods and principles to various contemporary science fiction works, including works by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Vernor Vinge. The theoretical framework introduces a new informational theoretic re-framing of existing science fiction literary theoretic posits such as Darko Suvin's novum, the mega-text as conceived of by Damien Broderick, and the work of Samuel R Delany in investigating the subjunctive mood in SF. An informational aesthetics of SF proper is established, and the influence of analytic philosophy - especially modal logic - is investigated. The materialist foundations of the metaphysical outlook of SF proper is investigated with a view to elucidating the importance of the relationship between scientific materialism and SF. SF is presented as The Fiction of Veridical, Counterfactual and Heterogeneous Information.