#path matrix of powers in adjacency matrix

[aggravateddurian]

"Attention Dogtown residents! This is V. As of this moment, I am imposing a state of emergency during the transition of power. Colonel Hansen's death at the hands of Arasaka agents is a shock to us all, but I assure you that they paid the price with their blood." "There will be changes to the way we do things in Dogtown, and there will be some who will attempt to resist change. This message is directed towards them: fall into line, leave Dogtown, or suffer the consequences of doing business the 'old way.' There's a new vision for Dogtown: my vision. If you can't handle the idea of making Dogtown a true beacon of freedom, then the gate is right there."

A self-indulgent AU where V becomes leader of Barghest and Dogtown, and decides to use Hansen's wealth to make Dogtown a place people want to live. Cue numerous assassination attempts and Myers seething and throwing her agent at Reed every time she sees him (yes, this will be this AU's running gag, like Mitch's coffee machine for Brother's Shadow).

I'm going with a softer approach than I initially intended. I was going to turn V into just as much a warlord as Kurt, but a discussion I had yesterday with @wayfaringellie made me realise that I don't really think V would become that, unless she was a completely amoral corpo bloodsucker. None of my Vs, or V-adjacent OCs, are ever like that, except for Vince at the start of Brother's Shadow (but he was also a Corpo, so it makes sense).

There are some (like Takemura) who would swear to kill V, or cut V out of their life, but I think that most people in V's life would at least be optimistically wary (knowing V) to downright supportive (enter Rogue, Mr Hands). This leads me to V's relationship with Judy, which will be tried at times.

In much the same way that Judy believes in the idea of the Mox, she likes the idea of V using all of Hansen's misbegotten wealth to actually help the people of Dogtown, to make it a place where the downtrodden can actually live a life of dignity. V aims to make the old Barghest propaganda true. She's also worried that V's drive to make Dogtown an actual paradise might drive V down the same path as Hansen.

She wants to believe that V is still a good person, the same V she fell in love with, before she fell in with Barghest, and became enamoured with the idea of fixing Dogtown.

Ultimately, V proves to be the same V she fell in love with before she underwent her treatment using the Neural Matrix she stole from Hansen, but V is so worried that she's slipping down Hansen's path (and more than a little worried that she might lose Judy) that whenever she's worried her plans might be extreme, she checks to see Judy's reaction. This means that essentially, Judy is, to a degree, dictating the future of Dogtown.

V always jokes that Judy has her leash, ready to pull it if she starts barking at the neighbours. Trust me, the double entendre of Judy having V on a leash is not unrecognised, but I need to fit as many dog puns into the Barghest AU.

"Has anyone noticed that all the serious decisions in here are being made by a girl who edits smut BDs for a living?" - Jago Szabó, 2078

[sjerzgirl]

Good morning! As the country reels from economic sabotage, international chaos, and billionaires playing messiah on social media, one thing is becoming painfully clear: California may be the last adult in the room, and Gavin Newsom just poured himself a triple espresso and started drafting his own foreign policy.

In a move that’s part constitutional dare, part soft-secession, Newsom declared that California won’t be following Trump’s "Liberation Day" tariffs, which have detonated markets, delayed critical imports, and introduced the largest tax hike on working families in over 50 years. “California is not Washington, D.C.,” he posted defiantly, as if someone had just challenged him to a duel with spreadsheets and carbon credits. He’s now openly courting China, Canada, and Mexico to forge trade partnerships directly with the state, treaty-adjacent, sure, but not quite treaties. It’s all technically illegal-ish, but deeply Californian.

With 40 million residents and a $3.9 trillion economy, California is the fifth-largest economy in the world, richer than India, the UK, or France. So when Newsom says, “We’re not standing idly by,” it’s not just political theater. It’s a constitutional stress test. Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, is unlikely to approve exemptions, but Newsom’s making clear: If D.C. won’t lead, Sacramento might.

And speaking of people who think they’re leading, Elon Musk is back in full martyr mode. In a 24-hour spiral of posts, Musk accused Senator Chuck Schumer of benefitting from “government fraud” and declared, during a Fox News segment, that unnamed forces want to “kill [him]” for stopping waste and corruption. It’s hard to keep track of whether Musk is fighting the deep state or just rage-quitting Path of Exile again after losing to a tutor. Either way, he’s tweeting like a man who thinks he’s Neo from The Matrix but is coming off more like Tommy Wiseau with WiFi.

