I wonder what comparisons the students playing this game could draw to real life after having analyzed the outcome of this imaginary predicament?

I thing group activities like this are the best way to engage a class and I look forward to participating in similar tasks this quarter. As it happens I have actually participated in this exact game previously for a political science class seeing the over lap of knowledge between the two subjects if very interesting.

hard work load

Shows them adapting to certain situations like different biomes.

This shows how many biomes are in Africa and how big the continent is

Discusses how African hunter-gatherers adjusted their tools and lifestyles to fit three main African environments: tropical rainforests, open savannas, and riverbank/lakeside areas, each with unique resources and conditions.

This part explains that their lifestyle revolves around hunting and gathering diverse food sources, causing them to move in a predictable pattern based on seasonal availability in different areas.

This is different from what I learned about Africa because I was taught that women did not matter in that continent

What is clear across this selection of readings, and their integration into the opening of “A Game of Chess” is the power of woman, or rather the power of “love” (a horribly ambiguous term as it is employed in the readings), which emanates from woman. Enobarbus and Mecaenas fear Cleopatra, in her relationship with Antony. Right after Enorbarbus says, “I saw her once Hop forty paces through the public street; And having lost her breath, she spoke, and panted, That she did make defect perfection, And, breathless, power breathe forth” Mecaenas replies, “Now Antony must leave her utterly.” It is this “now” that marks the fear; it is directly following the detailing of Cleopatra’s everlasting, impossible perfection and power (explicit here) that it is decided Antony cannot be with her. “...secret splendor and fatal beauty That nature had bestowed on her” describes only the corpse of the woman in A Martyred Woman (mysteriously radiant, dangerously enchanting, almost like a force of nature—this connection could either be a testament to female power, or a putting of it onto something else/an attempt to remove it from the source). Philomela is said to immediately ignite “the flame of love” that “takes” Tereus, “as if one had set afire ripe grain, dry leaves, or a haystack.”

And it is as though in utter fear of this power, of this hold of women over men, issuing so strongly before a woman even really does anything, that their voices are taken away. Philomela’s tongue is cut off, and then she is falsely proclaimed dead (an ultimate silencing). Octavius knows what his plan is with Cleopatra—what she says will not make a difference. Dido is twisted into suicide (a self-silencing). The entirety of A Martyred Woman is a man speaking on the image of a dead woman—his thoughts, his views, his opinions.

Eliot adds to this. “Marie” follows “he said” (doubly so, actually, with Eliot writing the poem). Madame Sosostris is a reference to Chrome Yellow’s Madame Sesostris—a man impersonating a woman. And is the spelling change a further mocking? Sybil’s voice is hidden in the epigraph under male layers: Trimalchio, and his friends from childhood, Eliot (macro). When Eliot says, “yet there the nightingale Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues ‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears” it appears that the voice, the story, of Philomela persists in the song of the nightingale—despite the violence inflicted upon her (rape by King Tereus and the mutilation of her tongue)—but in nature (there might be more here, too, with another nature!), the female nightingale is mute; only the male of the species sings. If anything is being sung, then, it is Tereus’ voice, Tereus’ story. Or what is being “sung” by Philomela as a nightingale comes out as nothing (“‘Jug Jug’”)—can a desert be filled? It would no longer be a desert. Then, mockingly, “the world pursues…”

"The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne..." as mentioned in his notes, is a direct reference to Cleopatra from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. The image evoked through the inclusion of a throne sets a lavish and ornate tone for II.) A Game of Chess. The throne also signifies an purposeful shift from the natural world and decaying land in The Burial of the Dead to artificial human creations. Eliot goes on to reference other lavish decor elements including "jewels", "vials of ivory and coloured glass," and "strange synthetic perfumes." The proceeding lines are jagged and chaotic, similar to the space being described. In contrast, below is a pasted description of Cleopatra's throne from Act 1, scene 2:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them;

Here, her throne is aligned with elements of the natural world including water and wind. Cleopatra's power, represented in part through her throne, is able to captivate forces even as strong as the wind as they're "love-sick." Thus, while Eliot refers to Shakespeare's work in the opening line of A Game of Chess, the surrounding associations to the thrones differ greatly. It is ultimately through this divergence that Eliot comments on the decay of the wasteland as feminine power is reduced to a force against nature.

This line is a reference to Ophelia in Shakespeare's play Hamlet. Ophelia states/sings "Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night," in conversation with King Claudius. This appears just before her stage exit and ultimate death by suicide/drowning. The inclusion of "sweet ladies" as a closing image from Ophelia is rather ironic due to her mental state at this point in the play. She has gone mad, evident in her repetitive speech preceding her good night call, specifically in relation to death. She repeats "He is dead and gone," in song, demonstrating a troubled mentality. Furthermore, her commentary on Saint Valentine's day is connected to feminine seduction and lust. She therefore displays the messy combination of trauma, hardship, and feminine desires. Thus, this context does not allude to an image of a "sweet lady," instead displaying the complexity of womenhood. Moving to Eliot's inclusion of this line as the closing thought to II. A Game of Chess, Ophelia's madness is echoed in the pub. This sets up for a similar good night call, signifying a tragic future for the women at the bar. Their time is running out as repeated "Hurry up please its time" and their bodies look "antique." In closing, this borrowed goodnight line from Hamlet furthers Eliot's commentary of women going mad depicted through the chaos of the pub and connection to Ophelia's mental state.

A Game of Chess" gives interesting insight into the place of women, marriage, and sex in Eliot's The Waste Land. In a conversation between a group of women, the narrator (keep in mind, this narrator is a different one from the first section of The Waste Land), says to her friend, "and think of poor Albert, / He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time, / And if you don't give it him, there's others will" (lines 147-9). In the waste land, marriage has become hollow and superficial; rather than being a bondage rooted in love and mutual respect, it acts chiefly to 1) fulfill the husband's sexual needs, and 2) to produce children. Additionally, sex has become an emotionally sterile act, devoid of any intimacy or tenderness: it is a service to be completed by the wife to her husband, lest she hopes to lose her husband’s loyalty.

Drawing back to an earlier text, Baudelaire’s poem “A Martyred Woman” takes the changed nature of sexual intimacy to an entirely new extreme: violence. The subject, a decapitated body of a young woman surrounded by perfumes and luxury possessions, becomes an object of fetishization to the narrator. He first admires the “secret splendor and fatal beauty” of her nude body, only to conclude that she is a sex worker who gave away her “inert, complacent flesh to fill / The immensity of his lust” (lines 23 and 48-9). While both texts depict women’s body and sexuality being denied their own agency, there is something all the more violent in the Baudelaire poem: the act of sex is not purely emotionally sterile and transactional, but grotesquely commodified, reduced to an object of lust even after death. The deceased woman is violated twice, first by her killer, and then the narrator, who aestheticizes her lifeless body.

In Eliot's quote "And if you don't give it him, there's others will," the speaker strips Lil of her self-worth and reduces her to a replaceable object. Eliot's utilization of chess imagery, paired with his connections to sources that depict violence toward women, suggests that relationships between men and women in the wasteland are purely transactional, with each individual in pursuit of their own victory. In Pound's "Blocked light working in. Escapes. Renewing of contest," chess is a constantly evolving strategic game. This mirrors how Lil can easily be replaced—she is valued only for what she offers, not for her inherent worth as a person. Middleton's "We must not trust the policy of Europe Upon a woman's tongue" reinforces this pattern of silencing and dehumanizing women. Women are deemed unreliable, just as Lil is seen as disposable. The quote "Divided from herself and her fair judgment, Without the which we are pictures, or mere beasts" proves particularly revealing. Here, Ophelia's "fair judgment"—her ability to have rational thoughts—is presented as the quality that makes her human. Yet when men chose to ignore or suppress these very qualities in women, they reduce them to inhuman objects. This dehumanization allows men to justify there cruelty.

This whole second section of “A Game of Chess” breaks formally from the first half. The beginning of the section is comprised of one large paragraph, unbroken, while the middle section, specifically lines 111-128, are broken up: indentations carry words across the page, whole sentences begin with one word on the line before, questions infect the poem. The form of the poem begins to break apart and descend here, mirroring the content and references to Hamlet’s Ophelia, who begins to break apart inside and descend into a state of madness. Interestingly, the line pulled directly from Ophelia, “Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night,” which ends this section of the poem, is not the last word spoken by Ophelia. This is surprising, as the crazed repetition of “good night” within Ophelia’s line seems like a final goodbye, and would not be shocking as the last words of a person contemplating suicide. Eliot is therefore both in accordance and disagreement with the original Shakespeare: his text breaks down like Ophelia, but his ending is taken from her middle. This reinterpretation reflects broader modernist themes of taking the old and adapting it to the new, which Eliot does repeatedly, and takes it to a deeper level within the form of the poem, mirroring the content of an older text within the form of his text.

When I read the line “Those are pearls that were his eyes” in tonight’s reading, I was shocked. I was immediately taken back to our conversation about Ariel’s character in The Tempest, and the identical line in “The Burial of the Dead,” Furthermore, the difference between the uses of “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” interested me a lot. In “The Burial of the Dead” the line is a parenthetical line in reference to the “drowned Phonecian Sailor” in the tarot card reading by “Madame Sosostris.” Furthermore the full line reads “Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!” This is a direct reference to when Ariel sings to Ferdinand, whom they have shipwrecked on Prospero’s island. They sing: “Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes: / Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange,” lying to Ferdinand that his father died in the shipwreck, leaving him, as the heir to the throne, the new King. This line, full of rhymes and interesting imagery, acts as a spell, with Ariel using his magical rhetoric to convince Ferdinand of an untruth. Thus, the line’s use in “The Burial of the Dead” can be seen as a diversion, with the “Look!” making that all the more convincing. In “A Game of Chess,” the line reads “I remember/Those are pearls that were his eyes.” To which the (a?) speaker responds, “‘Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?’” The reintroduction of this line in this context, perhaps suggests the memory of humanity’s connection to nature, a time when beautiful and rare pearls equated to the beauty and importance of one’s vision. The response, “‘Are you alive, or not?’” confused me, especially after the preceding line, but maybe that will be parsed through during our discussion, or in a further source. Additionally, the placement of this line, in response to the questions “Do/you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember/’Nothing?’” felt really intentional to me. It seemed as if it was testing the reader’s memory; in some way, this quoted speaker is Eliot, reaching out to the audience, asking us if we remember the first use of the line.

The lines “In the midst of perfume flasks, of sequined fabrics / And voluptuous furniture, / Of marble statues, pictures, and perfumed dresses…A headless cadaver pours out, like a river, / On the saturated pillow / Red, living blood, that the linen drinks up / As greedily as a meadow” stuck out to me when reading the references tonight. The inspiration taken from this source, “A Martyred Woman” in Les Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire, lies not in a central theme, character, or a famous line, but instead the image of an ornate room. “A Martyred Woman” dances around an extravagant room, with “voluptuous furniture” and “marble statues,” finally setting onto the subject, a nude, headless cadaver, posed on the bed: the product of an “unwholesome love.”

The inspired lines of “A Game of Chess” – “glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,/From satin cases poured in rich profusion./In vials of ivory and coloured glass/Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes” etc. – are clearly harking back to the image of luxury provided in “A Martyred Woman.” The difference, however, lies in the subject, or lack thereof: the nude cadaver. Her presence and neck oozing “red, living blood,” is central to the themes of the poem, yet the possessives “her” and “she,” which are continually referenced in the stanza, are undefined. This gives us only one half of the story provided by Baudelaire. We, the readers, know, from reading “A Martyred Woman,” that the ornate room holds secrets and murder, yet, in “A Game of Chess,” we live and read about it with utter ignorance.

Furthermore, the lines “fatal beauty/That nature had bestowed on her” from “A Martyred Woman” also really stood out to me. In a tale of a woman, brutally murdered, but worshiped by a love sick lover, the idea of "nature" “bestow[ing]” this “fatal[ity]” is really interesting.. This idea of “nature” “bestow[ing]” is twofold: it is, as if, instead of her death being the fault of her murderer, it is her “nature”, her existence, that allowed it; or her murder was a “natur[al],” primitive reaction on the part of her obsessed killer. This image of luxury and wealth shrouding blood, obsession, and unhealthy love is really interesting.

