text:
\section{Introduction}

Cognitive training (CT) has garnered considerable attention due to the promising intervention outcomes it has provided for improving cognitive skills such as attention, problem solving, reading comprehension and information retrieval. Clinician-delivered or computerised CT has been used for children with attention problems (ADHD)
\cite{MooreEtAl2018} and engagement in intellectually stimulating lifestyle activities has been observed to help maintain cognitive function into later life, via enhancement of cognitive reserve \cite{Stern2012}. The aim of CT therefore is to deliver such benefits to cognition as a targeted discrete intervention. However, to date, the numerous studies and CT products, often commercially marketed as "brain training" programmes or apps, have not been found to produce clear evidence of benefit to cognition  \cite{GatesEtAl2019}.
This failure has been attributed to several factors. The first problem (P1)
 is that of adherence to the CT programme; with traditional CT programmes often having attrition rates exceeding 15\% \cite{WykesEtAl2011}. Prior studies have indicated that participant adherence can decrease with increasing intervention complexity and intensity \cite{LamEtAl2015}, \cite{ColeyEtAl2019}, with inhibition due to poor task performance being a strong predictor for training dropout \cite{Arbiv2015}. These CT programmes are overly repetitive and fail to address the motivational deficits often characteristic of older people with memory difficulties \cite{SavulichEtAl2017b}. Furthermore, it has been suggested that a VR format may increase training adherence (when compared to an on-paper equivalent task) in individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and dementia patients \cite{ManeraEtAl20106}.
The second problem (P2) is that the skills developed and the cognitive improvements made during these training programmes do not transfer to daily life. While the user might get better at playing the games, there is little evidence that these skills will generalise beyond that \cite{Simons2016}. Existing dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) models have historically relied on the player's performance to infer what changes in difficulty are appropriate. However, Pagulayan et al. point out that a game's evaluation factor ought to be the affective experience provided by the gameplay, rather than user performance as in productivity software \cite{PagulayanEtAl2002}. Mishra et al. were also of the opinion that the input channel for closed-loop games should include real-time data from player interactions and behaviour, rather than just player performance metrics \cite{MishraEtAl2016}.

The work presented in this paper introduces a novel CT programme designed to address these two problems, with an ultimate goal of employing this CT environment for people with early stages of dementia to support cognitive training. In keeping with other approaches to CT, a game-based paradigm is used to enhance participant enjoyment and thus increase adherence (addressing P1). The use of VR to create simulated real-world environments within which the CT game is enacted helps overcome the transfer problem and facilitate extension of CT-generated gains to real life activities (addressing P2). Additionally, the design of the CT task incorporates an active control arm and  an affective feedback loop that enables the dynamic adjustment of the game's difficulty (DDA), in real-time, based on the player's affective state \cite{Liu2009} and their in-game performance (addressing P1). The affective feedback loop is based on measuring facial electromyography (EMG) signals related to the nonverbal facial behaviour of the participants, and training supervised machine learning models with user self-reported affect labels. The employment of facial EMG is due to three reasons: (i) other physiological measures such as the galvanic skin response (GSR) have been reported to provide extremely noisy signals in gaming where the user is using a controller and moving around  during the game play \cite{GabanaEtAl2016}; (ii) it is widely acknowledged that the face is the primary means for communicating affective and cognitive mental states, including emotions, interest, agreement, comprehension, concentration and intentions \cite{Baron-Cohen96}, \cite{CohnEkman2005}; and (iii) computer-vision based analysis of facial expressions, despite its efficacy \cite{Sariyanidi2015Automatic}, \cite{Martinez2019Automatic}, is not appropriate in a VR context as the user's face is mostly occluded by the head-mounted display.

\section{Related Work}

\subsection{Cognition, Memory and Affect}

The bisection of memory into short-term-memory (STM) and long-term-memory (LTM), first proposed by Hebb \cite{hebb1949a}, represents the core underlying division imposed in the taxonomy of cognitive systems.
The unitary notion of STM can be partitioned to recognise a distinct cognitive system, working memory (WM), that is responsible for temporarily storing task relevant information available for manipulation.
LTM can be divided into procedural (non-conscious) memory, which underpins skills/habits/conditioning, and declarative (consciously accessed) memory for storing facts and events
\cite{squire2004a}. Declarative memory can be further separated into semantic memory (SM), a store of facts about the world, and episodic memory (EM), the facility for re-experiencing events in the context in which they originally occurred
\cite{tulving1983a}. EM is widely considered as a cognitive competence unique to humans. Unlike SM, it explicitly encodes spatial, contextual and temporal information.

Neurological disorders such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or dementia are associated with memory impairments. Numerous studies have shown deficits in short-term memory, long-term memory and coordination of multiple tasks resulting from such disorders (e.g. see \cite{baddeley1991a}). Therefore, the VR cognitive training intervention developed for \textit{this work incorporates both WM and EM training tasks}.

WM capacity can be tested through a variety of tasks. These tasks typically come in the form of a dual-task paradigm that combines a measure of memory span (a STM test that involves immediate recollection of an ordered list of items) with a simultaneous processing task (e.g. see \cite{daneman1980a}). It has also been argued that WM reflects the ability to maintain multiple, task-relevant, pieces of information in the face of distracting irrelevant information \cite{engle1999a}. The WM training task implemented in this work draws on both of these ideas.
A wide variety of methods have been developed to assess EM capacity, but not all produce consistent results \cite{cheke2013a}. For the purpose of this work, the implemented EM training primarily focuses on spatial memory (SM) tasks, as they engage the same regions of the brain that EM requires \cite{burgess2002a}. SM tasks also proved to be a good fit for the VR paradigm, where ecologically valid scenarios could be presented to the user in an engaging manner.

Bennion et al. \cite{bennion2013a}, in their study of the effect of emotion on memory, suggest that there is strong evidence to support the following hypotheses: emotion usually enhances memory; when it does not, its effect can be understood by the magnitude of elicited arousal (with arousal benefiting memory up to a point, but then having a detrimental influence); and when emotion facilitates the processing of information, it also facilitates the retention of that information.
The general notion that arousal will enhance memory, up to a point, was reinforced by Yeh et al. in their research of the effects of negative affect on WM capacity
\cite{yeh2015a}. They promote the idea of a game that appropriately challenges users in order to activate their attention, while avoiding negative emotional responses.

\subsection{Affect and Gaming}
Two domains, particularly relevant to this work, have shown promise in recent literature for the application of affective computing methods. The first is the domain of cognitive training, which is motivated by the strong relationship between emotions and cognitive performance
\cite{gabana2017a}. The second is the domain of video games, where the interaction has been noted as a predominantly emotional one \cite{yee2007a} and therefore susceptible to affective adaptation -- i.e., dynamically changing the gameplay experience based on affective signals read from the player.

Affective gaming can be realised through the use of biofeedback techniques. However, for a game to be considered affective (and not simply a biofeedback game), it must exploit this biological information to propagate affective feedback
\cite{bersak2001a}. That is, the game is an intelligent participant in the biofeedback loop. What distinguishes affective feedback from biofeedback is that the player is not deliberately controlling their physiological responses in order to influence gameplay.

There are numerous novel possibilities for emotive twists on conventional gameplay experiences. For example, Reynolds and Picard developed AffQuake \cite{reynolds2004a}, a modification to ID Software's Quake II that incorporated affective signals to alter gameplay in a variety of ways (e.g. in StartleQuake, when a player becomes startled, their avatar also becomes startled and jumps back). Valve Corporation have also experimented with similar modifications to their games: Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead 2
\cite{bouchard2012a}. In these modifications, the player's stress level, measured as the electrical response of their skin, determines the pace of the gameplay.
Compared to conventional gameplay, the use of VR in video games induces a greater degree of engagement and immersion in players. This heightened immersion, named presence (or the feeling of being there in the virtual world), has been reported to directly impact the affective states experienced by the player during gameplay -- i.e., high levels of presence induce more intense and vivid emotions \cite{riva2007a}.

\subsection{Therapeutic Applications of Virtual Reality}
In a systematic review of computerised cognitive training literature, Hill et al. concluded that computerised CT is a viable intervention for enhancing cognition in people with MCI \cite{hill2017a}. Interestingly, they found that for individuals with dementia, the only clinically meaningful effect sizes were found in studies that utilised immersive technology such as VR or the Nintendo Wii
\cite{hill2017a}.
These findings strongly support the idea that greater transference of cognitive performance to daily life could be achieved through training on ecologically valid tasks in VR.

Savulich et al. attempted to address the motivational deficits in older populations with memory impairments through a novel memory game on an iPad "Game Show" which targeted EM as its cognitive process \cite{SavulichEtAl2017b}. The game was designed to have the same motivational properties typical of computer games (tutorials, stimulating music, progression, etc.) and employed DDA with in-game performance as a sole input. They conducted a randomised controlled trial with 42 patients (aged 45 and over) diagnosed with amnestic mild cognitive impairment, splitting the participants evenly into a training and control group.
Their results showed significant EM improvements in the CT group, and suggested that gamification enhanced participant motivation.