Meanwhile, the real corruption Musk refuses to see is happening right next door. At a Democratic-led shadow hearing (yes, that’s a real thing now), former DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer testified that she was fired for refusing to help Mel Gibson get his gun rights back. What followed was a whirlwind of intimidation, including a letter delivered by armed U.S. Marshals while her teenage child was home alone. It was a scene straight out of a dystopian drama, only this one stars Todd Blanche, Trump’s former lawyer turned Deputy AG, playing enforcer for the regime. Oyer’s defiance was clear: “I will not be bullied into concealing the ongoing corruption and abuse of power at the Department of Justice.”

And just when you thought this trade war couldn’t get any more surreal, the Chinese Embassy itself joined the roast, quoting none other than Ronald Reagan to mock Trump’s tariffs.

“The most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

Yes, that’s a Reagan quote being weaponized by a foreign power to highlight the absurdity of Trump’s “America First” economic sabotage. When even Beijing is dragging you with conservative icons, maybe it’s time to admit your strategy is less “4D chess” and more “throw the board off the table and blame immigrants.”

Down in Texas, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shocked his anti-vax loyalists by endorsing the MMR vaccine during a deadly measles outbreak, prompting howls of betrayal from the same crew that helped launch him into office. Dr. Magnetism herself, Sherri Tenpenny, said there was “no excuse” for such a “poorly worded statement.” Del Bigtree is in denial, insisting Kennedy’s post “got cut off,” while others are crying foul over what they see as a full establishment heel-turn. It’s a twist so sharp it could rupture a spleen. But don’t worry, Kennedy tried to make it up to them by promoting budesonide and clarithromycin, neither of which treat measles and both of which might do more harm than good. If this is pandemic Redux, we’re watching the remix with worse DJs.

And for those still wondering how all this affects regular people: Ask Bradley Bartell, a Trump voter who just spent six weeks fighting to free his wife Camila Muñoz from ICE detention after their honeymoon. Camila overstayed a visa during the pandemic lockdown and has no criminal record. That didn’t stop ICE from detaining her for 49 days without charges, without a court date, and shipping her to Louisiana, far from her home in Wisconsin. Bartell drove 15 hours to see her, paid a $3,000 bond, and now questions everything. “Why not use an ankle monitor?” he asked. It’s a good question, especially in a country where mass fraud is forgiven on Wall Street, but marriage to a citizen gets you imprisoned.

Markets are collapsing. Trade partners are retaliating. Measles is killing children again. And Elon Musk is broadcasting live from inside his own persecution complex while operating a federal surveillance agency with no oversight. Meanwhile, California is flirting with the idea of being its own country, and at this rate, who could blame them?

This is not politics as usual. It’s a stress test on every American institution, and the cracks are showing in real time. From public health to immigration to the rule of law, the system isn’t just wobbling, it’s being hollowed out, co-opted, and streamed for clicks.

Stay focused. Stay loud. Stay sane.

#elonmusk #GavinNewsom #california #measles #RFKjr

[emilyratajkowski164395]

In network science, embedding refers to the process of transforming nodes, edges, or entire network structures into a lower-dimensional space while preserving the network's essential relationships and properties. Network embeddings are particularly valuable for machine learning applications, as they allow complex, non-Euclidean data (like a social network) to be represented in a structured, high-dimensional vector format that algorithms can process.

Building on the concept of embeddings in network science, these transformations unlock several advanced applications by enabling traditional machine learning and deep learning methods to operate effectively on graph data. A key advantage of embeddings is their ability to encode structural and relational information about nodes in a network into compact, dense vectors. This allows complex, sparse graphs to be represented in a way that preserves both local connections (like close friendships) and global structure (like communities within the network).

There are multiple approaches to generating these embeddings, each with its own strengths:

Random Walk-based Methods: Techniques like DeepWalk and node2vec use random walks to capture the network’s context for each node, similar to how word embeddings like Word2Vec capture word context. By simulating paths along the graph, these methods learn node representations that reflect both immediate neighbors and broader network structure.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs): Graph neural networks, including variants like Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and Graph Attention Networks (GATs), use neural architectures designed specifically for graph data. GNNs aggregate information from neighboring nodes, creating embeddings that adaptively capture the influence of each node’s surroundings. This is especially useful in tasks that require understanding both individual and community-level behavior, such as fraud detection or personalized recommendations.