Throughout the sources we read tonight, there is a recurring theme of violence toward women imposed through romantic relationships. In Eliot's "A Game of Chess," perfume serves as a symbol that shifts from natural purity to artificial corruption across the works he references. In Paradise Lost, perfume appears in the quote "Fanning thir odoriferous wings dispense Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole Those balmie spoiles." Here, perfume is natural and pure, emanating from Eden's perfect landscape. This directly contradicts Eliot's description of perfume as "Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused And drowned the sense in odours." Eliot explicitly calls perfume "synthetic," creating contrast with Milton's natural description. This same corrupted use of perfume appears in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra: "The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them." Here, perfume affects nature itself, making the winds "love-sick," which aligns with Eliot's theme of grief in The Waste Land. Later in the same play, "From the barge A strange invisible perfume hits the sense Of the adjacent wharfs... Antony, Enthroned i' the market-place, did sit alone, Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy, Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too." Cleopatra's perfume seems to brainwash people when they smell it, making them obsessed with her. In Baudelaire's "A Martyred Woman," perfume again appears "In the midst of perfume flasks, of sequined fabrics And voluptuous furniture, Of marble statues, pictures, and perfumed dresses That trail in sumptuous folds." Perfume exists in an elegant and extravagant context, but it masks the horror of the dead woman in the room. Eliot makes perfume fake and "synthetic" because it is no longer pure like it was in Paradise Lost. In Cleopatra it makes people lose themselves and obsess over her, and in "A Martyred Woman" perfume conceals death and decay. Since perfume is something associated with attraction, and both Cleopatra and Baudelaire's poem center on the death of women, Eliot demonstrates that relationships have become as artificial and deceptive as the synthetic perfumes.

The line “From satin cases poured in rich profusion; In vials of ivory and coloured glass / Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes” felt to me an interesting parallel between the line “Purple the sails, and so perfumed that the winds were love-sick with them;” from Antony and Cleopatra. While the clearest connection between these texts is the “burnish’d throne” line, an image that Eliot draws directly from Shakespeare, the description of lavish luxury that follows intrigued me. The lush, opulent imagery of “satin,” “rich,” and “ivory” mirrors similar imagery within Shakespeare, like the use of “purple,” a color which was costly to produce, and therefore associated with wealth and nobility. These images stand in stark contrast to the dark, deathly imagery of the previous chapter of the poem, like the “brown fog” and “dead sound.” However, underneath this rich imagery is a thread of suicide and violence more gruesome than that found in “The Burial of the Dead.”

Almost all of the sources we read include a woman of noble standing conducting some act of violence, whether it be suicide or violence against another. The imagery highlighted above from Antony and Cleopatra is vastly different from the ending where Cleopatra kills herself by being bitten by a snake. This pattern continues in Ovid, where Philomela is both “dressed magnificently” and later goes on to “strike” and “hack” the throat of her nephew, brutally killing him before feeding him to his father. In Aeneid, Dido lays on a “golden couch” before she gives “over to the flames,” thereby killing herself. All of these cases, which Eliot references over and over in this passage, infect the poem with a dark, gruesome meaning that would otherwise be covered by the richness of the imagery. This shows the nature of death and darkness, which can express themselves so clearly, as seen in “The Burial of the Dead,” or can seep into and hide themselves behind glamour and opulence, as seen in the beginning of “A Game of Chess.”

“The cards, the cards, the cards will tell/ The past, the present, and the future as well/ The cards, the cards, just take three/ Take a little trip into your future with me” (Princess and The Frog). But can Tarot really tell the future? Or is it just a game? In Ritual and Romance Weston recounts the history of tarot cards, which are from unknown origin, and are believed to have started as a game– like a standard deck of cards. But how did they become vessels of clairvoyance? The transformation is what I believe Eliot is most interested in, as he writes “I do not find the hanged man.” Just as the man hangs between two states, the card exists in limbo, as both a game and a powerful tool of divination. The mystery surrounding the cards’ origin only further complicates this story of the hanged man, existing as the string that suspends and bridges game and prophecy. Without their muddled history, the cards would have a clear purpose as either a game or tool of deviation and they would not be suspended between both.

https://histoire-geographie.ac-dijon.fr/spip.php?article1092

I agree with the sentiment that there are numerous challenges involved when it comes to designing things. We often take for granted the fact that certain designs may not be inclusive for particular groups of people. I’m very interested in this aspect of design, especially when it comes to making designs that are inclusive of disabled people, such as those who rely on screen readers or are color blind. I find this conclusion of the chapter useful because there are important things to keep in mind when designing something. This reminds me of my INFO 498 C class, where they address that as a game designer, you must take into consideration the different feedback that you will receive in order to improve upon your product.

Author response:

The following is the authors’ response to the original reviews.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:

This is a manuscript describing outbreaks of Pseudomonas aeruginosa ST 621 in a facility in the US using genomic data. The authors identified and analysed 254 P. aeruginosa ST 621 isolates collected from a facility from 2011 to 2020. The authors described the relatedness of the isolates across different locations, specimen types (sources), and sampling years. Two concurrently emerged subclones were identified from the 254 isolates. The authors predicted that the most recent common ancestor for the isolates can be dated back to approximately 1999 after the opening of the main building of the facility in 1996. Then the authors grouped the 254 isolates into two categories: 1) patient-to-patient; or 2) environment-to-patient using SNP thresholds and known epidemiological links. Finally, the authors described the changes in resistance gene profiles, virulence genes, cell wall biogenesis, and signaling pathway genes of the isolates over the sampling years.

Strengths:

The major strength of this study is the utilisation of genomic data to comprehensively describe the characteristics of a long-term Pseudomonas aeruginosa ST 621 outbreak in a facility. This fills the data gap of a clone that could be clinically important but easily missed from microbiology data alone.

Weaknesses:

The work would further benefit from a more detailed discussion on the limitations due to the lack of data on patient clinical information, ward movement, and swabs collected from healthcare workers to verify the transmission of Pseudomonas aeruginosa ST 621, including potential healthcare worker to patient transmission, patient-to-patient transmission, patient-to-environment transmission, and environment-to-patient transmission. For instance, the definition given in the manuscript for patient-to-patient transmission could not rule out the possibility of the existence of a shared contaminated environment. Equally, as patients were not routinely swabbed, unobserved carriers of Pseudomonas aeruginosa ST 621 could not be identified and the possibility of misclassifying the environment-to-patient transmissions could not be ruled out. Moreover, reporting of changes in rates of resistance to imipenem and cefepime could be improved by showing the exact p-values (perhaps with three decimal places) rather than dichotomising the value at 0.05. By doing so, readers could interpret the strength of the evidence of changes.

Impact of the work:

First, the work adds to the growing evidence implicating sinks as long-term reservoirs for important MDR pathogens, with direct infection control implications. Moreover, the work could potentially motivate investments in generating and integrating genomic data into routine surveillance. The comprehensive descriptions of the Pseudomonas aeruginosa ST 621 clones outbreak is a great example to demonstrate how genomic data can provide additional information about long-term outbreaks that otherwise could not be detected using microbiology data alone. Moreover, identifying the changes in resistance genes and virulence genes over time would not be possible without genomic data. Finally, this work provided additional evidence for the existence of long-term persistence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa ST 621 clones, which likely occur in other similar settings.

We thank the reviewer for their thorough evaluation of our work, and for the suggested improvements. A main goal of this study was to show that integrating routine wgs in the clinic was a game changer for infection control efforts. We appreciate this aspect was highlighted as a strength by this reviewer. While some of the weaknesses identified are inherent to the data (or lack thereof) available for this study, we have revised the manuscript to include a detailed discussion on limitations (sampling, thresholds of genetic relatedness, definition and categories etc.) that could influence the genomic inferences. We also provided exact p-values for the changes in rates of resistance, as requested. Finally, we have positively answered all the specific recommendations suggested by the reviewer and modified the manuscript accordingly.

Reviewer #2 (Public Review):

Summary:

The authors present a report of a large Pseudomonas aeruginosa hospital outbreak affecting more than 80 patients with first sampling dates in 2011 that stretched over more than 10 years and was only identified through genomic surveillance in 2020. The outbreak strain was assigned to the sequence type 621, an ST that has been associated with carpabapenem resistance across the globe. Ongoing transmission coincided with both increasing resistance without acquisition of carbapenemase genes as well as the convergence of mutations towards a host-adapted lifestyle.

Strengths:

The convincing genomic analyses indicate spread throughout the hospital since the beginning of the century and provide important benchmark findings for future comparison.

The sampling was based on all organisms sent to the Multidrug-resistant Organism Repository and Surveillance Network across the U.S. Military Health System.

Using sequencing data from patient and environmental samples for phylogenetic and transmission analyses as well as determining recurring mutations in outbreak isolates allows for insights into the evolution of potentially harmful pathogens with the ultimate aim of reducing their spread in hospitals.

Weaknesses:

The epidemiological information was limited and the sampling methodology was inconsistent, thus complicating the inference of exact transmission routes. Epidemiological data relevant to this analysis include information on the reason for sampling, patient admission and discharge data, and underlying frequency of sampling and sampling results in relation to patient turnover.

We thank the reviewer for their thoughtful feedback on our manuscript and for highlighting the quality of the genomic analyses. We agree that the lack of patient epi data (e.g. date of admission and discharge) and the inconsistent sampling through the years are limitations of this study. We have revised the manuscript to acknowledge these limitations and discuss how not having this data complicates the inference of exact transmission routes. Finally, we have positively answered all the specific recommendations suggested by the reviewer and modified the manuscript accordingly.

Reviewer #3 (Public Review):

Summary:

This paper by Stribling and colleagues sheds light on a decade-long P. aeruginosa outbreak of the high-risk lineage ST-621 in a US Military hospital. The origins of the outbreak date back to the late 90s and it was mainly caused by two distinct subclones SC1 and SC2. The data of this outbreak showed the emergence of antibiotic resistance to cephalosporin, carbapenems, and colistin over time highlighting the emerging risk of extensively resistant infections due to P. aeruginosa and the need for ongoing surveillance.

Strengths:

This study overall is well constructed and clearly written. Since detailed information on floor plans of the building and transfers between facilities was available, the authors were able to show that these two subclones emerged in two separate buildings of the hospital. The authors support their conclusions with prospective environmental sampling in 2021 and 2022 and link the role of persistent environmental contamination to sustaining nosocomial transmission. Information on resistance genes in repeat isolates for the same patients allowed the authors to detect the emergence of resistance within patients. The conclusions have broader implications for infection control at other facilities. In particular, the paper highlights the value of real-time surveillance and environmental sampling in slowing nosocomial transmission of P. aeruginosa.

Weaknesses:

My major concern is that the authors used fixed thresholds and definitions to classify the origin of an infection. As such, they were not able to give uncertainty measures around transmission routes nor quantify the relative contribution of persistent environmental contamination vs patient-to-patient transmission. The latter would allow the authors to quantify the impact of certain interventions. In addition, these results represent a specific US military facility and the transmission patterns might be specific to that facility. The study also lacked any data on antibiotic use that could have been used to relate to and discuss the temporal trends of antimicrobial resistance.

We thank the reviewer for their evaluation of our work and for highlighting the broad implications of our findings regarding the application of real-time surveillance to suppress nosocomial transmission. We agree with the reviewer that fixed thresholds and definitions are imperfect to classify the origin of an infection. The design of this study (e.g. inconsistent sampling through time) was not conducive to provide a comprehensive/quantitative measurement of transmission routes. Thus, we decided to apply conservative thresholds of genetic relatedness and strict conditions (e.g. time between isolate collection, shared hospital location etc.) to favor specificity as our goal was simply to establish that cases of environmentto-patient transmission did happen. In the absence of a truth set, we have not performed sensitivity analysis, but we are conducting a follow-up study to compare inferences from MCMC models to our original fixed-thresholds predictions. This limitation is now discussed in the revised manuscript. Finally, we have positively answered all the specific recommendations suggested by the reviewer and modified the manuscript accordingly including the addition of Figure S3.

Reviewer #1 (Recommendations For The Authors):

The definitions used on lines 391-396 are necessarily somewhat arbitrary, but it would be helpful to have a little bit more justification for the choices made, particularly for the definition of environmental involving the "3x the number of years they were separated". It seems a little hard to square this with the more relaxed 10 SNP cutoff for a patient-to-patient designation. Are there reasons for thinking SNP differences associated with environmental transmission should be smaller than for patient-to-patient, or is the aim here just to set the bar higher for assuming an environmental source? Because these definitions are quite arbitrary, there could also be some value in exploring the sensitivity of the results to these assumptions.