Gamito et al. investigated the effectiveness of VR for neuropsychological rehabilitation \cite{GamitoEtAl2015} by developing a VR application for CT which incorporated attention and memory tasks resembling daily real-world activities. These tasks targeted WM, visuo-spatial orientation, selective attention, recognition memory and calculation. The training linearly increased in difficulty throughout the sessions. This was employed in a study consisting of twenty stroke patients, with a mean age of 55 years (SD = 13.5), who were randomly assigned between an intervention and control group. The results of their study generally supported the efficacy of VR-based interventions for CT, with significant benefits to memory and attention functions observed in the intervention group (with the exception that no significant improvement was seen in visual memory).

Optale et al. conducted a 6-month long randomised controlled pilot study investigating the efficacy of their VR training intervention in lessening cognitive decline and improving memory functions \cite{OptaleEtAl2010}. The VR tasks asked the user to navigate a simple environment and tested their capacity to recall the route they have taken and their orientation, with a gradual, linear, increase in the complexity of the stimuli. They recruited 36 elderly individuals (median age 80 years) with memory impairment and divided them into an experimental group and an active control group (which received music therapy sessions). Their results showed that participants in the experimental group exhibited improvement in general cognitive functioning and verbal memory, with the most significant effects observed in long-term memory.

Despite their promising results, none of the reviewed studies utilised affective feedback as part of their VR intervention, which is the main focus of this work.
There also exist other VR applications for CT (e.g., \cite{pedroli2018a}, \cite{DonigerEtAl20108}, \cite{CaggianeseEtAl2018}), however, these have not yet reached the point of carrying out studies with their target population.

\subsection{Emotion Sensing from Facial EMG}
Computer-vision based analysis of facial nonverbal behaviour (facial actions or facial expressions) is not appropriate in a VR context as the user's face will be mostly occluded by the  head-mounted display (HMD).
Cohn and Ekman in \cite{CohnEkman2005} provide a detailed review about early studies that have used surface EMG to measure facial muscle activity in relation to emotion and the evidence found in terms of predictive correlation with self- and observer reported emotion.
Therefore, this work utilises facial electromyogram (EMG), recorded from surface electrodes placed over regions of the user's face, to measure signals related to the affective facial behaviour of the participants, using a novel device, Faceteq \cite{mavridou2017a}.

For extracting features from facial EMG, Jerritta et al. investigated the application of higher order statistics (HOS) to derive a set of facial EMG features for classifying Ekman's six basic emotional states \cite{ekman1992b}.
They used audio-visual (video clips) stimuli to induce emotional responses in participants, and employed a kNN classifier with PCA as a dimensionality reduction technique.
Their results showed that the use of PCA prior to classification improved the classifier's accuracy, achieving an average classification rate of 69.5\% across the six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise).
Perusquia-Hernandez et al. \cite{perusqu2017a} investigated the recognition of spontaneous vs. posed smiles, using spatial and temporal patterns of facial EMG.
Due to the unbalanced nature of the collected data, they undersampled the majority class to match the minority class samples (as in \cite{shumailov2017a}). The best classification results for this 2-class problem, obtained using spatial-temporal features with a Gaussian kernel SVM, range from 85.23\% to 96.43\% (across participants), using a 70/30 training/validation data split.
Soon et al. developed an application for speech recognition based on facial EMG. Three participants were asked to say a series of numeric (spoken in Malay and English) and command words (spoken in English). Temporal features were extracted from a DWT-Haar approximation of the input signal. Four different classifiers were evaluated: Random Forest, Linear Discriminant Analysis, Naive Bayes and Multilayer Perceptron. Classification results were obtained through a cross-validation scheme with a 66/34 training/validation data split. Random Forest provided the best overall performance with temporal features achieving 64.7\%, 49\%, and 41.8\% in Malay, English, and command words respectively.

\section{Study Design}
\subsection{Game Design}
Two separate virtual environments were developed, a virtual supermarket and a virtual multi-room museum (see Fig.~\ref{fig:supermarket} and Fig.~\ref{fig:museum}). These locales provided the setting for the WM and EM tasks respectively, and were selected to promote the ecological validity of the intervention, i.e., both environments are likely to be familiar to the older target population and, in the case of the supermarket, to reflect a daily activity. The underlying hypothesis was that
by setting the tasks in highly immersive virtual re-creations of real-world environments and having users perform practical tasks (e.g. collecting products from a shopping list and interacting with displays in a museum) the acquired cognitive skills would better generalise to daily life.

In the initial phase of the work, a fixed difficulty framework was implemented for both the WM and EM tasks consisting of three difficulty levels (easy, medium and hard).
This was designed with the purpose of eliciting a range of emotional responses from study participants and, thus, generating a balanced dataset. These difficulty levels differed in the cognitive load required from the participant (e.g. shorter/longer shopping lists in the supermarket, less/more display locations to remember in the museum).

Both tasks employ the same annotation and EMG logging scheme. EMG data is recorded from when the task starts. After every 45 seconds of gameplay (a time period arrived at through pilot tests) the recording is paused and written out to a log file (created for that segment). When this occurs, the game environment fades to black and the affective slider 	(see Fig.~\label{fig:slider}) (implemented in VR to mitigate gameplay disruption), is displayed to the player. Players interact with the slider using a VR laser pointer and, when they are happy with their selection (which should best describe the average affect experienced by the player during the preceding 45 seconds of gameplay), press a confirmation button to append the arousal/valence values to the associated EMG log. Gameplay and EMG recording then resumes. This process repeats until the timer runs out.

Putze et al. performed a systematic investigation into the effects of interrupting the VR experience through a questionnaire either inside or outside of VR \cite{Putze-2020}. Their results showed that administering questionnaires in VR reduces the Break in Presence without affecting the self-reported player experience. This motivated our decision to collect the labels during gameplay. The use of the affective slider was motivated by its facility for expeditious annotation and its interpretability. We therefore decided that obtaining these labels inside VR will better represent the range of emotions experienced at different points during gameplay (while the experience is still fresh).
Score tracking and a leaderboard (staples of gamification) were also included for both tasks.

A heads-up-display (HUD) was included that enabled the player to track their current score, time left and other task specific information. Together, the inclusion of these elements was intended to draw the player's focus away from the novelty of VR (thereby mitigating the expected positive bias in the dataset) onto their task performance. To further associate player performance and emotional response, audio-visual stimuli were added in response to correct (bell ringing sound and confetti explosion) and incorrect (buzzing sound and red X) answers.

\subsubsection{Working Memory Task}
\begin{figure}[!t]
	\begin{tabular}{c}
		\includegraphics[scale=0.18]{Supermarket4.jpg}\\
	\end{tabular}
	\caption{The custom virtual supermarket environment, in which WM tasks were carried out, and player interaction with this environment. }
	\label{fig:supermarket}
	 \vspace{-4mm}
\end{figure}
The goal of the WM task is to find a (randomly generated) array of products in a virtual supermarket (see Fig. \ref{fig:supermarket}), placing each product in a shopping basket. The products are specified to the player at the start of each round through the HUD. Each product on the shopping list is displayed on the HUD (as an image and text description) for 1 second, with a 500 ms interval. Players are challenged to remember remaining items on the shopping list (stored in WM), while they actively search for each product.
The number of products to be collected is determined by the difficulty level. The medium difficulty tasks users with finding 7 products, this is intended to be the most engaging and balanced difficulty for most users (based on Miller's magic number seven, plus or minus two \cite{miller1956a}). The easy and hard difficulties task users with finding 2 and 12 products respectively. These difficulties were designed to increase the likelihood of inducing negative affect in users, i.e., calm-negative on easy (bored due to insufficient challenge) and energetic-negative on hard (frustrated due to excessive challenge). The specific number of products for each difficulty level was determined through pilot testing and feedback.
For each correct item collected, 5 points are added to the player's score. Collecting an item that was not on the shopping list reduces the player's score by 4. Therefore, while the player is incentivised to carry out the task quickly, the priority is to ensure that no mistakes are made. The random generation of shopping lists promotes the task's replayability, maintaining the emphasis on short-term WM (rather than remembering the shopping lists from previous attempts) on repeated playthroughs.

\subsubsection{Episodic Memory Task}
\begin{figure}[!t]
	\begin{tabular}{c}
		\includegraphics[scale=0.15]{Museum-all.jpg}\\
	\end{tabular}
	\caption{The custom, multi-room, virtual museum environment, in which EM tasks are carried out. More rooms are unlocked as the difficulty level increases. Green arrow markers indicating which displays are to be remembered during the encoding phase. Bottom right: visual feedback for correct answer during the retrieval phase.}
	\label{fig:museum}
	 \vspace{-4mm}
\end{figure}
The EM task takes place in a multi-room virtual museum environment (see Fig.~\ref{fig:museum}). The core task is divided into two consecutive phases: encoding (storage of information, such that it can be distinguished from other distinct pieces of information) and retrieval (recognition of previously stored information) \cite{wang2012a}. In the encoding phase, players are asked to search for one or more displays at randomly generated locations in the museum.
Players interact with marked displays in this phase using a laser pointer. On doing so, the age of the display is shown to the player. This interaction can take place at a distance, allowing a greater degree of spatial context to be encoded. After all the marked displays have been interacted with, the game transitions to the retrieval phase removing the marked displays from the museum, and teleporting the player back to the museum entrance.