Matrix Factorization Techniques: These methods, like LINE (Large-scale Information Network Embedding), decompose the graph adjacency matrix to find latent factors that explain connections within the network. Matrix factorization can be effective for representing highly interconnected networks, such as knowledge graphs, where the relationships between entities are intricate and abundant.

Higher-order Proximity Preserving Methods: Techniques like HOPE (High-Order Proximity preserved Embeddings) go beyond immediate neighbors, capturing higher-order structural relationships in the network. This approach helps model long-distance relationships, like discovering latent social or biological connections.

Temporal Network Embeddings: When networks evolve over time (e.g., dynamic social interactions or real-time communication networks), temporal embeddings capture changes by learning patterns across network snapshots, allowing predictive tasks on network evolution, like forecasting emerging connections or trends.

Network embeddings are powerful across disciplines. In financial networks, embeddings can model transaction patterns to detect anomalies indicative of fraud. In transportation networks, embeddings facilitate route optimization and traffic prediction. In academic and citation networks, embeddings reveal hidden relationships between research topics, leading to novel insights. Moreover, with visualization tools, embeddings make it possible to explore vast networks, highlighting community structures, influential nodes, and paths of information flow, ultimately transforming how we analyze complex interconnections across fields.

[theinsanecrayonbox]

some half thoughts about how a canon-adjacent Sister RElocation AU could unfold (as in the AU starts, but instead of the Funrocks all arriving and battle of the bands ensues, Lols and Bonnet arrive and then game as usual)

Bonnet and Lolbit are still not fully synced with the Faznetwork, so they are not affected by the OTA update that uploaded the virus into the other animatronics. as a result, they were both "quarantined" before the update; Bonnet in Bonnie Bowl, Lolbit in...uh...idk actually. but Freddy's reaction to the OTA update distracted from Vanny doing a direct hardwire update to those two.

SO, Gregory finds Lols while to try to find the hurt Freddy to help him; they fill him in on what's going on the best they can, and they end up guiding him through the Fazwatch while Freddy is having connection issues. when they end up in Parts and Services, there's some hardware missing to properly fix Freddy, so that's an extra fetch quest for Gregory to complete alone, leading to him crossing paths with Vanny more, who has realized that the Funrocks are loose too. Lols ends up staying in Parts and Services after Freddy is fixed, to finish the hardware repairs and also to try to find the route source of the virus to take it out, so Freddy and Gregory go on the usual parts hunt.

now the main divergences:

if you go the Fazerblaster/Chica voice box route, you run into Bonnet in Bonnie Bowl. she's not a threat, but Vanny does show up. Gregory gets to hide, but sees the scene of Vanny kinda violently attack to infect Bonnet, before dragging her off (with some comment about "it's always the rabbits" or something). and then from then on, Bonnet is now also a roaming threat, similar to Moon. when Gregory gets back to Parts and Services with the voice box and tells Lols about Bonnet, they decide they have to leave to go check on her; later on, Lols contacts him through the watch revealing that they too have gotten infected, but the main source of corruption seems to be coming from Roxy Raceway.

if you go the Fazcamera/Monty's claws route, when Gregory arrives to Parts and Services with the claws, Lols becomes very angry and immediately ditches him. thus when Gregory goes back out, he'll run into Bonnet who reveals that Lols has been corrupted and is now hunting him down too. Lols' eyes can be harvested like Roxy's, because Lols sees the matrix code and whatnot, so similar enough. Gregory ends up having to run a maze case through the Fazcade with Lols chasing him down instead of the Roxy Raceway chase then (so I guess instead Bonnet goes to the Raceway to fills in the "the power drain is from down there" line, because Vanny catches her and drags her down there still but she's slightly more coherent)

onto Ruin!

Cassie finds Bonnet locked down in the Daycare Theater's storage I guess, having gone a little nutty being so isolated. she's colored herself half blue, having split herself between herself and her imaginary missing brother. dunno how Cassie resolves her...she lets her out, so Bonnet kinda runs loose now, but isn't really a threat...