Thank you. We agree with the reviewers that SNP thresholds, albeit necessarily, are arbitrary and that more discussion/justification was needed to put the genomic inferences in context. We have revised the manuscript to indicate that: 1/ the 10 SNP cutoff for a patient-to-patient designation was set to account for the known evolution rate of P. aeruginosa (inferred by BEAST at 2.987E-7 subs/site/year in this study and similar to previous estimates PMID: 24039595) and the observed within host variability (now displayed in revised Fig. 1E). We note that this SNP distance was not sufficient and that an epi link (patients on the same ward at the same time) needed to be established. 2/ the environment-to-patient definition was indeed set to be most conservative (nearly identical isolates in two patients from the same ward with no known temporal overlap for > 365 days). This was indeed done to favor high specificity as this inference relied solely on clinical isolates (i.e. the identical environmental strain in the patientenvironment-patient chain was not sampled). For these clinical isolates to have acquired no/very little mutation in that much time, no/low replication is expected and, although unsampled, we propose this most likely happened on hospital surfaces.

While the term "core genome" should be familiar to most readers, "shell genome" and "cloud genome" are less widely known, and an explanation of what these terms mean here would be helpful.

Thank you. We have revised the manuscript to define the core, shell, and cloud genomes as genes sets found in ≥ 99%, ≥ 95% and ≥ 15% of isolates, respectively.

In the first paragraph of the discussion, it could be added that in many cases for clinically important Gram negatives short read sequencing alone will fail to detect transmission events as outbreaks can be driven by plasmid spread with only very limited clonal spread (see, for example, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-021-00879-y )

Thank you. We agree this is an important/emerging aspect of surveillance. However, the goal of this discussion point was to explain why such a large outbreak was missed prior to implementing WGS (short read) surveillance. We feel that discussing “plasmid outbreaks” (which is not at play here, and relatively rare in P. aeruginosa compared to the Enterobacteriaceae) and the need for long read will distract from the narrative. 

line 599 What does "Mock" mean here? Would it be more accurate to say it is a simplified floor plan?

Thank you. “Mock” was changed to “simplified”

IPAC abbreviation is only used once - spelling it out in full would increase readability.

Revised manuscript was edited as suggested.

MHS is only used twice.

Revised manuscript was edited to spell out Military Health System

Line 364: full stop missing.

Revised manuscript was edited as suggested.

Line 401: Bayesian rather than bayesian.

Revised manuscript was edited as suggested.

Reviewer #2 (Recommendations For The Authors):

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to review this interesting manuscript.

The conclusions of this paper are mostly well supported by the data presented, but epidemiological information was limited and the sampling methodology was inconsistent, thus complicating inference of exact transmission routes.

Major issues:

What was the baseline frequency of clinical and/or screening samples of Pseudomonas aeruginosa at the hospital? Neither Figure 1D nor Table S1 allows for differentiating between clinical and screening samples. Most isolates were cultured from clinical materials, and there is no information about the patients' length of stay and their respective sampling dates. Is there any possibility of finding out whether the samples were collected for clinical or screening purposes? Would it be possible to include the patients' admission data to determine whether the strains were imported into the hospital or related to a previous stay, e.g. among known carriers? Also, the issue of sampling dates vs. patient stay on the ward should be addressed, as there may be an overlap in patients' stay on the ward but no overlap in terms of sampling dates or even missing samples (missing links).

We have revised the manuscript to address this important point: i) 16 isolates were from surveillance swabs and are labelled “Surveillance” in Table S1. The remaining 237 were clinical isolates; ii) unfortunately, because the sampling was done under a public health surveillance framework, we do not have access to historical patient data (admission/discharge date, wards, rooms, etc.) and we can not calculate length of stay or better identify patient overlap. These limitations are now acknowledged in the discussion of the revised manuscript.

In order to evaluate the extent of the outbreak, more epidemiological data would be useful What is the size of the hospital, what is the average patient turnover, and what is the average length of stay in ICU and non-ICU? Is there any specialization besides the military label?

We have revised the manuscript to indicate that facility A is 425-bed medical center and is the only Level 1 trauma center in the Military Health System. Unfortunately, the data to calculate length of stay, throughout the years, in ICU and non-ICU, was not available to us. This limitation is now also acknowledged in the discussion.

Perhaps the authors could attempwt to discuss the extent to which large outbreaks like these may be considered as part of unavoidable evolutionary processes within the hospital microbiome as opposed to accumulation and transmission of potentially harmful genes/clones, and differentiate between the putative community spread without any epidemiological links on the one hand, and hospital outbreaks that could be targeted by local infection prevention activities on the other hand.,

We respectfully disagree with the suggestion that this large outbreak “may be considered as part of unavoidable evolutionary processes within the hospital microbiome” and should be opposed to “transmission of potentially harmful genes/clones”. As a matter of fact, our data showed that infection control staff at Facility A responded with multiple interventions, including closing sinks, replacing tubing, and using foaming detergents. This resulted in slowing the spread of the ST621 outbreak with just 3 cases identified in 2022, 0 cases in 2023 and 1 case in 2024. This is now discussed in the revised manuscript.

Page 5, lines 88-92 lines 101-104. It seems as if the outbreak was identified only by the means of genomic surveillance. This raises questions as to the rationale for sampling and sequencing, especially prior to 2020. Considering 11 cases per year between 2011 and 2016, one could assume such an outbreak would have been noticed without sequencing data.

The MRSN was created in 2010, in response to the outbreak of MDR Acinetobacter baumannii in US military personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Between 2011 and 2017, the MRSN collected MDR isolates (mandate for all MDR ESKAPE but compliance varied between years and facilities) from across the Military Health System and, for select isolates (e.g. high-risk isolates carrying ESBLs or carbapenemases) performed molecular typing by PFGE. In 2017 the MRSN started to perform whole genome sequencing of its entire repository. In 2020, a routine prospective sequencing service was started and first detected the ST621 outbreak. A retrospective analysis of historical isolate genomes (2011-2019) identified additional cases. The first paragraph of the discussion lists possible factors to explain why the ST621 escaped detection by traditional approaches. We believe 11 cases per year is not a strong signal when stratified by month, wards, or both, especially for a clone lacking a carbapenemase and without a remarkable antibiotic susceptibility profile. 

Did the infection control personnel suspect transmission? If yes, was the sampling and submission of samples to the MRSN adapted based on the epidemiologic findings?

The ST621 outbreak was unsuspected before the initial genomic detection in 2020. Until that point, MDR isolates only (Magiorakos et al PMID: 21793988) were collected but compliance was variable through time. Quickly thereafter (starting in 2021), complete sampling of all clinical P. aeruginosa (MDR or not) from Facility A was started. The manuscript was revised to clarify those details of the sampling strategy.

Is there any information about how many environmental sites were sampled without evidence of ST621 / screening samples were cultured without evidence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa?

For patient isolates, only 16 isolates were from surveillance swabs. The remaining 237 were clinical isolates. No denominator data was available to calculate P. aeruginosa and ST-621 positivity rate in surveillance swabs throughout the time period. For environmental isolates, a total of 159 swabs were taken from 55 distinct locations in 8 wards/units including the ER. This data is now included in the revised manuscript. However, a complete analysis of these swabs (positivity rate for ESKAPE pathogens, P. aeruginosa, per ward/floor/room, per swab type (sink drain, bed rail etc.) etc.) is beyond the scope of this study and is being performed as a follow up investigation.

Page 5 lines 89 and 39 Figure S1B. Please describe how the allelic distance for the cluster threshold was selected.

As indicated in the legend of Figure S1B, no thresholds were applied. All ST621 isolates ever sequenced by the MRSN were included. All except 3 isolates shared between 023 cgMLST allelic differences. The remaining 3 were distant by 88-89 allelic differences. The text was revised to clarify this point.

Page 5 lines 99-100. Could the authors please provide some distribution measures (e.g. IQR).

Done as requested. The revised manuscript now reads “…of just 38 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and an IQR of 19 (Fig. 1A, Table S1).”

Page 5 line 102. Could the authors please provide some distribution measures (e.g. IQR).

Please see above. A chart was created and is now included as Fig. S2.

Page 6 line 107 and page 34 figure 1c. In the text it is stated that isolates were collected in 27 wards, the figure 1C depicts 26 wards and n/a.

Thank you for spotting this inconsistency. This has been fixed in the revised manuscript.

Page 6 lines 117-118. Samples collected in the emergency room would imply samples collected on admission, already addressed previously. Did the authors investigate a potential import into the hospital from community reservoirs or were all these isolates collected among patients who had been previously admitted to the hospital and/or tested positive for the outbreak strain?

We agree that samples collected in the ER imply samples collected on admission. Of the 29 ER isolates only 9 (31%) were primary isolates (first detection in a new patient) which suggests a majority were from returning patients at Facility A. Because the sampling was done under a public health surveillance framework, we do not have access to historical patient data (admission/discharge date, wards, rooms, etc.) to investigate/confirm that these 9 patients had previous visits at Facility A. This point is now discussed in the revised manuscript.

Page 6 line 128. This could also represent increased selective pressure. However, according to Table S1, the 28 isolates collected in 2011 (the number does not match with Figure 1D) were from many different wards, thus indicating earlier spread throughout the hospital.

Yes, we agree. Please note that table S1 lists all isolates for 2011 whereas Figure 1D focuses on primary (first isolate from each patients) only.  

Page 7 line 133. Both Figure 2 and the discussion section, page 13 line 296 suggest the year 2005 instead of 2004?

Thank you for catching this typographical error. This was corrected to 2004 in the revised manuscript.

Figure 1E. The figure should also depict intra-patient diversity for comparison.

Thank you for this great suggestion. We have revised Figure 1E accordingly.

Page 7, lines 146-147 Could the authors attempt explaining the upper part of the bimodal peaks?

This is an all-vs-all SNP analysis for all inter-patient isolates. For each isolates all distances to other isolates are reported, not only the smallest. The upper peaks represent comparisons to isolates from a different outbreak subclone (SC1 vs SC2).

Page 7, line 150 This is a very small number considering the extent of the outbreak and suggests a large number of missing links. Or does this rather imply continuous import and evolution over time that does not necessarily represent transmission within the hospital?

We believe all cases were due to transmission happening within the hospital. Based on conservative thresholds (genetic relatedness and epi link, or lack thereof) the precise origin from another patient (n=10) or a contaminated surface (n=12) can be inferred. For the remaining 60 patients, with the available sampling, the conditions we chose are not met and we simply do not conclude whether a direct patient-to-patient or an environmental origin was more likely.

Page 8 line 155. What does the temporal overlap refer to - sampling date versus patient's stay on the ward? Please specify.

The temporal overlap was investigated from sampling dates, as dates of patient admission/discharged were not available.

Page 8, line 157: What does primary/serial isolate mean - first and follow-up samples of ST621 per patient?

Yes. Primary isolate is used to designate the first isolate from a patient. Serial isolates designate follow-up samples of ST621.

Page 8 line 165: Table S3 and Figure 3 only refer to environmental samples from three wards. Ward 20 rooms 2 and 18 as well as ward 1 rooms 1 and 6 were hotspots - is there any information on the specific infection control/disinfection measures? Addressed in discussion page 12, lines 273-275, but no information on what was actually done.

The manuscript was revised to indicate the precise disinfection measures that were taken. A follow-up study is ongoing to assess long-term efficacy and monitor possible retrograde growth from previously contaminated sinks.

Page 8 line 175: Evaluation of change in resistance fraction over time - There may have been a selection bias with an inconsistent number of strains sequenced per year.

Yes, incomplete sampling and possible selection bias are now listed with other limitations of this study in the discussion of the revised manuscript.

Page 9 line 183: The referral to Table S1 is unclear, I could not find the number and the specific isolates selected for long-read sequencing.

Thank you. This has been added to the revised Table S1.

Page 10 lines 217-225 and Figure 4C: Perhaps it is possible to better align what is written in the text and the caption of the figure. The caption does not clarify that only one patient develops colistin resistance (what was the reason to include the other patients?).

Thank you. We have revised the text and the caption of the figure to clarify that only isolates from one patient developed colistin resistance. The isolates from the other patients on Fig. 4C are shown to provide context and accurately map the emergence of the PhoQE77fs mutation.  

Page 10, lines 228-229 and Table S5: How is it possible to identify those 64 genes in Table S5?

We have revised Table S5 to facilitate the identification of the 64 genes with ≥ 2 independently acquired mutations (excluding SYN). Specifically, we have added column E labeled “Counts independent mutations per locus (excluding SYN)”. A total of 205 rows (in this table each row is a variant) have a value ≥ 2 and these represent 64 genes (upon deduplication of locus tags).  

Page 13, lines 280-281: Where is the information on chronic infection presented? Serial cultures would not necessarily mean chronic infection.

Authors response: Yes, we agree this was not the appropriate characterization and this was revised to ‘long-term’ infections.