In the retrieval phase, players are tasked with placing a subset of the displays they interacted with during the encoding phase back in their original positions. The player uses the laser pointer to indicate where in the environment (from a selection of highlighted zones) they think it was located.
On completion of the retrieval phase, a short bonus phase is initiated. Players are shown three displays they have interacted with and are asked which of them is the oldest/youngest.
This textual (age) recall is not randomised, and players who can efficiently store the information in their LTM should perform better over repeated sessions.

\subsection{Data Acquisition}
After the study procedure and protocol was approved by Cambridge's Department of Computer Science and Technology Ethics Committee, 18 participants (5 female and 13 male, ranging in age from 20 to 37) volunteered to engage in the EMG data acquisition study, by wearing the HTC Vive VR headset with Faceteq sensing HMD foam insert (see Fig.~\label{fig:faceteq}).
6 of these participants engaged in a preliminary pilot study, while the data collected from the remaining 12 formed the final annotated facial EMG dataset.
\begin{figure}[!t]
	\begin{tabular}{c}
		\includegraphics[scale=0.55]{Faceteq-all.png}\\
	\end{tabular}
	\caption{Prototype Faceteq sensing HMD foam insert and how it is placed in the HTC Vive.}
	\label{fig:faceteq}
	 \vspace{-4mm}
\end{figure}

The participants were first acquainted with the research goals of the study through an information sheet and verbal introduction.
They were introduced to the meaning of arousal and valence, and shown the affective slider annotation scheme (see Fig.~\ref{fig:slider}). The EMG recording sessions lasted for 3 minutes and 45 seconds, of which there were six in total (one per difficulty level, for both the WM and EM tasks). Half of the participants played through the difficulty levels in reverse order (hard-to-easy) to reduce the likelihood of the collected data being skewed positive (as in \cite{shumailov2017a}). The hypothesis here is based on the concept of the difficulty curve, the idea that, for an optimal experience, a game's difficulty should progress in a manner consistent with real-world skill acquisition (easy challenges during the cognitive stage,  moderate challenges during the associative stage, and more difficult challenges during the autonomous stage) \cite{b2009a}. By delivering challenges to the player in a reversed order, it is expected that they will experience negative affect more frequently (e.g. frustration early on, and boredom towards the end).

Participants were given a two minute break between gameplay sessions, allowing them to return to a neutral affective state. During these breaks, participants were asked to give an affective label that best summed up that session (using Russell's circumplex model \cite{russell1980a}).
A short informal interview was conducted, after the EMG data collection and all other results from the study were recorded,  with the following questions.

\begin{itemize}
\item Which of the two environments did you prefer spending time in?
\item Which of the two tasks did you find more engaging?
\item Did you experience any discomfort during the session and, if you have prior experience of VR, was the addition of the Faceteq sensor off-putting in any way?
\item To what extent, if any, did the annotation scheme affect your gameplay experience?
\end{itemize}

\subsection{Findings}
The majority of participants (10/12) expressed a preference for the museum environment over the supermarket, with many responses indicating that the supermarket felt more mundane as it is an environment they are overly familiar with in the real world. This may point to a trade-off between ecological validity and engagement in the choice of cognitive training environment. Responses were evenly split when it came to task preference, with many stating they preferred the EM task as it had more gameplay variety, while others appreciated the more naturalistic interactions in the WM task.
The response to the Faceteq sensor was positive. None of the participants indicated that they experienced any motion sickness or that the sensor was off-putting. Of the nine participants with prior VR experience, five particpants responded that they weren't aware of the sensor once they started playing, two participants responded that they there were aware of the sensor but it had no significant impact on their engagement, and two participants (self-identified regular VR users) stated that the ADC box attached to the back of the HMD (see Fig.~\ref{fig:faceteq}) served as a counterweight to the front-heavy HTC Vive. Most participants (7/12) stated that the in-game annotation scheme was mildly disruptive to the gameplay experience, while others either found it did not affect their experience (3/12) or found it very disruptive (2/12).

\section{SYSTEM EVALUATION}
This evaluation aims to investigate whether and how the developed CT environment and the overall system (with its modules for sensing, feature extraction and affect recognition) work together.

\subsection{EMG Feature Extraction}
\subsubsection{Pre-processing} Sousa and Tavares noted, in their review of EMG normalisation methods \cite{sousa2012a}, that the voltage potential of surface EMG depends on several factors, varying between individuals and also over time within an individual.
Baseline normalisation (removal) is a viable strategy to respond to these issues, having seen use in numerous studies on a variety of physiological signals (e.g., \cite{m2013a}). The user's baseline was read during the first 45 seconds of gameplay as at this point the novelty of VR had diminished to some extent, and the activities during the early-game are typically less arousing (e.g. reading shopping list, and looking at displays).
\subsubsection{Feature Extraction}
After baseline normalisation, the input signal was processed using DWT \cite{zhang2010a}. The choice of mother wavelet for signal approximation was informed by the work of Phinyomark et al. \cite{phinyomark2010a}. They found that, for the purpose of denoising, coif5, Haar (db1), bior1.1 and rbio1.1 are the most suitable. A preliminary evaluation with our dataset showed that each of these wavelets resulted in very similar classification improvements (around +5\% to +7\% accuracy depending on the classifier). Therefore, going forward, the presented results are based on the DWT-Haar approximation of the EMG signal due to its efficient computation.
A significant number of studies, in the domain of facial EMG classification, have shown temporal features to be the most informative \cite{jerritta2014a, perusqu2017a, hamedi2018a, soon2017a}.
Based on these findings, the time and time-frequency domain features were extracted from the DWT approximation of the signal. These are shown in Fig. \ref{fig:features} (see \cite{tkach2010a} for mathematical definitions). Extracting this many features, from eight EMG channels, results in a high dimensional (8 * 14 = 112) dataset.

\subsubsection{Feature Selection}
Due to the dimensionality of the dataset, it was considered pertinent to include a feature selection step prior to classification. The strategy employed here was inspired by the work of
Clerico et al. \cite{clerico2016a}, who utilised the minimal-redundancy-maximal-relevance criterion (mRMR) \cite{peng2005a} to select the best features in an EMG affective gaming context.
mRMR attempts to find optimal features, based on mutual information, through forward selection.
The greatest classification improvement was achieved by selecting the best 30 features, identified by mRMR (around +3\% to +5\% accuracy depending on the classifier). These features were distributed among different muscle groups with the top 30 ranking made up of 10 features from users' eyes,  9 from their mouth, 7 from their eyebrows, and 3 from their corrugator supercilii.
\begin{figure}[!t]
	\begin{tabular}{c}
		\includegraphics[scale=0.5]{Features.png}\\
	\end{tabular}
	\caption{List of time and time-frequency domain features extracted from the DWT approximation of the signal.}
	\label{fig:features}
	 \vspace{-4mm}
\end{figure}

\subsubsection{Findings}
SSC was the most common feature in the ranking, being extracted from all muscle groups bar the corrugator supercilii. SSC, extracted from the right eye sensor, was also computed to be the second most informative feature in the ranking. This was accompanied by MMAV1 extracted from the right mouth sensor (1st) and ZC extracted from the left mouth sensor (3rd), in a top three that scored significantly higher (by a factor of at least 3) than the remaining 27 features. Interestingly, extracted RMS features were considered relatively uninformative despite it being regularly cited as one in facial EMG emotion recognition research (e.g. \cite{jerritta2014a, hamedi2018a}). Though deviations in expected results, such as this, may be attributed to the fact that
physical expressions of affect in peoples' faces are likely to be impacted by the VR headset.
\begin{figure}[!t]
\begin{tabular}{c}
	\includegraphics[scale=1.1]{Classification.png}\\
	\end{tabular}
    \caption{Classification accuracies for kNN, SVM and LDA for positive valence vs. negative valence and high arousal vs. low arousal. Results are obtained using leave-one-subject-out cross-validation strategy.
}
	\label{fig:classification}
	 \vspace{-4mm}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Affect Classification}
\subsubsection{Classification}
First the original (-1 to +1 continuous) valence/arousal labels were truncated into one of four emotion labels: energetic-positive (high valence, high arousal); calm-positive (high valence, low arousal); energetic-negative (low valence, high arousal); calm-negative (low valence, low arousal). This allows emotion recognition to be framed as a 4-class classification problem.
Three classifiers, which have been utilised to varying degrees of success in existing facial EMG literature \cite{jerritta2014a, perusqu2017a, hamedi2018a, soon2017a}, SVMs (with Gaussian kernel);
kNN (with various values for k); and LDA were evaluated using the (subject-independent) leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) cross-validation strategy. The best classification results for each classifier can be seen in Fig.~\ref{fig:classification}.
The kNN (k = 4) offered the best arousal classification rate (76.2\%), and the best classification rate on the combined valence/arousal 4-class classification problem (68.8\%). LDA yielded the best valence classification rate (64.1\%), but fell behind kNN on the 4-class classification problem (65.9\%). The Gaussian SVM generally underperformed, though by investigating different kernels and further tuning hyperparameters, this could be improved in future work.
\subsubsection{Findings}
The most noticeable discrepancy between the labels acquired in-game and those acquired post-game, was a consistently lower annotated value for arousal in the post-game interview. This manifested as a significantly lower classification accuracy for arousal when using the post-game labels as the four classes (around -15\% to -19\% depending on the classifier), while valence classification remained comparable. This suggests that the primary benefit of acquiring affective labels in-game is a more reliable estimate of the intensity of emotions. Placing participants in a reversed difficulty group had the desired effect of inducing negative affect more frequently (resulting in a more balanced dataset), with that group accounting for approximately 61\% of energetic-negative and 67\% of calm-negative annotations.
A notable difference between how our classification results were arrived at compared to those discussed in similar works (section 3.3), is that these results were computed using the (subject-independent) leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) cross-validation strategy.
\begin{table*}[]
    \centering
     \setlength\tabcolsep{3.9pt}