Lols though is in the Fazcade, consumed by all the stripped game cabinet wires, plastered and strung up against the wall. Cassie probably stumbles upon them because they see Monty exiting the Fazcade randomly and is curious what that's all about despite Helpi telling her not to go near there. in reality, they are dormant; in AR though, it is a boss battle time. very similar to Greg's Fazcade maze chase, but this time there's wire tentacles that jut from the walls too. and if Cassie puts the mask in Lols' presence, it cannot be removed until the event is finished.

[towers-angel]

I appreciate your willingness to help - though, I am not the one that made said miscalculation. My,... companion, (of whomst is currently hiding in my bag out of embarrassment) was the one to make said mistake.

Guardian,...

Nonetheless - it is not the time that is the problem, it is the universal travel itself. I was under the guise that the equations used by our rune-adjacent matrix were fixed on a more linear path than it seems they are - that is something I will have to bring up with my own.. scientist, if I am to ever make it back.

And although I will always be thankful and grateful for your help or attempts at helping - I cannot help but feel guilty that you might spend any lengthy amounts of time trying to.

My own lifespan has been elongated indefinitely by the powers of machine and magic that I do not even attempt to properly comprehend - and no, it is not the same mix of magic and machine that you have no doubt attempted to sway from in your own timelines - and I cannot assume how your own lifespan works, of course. But I can only imagine how much time you might have left in your life to fix your own universes problems.

...And again, you remind me so much of someone I know back home. And I know that he only has so much time left- even if he wishes to deny it. I suppose I cannot help the imprintation of my fears.

- F. 💫

// I am realizing how similar the Destiny 2 Traveler and the Arcane Machine Herald Viktor are similar and it's genuinely funny to me -🌟

What I mean, is that Runeterra (I believe that is what it's called? That is what the person I asked called it) is not my home. It is not the first time I have been somewhere that is other than my home, but this place is so othering that I am unsure of where to go next, or how to get home from here.

And yes - I am here completely by miscalculation. I was aiming to do a bit of damage control in one of the timelines of my universe, and was instead spit out... here. Well, what I believe you would call 'Zaun.' Before the collapse.

I appreciate your answers, and your well wishes. You almost remind me of someone, from back home. It is... a comfort, all things considered

- F. 💫

(OOC: super super tempted to make a blog for this interdimentional oc what do you think)

Ah, I understand your dilemma now. Oftentimes, calculating the transition from one timeline to another is fickle. I’m sure you know that time is not linear—but relative. Even if you intended to arrive at a specific moment in your timeline, you must have forgotten to correlate space-time into your calculations. Therefore, a simple mistake in arithmetic resulted in your arrival in a different universe.

Anyway, I’m sure you do not wish to hear me lecture about general relativity. However, it is necessary to address the causation of your situation.

To return you to your specific time and universe will be an onerous task. It will take me weeks to calculate the proper formula—yet I will do my best.

I am glad that my presence comforts you, despite the circumstance.

// admin: if you do decide to make the blog, I am most excited! I love interdimensional hijinks.

[grandhotelabyss]

As its critics from the 1980s to the present have emphasized, “theory” attempts a fundamental break with the liberalism, in the broad sense, that first became ascendant in Western societies beginning in the 18th century. This break took a variety of forms, but the major thinkers placed under the “theory” heading shared a broad concern with the crisis that had come to afflict the epistemological frameworks and political assumptions inherited from the Enlightenment and embodied in science, technology, and the modern state and its institutions. This preoccupation is present in Heidegger, with his account of technological “enframing”; Horkheimer and Adorno, with their pronouncement that “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant”; Foucault, with his systematic critique of the institutional structures by which modern power operates; and Girard, with his apocalyptic vision of a world that risks reverting to archaic violence.

Geoff Shullenberger, “Theorycels in Trumpworld”

(Much of my official education was conducted by Marxists and much of my unofficial education by writers at least adjacent to neoconservatism. These left- and right-Hegelians agreed—it was one of the few things they did agree on—that Theory and its adjuncts were closer to fascism than to any kind of liberal or left tradition. 

Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind complains of “The Nietzscheanization of the Left,” on the grounds that when Nietzsche dissolves truth in the will-to-power he clears a path for Hitler; by contrast, Bloom allows that Marx at least remains within the truth-seeking Socratic tradition. Strange a bedfellow as he makes with Bloom, Edward Said is not far from this concern when he contends that Theory, given its clerical textuality and incognizance of its material social matrix, does not meet the criteria of what he calls “secular criticism.” 