Page 14 line 306: Emergence of colistin resistance in a single patient, correct?

Yes. This was further clarified in the text.

Page 14 lines 315-320: This should go to the results section. In particular disinfection, closing, and replacing of tubing should be mentioned in the results section in reference to the results presented in Table S3.

Thank you. We have considered this suggestion and have decided to leave this discussion as the closing paragraph of this publication. A follow-up study is ongoing to assess long-term efficacy of these interventions on the ST-621 bur also other outbreak clones at Facility A.

Methods

Page 15 lines 330-333: Perhaps it is possible to avoid redundancy.

Thank you. We have revised the text accordingly.

Page 15 lines 341: Information on which isolates were subjected to long-read sequencing is missing.

Thank you. This has been added to the revised Table S1.

Page 16 line 345: Was there a particular reason why Newbler was chosen?

No. At the time Newbler was the default assembler built in the MRSN bacterial genome analysis pipeline and QC processes.

Page 16, line 357-358: What was the rationale for selecting this isolate as reference genome?

This isolate was chosen because it was collected early in the outbreak and phylogenetic analysis revealed it had low root to tip divergence.

Page 16 line 361: Why 310 isolates, if only 253 were assigned to the outbreak clone and only a subset of those were collected in facility A?

This was a typographical error that has corrected (it now reads “…set of 253 isolates.”) in the revised manuscript.  

Page 17 lines 387-395: What is the reason that intra-patient diversity was not included in the set of criteria for SNP distances?

The observed within host variability (now displayed in revised Fig. 1E) was taken into consideration when setting SNP thresholds for categorizing patient-to-patient transmission or environment-to-patient event. This is now clarified in the revised manuscript.

Page 17 line 392: How was the threshold of <=10 SNPs determined?

The 10 SNP cutoff to infer a patient-to-patient transmission event was set to account for the known evolution rate of P. aeruginosa (inferred by BEAST at 2.987E-7 subs/site/year in this study, and similar to previous estimates PMID: 24039595) and the observed within host variability (now displayed in revised Fig. 1E). We note that this SNP distance was not sufficient and that an epi link (patients on the same ward within the same month) needed to be established.

Page 17 line 395 and Figure 2: What was the assumed average mutation rate per genome per year?

Thank you. The mean substitution rate inferred by BEAST was 2.987E-7 similar to estimate from previous studies on P. aeruginosa outbreaks (e.g. PMID: 24039595).

Reviewer #3 (Recommendations For The Authors):

Please find (line-by-line comments) on each section of the manuscript below:

Introduction

Line 86: I am wondering why the authors state ">28 facilities" instead of the exact number of facilities from which these lineages were recovered.

Thank you. Manuscript was revised to provide the exact number of facilities. It now reads “…recovered from 37 and 28 facilities, respectively.”

Methods

It's not clear to me which criteria were used for collecting these isolates (both prospective and retrospective). I understand that some of the data are described in more detail in Lebreton et al but I did not find the specific criteria for the collection of the isolates and I imagine that these might differ if different facilities. Would it be possible to comment on that and add a short paragraph in the Methods section?

Thank you. This lack of clarity was also raised by other reviewers, and we have revised the manuscript to indicate that: 1/MDR isolates only (Magiorakos et al PMID: 21793988) were collected from 2011-2020 with the same criteria for all facilities although compliance was variable through time and between facilities; and 2/ starting in 2021 all P. aeruginosa isolates, irrespective of their susceptibility profile, were collected from Facility A

The data comes from a US Military hospital. Is this related to the US Veterans Affairs Healthcare system? Is there more detailed information about the demographics of the patient population?

Facility A is part of the Military Health System (MHS) which provides care for active service members and their families. This is distinct from the US Veterans Affairs Healthcare system. Only limited patient data was accessible to us as this study was done as part of our public health surveillance activities. Patient age (avg. 57.2 +/- 21.0) and gender (ratio male/female 1.7) are provided in the revised manuscript. 

Line 384ff: The origin of infection was inferred based on the SNP threshold and epidemiological links. However, recombination events can complicate the interpretation of SNP data. Have the authors attempted to account for this?

Thank you. We agree that recombination events can complicate the interpretation of SNP data. We used Gubbins v2.3.1 to filter out recombination from the core SNP alignment, as indicated in the revised manuscript.

The authors' definition of environment-to-patient transmission seems conservative (nearly identical strain and no known temporal overlap for > 365 days). Have the authors changed the threshold, performed sensitivity analyses, and tested how this would affect their results?

Indeed, acknowledging that fixed thresholds have limitations in their ability to accurately predict the origin of infections, we took a conservative approach to favor specificity as our goal was simply to establish that cases of environment-to-patient transmission did happen. In the absence of a truth set, we have not performed sensitivity analysis, but we are conducting a follow-up study to compare inferences from MCMC models to our original predictions. This limitation is now discussed in the revised manuscript.

The authors don't seem to incorporate the role of healthcare workers in the transmission process. Could they comment on this? I am assuming that environment-to-patient transmission could either be directly from the environment to the patient or via a healthcare worker. I think it's fine to make simplifying assumptions here but it would be great if this was explicitly described.

Thank you for this suggestion. We have not sampled the hands of healthcare workers in this study. As a result, the reviewer is correct to say that we made the simplifying assumption that healthcare workers would be possible intermediates in either environment-topatient or patient-to-patient transmissions, as previously described by others (PMID: 8452949). This limitation is now discussed in the revised manuscript.

Page 5, line 100: What does "all vs all" mean? Based on the supplement, I assume it's the pairwise distance and then averaged across all of those. It would improve the readability of the manuscript if the authors could briefly define this term and then maybe refer to Table S1.

Thank you. We have created Fig.S2 and revised the manuscript to state that ST-621 isolates from facility A belonged to the same outbreak clone with a distance (averaged all vs all pairwise comparison) of just 38 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and an IQR of 19 (Fig. S2, Table S1).

Figure 1D: It would be interesting to see additional figures in the supplement on the percentage of sequenced isolates per year and whether it varies across the different sources/sites. Is there any information on which isolates were chosen for sequencing?

Lack of clarity in the sampling/sequencing scheme was raised by multiple reviewers and we have provided a thorough response to earlier comments. We also have revised the material and methods section accordingly. Finally, we have created Fig. S3 to show the percentage of sequenced isolates per year across different sources/sites, as suggested by the reviewer. No noticeable patterns were observed. 

It seems like only a subset of all clinical isolates were sequenced. Would it be possible that SC2 was present already earlier but not picked up until a certain date?

Although all isolates received by the MRSN were sequenced, compliance varied through time so it is true that not all clinical isolates were sequenced between 2011-2019. As such, we fully agree with this hypothesis and discuss this possibility as BEAST analysis placed the origin of SC2 in 2004 while the first detection of an SC2 isolate was in December 2012. This limitation is now discussed in the revised manuscript.

Could the authors elaborate on whether the isolates resulted from single-colony picks? Is it possible that the different absence of a subclone is due to the fact that they picked only a colony?

Yes, the isolates resulted from single-colony picks except when the presence of different colony morphologies was noted. In the latter, representative isolates for each colony morphologies were processed. We have revised the methods to make that clear.

Figure 2: It is difficult to see which nodes belong to which patient due to the small font size. I wonder if it was possible to color the nodes for each patient, to make it more readable.

We tried coloring the nodes but with > 60 distinct patients/colors we decided it did not improve clarity. We have revised figure 2 to increase the font size.  

Page 7-8, lines 154-155: Did the authors check whether there were isolates of the same strain (that were found in the environment) present in other patients elsewhere in the ward?

Yes. In rare cases, we observed virtually genetically identical isolates from two patients collected in different wards. Because we only have access to clinical isolate data (collected from patient X in ward Y) and do not have access to patient data (admission/discharge date, wards, rooms, etc.), we do not know but cannot exclude that patients overlap in a room prior to the sampling of their P. aeruginosa isolates. We designed our fixed thresholds to be conservative. As a result, in this analysis, these cases are labelled as “undetermined”.  

Page 8: Do the authors have any information on antibiotic use during this timeframe? From the discussion, it seems like there is no patient-level prescription data. Is there any data on overall trends? How were trends in antibiotic use correlated with trends in antibiotic resistance?

Unfortunately, patient-level prescription data (or any other data not linked to the bacterial specimens) was not accessible to us as this study was done as part of our public health surveillance activities.

To infer the origin of infection, the authors used a static method with fixed thresholds and definitions. This study does not provide any uncertainty with their estimates. Maybe the authors could add a sentence in the discussion section that MCMC methods to infer transmission trees incorporating WGS could provide these estimates. These methods have not been applied to PA a lot but two examples where MCMC methods have been used without WGS (though the definition of environmental contamination may differ between these studies and this study).

https://doi.org/10.1186/s13756-022-01095-x

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006697

Thank you for this great suggestion. We have revised the manuscript to include a discussion on the limitations of fixed thresholds to infer transmission chains/origins, and to discuss existing alternatives including MCMC methods. 

Line 322-323: This sentence is a bit vague since not all of these HAI are due to P. aeruginosa. I would suggest citing a number that is specific to PA.

Thank you. While our paper shows a particular example of protracted P. aeruginosa outbreak, the roll-out of routine WGS surveillance in the clinic will help prevent hospital-associated drug-resistant infections for more than this species. We believe that broadening the scope in the last sentence of the manuscript is important and we decline to revise as suggested.

I was just reading articles about game theory and this reminds me of Prisoner's Dilemma where best actions for individuals lead to worse outcomes for everyone. I am curious how egoism deals with these kind of settings.

This is even more evidence for the previous claims in this. It dips into philosophical reasoning for why things are certain things. the football does not have purpose or meaning until you put it in the context of a football game and on a football field. We give things meanings to support our world view.

The book presents a collection of chapters that focus on the design, use, and evaluation of games and the application of gamification processes in serious learning scenarios. This is clearly the way of the future, as those technologies are currently being used to change the way we explore, learn, and share our knowledge with others. The field will evolve in the near future with the use of new delivery platforms, while various technologies will merge into more concrete media, including wearable multipurpose devices. This book presents a series of design and evaluation case studies enabling the reader to appreciate the complexity of the task in hand, sample different case studies, and appreciate how different requirements can be met using game design and evaluation theory, analysis, and implementation.

How the native cultures lived in the northeastern woodlands

Tv become more accessible, streaming changed the game, more funding , and better tvs. Tv has definitely changed a lot.

try to find: number of slots they've tried, how many spins per one, maybe complete two of the daily quests on two or three unique days?

17

shapes are mutually defining and read as a single unit whether...

19

the figure-field relationship ceases to be as such, and all shapes interact with one another.

33 consider when a pattern can be strongly directional — how does it read when turned across diff angles?

34, on game C, Manipulations

move from simple positions of the design unit to more complex by carefully controlling the repeat size, its dark-light balance, and its alignment with itself

Figure 1-35 (p37)...!!!

It seems like what these men really wanted was control based off their hunting regulations (not that hunting regulations are bad, but maybe they were creating them for the wrong reasons) and their background in eugenics.

it is crazy to think that iron has held a place over 3000 years ago with it still being very prominent today and a total game changer when it was first able to be mass mined and produced.

this is very funny though reminiscent of someone in its ironic but present ego

I actually really like the idea of this, but I would rather have more open communication in the classroom. Instead, could this be used when you are doing more of a game in the classroom? That's how I envision it. You could even split them into small groups and see multiple responses, yet still not have to look at 25 different whiteboards.

seems like a complicated way to say that they are liars. What's the benefit of theory here? Are we also playing an obfuscating game that ensnares academics in little traps?

Classic :)

The boy appears to be an unstoppable force.

When crafting items in Minecraft, the player has to remember many different recipes, often involving multiple steps. If the player is unfamiliar with the recipes, it can create high cognitive load, making the crafting process slow and frustrating. However, by using the crafting book or search bar, the game reduces cognitive load by presenting the recipes and options in an organized, easy-to-access way, allowing the player to focus on gameplay rather than memorizing every recipe.

When setting up a new video game, the graphics menu might have dozens of options like textures, shadows, brightness, and resolution. With so many choices, players often take a long time adjusting everything before they even start playing. But if the game only offers a few simple presets like Low, Medium, and High, players usually make a decision much faster. This shows Hick’s Law the more choices you have, the longer it takes to decide.

I think Progressive Disclosure is powerful because it balances simplicity with depth. New users aren’t overwhelmed right away, but advanced users still discover more value over time. It’s like leveling up in a game features unlock as you get comfortable, which keeps users engaged instead of confused or frustrated.