    \fontsize{10}{11.5}\selectfont

   \begin{tabularx}{\linewidth}{c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c}
 \hline

    \rowcolor{blue!10}
  {\textbf{PID}} &\multicolumn{2}{c|}{\textbf{P1}} & \multicolumn{2}{c|}{\textbf{P2}} &\multicolumn{2}{c|}{\textbf{P3}} &\multicolumn{2}{c|}{\textbf{P4}} &\multicolumn{2}{c|}{\textbf{P5}} &\multicolumn{2}{c|}{\textbf{P6}} &\multicolumn{2}{c}{\textbf{Mean}} \\
\hline
  \rowcolor{blue!10}

 \textbf{Game Version} & \textbf{Ad} & \textbf{NAd} & \textbf{Ad} & \textbf{NAd} & \textbf{Ad} & \textbf{NAd} & \textbf{Ad} & \textbf{NAd} & \textbf{Ad} & \textbf{NAd} & \textbf{Ad} & \textbf{NAd} & \textbf{Ad} & \textbf{NAd} \\
 Competence	&	2	&	1	&	3	&	2.5	&	2.5	&	0.5	&	3	&	2	&	2	&	2	&	3	&	2	&	2.58	&	1.67	\\ \hline
Sensory and Imaginative Immersion	&	4	&	3	&	4	&	4	&	3	&	2	&	3	&	3	&	2	&	3	&	4	&	4	&	3.33	&	3.17	\\ \hline
Flow	&	3.5	&	3.5	&	4	&	3.5	&	3	&	2	&	3	&	3	&	2	&	3	&	3.5	&	2	&	3.17	&	2.83	\\ \hline
Tension	&	2	&	3.5	&	0.5	&	0.5	&	0	&	2	&	0	&	0.5	&	2	&	0	&	0.5	&	1.5	&	0.83	&	1.33	\\ \hline
Challenge	&	4	&	4	&	2.5	&	3	&	3	&	4	&	3.5	&	4	&	1	&	3	&	2	&	3.5	&	2.67	&	3.58	\\ \hline
Negative Affect	&	1.5	&	3	&	0	&	0.5	&	0	&	1	&	0	&	0	&	0.5	&	0	&	0	&	0	&	0.33	&	0.75	\\ \hline
Positive Affect	&	2.5	&	1.5	&	3.5	&	3.5	&	3	&	2	&	2.5	&	2	&	1.5	&	3	&	3	&	2.5	&	2.67	&	2.42	\\ \hline
\end{tabularx}
     \caption{In-game GEQ \cite{ijsselsteijn2007a} module responses for each participant (P) represented with participant ID (PID), for Adaptive (Ad) and Non-Adaptive (NAd) versions of the game. Values are on a scale of 0 (not at all) to 4 (extremely), and were calculated by averaging across their respective components.}
      \label{tab:IG-evaluation}
    \vspace{-4mm}
\end{table*}
\begin{table}[h!]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{ c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c }
\hline
  \rowcolor{blue!10}
\textbf{PID}	& \textbf{P1} &	\textbf{P2} & \textbf{P3}	 & \textbf{P4}  & \textbf{P5}	 & \textbf{P6} & \textbf{Mean}\\
\hline
Positive	& 2.4 &	2.6	& 1.4 &	1.6 & 2 &	2.8	& 2.13 \\
\hline
Negative	& 0.33 &	0 &	0 &	0 &	0 &	0.33 &	0.11\\
\hline
Tired &	1 &	0.5	 & 0 &	2.5 &	0 &	0 &	0.67\\
\hline
R2R &	1 &	1 &	0.33 &
0.33 &	0.33 &	1.66 &	0.78\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{Post-game GEQ module responses for each participant (P) on a scale of 0 (not at all) to 4 (extremely), calculated by averaging across their respective components. R2R refers to Return to Reality.}
      \label{tab:PG-evaluation}
 \vspace{-4mm}
\end{table}
\section{Intervention Evaluation}
The goal of this evaluation was to gather qualitative feedback from the target population (older adults) to examine the potential benefits of utilising affective adaptation for CT and gather insights for defining future research steps.

\subsection{Affective Feedback Loop Integration}
The system integrated here relies on both affect sensing and player performance as a data point, due to its exhibited value in existing DDA solutions and to offset the (classification) inaccuracies in the model (i.e. to avoid fixing what is not broken \cite{hunicke2005a}).
The number of difficulty levels in this new adaptive version of the game was increased from three (easy-medium-hard) to ten (10-point scale). This allows for more subtle transitions in difficulty to avoid the player becoming overly conscious of the adaptation (and potentially feeling `cheated' by it \cite{hunicke2005a}). Every 45 seconds (in place of the annotation interface from the previous study) the player's affect is classified in real-time based on incoming facial EMG signals. The following DDA rules, encompassing both player affect and performance, govern how the difficulty is adapted:
\\
\\
\textit{[Calm-Negative + :Perfect Score]:} Increment difficulty by 2;\\
\textit{[Calm-Negative + Imperfect Score] or [Positive Valence + Perfect Score]:} Increment difficulty by 1;\\
\textit{[Positive Valence + Imperfect Score]:} No change in difficulty;\\
\textit{[Negative Score] or [Energetic-Negative + Imperfect Score]:} Decrement difficulty by 1;\\
\textit{[Energetic-Negative + Negative Score]:} Decrement difficulty by 2.\\

This rule set was arrived at following a short testing period with pilot participants. For instance, in the
\emph{[Calm-Negative + Perfect Score]} case, it is hypothesised that the player is not enjoying the game as valence is negative, and is likely bored as they are in a non-energetic state, and the score is perfect, so the level is increased by two. Instead, \emph{[[Positive Valence + Perfect Score]} leads to a smaller increment of one in order to gradually maximise the cognitive challenge provided by the game, while minimising the risk of disrupting the player's engagement (as indicated by the positive valence score). In the best-case execution, the adaptation is intended to lead players to a flow state \cite{csikszentmihalyi2014a}, where they are faced with tasks that they have a chance of completing through application of their skills. In addition to being a signifier of high engagement, being in a state of flow has been shown to improve cognitive performance \cite{gabana2017a}.

\subsection{Evaluation Study}
The protocol for the evaluation study was largely similar to the previous study, with a few notable exceptions. 6 participants (4 female and 2 male, ranging in age from 60 to 100), with no history of cognitive impairment, volunteered to engage in this evaluation study. The recruitment of this older control group was facilitated by the researchers from The University of Cambridge's Department of Neuroscience. None of the participants played video games with any degree of regularity and only one had prior experience of VR.
Participants started by completing a battery of standardised cognitive tests
\cite{mioshi2006a, nelson1982a, osterrieth1944a, crockett2008a, tombaugh2004a, chan2016a, wechsler1958a} (administered by the Clinical Neuroscience researchers). This enabled accurate characterisation of the sample and the investigation of correlations between the standardised tests and the new VR paradigm. The time taken to administer these tests averaged at about 1 hour.

Participants were given an explanation of the task goals and time to practice in the VR environment prior to starting the session proper. They played both an adaptive and non-adaptive (linearly increasing difficulty) version of the game (without being told which version is which), in two, fifteen minute, gameplay sessions (7 minutes and 30 seconds for both WM and EM tasks). To mitigate any order effects bias in the evaluation of the adaptive and non-adaptive versions, half of the participants played the adaptive version first, while the other half played the non-adaptive version first. Participants' subjective experience (i.e. immersion, engagement, and flow) with the VR training intervention was evaluated using the in-game and post-game components of the game experience questionnaire (GEQ)
\cite{ijsselsteijn2007a}.