On a level above intercollegiate political polemics, though, Bloom and Said both understand that Nietzsche & Co. are not dispatched so easily—that both liberal and left societies, and the management-by-bloodless-and-soulless-expert to which their secularism gives rise, is vulnerable to challenge by both ideas and institutions more alive than is reason to the heights and depths of human experience. 

Since we're reading people's old doctoral dissertations, as Shullenberger does with a MAGA media man's thesis on Heidegger, let me here note that, to spare liberal and left societies the pains described in the above paragraph, I took the trouble to in my own to restate an old argument in new terms and at some length: to wit, enlightened society produces its own vaccination against irrationalist terrors in the form of art, which arrays into complex and recursive forms of irreducible order the chaos that enlightened society necessarily banishes from its grid. 

Art relieves us of the grid's oppressive linearity, correctly denounced by Nietzsche, Foucault, Adorno, et al., while keeping the grid extant so that we can enjoy the genuine benefits of the predictability it offers; and at its best, art may provide hints for improving the grid, even teaching the gridmakers that a curve or spiral will not interfere as much as they may fear with the orderly operation of enlightened institutions. But this inoculation only works if you let art actually be art, that is, if you let it stand a little aside from social reason rather than reducing it to a political polemic by other means, as Bloom does when he objects to Death in Venice for sexually traducing high culture or Said does when he chides Jane Austen for being complicit with slavery. 

No one should ever read anyone's doctoral dissertation, old or new, but immediately after writing mine I also wrote a novel. In Portraits and Ashes, a literal theorycel—I wrote the book before this word existed—speaks the liberationist language of High Theory even as he founds a severely irrationalist cult to challenge a normative dominant liberal civilization that cannot in itself satisfy anyone's deepest or highest needs. My novel's heroes must both resist the authentic temptation of this cult and find a way to live within liberal society that answers the indestructible claims of the id and the soul. Luckily for them, one is a reader and the other two are painters—though these are just metaphors for what anyone is when tacking between reason's over- and undersides while still navigating our chartered world. 

Even though one persuasive complaint about this world is that it compels everyone to commerce all the time, I still have to tell you this in conclusion: you can read a chapter of Portraits and Ashes here and buy the whole book here.)

[codezclub]

C Program to find Path Matrix by powers of Adjacency matrix

Path Matrix by powers of Adjacency Matrix Write a C Program to find Path Matrix by powers of Adjacency Matrix. Here’s simple Program to find Path Matrix by powers of Adjacency Matrix in C Programming Language. Adjacency Matrix:  Adjacency Matrix is a 2D array of size V x V where V is the number of vertices in a graph. Let the 2D array be adj[][], a slot adj[i][j] = 1 indicates that there is an…

[rainpcbd503-blog]

Rain Computers

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[thousandmaths]

Day 27: Talk with Vic IV

Today I met with Vic, as my recently-chosen advisor, to discuss possible topics of study. Today’s citation is “Conjectures on the Quotient Ring by Diagonal Invariants” by Mark Haiman.

------

Vic

We began with some broad-scale discussions about my areas of interest. I was surprised how much I was able to specify, even though a lot of it came up later in the meeting than was strictly useful.

Coxeter-Catalan combinatorics

Alternating Sign Matrix-adjacent things

Order theory, especially its topological features

After some discussion about the Equivariant Combinatorics seminar, Vic tipped his hand and talked about stuff that came up in one of the REU projects that the students decided not to explore (and “they were right to not go that way”, he admits). He figured that it might serve as a nice problem to start getting engaged with the literature especially around symmetric functions and the Coxeter generalizations.

The story starts with $(q,t)$-Catalan polynomials but quickly degenerates into something a lot more comprehensible, so I’ll lop off a little bit of the motivation. Basically, by setting $t=1/q$ in the $(q,t)$-Catalan polynomial, you end up with a classical $q$-analogue of the Catalan polynomials first considered by MacMahon:

$$ C_n(q) = \sum_{\pi\in\text{Dyck}(n)} q^{\text{maj}(\pi)}, $$

where $\text{Dyck}(n)$ is the set of Dyck paths of length $n$, and $\text{maj}(\pi)$ is the major index (in the extended sense— instead of permutation we use binary words: $0$s representing the up-steps and $1$s representing the down-steps).

