Figure 1: a) The exergame is based on a computer-controlled stationary exercycle and played while wearing a head-mounted display. b) A "self modelling cue" helps the player to identify a "ghost" avatar with their own previous performance. c) Low-intensity cycling and avoiding trucks during warm-up, recovery and cool-down phases. d) High-intensity race against the "ghost."

A key requirement for a sense of presence in Virtual Environments (VEs) is for a user to perceive space as naturally as possible. One critical aspect is distance perception. When judging distances, compression is a phenomenon where humans tend to underestimate the distance between themselves and target objects (termed egocentric or absolute compression), and between other objects (exocentric or relative compression). Results of studies in virtual worlds rendered through head mounted displays are striking, demonstrating significant distance compression error. Distance compression is a multisensory phenomenon, where both audio and visual stimuli are often compressed with respect to their distances from the observer. In this paper, we propose and test a method for reducing crossmodal distance compression in VEs. We report an empirical evaluation of our method via a study of 3D spatial perception within a virtual reality (VR) head mounted display. Applying our method resulted in more accurate distance perception in a VE at longer range, and suggests a modification that could adaptively compensate for distance compression at both shorter and longer ranges. Our results have a significant and intriguing implication for designers of VEs: an incongruent audiovisual display, i.e. where the audio and visual information is intentionally misaligned, may lead to better spatial perception of a virtual scene.

This work presents a novel hand pose estimation framework via intermediate dense guidance map supervision. By leveraging the advantage of predicting heat maps of hand joints in detection-based methods, we propose to use dense feature maps through intermediate supervision in a regression-based framework that is not limited to the resolution of the heat map. Our dense feature maps are delicately designed to encode the hand geometry and the spatial relation between local joint and global hand. The proposed framework significantly improves the stateof-the-art in both 2D and 3D on the recent benchmark datasets.

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Objective: This article reports on the evaluation of The School Attendance Demonstration Project (SADP). SADP is an intervention aimed at improving the school attendance rates of 16-to 18-year-olds receiving public assistance. Method: Experimental group students attending school less than 80% of the time received a notice to attend an orientation for services. Students who continued to attend school less than 80%, did not attend the orientation, and could not show good cause for attendance were sanctioned. The study used a control group with random assignment. Results: Data show that in any month, more experimental group students met the attendance rule than did control group students. Logistic regression predicted that females, Hispanics, students from single-parent families, and those attending alternative schools had difficulty meeting attendance requirements. Conclusions: The findings suggest that at-risk teens need alternative strategies from sanctions to encourage school attendance.

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Perception of distances in virtual reality (VR) is compressed: objects are consistently perceived as closer than intended. Although this phenomenon has been well documented, it is still not fully understood or defined with respect to the factors influencing such compression. This is a problem in scenarios where veridical perception of distance and scale is essential. We report the results of an experiment investigating an approach to reducing distance compression in audiovisual VR based on a predictive model of distance perception. Our test environment involved photorealistic 3D images captured through stereo photography, with corresponding spatial audio rendered binaurally over headphones. In a perceptual matching task, participants positioned an auditory stimulus with respect to the corresponding visual stimulus. We found a high correlation between the distance perception predicted by our model and how participants perceived the distance. Through automated manipulation of the audio and visual displays based on the model, our approach can be used to reposition auditory and visual components of a scene to reduce distance compression. The approach is adaptable to different environments and agnostic of scene content, and can be calibrated to individual observers.

An anonymous Web-based survey was used to gather the perceptions and experiences from 114 faculty members teaching in 16 social work programs in the California State University system about the effect of severe budget cuts on their educational activities. Most respondents reported they worked on their furlough days and maintained the same or larger workload that they had before the furlough. Larger workloads, diminished feelings of personal accomplishment, and stressful interactions with students were associated with higher levels of emotional exhaustion. Implications of these findings are discussed.The California Master Plan of 1960 for education guaranteed an affordable high-quality undergraduate and graduate education for all Californians. According to the plan, the top one-eighth of the state's high school graduates were eligible to enter one the 10 schools making up the University of California (UC) system. The UC system contained some of the worid's best research institutions. The top third of the state's high school graduates were funneled toward the 23 campuses making up the California State University (CSU) system. The CSU is the state's main mechanism for developing the California's professional and managerial class, including the preparation of social workers. Sixteen of the state's 18 public programs for educating graduatelevel social workers are located in the CSU. Two UC schools have master's of social work (MSW) programs, but unlike the CSU schools they do not have bachelor of social work (BSW) programs. Only two private schools in California prepare MSWs (Sunshine, 2010).The Great Recession resulted in the worst economic crisis for higher education since the 1930s. This crisis was particulariy bleak in California. Faced with a $40 billion deficit, the state government instituted draconian budget cuts. The CSU system lost $500 million in funding. These reductions resulted in faculty layoffs, furloughs for remaining faculty, reducing faculty recruitment, course cancellations, increased class sizes, and student enrollment caps (Mortenson, 2009).Accompanying these cuts were steep tuition and fee increases for students that were 50% higher than those levied by private institutions in the state (Marcus, 2009). The core components of California's Master Plan for higher education of providing low-cost, universal access.