Each session was concluded with an informal interview that took place after all other results from the study were recorded. The contents of this interview was the same as in the first study, with the exception of an additional question on the impact of the in-game affective annotation during the first study.
Participation in the study lasted for about 2 hours and 15 minutes on average (including breaks).
Immediately after playing each version (adaptive/non-adaptive) of the game, participants reported on their feelings of competence, sensory and imaginative immersion, flow, tension, challenge, negative affect, and positive affect by completing the \emph{in-game module} of the GEQ. Each of these categories is represented by a series of sub-components in the questionnaire, a numeric value is then computed for each by averaging across their sub-component values. The accumulated responses  can be found in Table~\ref{tab:IG-evaluation}. Finally, when both gameplay sessions were complete, the participants filled out the \emph{post-game module} of the GEQ \cite{ijsselsteijn2007a}. This gave participants the opportunity to think and reflect on the experience as whole. The accumulated results, similarly calculated by averaging across their sub-components in the questionnaire, are provided in Table~\ref{tab:PG-evaluation}.

\subsection{Findings}
Looking at Table~\ref{tab:IG-evaluation}, while the response to both versions of the game can generally be described as positive, there are a few noteworthy differences.
The two standout differences are the increased feeling of competence and the decreased feeling of challenge while playing the adaptive version of the game. The noteworthy increase in competence is particularly encouraging as it relates to one of the key deficiencies identified with existing cognitive training interventions, the drop-off in user engagement
\cite{Simons2016}. In their research of intrinsic motivation, Deci and Ryan argue that structures that enable feelings of competence during action can enhance intrinsic motivation for that action \cite{deci1985a}. This increased feeling of competence, brought about through affective adaptation, highlights the potential of adaptive techniques in motivating users to engage with cognitive training interventions. However, specific aspects related to intrinsic motivation were not included in the questionnaires employed in our studies. For more insightful conclusions on intrinsic motivation, relevant aspects should be investigated explicitly in future studies.

While the drop in challenge is not unequivocally positive, the decrease to a more neutral value in the adaptive version, along with the slight increase in flow (which describes a state of high engagement), suggests that participants are being met with more appropriate challenges that they can overcome using their skills \cite{csikszentmihalyi2014a} (potentially explaining the slight increase in positive affect, and decrease in negative affect while playing the adaptive version).
The largely positive responses provided for the \emph{post-game module} of the GEQ as seen in Table~\ref{tab:PG-evaluation}, in conjunction with those recorded by the \emph{in-game module}, are promising indicators that gamification and VR can play a role in increasing engagement with cognitive interventions in older adults.

Another area of interest for this evaluation was to what extent the WM and EM tasks, implemented in VR, engaged the intended cognitive abilities of the participants. This was examined by looking for correlations between how participants performed (relative to each other) in the standardised tests and the VR tasks. Positive correlations, calculated using Spearman's rank-order correlation (rho), were found between the performance rankings of participants in the VR paradigm and closely related standardized tests. Most notably, high positive correlations were found between the Trail Making Test \cite{tombaugh2004a}, which examines executive functioning (a superset of WM), and the WM task in VR (rho=+0.60), and between the 4 Mountains test (a short SM test) and the EM task in VR (rho=+0.74).

In the post-session interview, all 6 participants stated their preference for the museum environment (finding the supermarket more mundane). The overall consensus was, however, that the environments they would prefer would match those in the real-world. 5 participants preferred the EM task, stating that while they found it to be more complex, the greater variety it offered was a motivating factor for them to return to it and improve. This may point to task variety being an important factor in maintaining user engagement in cognitive training. All 6 participants responded that they felt no motion sickness during the study. 4 out of the 6 participants indicated that they felt no facial discomfort, while 2 participants, who wore glasses throughout the study, felt a bit of pressure on their face towards the end. This was likely a result of the slightly thicker face cushion used with the Faceteq prototype.
\section{Summary and Conclusion}
This work investigated
the development of
an affect-aware VR game for cognitive training using facial EMG signals for affect classification.
Classification rates of 64.1\% and 76.2\%, for valence and arousal respectively, were achieved through a combination of
DWT-Haar filtering, temporal feature extraction, feature selection, and kNN classification.
The promise of DDA in the development of more engaging cognitive training was substantiated through a small-scale user study with older adults.

The qualitative feedback garnered over the course of the study pointed to a notable increase in feelings of competency
and participants being more appropriately challenged.
Participant feedback relating to both the adaptive and non-adaptive versions of the game was largely positive. This response lends credence to the notion that gamification and VR are viable tools for improving engagement in cognitive training with older adults. The findings here should be qualified by reiterating an inherent limitation of the study. Six participants is a small user group for an evaluation study
and should be expanded in future research to fully determine the veracity of these findings.\\
\\

\textbf{ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.} This work has been partially supported by the EPSRC (grant ref. EP/R030782/1).

\balance

\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


Men ask for deadline extensions at twice the rate of women These are the most common things people lie about on their resumes New report shows how tough it is for women in tech, especially at conferences The super successful CEO of The Wing has a seemingly crazy email hack that is a major time saver 3 things it's not too late to start that will make you happier, healthier and more successful How to curb friends and family from asking for free professional services from you 5 easy ways to improve your morning commute mood What is credit invisibility?
The surprising names that are most likely to get a callback from hiring managers Should you quit your super-stressful job? These 5 entrepreneurs did The #1 culture problem in organizations: A lack of authenticity The super successful CEO of The Wing has a seemingly crazy email hack that is a major time saver Michelle Obama is a surprise textbook example of how women thrive and grow through adulthood 5 easy ways to improve your morning commute mood How to curb friends and family from asking for free professional services from you What is credit invisibility?
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text:
Beekeeping program operated on University's Main Station Field Lab helps veterans and first responders
Bees4Vets, a nonprofit run by University-connected husband and wife, assists veterans and first responders living with PTSD or TBI
Research & Innovation | August 09, 2021
Bianca Wright
Students in Bees4Vets program work with the hives in the apiary. Photo by Bees4Vets and Dfenwick Photography.
While teaching historical beekeeping years ago, Ginger Fenwick came across a document that resonated with her. Published April 1919, the document discussed the benefits of beekeeping as a hobby or vocation for disabled veterans. Around the time she read this, there were—and still are—concerningly high numbers of suicide among veterans. Both she and her husband come from military families, so this news hit home.
"Between us, we knew that we had to do something. It didn't matter what, we had to do something to help one person in our community," she said.
So Ginger Fenwick, now an accounting assistant in the University of Nevada, Reno School of Public Health, and her husband Daniel Fenwick, emeritus at the University, started Bees4Vets, a nonprofit with the mission of supporting veterans and first responders with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) by teaching beekeeping. The program is run independently of the University but utilizes space on the University's Main Station Field Lab, part of the Nevada Experiment Station and the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology and Natural Resources.
"PTSD" is the official diagnostic term, however there is growing support for renaming the condition to post-traumatic stress (PTS) or post-traumatic stress injury. By dropping the word "disorder," it is hoped that less stigma will be associated with the condition.
CNBC segment on Bees4Vets
On August 9, 2021, CNBC's The News with Shepard Smith aired a segment featuring Bees4Vets. The segment included interviews with Daniel and Ginger Fenwick and participants in their program.
"I'm so humbled at this special opportunity to share our success with the nation and hopefully inspire others to help those with PTSD [and] TBI in their communities too," Ginger Fenwick said. "Honeybees are a great example of working together for sweeter tomorrows, and were it not for our veterans and first responders our 'tomorrows' might never come. We owe them so much, this is just our way to say 'Thank you for all you do!'"
Bees4Vets classes are conducted on space provided by the University's Main Station Field Lab. Photo by Jane Tors.
Ginger Fenwick standing in front of the beehives. Photo by Jane Tors.
NBC captures footage for their television news segment about Bees4Vets. Photo by Claudene Wharton.
Ginger Fenwick being interviewed by NBC. Photo by Jane Tors.
Building a support system through beekeeping
In the four years and counting that Daniel and Ginger Fenwick have operated Bees4Vets, they have always worked to create a safe and accommodating environment for their students. Each beekeeping season, which runs approximately from April to October, there are typically 10 spaces available for veterans and first responders living with PTSD or TBI. Throughout the season, participants learn beekeeping while gaining skills that can benefit their personal life and, in many instances, their careers.
Classes are conducted on the apiary, the place where the bees are kept, and participants work with approximately 30 beehives. To help students feel as comfortable as possible, they have the option of working apart from others. They can also choose to bring a friend or family member along to work with them. Having these options available assists in making the program accessible to students with varying needs so that more can participate.
Daniel and Ginger Fenwick have seen many students prosper during and after their experience with the program. Through beekeeping, students learn how to work peacefully and methodically with the bees and their hives, which teaches them "mindfulness" and how to live in the moment. Ginger Fenwick said developing these skills helps students overcome their fears and better cope with anxiety.
"One change we've noticed most [in participants] is a calmness," she said. "We have a veteran right now who said that when he rolls into that apiary, he is just so full of anxiety and frustration. But as soon as he gets towards that hive, he just calms down."
Another major benefit of the program Daniel Fenwick mentioned is a sense of belonging.
"Most people in the military talk about how they're part of a team. When they leave the military, that team goes away. Some of [the students] have talked about this as the worst thing for them – all that support is gone," he said. "Our first-year students still get our weekly emails. We've left them as part of that team; they can come out to the apiary anytime they want."
Upon beginning the class, Bees4Vets students receive all the basic beekeeping equipment free-of-charge. This equipment is donation funded. Ginger and Daniel Fenwick run the program in their spare time. While the work involved can be demanding, they both emphasized how important it was to them.
"It's worth it to help people. When somebody tells you how much you've helped them, it really pulls at your heart," Daniel Fenwick said. "Regardless of who you are and what your background is, we can all help each other, and this is where we found a spot where we could help somebody."
Ginger Fenwick shared a similar sentiment. "It doesn't take a degree to make someone feel that they have value and that you care for them, and I think that's also what Dan and I really try to share with these folks, 'you're important to us'," she said. "Our goal was always just to help one [person] and we have succeeded beyond our dreams."
In weekly classes, veterans and first responders learn the art of beekeeping. Photos by Bees4Vets and Dfenwick Photography.
Support from Nevada Experiment Station
Bees4Vets is also made possible by the support of the Nevada Experiment Station. This partnership has allowed the nonprofit ample space to host students and the numerous beehives. The Station grows alfalfa, which not only nourishes the bees and gives them forage but having the bees helps with pollination of the plant. Chris Pritsos, director of the Nevada Experiment Station, called Bees4Vets "outstanding."
"One of the Experiment Station's missions is to provide support to Nevadans in the area of health and nutrition," he said. "Partnering with Bees4Vets is a great collaboration that allows us to help address that mission through agricultural practices while contributing to the health of our fields through pollination."
In the future, Ginger and Daniel Fenwick hope to expand upon what Bees4Vets can offer. They would like to add 10 more students to the class and eventually collaborate with someone who can also teach agricultural concepts to the participants. Because many of their veterans are also becoming farmers, Ginger Fenwick said having this additional training would be another way they could support their students' goals.
Pritsos was also optimistic about the future of Nevada Experiment Station's partnership with Bees4Vets. "We have had a very productive relationship with Bees4Vets program and anticipate continuing and expanding this relationship to not only provide much needed assistance to [veterans and first responders] but to also serve to train future beekeepers so vital to the agricultural and natural resources of this region," he said.
"Bees are agriculturally important because they are involved in pollinating many of the fruits and vegetables that we want to see when we walk into a grocery store," said Anne Leonard, associate professor of Biology in the University's College of Science with active research studying plant-pollinator interactions. "Honeybees in particular are responsible for the year-round availability of popular fruits and vegetables."
To learn more about the beekeeping program and how to get involved, visit the Bees4Vets website.
University of Nevada, Reno and University of Nevada, Las Vegas recognized as two of the nation's top research universities by Carnegie
Both Universities recieved R1 status in 2018
Several University programs organize new collaborative symposium to showcase work of more than 100 undergraduate students
Nevada Institute for Sustainability receives gifts from NextEra Energy Resources
The gifts will facilitate the development of a minor in sustainability.
Bahram Parvin advances breast cancer research
Electrical and Biomedical Engineering Professor Bahram Parvin and his lab have developed a novel method for treating breast cancer that promises to be more effective and less toxic than traditional treatments.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