It’s worth noting that this is also a $q$-analogue in the analytic sense: that is, the ordinary Catalan numbers are $\frac{1}{n+1}\binom{2n}{n} = \frac{(2n)!}{n!(n+1)!}$, and the reason why MacMahon was considering them is because he wanted to prove that

$$ C_n(q) = \frac{1}{[n+1]_q} \begin{bmatrix} 2n \\\ n \end{bmatrix}_q = \frac{(2n)!_q}{n!_q(n+1)!_q}, $$

where the $!_q$’s are intended to denote the usual $q$-analogues of factorials. This formula is a lot easier for calculation purposes.

Anyway a kind of annoying feature about $C_n(q)$ is that it’s not unimodal: for instance, $C_3(q) = 1+q^2+q^3+q^4+q^6$. This is not unimodal because the coefficients in front of the $q^k$ do not increase, and then decrease. Instead they jump around a little bit: first decreasing from $1$ to $0q$, then increasing to $1q^2$, and then staying the same for a while, then decreasing from $1q^4$ to $0q^5$ and then increasing back to $1q^6$.

However, what seems like a coincidence is that if you break this polynomial into its even and odd powers, and then set $p=q^2$:

$$C_3(q) = (1+q^2+q^4+q^6) + q^3 = (1+p+p^2+p^3) + q(0+p+0p^2),$$

then as polynomials in $p$, both parenthetical expressions actually are unimodal (because “increase” and “decrease” are meant in the weak sense, where staying the same can count as either increasing or decreasing).

It turns out that this “coincidence” is not one at all: it happens for all $C_n(q)$. There is a very good (and very difficult*) reason for this phenomenon. One way to describe what Vic’s suggested project is, is to provide a combinatorial interpretation for it, instead of the difficult algebraic option that currently exists.** There is some hope in that this might be possible, since when we specialize to $q=1$, and consider the resulting two sequences in $n$, both of these are recognized by the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

------ 

[ * The experts in the crowd may be interested to know that this has to do with the interpretation of the $(q,t)$-Catalan polynomial as the graded Frobenius character of the diagonal coinvariant algebra. The latter admits an $\mathfrak{sl}_2$-action and hence has the requisite raising and lowering operators, and there exist standard tools to leveraging such operators into a unimodality statement. (This last remark, it seems to me, is a big reason why you might want crystals in your life, beyond simply enjoying frustration.) ]

[ ** Note that this is not a hoplessly difficult problem: since we are specialized to the $t=q^{-1}$ case, our aims would not, in particular, imply a combinatorial proof of $q,t$-symmetry. ]

[dorcasrempel]

Half of U.S. deaths related to air pollution are linked to out-of-state emissions

More than half of all air-quality-related early deaths in the United States are a result of emissions originating outside of the state in which those deaths occur, MIT researchers report today in the journal Nature.

The study focuses on the years between 2005 and 2018 and tracks combustion emissions of various polluting compounds from various sectors, looking at every state in the contiguous United States, from season to season and year to year.

In general, the researchers find that when air pollution is generated in one state, half of that pollution is lofted into the air and carried by winds across state boundaries, to affect the health quality of out-of-state residents and increase their risk of early death.

Electric power generation is the greatest contributor to out-of-state pollution-related deaths, the findings suggest. In 2005, for example, deaths caused by sulfur dioxide emitted by power plant smokestacks occurred in another state in more than 75 percent of cases.

Encouragingly, the researchers found that since 2005, early deaths associated with air pollution have gone down significantly. They documented a decrease of 30 percent in 2018 compared to 2005, equivalent to about 30,000 avoided early deaths, or people who did not die early as a result of pollution. In addition, the fraction of deaths that occur due to emissions in other states is falling — from 53 percent in 2005 to 41 percent in 2018.

Perhaps surprisingly, this reduction in cross-state pollution also appears to be related to electric power generation: In recent years, regulations such as the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Act and other changes have helped to significantly curb emissions from this sector across the country.

The researchers caution, however, that today, emissions from other sectors are increasingly contributing to harmful cross-state pollution.

“Regulators in the U.S. have done a pretty good job of hitting the most important thing first, which is power generation, by reducing sulfur dioxide emissions drastically, and there’s been a huge improvement, as we see in the results,” says study leader Steven Barrett, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. “Now it’s looking like other emissions sectors are becoming important. To make further progress, we should start focusing on road transportation and commercial and residential emissions.”