So the reason why Variable Rewards are powerful in UX design because people are naturally drawn to unexpected outcomes. Instead of getting the same reward every time, users will stay more engaged when the result is unpredictable. This has the same principle that makes slot machines addictive, that uncertainty has people to come back.

One example is that digital products is features like a loot box in a video game where the reward is uncertain but has a possibility very valuable.

I think this is something we all fall victim to from time to time. For example, if I'm playing a game and I keep losing, I may continue to play until I win, even if it's frustrating for me, because I don't want to feel like I've invested my time in nothing. It's also super common in gamblers, it seems.

There is an awareness that is, in my opinion, to be instructed towards implementation of progress-based gamifications, like achievements in a game- or in shadier cases profit bonuses in gambling. It can be manipulative to vulnerable users to implement loss aversion, evident in common scamming tactics as well.

Malcom X is pointing out that race shapes power and inequality in America. This shows the connection between history and present-day racism. I notice how he connects the past with what is still happening.

Page Layout: The overall design layout of the page is well done. The black text with the red hyperlinks highly contrasts against the white background. The font style between the text and the headline is also different, helping one easily differentiate between them.

Navigation Links: Like many media outlets, hyperlinks are standard. This feature is handy when links are directly integrated into the text, as it has been done here, without disrupting the flow of the text.

Direct Links to Article Section: This is a feature I don't recall seeing anywhere before, which has struck me as something beneficial. It offers the ability to directly share the link to the exact part of the article by clicking one button. It is an efficient and helpful feature.

Zeteo makes use of several video elements across the page. While it offers a "Playback speed" option, it fails to present a transcription or a summary of the video, which would be greatly useful to individuals with a hearing impairment.

Image Zoom-in: Zeteo presents an option to zoom in on pictures, a feature I rarely see across different platforms. This feature gives low-vision users the ability to view the image and its accompanying caption properly. Despite this, it lacks alt-text, which is a beneficial feature.

Katherine Hayles considers an electronic literary text as something independent, possessing its own materiality, rather than a new interpretation of a printed book. And this materiality is primarily created by the code that is used to create it. Such literature is a hybrid phenomenon that exists at the intersection of literature, game mechanics, visual art, and programming. And it is precisely this feature that requires the creation of fundamentally new approaches and tools for criticism.

With the rapid spread of technology in our daily lives through various gadgets, literature as a significant source of information has inevitably moved into the digital realm. Katherine Hayles accurately noticed that new forms of "modern culture" necessitated new forms of text, for example, character's lines in a computer game. As stated in the definition, literature has abandoned its printed form in favor of a computer-based code shell. The author also covered the question of progress in genres of electronic literature bounded to the progress in technologies itself. It is illustrated with an expansion of hypertext fiction forms and deeper immersion to interactive fiction. In general, we can conclude that electronic literature is a natural successor of the printed literature.

example

talking about the test and the game

player movements

first recorded game in Europe was played in 13 century Florence

UCLA tested Gareyev and othere for tests - play chess with your eyes closed - runs a memory lab

hell no again That game needs to be replaced by an alternative that renders this obsoloate!

ask questions. KEY- dont be shy, be the one that ask questions because maybe other have the same questions.

When I read any big assignments, I like doing Cornell notes so I can understand what I have read, and I put my questions down right away.

And yet notes that it was TAUGHT to kids in school history lessons -> seems to me to be cherry picking what is and isn't "history" here.

Ah, but likens it to Conservatives' view that if THIS is the history being taught, just shouldn't teach history at all -> calls this "zero-sum game of heroes and villains" instead of exploring nuance, etc.

"It was not an anlysis of people's ideas in their own time, nor a process of change over time." Again -> main issue here is it's link to the present.

Do you want more fun playing Kubb lawn game? See how this simple twist to the rules makes Kubb easier. Casual yet competitive and much more entertaining.

Master this fun Swedish lawn game that combines skill and strategy with our complete guide on how to play Kubb. By learning the simple Kubb rules and clever throwing techniques, you'll be ready to dominate your next outdoor get-together with friends and family. Read the full Kubb game instructions below and start playing this classic game today!

The specific line reminds me of the concept of Journalism. When I was doing previous research for this class, I looked into sources like ScienceDaily, which was referred to as a site for journalism. Journalism is a low-quality form of Journalism in which information is repackaged to create articles to meet the increasing pressure of time and cost without further research or fact-checking. It plays a huge game of telephone between news and research articles that offers, most of the time, nothing new for consumers, which lengthens the time in research. There are many arguments on whether or not certain things are churnalism or articles that are catered to putting information in plain terms or simpler terms for audiences like children and the general public is up to wider debate and Case by case.

https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1nfvrpl/this_typewriter_comes_from_the_game_control_are/

I can actually say that this has happened to me in real life where this anomaly occurred. This video game called "R.U.S.E." was removed from Steam awhile ago and me as well as some of my friends really enjoyed it, so when we got computers we decided to go looking for digital keys for it. When we found them before a few years back they were like $60 and now they are $200 - $250 even though the demand for the game has not grown since it is so old. I just wanted to show that this anomaly is more common than one might think.

Zero mention of the obvious problems with market failure or dysfunction, Zero mention of how markets are greedy (literally) algorithms often misaligned with long-term incentives

The believing game gives nuance to the idea of multiple perspectives during critical conversations. Rather than listening for holes in an argument or idea and biting our tongues to keep from arguing in reply, the believing game asks us to “try to believe things that we don’t believe—especially things we don’t want to believe” (“The Believing Game” 4). Elbow reiterates that the danger that lies in both games is imbalance: vehemently dismissing every idea beyond what we are ideologically attached to (the doubting game) and accepting whatever seems most evident from those we agree with or those with authority in a culture (the believing game). Rather, careful thinking requires both doubting and believing to see an idea from multiple angles or perspectives. One goal of critical listening is to “dwell-in” (“Bringing the Rhetoric” 395) or believe—even if only for a moment—another person’s perspective or experience. Elbow provides three teaching strategies to encourage the believing game when an outnumbered view surfaces in a discussion:

■ The three-minute or five-minute rule can be invoked for any member of the classroom community who feels they are not being listened to; when the rule is invoked, this person may speak for three or five minutes and no one else is allowed to talk or reply. ■ Allies only— no objections is a rule that permits only those who are able to believe the minority-held viewpoint to participate in the discussion, with no objections allowed. ■ Testimony is a practice where speakers are asked to share their stories or life experiences that informed their viewpoint on an issue and to share their experience with what it is like to live with this view. Other participants in the discussion must not respond or disagree, even after the speaker’s story has ended.

Author response:

The following is the authors’ response to the original reviews.

Joint Public Review:

Weaknesses:

The lack of pleiotropy is an unconfirmable assumption of MR, and the addition of those models is therefore quite important, as this is a primary weakness of the MR approach. Given that concern, I read the sensitivity analyses using pleiotropy-robust models as the main result, and in that case, they can't test their hypotheses as these models do not show a BMI instrumental variable association. The other weakness, which might be remedied, is that the power of the tests here is not described. When a hypothesis is tested with an under-powered model, the apparent lack of association could be due to inadequate sample size rather than a true null. Typically, when a statistically significant association is reported, power concerns are discounted as long as the study is not so small as to create spurious findings. That is the case with their primary BMI instrumental variable model - they find an association so we can presume it was adequately powered. But the primary models they share are not the pleiotropy-robust methods MR-Egger, weighted median, and weighted mode. The tests for these models are null, and that could mean a couple of things: (1) the original primary significant association between the BMI genetic instrument was due to pleiotropy, and they therefore don't have a robust model to explore the effects of the tobacco genetic instrument. (2) The power for the sensitivity analysis models (the pleiotropy-robust methods) is inadequate, and the authors share no discussion about the relative power of the different MR approaches. If they do have adequate power, then again, there is no need to explore the tobacco instrument.

Reviewing Editor Comments:

We suggest that the authors add power estimates to assess whether the sample size is sufficient, given the strength and variability of the genetic instruments. It would also be helpful to present effect estimates for the tobacco instruments alone, to clarify their independent contribution and improve the interpretation of the joint models. In addition, the role of pleiotropy should be addressed more clearly, including which model is considered primary. Stratified analyses by smoking status are encouraged, as prior studies indicate that BMI-HNC associations may differ between smokers and non-smokers. Finally, the comparison with previous studies should be revised, as most reported null findings without accounting for tobacco instruments. If this study finds an association, it should not be framed as a replication

We would like to highlight that post-hoc power calculations are often considered redundant since the statistical power estimated for an observed association is directly related to its p-value[1]. In other words, the uncertainty of the association is already reflected in its 95% confidence interval. However, we understand power calculations may still be of interest to the reader, so we have incorporated them in the revised manuscript. We have edited the text as follows (lines 151-155):“Consequently, we used the total R² values to examine the statistical power in our study[42]. However, we acknowledge that the value of post-hoc power calculations is limited, since the statistical power estimated for an observed association is already reflected in the 95% confidence interval presented alongside the point estimate[43].” We have also added supplementary figures 1 and 2.

We can see that when using the latest HEADSpAcE data we were able to detect BMI-HNC ORs as small as 1.16 with 80% power, while the GAME-ON dataset only permitted the detection of ORs as small as 1.26 using the same BMI instruments (Figure B). We have explained these figures in the results section as follows (lines 257-263): “Using the BMI genetic instruments (total R²= 4.8%) and an α of 0.05, we had 80% statistical power to detect an OR as small as 1.16 for HNC risk (Supplementary Figure 1). For WHR (total R²= 3.1%) and WC (total R²= 4.4%), we could detect odds ratios (ORs) as small as 1.20 and 1.17, respectively. This is an improvement in terms of statistical power compared to the GAME-ON analysis published by Gormley et al.[28], for which there was 80% power to detect an OR as small as 1.26 using the same BMI genetic instruments (Supplementary Figure 2).”

The reason we use inverse variance weighted (IVW) Mendelian randomization (MR) to obtain our main results rather than the pleiotropy-robust methods mentioned by the reviewer/editors (i.e., MR-Egger, weighted median and weighted mode) is that the former has greater statistical power than the latter[2]. Hence, instead of focussing on the statistical significance of the pleiotropy-robust analyses, we consider it is of more value to compare the consistency of the effect sizes and direction of the effect estimates across methods. Any evidence of such consistency increases our confidence in our main findings, since each method relies on different assumptions. As we cannot be sure about the presence and nature of horizontal pleiotropy, it is useful to compare results across methods even though they are not equally powered. It is true that our results for the genetically predicted effects of body mass index (BMI) on the risk of head and neck cancer (HNC) differ across methods. This is precisely what led us to question the validity of our main finding (suggesting a positive effect of BMI on HNC risk). We have now clarified this in the methods section of the revised manuscript as advised. Lines 165-171:

“Because the IVW method assumes all genetic variants are valid instruments[44], which is unlikely the case, three pleiotropy-robust two-sample MR methods (i.e., MR-Egger[45], weighted median[46] and weighted mode[47]) were used in sensitivity analyses. When the magnitude and direction of effect estimates are consistent across methods that rely on different assumptions, the main findings are more convincing. As we cannot be sure about the presence and nature of horizontal pleiotropy, it is useful to compare results across methods even if they are not equally powered.”

We understand that the reviewer/editors are concerned that we do not have a robust model to explore the role of tobacco consumption in the link between BMI and HNC. However, we have a different perspective on the matter. If indeed, the main IVW finding for BMI and HNC is due to pleiotropy (since some of the pleiotropy-robust methods suggest conflicting results), then the IVW multivariable MR method is a way to explore the potential source of this bias[3]. We were particularly interested in exploring the role of smoking in the observed association because smoking and adiposity are known to influence each other [4-9] and share a genetic basis[10, 11].

We agree that it would be useful to present the univariable MR effect estimates for smoking behaviour and HNC risk along those obtained using multivariable MR. We have now included the univariable MR estimates for both smoking behaviour variables as a note under Supplementary Table 11 and in the manuscript (lines 316-318): “In univariable IVW MR, both CSI and SI were linked to an increased risk of HNC (CSI OR=4.47 per 1-SD higher CSI, 95%CI 3.31–6.03, p<0.001; SI OR=2.07 per 1-SD higher SI 95%CI 1.60–2.68, p<0.001) (Additional File 2: note in Supplementary Table 11).”

We understand the appeal of conducting stratified MR analyses by smoking status. However, we anticipate such analyses would hinder the interpretation of our findings as they can induce collider bias which could spuriously lead to different effect estimates across strata[12, 13].