3437 GRANTS SIDE Road - Beautiful custom log home on 26 treed acres. Property has trails throughout, mature fruit trees, stone walled perennial gardens and a large barn. Located in a tranquil setting, no neighbours in sight and just 20 minutes from Kanata. Home features a large wraparound deck (2018), maple hardwood floors, open-plan main floor with a gorgeous stone fireplace at its heart, double high ceilings, skylights and exposed beams. Modern kitchen, ample granite countertop and a large pantry. Ground floor also has a dining room, a main floor office, 3-piece bathroom/utility room, a mudroom with access to a single car garage, and a lovely sunroom with 7 new windows to enjoy the view. Upstairs has a loft and three bedrooms, with two offering access to a balcony and a 4-piece bathroom with new fixtures (2018). Unfinished basement with propane furnace, loads of storage, a cold room, and walkout access. The barn is serviced by its own electrical panel. Plenty of nature and stargazing on this hobby farm.
Bedroom 2nd 11' 6"x9' 6"
Den / Office Main 19'x10' 6"
Dining Room Main 15'x9' 6"


text:
Christmas in springtime
Inspecting Carol at Lakewood Playhouse
from left: Dana Galagan as Dorothy, Tyler Petty as Bart, Tim Hoban as Phil, Brittany Griffins as M.J., Jed Slaughter as Wayne, photo by Tim Johnson
Plays about incompetent theater companies putting on bad plays are so common as to be practically a genre of their own. Some are as bad as the absurd performances they satirize, but there have been a few on stage and screen that are outstanding. The classics of this type are Noises Off and the mockumentary film Waiting for Guffman. The Puget Sound region has its own home-grown entry in the genre, Inspecting Carol by Daniel Sullivan and the Seattle Repertory Company, which premiered at the Rep in 1991. Now it comes to Lakewood Playhouse with an outstanding ensemble cast led by Dennis Rolly, Jed Slaughter, Brittany Griffins, Mark Peterson and Shelleigh-Mairi Ferguson, directed by Jen York.
The Soapbox Playhouse has put on the same boring production of A Christmas Carol year after boring year. But this year things go even more wildly awry than usual. The company is broke, the kid playing Tiny Tim (Gunnar Ray as Luther/Tim) is growing up and is way too big for the part, the actor playing Scrooge (Rolly as Larry/Scrooge) wants to do it in Spanish, and the actor play Bob Cratchit (Tim Hoban as Phil/Bob) has had a one-time fling with the company founder and artistic director, Zorah Bloch (Steffanie Foster) who is now trying to seduce the new guy, Wayne Wellacre (Slaughter). And for reasons that should make no sense to any of them, the entire company thinks Wayne is the inspector from the National Endowment spying on them incognito as a would-be actor — which is apparently why Zorah is trying so hard to seduce him.
Like many a farce, it starts off rather slowly. Conversations between M.J. the stage manager (Griffins) and Karen (Ferguson), who handles the dwindling-to-non-existent finances, are only mildly funny but are needed to set the stage for the mayhem to follow.
The comedy really kicks into high hear when Slaughter first appears on the scene as a confused would-be actor who bursts into an impromptu monologue: "Now is the winter of our discontent …" from Richard III. This kind of comedy is something new to Slaughter, and it seems to be a role he was born to play.
Rolly is outstanding as the proud trouble maker Larry, who insists on changing everything and somehow gets away with it (up until but not including doing the play in Spanish). Rolly has been acting since the 1970s and has proven himself to be equally at ease with the silliest of comedies to the most demanding of tragedies, performing in more Shakespeare plays with Harlequin and the old Washington Shakespeare Festival than, probably, anyone. His range of emotions expressed in this performance is amazing. He assumes the character so completely that even when he's just standing on the side while other actors are interacting, he is thoroughly being Larry/Scrooge.
Also outstanding in this play are Bloch (hilarious in the seduction scene with Slaughter), Griffins who frantically tries to herd this company of misfits, and Peterson as the actor who hates everything about the show he's doing and can't learn his lines — partly because he was brought in at the last minute as a token black actor in Zorah's new commitment to multi-culturalism and partly because Larry keeps changing the script.
Blake York has come up with a purposefully unremarkable scenic design that is perfect for this play, and Stu Johnson has devised some crazy costumes — most notably the costumes Wayne is forced to wear as the various ghosts, including one he says makes him look like the ghost of Liberace.
For a lighthearted evening of laughter, take in Lakewood Playhouse's Christmas in springtime, Inspecting Carol.
Inspecting Carol 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through May 12, $26.00, $23.00 Military and seniors, $20.00 students and educators, pay what you can Feb. 28 and March 6-7, Lakewood Playhouse, 5729 Lakewood Towne Center Blvd. Lakewood, 253.588.0042, lakewoodplayhouse.org.
Posted by Alec Clayton at 7:46 AM
The Power of Youth
Tacoma little theatre's 'Off the Shelf' presents ...
Preview: Laura at Tacoma Little Theatre
In the footsteps of her ancestors
Mobbed Up for Murder
Olympia Family Theater launches Summer Stage
Collaboration transforms 950 Gallery
Abby E. Murray Selected as Tacoma's 2019-2021 Poet...
Mountains, thickets and tangles
Charlie Brown is still a good man


I would like to monitor my openstack deployment like get statistical data from NICs, hard drive usage, when a service goes down, when a vm gets created or deleted, statistical data from vms like network usage, hard drive usage, cpu usage. I have seen online that tools like Cacti and Nagios can do that but from my searches I could not find any information on how to do that. If someone that has done that before could point me in the right direction it would be awesome.
Definitely, if U have experience with Nagios/Sensu/Zabbix/etc - U can use any of them.


