Masculinity and militarisation under an illiberal democratic regime

Rebecca Tapscott explores how Uganda's ruling regime leverages tensions between masculine ideal-types to govern young men in the informal security sector

The government has long hands

Rebecca Tapscott highlights some of the findings from her recently published paper ‘The Government Has Long Hands: Community Security Groups and Arbitrary Governance in Uganda’s Acholiland‘ (JSRP Paper 24

Open source and consumption

This article illuminates the common concepts and widely-observed practices concerning open source. Positioning 'open-source' as a common practice and a viable methodology for collaborative participatory co-production in today's knowledge society, the article explains how open-source co-production participatory methods, now also seen in mundane cultural, food and beverage production and consumption, evolve from the Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement, what motivate people to participate, and how such practices implicate in different sectors in contemporary societies. This article argues that the open-source practices resemble the amateur DIY cultures and can be considered as a lifestyle, elected and subscribed by some. Open source suggests that consumption is no longer simply a passive activity; it could be a personal statement, a liberating, creative and varied experience

Optimizing Player and Viewer Amusement in Suspense Video Games

Broadcast video games need to provide amusement to both players and audience. To achieve this, one of the most consumed genres is suspense, due to the psychological effects it has on both roles. Suspense is typically achieved in video games by controlling the amount of delivered information about the location of the threat. However, previous research suggests that players need more frequent information to reach similar amusement than viewers, even at the cost of jeopardizing viewers' engagement. In order to obtain models that maximize amusement for both interactive and passive audiences, we conducted an experiment in which a group of subjects played a suspenseful video game while another group watched it remotely. The subjects were asked to report their perceived suspense and amusement, and the data were used to obtain regression models for two common strategies to evoke suspense in video games: by alerting when the threat is approaching and by random circumstantial indications about the location of the threat. The results suggest that the optimal level is reached through randomly providing the minimal amount of information that still allows players to counteract the threat.We reckon that these results can be applied to a broad narrative media, beyond interactive games

Microstates of a Neutral Black Hole in M Theory

We consider vacuum solutions in M theory of the form of a five-dimensional Kaluza-Klein black hole cross T^6. In a certain limit, these include the five-dimensional neutral rotating black hole (cross T^6). From a IIA standpoint, these solutions carry D0 and D6 charges. We show that there is a weakly coupled D-brane description which precisely reproduces the Hawking-Bekenstein entropy in the extremal limit, even though supersymmetry is completely broken.Comment: 11 pages. v2: microstate counting extended to generic angular moment

(In)security groups and governance in Gulu, Uganda

Last November, at three in the morning, a man was murdered on the street not far outside Gulu Town. There were tens of witnesses, yet there was no investigation, no prosecution, and no compensation provided to the victim’s family. A common reflection on the event was that the victim “did good to die”

Characterizing and modeling the dynamics of online popularity

Online popularity has enormous impact on opinions, culture, policy, and profits. We provide a quantitative, large scale, temporal analysis of the dynamics of online content popularity in two massive model systems, the Wikipedia and an entire country's Web space. We find that the dynamics of popularity are characterized by bursts, displaying characteristic features of critical systems such as fat-tailed distributions of magnitude and inter-event time. We propose a minimal model combining the classic preferential popularity increase mechanism with the occurrence of random popularity shifts due to exogenous factors. The model recovers the critical features observed in the empirical analysis of the systems analyzed here, highlighting the key factors needed in the description of popularity dynamics.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Modeling part detailed. Final version published in Physical Review Letter