We thank the reviewer/editors for their comment regarding the way we frame of our findings. We have now edited the discussion section to highlight our study results are different to those obtained in studies that do not account for smoking behaviour. Lines 398-401: “With a much larger sample (N=31,523, including 12,264 cases), our IVW MR analysis suggested BMI may play a role in HNC risk, in contrast to previous studies. However, our sensitivity analyses implied that causality was uncertain.”

Reviewer #1 (Recommendations for the authors):

The authors do share a table of the percent variance explained of the different genetic instruments, which vary widely, and that table is very welcome because we can get some sense of their utility. The problem is that they don't translate that into a power estimate for the case-control study size that they use. They say that it is the biggest to date, which is good, but without some formal power estimate, it is not particularly reassuring. A framework for MR study power estimates was reported in PMID: 19174578, but that was using very simple MR constructs in use in 2009, and it isn't clear to me if that framework can be used here. That power paper suggests that weak genetic instruments need very large sample sizes, far larger than what is used in the current manuscript. I am unable to estimate the true strength of the instruments used here, and so I am unsure of whether power is an issue or not.

We have now included power calculations in our manuscript to address the reviewer’s concerns. Nevertheless, as mentioned above, post-hoc power calculations are of limited value, as statistical power is already reflected in the uncertainty around the point estimates (the 95% confidence intervals). Hence, it is important to avoid drawing conclusions regarding the likelihood of true effects or false negatives based on these calculations.

Although the hypothesis here is that smoking accounts for the apparent BMI association previously reported for HNC, it would have been preferable to see the estimates for their 2 genetic instruments for tobacco alone. The current results only show the BMI instruments alone and then with the tobacco instruments. I would like to see what the risk estimates are for the tobacco instrument alone, so that I can judge for myself what happens in the joint models. As presented, one can only do that for the BMI instruments.

We thank the reviewer for this comment. The univariable IVW MR estimate of smoking initiation was OR=2.07 (95%CI 1.60 to 2.68, p<0.001), while the one for comprehensive smoking index was OR=4.47 (95%CI 3.31 to 6.03, p<0.001). We have included this information in the manuscript as requested (please see response to reviewing editor above).

On line 319, they write that "We did not find evidence against bias due to correlated pleiotropy..." I find this difficult to parse, but I think it means that they should believe that correlated pleiotropy remains a problem. So again, they seem to see their primary model as compromised, and so do I. This limitation is again stated by the authors on lines 351-352.

We apologise if the wording of the sentence was not easy to understand. When using the CAUSE method, we did not find evidence to reject the null hypothesis that the sharing (correlated pleiotropy) model fits the data at least as well as the causal model. In other words, our CAUSE finding and the inconsistencies observed across our other sensitivity analyses led us to believe that our main IVW MR estimate for BMI-HNC was likely biased by correlated pleiotropy. We believe it is important to explore the source of this bias, which is why we used multivariable MR to investigate the direct effect of BMI on HNC risk while accounting for smoking behaviour.

In the following paragraphs (lines 358-369), the authors state that their findings are consistent with prior reports, but that doesn't seem to be the case if we take their primary BMI instrument as representing the outcome of this manuscript. Here, they find an association between the BMI instrument and HNC risk, but in each of the other papers they present the primary finding was null without the extensive model changes or the aim of accounting for tobacco with another instrument. I don't see that as replication.

This is a good point. We have now edited the discussion of our manuscript to avoid giving the impression that our findings replicate those from studies that do not account for smoking behaviour in their analyses. We have edited lines 384-401 as follows:

“Previous MR studies suggest adiposity does not influence HNC risk[27-29]. Gormley et al.[28] did not find a genetically predicted effect of adiposity on combined oral and oropharyngeal cancer when investigating either BMI (OR=0.89 per 1-SD, 95% CI 0.72–1.09, p=0.26), WHR (OR=0.98 per 1-SD, 95% CI 0.74–1.29, p=0.88) or waist circumference (OR=0.73 per 1-SD, 95% CI 0.52–1.02, p=0.07) as risk factors. Similarly, a large two-sample MR study by Vithayathil et al.[29] including 367,561 UK Biobank participants (of which 1,983 were HNC cases) found no link between BMI and HNC risk (OR=0.98 per 1-SD higher BMI, 95% CI 0.93–1.02, p=0.35). Larsson et al.[27] meta-analysed Vithayathil et al.’s[29] findings with results obtained using FinnGen data to increase the sample size even further (N=586,353, including 2,109 cases), but still did not find a genetically predicted effect of BMI on HNC risk (OR=0.96 per 1-SD higher BMI, 95% CI 0.77–1.19, p=0.69). With a much larger sample (N=31,523, including 12,264 cases), our IVW MR analysis suggested BMI may play a role in HNC risk, in contrast to previous studies. However, our sensitivity analyses implied that causality was uncertain.”

We also deleted part of a sentence in the discussion section, so lines 416-418 now look as follows: “An important strength of our study was that the HEADSpAcE consortium GWAS used had a large sample size which conferred more statistical power to detect effects of adiposity on HNC risk compared to previous MR analyses[27-29].”

On lines 384-386 they note a strength is that this is the largest study to date, but I would reiterate that larger and more powerful does not equate to adequately powered.

This is true. We have included power calculations in the manuscript as requested.

It's well known that different HNC subsites have different etiologies, as they mention on lines 391-392, and it is implicit in their use of data on HPV positive and negative oropharyngeal cancer. They say that they did not find evidence for heterogeneity in this study, but that would only be true for the null BMI instrument. The effect sizes for their smoking instruments are strikingly different between the subsites.

We agree and are sorry for the confusion we may have caused by the way we worded our findings. We have edited the text to clarify that the lack of subsite heterogeneity only applied to our results for BMI/WHC/WC-HNC risk. Lines 418-424 now read as follows:

“Furthermore, the availability of data on more HNC subsites, including oropharyngeal cancers by HPV status, allowed us to investigate the relationship between adiposity and HNC risk in more detail than previous MR studies which limited their subsite analyses to oral cavity and overall oropharyngeal cancers[28, 68]. This is relevant because distinct HNC subsites are known to have different aetiologies[69], although we did not find evidence of heterogeneity across subsites in our analyses investigating the genetically predicted effects of BMI, WHR and WC on HNC risk.”

Finally, the literature on mutational patterns gives us strong reason to believe that HNC caused by tobacco are biologically distinct from tumors not caused by tobacco. The authors report in the introduction that traditional observational studies of BMI and HNC have reported different findings in smokers versus never smokers, so I would assume there is a possibility that the BMI instrument could have different associations with tumors of the tobacco-induced phenotype and tumors with a non-tobacco induced phenotype. I would assume that authors have access to the data on self-reported tobacco use behavior, even if they can't separate these tumors by molecular types. Stratifying their analysis by tobacco users or not might reveal different results with the BMI instrument.

We appreciate the reviewer’s comment. We agree that it would have been interesting to present stratified analyses by smoking status along our main findings. However, we decided against this because of the risk of inducing collider bias in our MR analyses i.e., where stratifying on smoking status may induce spurious associations between the adiposity instruments and confounding factors. Multivariable MR is considered a better way of investigating the direct effects of an exposure (adiposity) on an outcome (HNC) accounting for a third variable (smoking)[14], which is why we opted for this method instead.

References:

(1) Heinsberg LW, Weeks DE: Post hoc power is not informative. Genet Epidemiol 2022, 46(7):390-394.

(2) Burgess S, Butterworth A, Thompson SG: Mendelian randomization analysis with multiple genetic variants using summarized data. Genet Epidemiol 2013, 37(7):658-665.

(3) Burgess S, Davey Smith G, Davies NM, Dudbridge F, Gill D, Glymour MM, Hartwig FP, Kutalik Z, Holmes MV, Minelli C et al: Guidelines for performing Mendelian randomization investigations: update for summer 2023. Wellcome Open Res 2019, 4:186.

(4) Morris RW, Taylor AE, Fluharty ME, Bjorngaard JH, Asvold BO, Elvestad Gabrielsen M, Campbell A, Marioni R, Kumari M, Korhonen T et al: Heavier smoking may lead to a relative increase in waist circumference: evidence for a causal relationship from a Mendelian randomisation meta-analysis. The CARTA consortium. BMJ Open 2015, 5(8):e008808.

(5) Taylor AE, Morris RW, Fluharty ME, Bjorngaard JH, Asvold BO, Gabrielsen ME, Campbell A, Marioni R, Kumari M, Hallfors J et al: Stratification by smoking status reveals an association of CHRNA5-A3-B4 genotype with body mass index in never smokers. PLoS Genet 2014, 10(12):e1004799.

(6) Taylor AE, Richmond RC, Palviainen T, Loukola A, Wootton RE, Kaprio J, Relton CL, Davey Smith G, Munafo MR: The effect of body mass index on smoking behaviour and nicotine metabolism: a Mendelian randomization study. Hum Mol Genet 2019, 28(8):1322-1330.

(7) Asvold BO, Bjorngaard JH, Carslake D, Gabrielsen ME, Skorpen F, Smith GD, Romundstad PR: Causal associations of tobacco smoking with cardiovascular risk factors: a Mendelian randomization analysis of the HUNT Study in Norway. Int J Epidemiol 2014, 43(5):1458-1470.

(8) Carreras-Torres R, Johansson M, Haycock PC, Relton CL, Davey Smith G, Brennan P, Martin RM: Role of obesity in smoking behaviour: Mendelian randomisation study in UK Biobank. BMJ 2018, 361:k1767.

(9) Freathy RM, Kazeem GR, Morris RW, Johnson PC, Paternoster L, Ebrahim S, Hattersley AT, Hill A, Hingorani AD, Holst C et al: Genetic variation at CHRNA5-CHRNA3-CHRNB4 interacts with smoking status to influence body mass index. Int J Epidemiol 2011, 40(6):1617-1628.

(10) Thorgeirsson TE, Gudbjartsson DF, Sulem P, Besenbacher S, Styrkarsdottir U, Thorleifsson G, Walters GB, Consortium TAG, Oxford GSKC, consortium E et al: A common biological basis of obesity and nicotine addiction. Transl Psychiatry 2013, 3(10):e308.

(11) Wills AG, Hopfer C: Phenotypic and genetic relationship between BMI and cigarette smoking in a sample of UK adults. Addict Behav 2019, 89:98-103.

(12) Coscia C, Gill D, Benitez R, Perez T, Malats N, Burgess S: Avoiding collider bias in Mendelian randomization when performing stratified analyses. Eur J Epidemiol 2022, 37(7):671-682.

(13) Hamilton FW, Hughes DA, Lu T, Kutalik Z, Gkatzionis A, Tilling K, Hartwig FP, Davey Smith G: Non-linear Mendelian randomization: evaluation of effect modification in the residual and doubly-ranked methods with simulated and empirical examples. Eur J Epidemiol 2025.

(14) Sanderson E, Davey Smith G, Windmeijer F, Bowden J: An examination of multivariable Mendelian randomization in the single-sample and two-sample summary data settings. Int J Epidemiol 2019, 48(3):713-727.

I did not know this was an opinion people had on archeology. All the people I know who learns of my interest in archeology often mentions the game Temple Run or Indiana Jones. Archeology as the catalyst to an adventure

Linking compensation to Balanced Scorecard measures makes sense because it creates alignment—people are rewarded for achieving the same goals the organization cares about. I like that Pioneer Petroleum went beyond just financial outcomes to include customer, employee, and environmental indicators, since this encourages a more balanced focus. At the same time, I think the risks are very real. If the wrong measures are chosen, or if the data isn’t reliable, people could “game the system” or prioritize numbers over quality. To me, this shows that while tying rewards to strategy can be powerful, it requires careful design and ongoing review to make sure the incentives actually drive the right behaviors.

Yes! I do not want my children on social media for as long as I possibly can. However, many coaches and extra curriculars use apps and social media to communicate. There is then minimal choices in keeping them away from it.

I think that use of VR in this way would be very interesting in a game format but I think that bringing things like VR into such serious topics as politics could get messy. Politics are already such a controversial topic that adding a "what could've been" scenario could be harmful.

Its so crazy to me how much VR can and will change the world. I think that its really cool to use as a fun game or activity but I do not think that it should be incorporated into everyday life. I feel as though its going to make the world into such a fake environment and ruin true socialness and connection.

I remember when Pokemon Go first came out, it became a part of everyone's routine to find them and they became sort of to immersid in the game because it had a tie in through the real world and through a simulation. It had some backlash because players were to focused on their when walking to find these pokemon, they would be lured into dangerous areas, be injured from vehicles, falling, etc. Much like VR, it was fun because our in your own reality while playing because it feels real to the players.