American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc. (APPI), is a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Psychiatric Association. Its purpose is twofold: to serve as the distributor of publications of the Association and to publish books independent of the policies and procedures of the American Psychiatric Association. APPI has grown since its founding in 1981 into a full-service publishing house, including a staff of editorial, production, marketing, and business experts devoted to publishing for the field of psychiatry and mental health.


text:
How Football Casuals Became Europe's First Sneakerheads
By Aleks Eror in Sneakers
Highsnobiety / DeAndre Holland
In Europe, when you use the words "terrace" or "casual," you tap into a subculture both ubiquitous in its backyard and obscure to outsiders. The terraces were where football fans stood before the introduction of all-seater stadiums, and the casuals were those fans most dedicated to style as they walked into those arenas. So when adidas recently reissued the Trimm Trab sneaker in its OG colorway, the German sportswear giant knew it was reviving a bona fide terrace classic.
Released in 1975 as part of a campaign to get lethargic West Germans to exercise more, by the early '80s the Trimm Trab had become the sneaker of choice for UK football casuals dressed in European designer sportswear by labels such as FILA, Sergio Tacchini, ellesse, Stone Island, and Lacoste (Fred Perry was a local favorite). In fact, it became so associated with the terraces that to this day the word "trabs" is slang for sneakers in Liverpool, one of the UK's most football-obsessed cities and a major center of casuals style.
Early in Nick Love's 2009 remake of classic 1989 hooligan film The Firm, Bex, leader of West Ham's Inter City Firm, can be seen trying on a pair of blue Trimm Trabs in a store. Lacing them up, he turns to the film's protagonist Dom and says, "There is only one trainer." And while plenty of classic models were also terrace favorites, this short tribute is a testament to the Trimm Trab's status among football casuals — arguably Europe's first sneakerheads.
And the Trim Trabb isn't the only cult terrace sneaker to come back into vogue. A few years ago, Europe descended into full-blown Stan Smith mania. I remember a trip to Paris in summer 2015 where it felt like every second person was wearing a pair of the iconic tennis sneakers.
The Stan Smith was reissued in 2014 after two years off the market. As i-D put it around that time, "Stan Smith is to trainers as Levi's are to jeans and Kim Kardashian's Instagram is to selfies: the ultimate expression of the form."
When I bought my first pair in 2007, however, the only people you saw wearing them were those whose tastes hadn't changed since the '80s or wannabe casuals such as myself. But with the reissue came Raf Simons applying his own deft touch to the silhouette and suddenly it exploded.
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Although no other casuals silhouette has come close to achieving the Stan Smith's level of prominence in the current market, the adidas Gazelle has probably come closest. The 2016 "Vintage Suede" pack saw the '60s icon reissued in three classic colorways that reminded the world of its understated style.
Like the Trimm Trab and Stan Smith, the Gazelle was an ever-present on the terraces in the '80s and enjoyed a revival in the '90s Britpop era, with Noel Gallagher of Oasis one of many to bring back the style. (Incidentally, Oasis' great rivals Blur had a song called "Trimm Trabb" on post-Britpop 1999 album 13.) The Gallagher brothers, lest we forget, are rabid Manchester City fans, and the two have probably done more than anyone to nudge terrace style into the mainstream — aside from Drake, of course.
If you've read to this point, you'll probably have noticed a pattern emerging: every sneaker discussed so far is by adidas. And that's without mentioning the adidas Originals SPEZIAL collection — a big influence on the resurgence of terrace fashion — the Campus, or the Samba, a sneaker so popular among Liverpool fans that since 2011 they have been spraypainting a pair gold and giving them to the fans' players of the season.
The Three Stripes was doubtless the biggest footwear brand among football casuals, but it isn't the only one to keep the flame alive. In recent times, old-school Reebok matchday favorites have experienced a return to prominence through collabs with Palace and Gosha Rubchinskiy. Likewise, last year, Italian label Diadora mined its history as a casuals favorite by enlisting West Ham hooligan-turned-author Cass Pennant to pose in its B.Elite silhouette for a promo campaign.
Before the casuals look became de rigueur, British football hooligans were more likely to wear Dr. Martens-style boots. This was part of a skinhead subculture that shifted from Jamaican-influenced, music-loving, and largely peaceable in the '60s to its infiltration by the far right in the '70s and '80s. And as hooliganism became the "English disease," these elements started to commingle — although simple club rivalries remained the hooligans' primary motivation.
As well as the greater availability of international products as European markets opened, the shift toward sneakers on the terraces could have been driven just as much by practical considerations as by style and commerce. With rival fan "firms" getting into brawls outside stadiums, wearing something better suited for running — either from opposing fans or the police — was merely logical. Likewise, clothing choices — ditching team colors for designer gear — gave away-team fans an element of camouflage.
That's not to suggest all casuals were hooligans, although there was a lot of overlap. But since the end of English football's hooligan era in the late '80s and early '90s, the resurgence of terrace style from the Britpop era onwards has been about the look alone.
It's said that fashions fade but style is eternal, and there's a simplicity that makes silhouettes such as the Stan Smith and Gazelle timeless. Unlike chunky sneakers, there's no ironic contrarianism, only what's simple, smart, and classic. The popularity of terrace-favorite sneakers will experience its peaks and troughs — you don't see quite so many Stan Smiths these days — but these shoes will never be the subject of mockery among future generations like bellbottoms, mullets, and perhaps the Balenciaga Triple S. Familiarize yourself with these terrace icons, because they're not going anywhere.
To stay updated on everything happening in the sneaker world, follow @Highsnobietysneakers on Instagram, check our sneaker release date calendar, and subscribe to our sneaker chatbot on Facebook to receive lightning quick updates to your inbox.
Words by Aleks Eror
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Roko is a Croatian masculine given name, cognate to Italian Rocco and Slovene Rok. It is related to the veneration of Saint Roch ().

Notable people with the name include:

 Roko Badžim (born 1997), Croatian basketball player
 Roko Baturina (born 2000), Croatian football player
 Roko Belic, an American film director, producer, cinematographer, and actor
 Roko Blažević (born 2000), Croatian singer
 Roko Glasnović (born 1978), Croatian cleric
 Roko Jureškin (born 2000), Croatian football player
 Roko Karanušić (born 1982), Croatian tennis player
 Roko Mišlov (born 1988), Croatian football player
 Roko Pelicarić (born 1998), Croatian water polo player
 Roko Prkačin (born 2002), Croatian basketball player
 Roko Strika (born 1994), Australian football player of Croatian descent
 Roko Šimić (born 2003), Croatian football player
 Roko Tošić (born 1979), Croatian table tennis player
 Roko Ukić (born 1984), Croatian basketball player

Croatian masculine given names

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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You are at:Home»Latest News»'THE END FOR ME? I DON'T KNOW,' ANSWERS LENNY
'THE END FOR ME? I DON'T KNOW,' ANSWERS LENNY
By CQN Magazine on	 6th December 2020 Latest News
NEIL LENNON admits he doesn't know if it is the end for him at Celtic.
The pressure is mounting on the beleaguered manager after the champions threw away two more careless points in the 1-1 draw against St Johnstone at Parkhead today.
The most recent flop means the Hoops have dropped more points after 14 games than they did in last season's truncated 30-game Premiership campaign where they won their ninth successive title.
This time around, they have been a shadow of that all-conquering outfit as they squandered ELEVEN points with a defeat against Steven Gerrard's Ibrox side and draws against Kilmarnock, Aberdeen, Hibs and now the Perth side.
Last term, they conceded 10, losing twice and drawing twice.
The team's abysmal performances have also seen them knocked out of the Champions League, Europa League Cup and Betfred League Cup inside three months while slumping 13 points adrift of the Govan club although they have two games in hand.
TROUBLE IN PARADISE…Neil Lennon during yje 1-1 stalemate against St Johnstone.
The furious fans are clamouring for the manager's head with the team, who play Hearts in the delayed Scottish Cup Final in a fortnight's time, in danger of toppling into oblivion before the turn of the year.
Lennon, 49, speaking to BBC Sportsound, said: "Do I feel it's the end for me? I don't know
"Can I turn it around? I've done nothing but try and bring success to the club, we're going through a real bad period at the minute. I've been through bad periods before.
"Can I turn it around? Yeah, of course I can. Will I get the time to do it? Well, I've already been told the club are with me.
"But it's a results-driven business and results aren't what they should be.
"It's not a question of me feeling I deserve anything, I'm grateful for the opportunity to manage this club and I am very proud to continue to do so."
Lennon was clearly irked when BBC reporter Kheredine Idessane asked whether or not time was up.
The Hoops gaffer answered: "I don't fear anything, you're asking all these negative questions, Kheridine, you're asking questions about my job.
"The club have already come out this week and said they back me, what more do you want them to do?
"I agree, the results aren't good enough, it will improve, I have no question of that, whether it's on me or not, we'll wait and see.
"But I cannot answers questions that you're asking."
Celtic had to rely on a header from substitute Mohamed Elyounoussi to give them a point after the Saints had scored through Chris Kane with their only shot on target.
The home defence have had only one clean sheet in their last 12 games while conceding 28 goals.
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YouTube Makeup guru Aaliyah Jay specializes in more than just beauty. The stunning Bombshell makes Fashion Nova's 'Sophia' satin romper look effortless and stylish. Petite with a tiny stature, the romper accentuates her legs and allows you to play with many style options. From casual, or like Aaliyah styles it, with a trendy pair of sleek Louboutins. It's safe to say it's pretty easy to dress up or down this Bomb fashion find for a steal of $35. Available in hunter green as well, you can find it here, bombers!


