The Blog is Serving Its Purpose: Self‐Presentation Strategies on 38pitches.com.

This research explored Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling’s self‐presentation strategies that he displayed on his blog ‐ 38pitches.com , in response to sports broadcasters’ and journalists’ portrayal of him during 2 events that made national sports headlines. A thematic analysis was conducted using constant comparative methodology of Schilling’s blog entries that he authored in response to these events. Three self‐presentation strategies emerged from data analysis: (a) critic, (b) committed individual, and (c) accountable person. Using Hermans, Kempen, and Van Loon’s (1992) dialogical self theory, the study revealed that Schilling fluidly moved between multiple positions when self‐presenting to combat media framing. Additionally, the findings suggests that blogs and other information and communication technologies (ICT) are valuable tools that professional athletes and other celebrities can employ to counter perceived negative media framing of their personae.     

FARMTASIA: an online game-based learning environment based on the VISOLE pedagogy

Virtual interactive student-oriented learning environment (VISOLE) is a game-based constructivist pedagogical approach that encompasses the creation of an online interactive world modeled upon a set of interdisciplinary domains, in which students participate as “citizens” to take part cooperatively and competitively in shaping the development of the virtual world as a means to construct their knowledge and skills. FARMTASIA is the first online game designed using the VISOLE philosophy, encompassing the subject areas of biology, government, economics, technology, production system and natural environment. The “virtual world” deployed is a farming system covering the domains of cultivation, horticulture and pasturage, situated in a competitive economy governed by good public policies. The design and implementation of FARMTASIA pursue three vital principles. The first one is to make the game as realistic as possible so that students can learn in a near-real life environment; the second one is to inject motivational elements so that students can sustain to learn and acquire various knowledge and skills with the game; and the third one is to make easy for teachers to conduct various VISOLE facilitation tasks. According to our exploratory educational study, we show evidentially that positive perceptions and an advancement of subject-specific and interdisciplinary knowledge appeared among the students who participated in VISOLE learning with FARMTASIA.     

Accelerating earthquake simulations on general‐purpose graphics processors

Parallelization strategies are presented for Virtual Quake, a numerical simulation code for earthquakes based on topologically realistic systems of interacting earthquake faults. One of the demands placed upon the simulation is the accurate reproduction of the observed earthquake statistics over three to four decades. This requires the use of a high‐resolution fault model in computations, which demands computational power that is well beyond the scope of off‐the‐shelf multi‐core CPU computers. However, the recent advances in general‐purpose graphic processing units have the potential to address this problem at moderate cost increments. A functional decomposition of Virtual Quake is performed, and opportunities for parallelization are discussed in this work. Computationally intensive modules are identified, and these are implemented on graphics processing units, significantly speeding up earthquake simulations. In the current best case scenario, a computer with six graphics processing units can simulate 500 years of fault activity in California at 1.5 km × 1.5 km element resolution in less than 1 hour, whereas a single CPU requires more than 2 days to perform the same simulation. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.