Chalmers' main claim in this book is that virtual realities are real, and that they are just as real as life right now, and there is no way of knowing that the life we are living right now is not a simulation. When I ask myself “Can you lead a good life in a virtual world?” I automatically think no. To me, in a virtual world, there is no real good you can do. If you help other people in the virtual world, you are only helping what I would think to be pixels. Anything you do in the virtual reality exists only in the simulation, but if you were to step out of it, anything you did is lost. It reminds me of having a high score in a game, but if you deleted the game, the high score goes away and it's like you never achieved the high score.

I think this connects to what we were talking about in class about gamification. Gamification is a concept that intersects with philosophy. Is it ethical to make certain concepts into a game? This text is trying to do the same thing, and interconnect philosophy and technology, by asking questions about emerging technology (ethics, privacy concerns etc), through a philosophical lens.

Haraway begins with a strong compelling opening that frames the argument she is trying to make. She proposes the question of the "inflection point” that changes the “game of life on earth”; she immediately emphasizes the gravity of the ecological and systemic crisis. She expands beyond the understanding of climate change to include toxic chemistry, mining, water depletion, ecosystem simplification, and mass extinctions to establish the interconnect and recursive nature of the collapse of our planet.

People are just expected to allow A.I. to take over without a say in the game.

This is by far the clearest way to illustrate the idea of the rhizome story. It is a rather complex idea to comprehend and this makes it much easier to wrap your head around.

I feel like this applies to "The boy in the book", in which we are also given multiple choices throughout the course of the story, but the effects of those choices are very limited. We get to choose where Nathan go and who he meets, but we do not get to decide what he ask or what he looks for when he gets to the places where we wants him to be (the Internet search is a major example of this.) The question then, should be to what degree should we get to make choices and should our choices affect the narrative for it to be considered true agency?

When I read this sentence, it reminded me of human's desire for accomplishment. I think thats why adventure maze works well. Just like when you are playing a game of Escape room, you are actively trying to find a way out and each step and subtle clue you find makes you feel closer to the goal. Adventure maze uses this sense of accomplishment to bring powerfulness to the player.

This speaks to how, in Hana Feels, her own feelings about cutting herself feel like they're being treated as a real-life scenario rather than a story when playing the game and making decisions, since you are making choices that will impact her mental health and her possibly continuing self-harm.

Nigh all computations are based on an equal sign, and so all forms of interaction within games are forced to accept the logic of exchange in a sense of transaction rather than potlatch.These transactional actions allow the player to advance and so lead you to the ultimate transaction between the author where you broker your actions throughout the game for an ending you hope for.

Please do check out The Natural Number Game at

https://www.ma.imperial.ac.uk/~buzzard/xena/natural_number_game/index2.html

Here you can see LEAN in action with every step of a proof spelled out!

This book was initially published in 1982. Back then, perhaps non-fiction programs were exclusively news programs and TV live game shows; this is no longer true today. In recent times, reality TV shows have become extremely popular. In my opinion, now more than ever, the narration of TV needs to be divided.

IT playing single player games with puzzels and problem solving, while managers played more competitive action roleplay games enhancing problem solving and managerial skills. Engineers played a game where you would build civilizations from scratch. A lot of the games played ties into each profession

Women stayed away from multiplayer confrontations games that is a representation of structural issues with sexual harassment or masked their gender to stay away from scrutiny

Grades have always been something students have tried to "game," and when you can have A.I. help you get good grades with less effort, of course people gravitate towards it. Perhaps this is an argument for "ungrading"

I wonder if turning it into a game would be helpful. I feel like it would work better for me that way.

Do to the age we live in, is there really any sort of job security for something like this? I mean, even AI in a video game can do the exact same thing, and those AI don't have so much time and money pored into them.

for - quote - scientific publishing is misdirection and huge business for publishing companies - quote - Alex Gomez-Marin - alignment - Alex Gomez-Marin - Indyweb - networked self-publishing

Utilizing "widgets" on an iPhone is also very helpful. I have a calendar widget on my home screen & it has been a game changer.

cute little idle game, "night" mechanic where automations turn off

I have personally used both chatgpt and game based learning in my classroom. I don't use chatgpt to provide feedback or assess. I do believe that those aspects are primarily the educators responsibility. However, I have used chatgpt to create collaborative groups, design seating charts, create short stories using specific information and more! I have found It to be quite useful when feeling overwhelmed with the amount of tasks we face daily. As for game based learning, my students love playing blooket and gimkit. I use this as an opportunity to connect vocabulary to images for better memory and to do drill practice with topics like verb conjugations. This past school year, I had students create a trivia game by creating questions about the country of their year long portfolio.

We should have Skoove expert, especially in Germany, being quoted here. Florian or Dominik, instead of a musician.

In order to benefit from brand awareness, it would be really nice having Skoove expert being quoted, insteas of a musician. In general, mentioning Skoove in a way that we really participated in this campaign would be really important for us.

Concerning! He's bought the brand washing attempts of big corps... am I being, rash? Is there no way out for Microsoft? Yes there is: One that doesn't include buying Activision despite being rotten? Profiting from endless games like CoD and Candy Crush? One that doesn't invest in data centers for AI that crush the global South? One that doesn't invest heavily in AAA titles like Halo, including its marketing, only to make a fraction of the investment sponsoring indies (and then laying them off)?

Then, no. I am not being rash. Microsoft owns a greedy ecosystem that includes Word and Excel. It asks people to pay for Windows licenses at 200€. Tried to do a Netflix with Xbox Game Pass. A big problem is that almost everyone knows Microsoft. Who knows Annapurna?

I think AI in sports will have a negative impact because it takes away the human side of the game that makes it exciting. The Washington Post said that MLB’s new ball-strike challenge system takes about “17 seconds,” and even though that’s quick, it still slows things down and changes the flow. I believe that rational decisions are a part of the game. I also don’t think other sports, like the NFL, should bring in AI to fix human errors, because the mistakes and arguments are part of what makes sports fun to watch. If AI gets too involved, games could start to feel robotic and less real. When it comes to jobs, I believe AI will start making a big impact before 2030. I also think people underestimate how many jobs AI can do, because it’s not just in tech, it could take over customer service, driving, and even some parts of healthcare.

important and impressive advice

One of my favorite factors about game.

I believe this fairness makes game intriguing for everyone regardless of social status.

Like the connection here. As an example, football field sometimes seems like huge ritual place, considering how people are hyped up for the game.

Which I believe makes game special and intriguing.

I think the author pointed out the essential element of the game. There are rules set within the game and players voluntarily follow it, no matter who the players are.

Cannot deny that play is made for entertainment. Even though there are serious side of the game, it also gives entertainment to people who feels it from doing serious games.

My favorite part about the concept of game, which, I believe, is maximized through modern form of "play," video games.

I always liked this question: why does people never question the rule of the game itself? In chess, such thoughts created rules like en passant and castling.

The spoil sport rejects the rules and thus rejects the game itself. The cheater rejects the rules but still continues to take part in the game-world.

The idea that the tension element confers a kind of ethical aspect to play is one that I agree with; as the author says, when a game is full of tension, the players character is revealed

This makes me think about our discussion in our first class; when considering what my favorite game is, I thought about the fact that I play a sport (basketball) but then hesitated to name that as a game. It is a game, of course, but after the years long experience I've had in training for the sport and competing very seriously, calling it a "game" feels in some ways very wrong. To me, it is more than a game; there are instances where some days it feels like work! With this in mind, can it still be considered a form of play?

This is kind of like false hope. We have agency in the game where we can make decisions that have impacts, but if these results lead to no end, no matter how immersive or engaging the environment is, the feeling of agency is bound to disappear.

This could be seen as a more figurative sense as well, by how the frightening place with all the dangers is the internal conflicts that people have to deal with. Adventures with Anxiety is a great example for that, with how the objective of the game is to struggle with the human's internal anxiety as the wolf and make sure that the human doesn't do anything bad. Dealing with those internal conflicts could lead to that mental freedom, which is the great reward that is mentioned.

I think that this is not similar to either of the games we have played because this is more describing a "sandbox" style game, but there are endings in Quing's Quest and Adventures with Anxiety.

This sentence ties to the big idea that when on a story journey, you should be questioning why everything is happening, even if we don't get all the answers we are looking for. This is similarly seen in Adventures With Anxiety, with how each of the choices makes you think about how it would have been different with another choice and what caused the specific reaction. Overall, it ends with you wondering whether or not you made all the right choices still and you won't truly know unless you play the game again.

Puzzles can be satisfying, but for them to be effective in enhancing the feeling of agency, they should not require a further suspension of disbelief. A game should work within the logic and rules that it's already established - such as Myst's elevator puzzle, in which it would be somewhat reasonable to have a hidden entrance; conversely, The Seventh Guest's cake puzzle is unrealistic as there is no reason to cut a cake past the game instructing the player to do so. Thus, the player feels as if they have effectively more agency in Myst than The Seventh Guest.

A puzzle/adventure game could be physically very open yet have many moral paths/choices

These sentences add to the author's definition of agency as a feeling of determination to solve a mystery or face the truth, is satisfactory. This is similar to finding the ending of the Adventures with Anxiety game, as we were "staring at the threatening beast" while still trying finish the game.

New way of agency, now you are not just navigating a game space, but you must solve a problem like a puzzle(direct user input that decides whether you win or not) in order to advance and navigate

Calm Things To Take Your Mind Off Noisy Sports Games

What were the results of this testing? Did it lead to fewer bugs or higher user satisfaction?

Mention any player metrics or feedback received post-launch to demonstrate success.

What was the user impact of these features? Include user growth or engagement metrics.

Imru-Ul-Quais' poem centers on themes of loss, longing, and memory, as he recalls past loves and mourns the traces of abandoned camps while weaving his grief into vivid depictions of nature, desire, and the desolate world around him. I paused at the line, “Nay, the cure of my sorrow must come from gushing tears. Yet, is there any hope that this desolation can bring me solace?” because it complicates the usual idea of mourning as a release, suggesting instead that memory may intensify pain rather than ease it. What especially captured my imagination, however, was the elaborate description of his horse, whose speed, strength, and other features seem to embody both the poet’s vitality and the severe beauty of the desert. The horse appears tireless (“he did not even sweat so as to need washing” after outrunning wild game") and is compared to natural forces like torrents and fire, suggesting a kind of resistance to human limits that contrasts sharply with the poem’s opening images of loss and desolation. This blending of personal sorrow with natural and animal imagery makes me think about how pre-Islamic poetry connects human emotion to the environment/nature, which could be an area to explore further.

Today: I want to get this half of the discussion done and take some time to myself to watch my show. This week: I want to get all my school work done and go out to the football game. This month: I want to focus on my school work while also focusing on balancing my social life.

Would you then say that play can make play in some way? Like in the game uno, your own unique rules can create a new form of play, or is it still the same?

Could there be limits to their interpretation, like when some days don’t play around, does our mind shift to not seeing the moment as a game

Very interesting tool, but bringing my A game will be scary

for - comparison - spiritual vs material technologies - Donald Hoffman

• Q❓- What about love? As per earlier discussion, love it's the most quintessential spiritual quality
• if we don't have live in life, any technology would not matter

for - future project - building a model to explain spacetime using Active Inference - Donald Hoffman - use Active Inference to minimise surprise using Markov chains - this model assumes consciousness is fundamental - this is going to be a model of intelligence based entirely from a model which takes consciousness as fundamental. - it goes back to game theory again. - back to the idea of a simulation - If you're able to create a piece of software that - is able to replicate and - is built on the fundamentals of consciousness. - Then it's potentially, it's going to think it's conscious

A game of baseball

This is very true nowadays, as you go to a basketball game and it's a blowout, but the next time you attend a game, it could end with a buzzer beater. You don't know what could happen.

This passage emphasizes the versatility of operating systems, which perform many roles depending on the type of computer and its purpose. Because computers are embedded in a wide range of devices—from household appliances to spacecraft—the OS must be designed to meet diverse needs and environments.

Explanation in English:

The word "commiserations" expresses sympathy or sorrow, often used to convey condolences or a shared sense of loss. In the provided context, it seems Adam is acknowledging a difficult situation, possibly related to a sports team facing relegation, where the speaker, likely Lawrence, is offering commiserations. The conversation reflects a blend of sadness over a loss and pride in the team’s sportsmanship, emphasizing the importance of the love of the game over financial rewards.