Cardiff Docks is a port in South Cardiff, Wales. At its peak, the port was one of the largest dock systems in the world with a total quayage of almost 11 km (6.8 mi). Once the main port for the export of South Wales coal, the Port of Cardiff remains active in the import and export of containers, steel, forest products and dry and liquid bulks.
Following the development of the coal found in the Cynon and Rhondda valley's and Merthyr area of South Wales, the export of both coal and iron products required a sea connection to the Bristol Channel if economic volumes of product were to be created.
In 1794, the Glamorganshire Canal was completed, linking the then small town of Cardiff with Merthyr, and in 1798 a basin was built, connecting the canal to the sea. By the 1830s, Cardiff became the pre-eminent iron-exporting port, shipping almost half of British overseas iron exports; between 1840 and 1870, the volume of coal exports increased from 44,350 to 2.219 million tonnes.
Increasing agitation for proper dock facilities led Cardiff's foremost landowner, John Crichton-Stuart, 2nd Marquess of Bute, to promote the construction of the (West) Bute Dock, opened in October 1839. Just two years later, the Taff Vale Railway was opened, following much the same route as the canal.
With the construction of the new East Bute Dock from 1855, built by Thomas Cubitt's firm, its opening in 1859 resulted in coal supplanting iron as the industrial foundation of South Wales, with exports reaching 2 million tons as early as 1862.
Frustration at the lack of development at Cardiff led to rival docks being opened at Penarth in 1865 and Barry, Wales in 1889.
These developments eventually spurred Cardiff into action, with the opening of the Roath Dock in 1887, and the Queen Alexandra Dock in 1907. By then, coal exports from the South Wales Coalfield via Cardiff totalled nearly 9 million tons per annum, much of it exported in the holds of locally owned tramp steamers. By 1913, this had risen to 10,700,000 tons, making Cardiff the biggest coal exporting dock in the world.
Cardiff's first steamship was the Llandaff of 1865, and by 1910, there were some 250 tramp steamers owned at Cardiff, by prominent firms such as William Cory & Son, Morel, Radcliffe, Tatem and Reardon-Smith. Each day, the principals of these companies would meet to arrange cargoes of coal for their ships in the opulent Coal Exchange in Mount Stuart Square. This trade reached its pinnacle in 1913, when 10.7 million tons of coal were exported from the port. After the First World War, there was a boom in shipping in Cardiff, with 122 shipping companies in existence in 1920. The boom proved short-lived, however; oil was growing in importance as a maritime fuel, and the terms of the Treaty of Versailles soon flooded Europe with cheap German reparation coal.
The Taff Vale Railway was built to transport coal from the South Wales Valleys to the docks. Its headquarters were a currently derelict building in Cardiff Bay railway station. The building was turned into a railway heritage centre in 1979 by the Butetown Historic Railway Society. By 1994 the Society had started to run steam locomotive hauled passenger services up and down 500 metres of track. However, as the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation had no interest in the railway, the Society changed its name to the Vale of Glamorgan Railway and moved from the site in 1997 to Barry Island railway station.
From 1910 onwards capacity issues meant that the more modern and less tidal Barry Docks took over as the largest volume export point of coal. Until the early 1920s, Cardiff docks continued to boom as a location for shipping companies, but the fall in demand for Welsh coal caused a dramatic fall in exports. By 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression which followed the General Strike in 1926, coal exports had fallen to below 5 million tonnes and dozens of locally owned ships were laid-up. Despite intense activity at the port during the Second World War and the attentions of the Nazi German Luftwaffe during the Cardiff Blitz, coal exports continued to decline, finally ceasing in 1964. In 1950, imports outstripped exports for the first time in the port's history. The 1970s saw a short-term import boom, and in the 1980s the port experienced a slight rise in traffic, while much of the former port area began to be regenerated into non-port uses. The port found a niche as an important local centre for general cargo operations.
Cardiff now has three operational docks capable of handling ships of up to 35,000 tons deadweight. The port has transit sheds with 258,500 m2 (2,782,000 sq ft) of storage space, two overland distribution sheds totalling 13,870 m2 (149,300 sq ft), and two timber sheds totalling 13,870 m2 (149,300 sq ft), two specialist steel sheds, with overhead gantry cranes, totalling 15,000 m2 (160,000 sq ft). There are 9 quayside cranes plus a range of mobile cranes. Cardiff's specialised facilities include a distribution terminal and chill and cold storage for perishables.
Tiger Bay was a local nickname for the general Cardiff Docks area, the evocative phrase deriving from the area's rough-and-tumble reputation. Merchant seamen arrived in Cardiff from all over the world, only staying for as long as it took to discharge and reload their ships: consequently many murders and lesser crimes went unsolved and unpunished, the perpetrators having sailed for other ports. In Victorian times, the name "Tiger Bay" was used in popular literature and slang (especially that of sailors) to denote any dock or seaside neighbourhood which shared a similar notoriety for danger.


Making mixtures of belly burners, energy boosters, party favors, always sounds delicious and innovative. Knowing what ingredients to add in your drink is the tricky part. Instead of throwing a bunch of fruits or vegetables in the blender try a few DIY beverages that specifically targets what you are aiming for.
If you are throwing a party, there are some mix drinks that are healthier than others, and with the right ingredient in the blender you won't hurt or damage your diet. As an alternative to drinking an original martini, try a healthier version by adding 2½ oz. of sour mix and ¾ oz. of sour apple liqueur and vodka each. This drink is called the sour-apple martini that is approximately 160 calories. For more fun add a slice of apple and you can enjoy a healthy cocktail.
Most if not all students cash tend to go to books or other expenses and simply do not have extra money for groceries. So, if you are not able to buy all these ingredients don't sweat it. Coffee and tea, especially green tea, are just as healthy without adding any sweeteners. And you can never go wrong with drinking a glass of water. Water that is safe is the best choice when it comes to healthy beverages. It is pure H2O that restores fluids and the removal of waste.
If you're into the party scene and after a week of partying or "pigging" out try Dr. Oz's 3-Day Detox Cleanse. This detox is said to help replenish your body and eliminate harmful toxins for only $16 a day!
Making healthy a DIY beverage is a blend of fun, healthy and nutritious benefits!
When you don't feel comfortable enough to work out around others, where do you work-out? Your room. You don't need a big space to make big moves and to get big results. You just need to know what exercises to do.
"I do P90X ab ripper DVD. I just watch the videos online and do them next to my bed," one college senior said.
Other exercises you can do in a smaller atmosphere are push-ups and squats. Strength exercises with resistant bands are great workouts as well.
Doing leg extensions, front squats and pull aparts with the resistant band can also be done in your room.
Small equipment like resistant bands, dumbbells, and ab wheels are perfect for dorms. They're portable and easy to store. And they help with some of the exercises that target specific parts of your body.
You can also find a full detailed list of exercises you can do online.
To tone your legs and butts, squats are the go to exercise for most if not all. Some even take on the 100 squats for 30 days challenge and are amazed with their results. If you like a bit of a challenge, adding dumbbells to your routine increases results and resistance.
If you don't have any workout equipment, try not to sweat it, because you don't necessarily need any. Your body is a work out equipment itself. You can always find space to do jumping jacks, to help you improve the time it takes to recover intense workouts and elevate your metabolism for about an hour which some people are not aware of. Push-ups and crunches are another workout you can do in a small place. To take your push-ups to the next level try doing the Spiderman pushups where you bend your elbows out to the side and lift one foot off the floor, bending the knee to the side up to hip level.
"Most of the time when I'm in the gym, I'm doing drills with just my body anyway. So I find working out in my room a lot easier," another student said.
Push-ups, squats, and crunches are only a few to thousands of workouts that you don't need a machine or gym to do. You can do them in the comfort of your own dorm room.


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Tag Archives: Doug Supernaw
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