中文解释：

“致以哀悼”这个词表达了同情或悲伤，通常用于表示慰问或共享某种损失。在提供的上下文中，亚当似乎在承认一个困难的局面，可能与一支正面临降级的运动队有关，发言者，可能是劳伦斯，正在表示哀悼。这段对话反映了对失利的悲伤与对团队运动精神的自豪感，强调了对游戏的热爱比金钱奖励更重要。

In the excerpt "relish our defeat," the speaker is expressing a sense of enjoyment or satisfaction derived from experiencing a loss. This phrase suggests an ironic or good-natured acceptance of failure, possibly indicating a camaraderie or shared perspective among team members or friends. It reflects a mindset that values the experience of defeat as part of the game, rather than merely focusing on winning.

在“relish our defeat”这个短语中，讲话者表达了一种从失败中获得的享受或满足感。这句话传达了一种讽刺或善意接受失败的情感，可能表明团队成员或朋友之间的相互理解与亲密。这反映了一种心态，即将失利的经历视为比赛的一部分，而不仅仅关注胜利。

What is Zoonie's favourite game?

Foreshadowing

These three questions happen to contain three very different examples of play that show us a wide range from harmless and innocent to extremely harmful and maladaptive. A baby enjoying a game is both normal and great for her positive development, but the gambler who is "losing himself" in his passion is quite literally ruining his life. It's interesting how different forms of play can have very different effects on the player's life

I enjoy that the book mentioned both the internal and external Demographic influences. Corporations must make discussions based both their own employee demographics and the pressure of consumers. An example of changes for consumers from my personal interests is the fact that in the video game series Kirby, the box art for the american releases of the games has kirby with his brows furrowed. This was to appeal to the interests of teenage boys, who were the primary demographic of american nintendo consoles, while in japan they were marketed towards families.

Not just cleaning or spending time with a significant other, but also important deadlines and homework assignments

This moment really changes the game in the Amistad story when the U.S. Navy finally catches up with the ship. The navigator tricked everyone by sailing west and north at night, which kept the Africans stuck at sea longer than they thought they would be, showing how both vulnerable and strong they were. Once they were captured near Long Island, the whole situation shifted from the ocean to American courts, meaning the Africans' future would depend not on navigation anymore, but on legal battles, politics, and the larger fight over slavery and freedom.

State how the UI/UX design improved user interaction or satisfaction rates.

Include specific metrics on user engagement or feedback received post-launch.

The “riding a bike” metaphor for reading theory reminded me of improvisation in sports: if you play too slowly, you risk losing the moment which could cost the game, but you also want to avoid playing too fast, so it seems improvising and being in the moment is the only play. Learning to play a sport is about process and sometimes is about finding the right way to play is about balance.

The social media metrics can be very unfair especially when people are putting their opinion out there and it's not necessarily ignored but put aside and hidden. At this point it can almost seem useless to even say anything when clearly the feeds are controlled by someone.

Although the internet feeds us with unlimited information, they don't always show us the entirety of what's going on in the world.

Tee & Mo's Grabs-A-Daisy game

Shows how technology was changing everyday life and family routines.

The question from Better Homes and Gardens, "Where does the receiver go"? Seems irrelevant to many people today. The answer to that question today could be that the receiver can be anywhere, even on the go outside of the home.

Back then many families had only one tv, while nowadays families tend to have multiple tv’s throughout the house.

The food at Casa Bonita

Rex, Hamm, Buzz, Slinky and Mr Potato Head waiting outside a warmly lit garage near a Dinoco petrol station

I find this very intriguing that a 3 sylable word can have so much meaning.

English Explanation:

In the excerpt, "feisty" describes an energetic and spirited attitude, particularly regarding a female professional golfer who makes the sport seem enjoyable and engaging. The conversation highlights how her feistiness brings excitement to golf, indicating that her lively nature enhances the experience. The context also includes humorous banter about golf, suggesting that the enjoyment of the game can depend on the people you are playing with.

Chinese Explanation:

在这个摘录中，“feisty”形容一种充满活力和精神的态度，特别是指一位女性职业高尔夫球手，她让这项运动看起来既有趣又吸引人。对话强调她的活泼使高尔夫变得更加刺激，表明她的生动个性提升了这项运动的体验。上下文还包含了关于高尔夫的幽默对话，暗示打球的乐趣可能取决于与你一起打球的人。

whacking

English Explanation: In this excerpt, the term "whacking" refers to the act of hitting a golf ball with force, often used informally to describe swinging a golf club. The conversation involves two individuals discussing golf, and one mentions following a female professional golfer online who is skilled and energetic. This suggests that "whacking" can also imply enjoying the game and making it look exciting. The mention of playing with a partner, Martin Gibson, indicates that one's experience can vary based on the playing companion.

Chinese Explanation: 在这段摘录中，“whacking”一词指的是用力击打高尔夫球，通常以非正式的方式形容挥动高尔夫球杆。对话中，两个人在讨论高尔夫，其中一人提到在线关注一位女性职业高尔夫球手，她技艺高超且充满活力。这表明“whacking”也意味着享受这项运动并使其看起来充满乐趣。提到与合作伙伴马丁·吉布森一起打球，说明与打球伙伴的配合会影响个人的游戏体验。

ignorant /ɪɡˈnɔːrənt/ tidak tahu\ Dalam konteks ini, 'tidak tahu' menunjukkan bahwa Tie Zhu tidak memiliki pengetahuan atau pemahaman tentang para immortal, meskipun ia menyadari pentingnya situasi tersebut berdasarkan ekspresi orang tuanya.

1. Adjektiva: Tidak memiliki pengetahuan atau informasi tentang sesuatu
2. He was ignorant of the rules of the game.
3. Ia tidak tahu aturan permainan.

別姓問題のネックは、選択性というところである。

This seems out of place based on the 'Rules of the Game' - we're supposed to be Python devs who don't know Ruby. The Phoenix vs Rails comparison doesn't align with the established context, and it doesn't connect to the previous conversation either.

This sounds like children not wanting another kid to have access to a new toy or game because they can't have it first or as much. This kind of business behavior is detrimental to country wide progress.

We can see these being true on this day of day but with kids and iPads, iPhones, and game devices.

Missing from the analysis, however, are all the pieces of the system that you benefit from, but that you weren't originally paying for. If you don't fund those solutions too, then it does become a zero sum game with the actors who are already receiving the money, with no way in for those that have been doing things for the common good from the beginning

• Storytelling With Charlotte
• Never Know Day
• Slomo Spot A Kiss Game
• Indoor Camp

Playing a game of pouring Coke into the gas pipe in your car

• Aimed for kids
• Educational
• Perfect for family game night
• 30 cards

Asher Watkins must have been shocked that the animal he was trying to murder was scary and mad

hmmm

that sound provocative to me

predator

What does it mean though for a "stock market" to go up?

If this was zero sum though, can the value be accumulating at the loss of some other entity that's not in the stock market, possibly customers of the actual product etc.?

But one could argue that customers paid for whatever value they got from the product. So that is a positive sum transaction too.

• ClojureScript has excelled in standard UI patterns but now aims to harness modern browser APIs for high-performance use cases.

"The majority of Clojurescript application development and community discussions seems to be focused on improving standard UI implementation patterns and the general workflow of how we can build web applications better, easier and faster." (Medium)

• The workshop’s goal was to probe ClojureScript’s internals, identify bottlenecks, and introduce technologies like WebGL, WebRTC, WebWorkers, and Emscripten.

"So for this workshop I chose to look more below the surface of Clojurescript, analyze problem areas, examine possible optimization strategies and above all introduce people to a number of modern web technologies (WebGL, WebRTC, WebWorkers, Emscripten), techniques & tools offering possible routes to use the language in a sound and elegant way to work with these features." (Medium)

• A six-step implementation of Conway’s Game of Life, from naive to optimized, achieved a speedup from 10,840 ms to 16.5 ms per frame (\~650× faster) on a 1024×1024 grid.

"Six implementations of Conway’s Game of Life — from naive (but idiomatic & slow) to optimized Clojurescript using typed arrays and direct pixel manipulations (10,840 ms / frame vs 16.5 ms / frame = \~650× faster for a 1024×1024 grid)." (Medium)

• A compile-time macro version of get-in eliminated temporary vector allocations and reduce calls, boosting lookup speed from 205.18 ns to 43.61 ns (\~5× faster).

"Benchmarking this example with criterium under Clojure (which has somewhat different/faster protocol dispatch than in Clojurescript), the macro version results in 43.61ns vs 205.18ns for the default get-in (\~5× faster)." (Medium)

• Switching from nested vectors to a flat 1D vector enabled nth-based indexing (\~6× speed-up), before Typed Arrays and loop-based pixel updates removed millions of function calls for the full \~650× gain.

"The more obvious improvement to speed up the simulation was using a flat 1D vector to encode the grid and calculate cell indices for the 2D coordinates ... gain a \~6× speed up ... Since all our data ... are stored in typed arrays ... and altogether gained a \~650× speedup compared to the original." (Medium)

• Adopting transduce for neighbor counting proved \~15–20% slower than map & reduce, highlighting that idiomatic functions can sometimes underperform.

"One of the intermediate steps ... was using transduce instead of map & reduce to compute the number of alive neighbor cells, however this ended up actually being \~15–20% slower in this case." (Medium)

• Effective WebGL programming demands deep knowledge of geometry, linear algebra, the OpenGL state machine, GPU pipelines, and GLSL, making it daunting for newcomers.

"To anyone interested in directly utilizing the GPU in the browser, WebGL is a huge & fascinating topic, but it can also be very daunting for newcomers to graphics programming, since efficient use of it requires a multitude of prerequisite knowledge and terminology about 2D/3D geometry, linear algebra, spatial thinking in multiple spaces (coordinate systems), low-level data organization, the OpenGL state machine ... GPU processing pipelines, knowledge of the GLSL shading language, color theory etc." (Medium)

• The thi.ng/geom library employs Clojure maps for semi-declarative OpenGL/WebGL buffer and shader specifications, while preserving explicit control over the GL state machine.

"The thi.ng/geom library takes a semi-declarative approach to working with OpenGL/WebGL in that it’s extensively using Clojure maps to define various geometry and shader specifications, which are then compiled into the required data buffers & GLSL programs ... but at no point is it hiding the underlying layer, giving advanced users full control over the GL state machine." (Medium)

• Shadergraph addresses GLSL code reuse by offering transitive dependency resolution, a library of common functions, compile-time minification, and metadata extraction for tooling.

"To address this in Clojurescript from early on, we can use the thi.ng/shadergraph library, which provides us with: a transitive dependency resolution mechanism for GLSL code ... a growing library of pure, commonly used GLSL functions (lighting, color conversion, matrix math, rotations, effects etc.) ... and a basic compile-time shader minifier ... Clojure meta data extraction of the defined GLSL functions ..." (Medium)

• A hands-on WebRTC demo showed how to stream a camera feed into Shadertoy-style WebGL shaders for real-time video FX processing.

"I prepared a small example combining a WebRTC camera stream with Shadertoy-like WebGL image processing using a bunch of effect options." (Medium)

• True parallelism in the browser comes from WebWorkers—unlike core.async’s simulated concurrency—and relies on isolated modules, message passing, and transferable ArrayBuffers for efficient data sharing.

"However, the currently only way to obtain real extra compute resources of a multi-core CPU in JavaScript is to use WebWorkers ... WebWorker code needs to be loaded from a separate source file and can only communicate with the main process via message passing. By default, the data passed ... is copied, but some types (e.g. ArrayBuffers) can also be transferred ..." (Medium)

• Emscripten’s LLVM-based compiler targets asm.js (and soon WebAssembly), enabling C/C++ modules to outperform idiomatic ClojureScript for math-heavy and mutable-data tasks.

"Emscripten ... a LLVM-based transpiler for C and C++ to asm.js ... the resulting asm.js code almost always performs noticeably faster than the Clojurescript version ... With WebAssembly on the horizon, it’s maybe a good time to invest some time into some “upskilling” ..." (Medium)

• The workshop’s capstone was a C-based 3D particle system demo, using Emscripten’s JavaScript ArrayBuffer heap and typed arrays to pack 36-byte particle structs tightly and avoid copying overhead.

"For the final exercise ... we implemented a simple 3D particle system in C, compiled it with Emscripten and learned how to integrate it into a Clojurescript WebGL demo ... The Emscripten runtime emulates the C heap as a single, large JS ArrayBuffer ... Each particle only takes up 36 bytes ... all particles in this array are tightly packed ..." (Medium)

Reminds me of the school of moral ambition - https://www.moralambition.org/