Barrett’s coauthors on the paper are Sebastian Eastham, a research scientist at MIT; Irene Dedoussi, formerly an MIT graduate student and now an assistant professor at Delft University of Technology; and Erwan Monier, formerly an MIT research scientist and now an assistant professor at the University of California at Davis. The research was a collaboration between MIT’s Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment and the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.

Death and the matrix

Scientists have long known that pollution observes no boundaries, one of the prime examples being acid rain.

“It’s been known in Europe for over 30 years that power stations in England would create acid rain that would affect vegetation in Norway, but there’s not been a systematic way to capture how that translates to human health effects,” Barrett says.

In the case of the United States, tracking how pollution from one state affects another state has historically been tricky and computationally difficult, Barrett says. For each of the 48 contiguous states, researchers would have to track emissions to and from the rest of the 47 states.

“But now there are modern computational tools that enable you to do these assessments in a much more efficient way,” Barrett says. “That wasn’t really possible before.”

He and his colleagues developed such tools, drawing on fundemental work by Daven Henze at the University of Colorado at Boulder, to track how every state in the contiguous U.S. affects pollution and health outcomes in every other state. They looked at multiple species of pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide, ozone, and fine particulates, from various emissions sectors, including electric power generation, road transportation, marine, rail, and aviation, and commercial and residential sources, at intervals of every hour of the year.

They first obtained emissions data from each of seven sectors for the years 2005, 2011, and 2018. They then used the GEOS-Chem atmospheric chemistry transport model to track where these emissions ended up, from season to season and year to year, based on wind patterns and a pollutant’s chemical reactions to the atmosphere. Finally, they used an epidemiologically derived model to relate a population’s pollutant exposure and risk of early death.

“We have this multidimensional matrix that characterizes the impact of a state’s emissions of a given economic sector of a given pollutant at a given time, on any other state’s health outcomes,” Barrett says. “We can figure out, for example, how much NOx emissions from road transportation in Arizona in July affects human health in Texas, and we can do those calculations instantly.”

Importing pollution

The researchers also found that emissions traveling out of state could affect the health of residents beyond immediate, neighboring states.

“It’s not necessarily just the adjacent state, but states over 1,000 miles away that can be affected,” Barrett says. “Different kinds of emissions have a different kind of range.”

For example, electric power generation has the greatest range, as power plants can loft pollutants far into the atmosphere, allowing them to travel over long distances. In contrast, commercial and residential sectors generally emit pollutants that chemically do not last as long in the atmosphere.  

“The story is different for each pollutant,” Barrett says.

In general, the researchers found that out-of-state air pollution was associated with more than half of all pollution-related early deaths in the U.S. from 2005 to 2018.

In terms of the impact on individual states, the team found that many of the northern Midwest states such as Wyoming and North Dakota are “net exporters” of pollution-related health impacts, partly because the populations there are relatively low and the emissions these states generate are carried away by winds to other states. Those states that “import” health impacts tend to lie along the East Coast, in the path of the U.S. winds that sweep eastward.

New York in particular is what the researchers call “the biggest importer of air pollution deaths”; 60 percent of air pollution-related early deaths are from out-of-state emissions.

“There’s a big archive of data we’ve created from this project,” Barrett says. “We think there are a lot of things that policymakers can dig into, to chart a path to saving the most lives.”

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the MIT Martin Family Fellowship for Sustainability, the George and Marie Vergottis Fellowship at MIT, and the VoLo Foundation.

Half of U.S. deaths related to air pollution are linked to out-of-state emissions syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

[sagebodisattva]

Antinatalism and Nihilism

Yeah. In case you didn't know, or were somehow a bit unsure about whether or not antinatalism was a nihilist philosophy, antinatalism is perplexingly nihilist, nihilistic supreme; that means it's the grand chalupa, with fresh sour cream.

The most standard commonly known definition of nihilism is a philosophical doctrine that suggests the negation of one or more reputedly meaningful aspects of life. If nay you say, then are you implying that antinatalism isn't asking it's prospective antinatalist to negate certain values that the majority of humans all share in common? I mean, it is called antinatalism, isn't it? Asking a human to consciously avoid procreating, whether just, correct, most moral, or not, this is still a value subtraction equation. The idea that consciousness is better off to never have existed is certainly a negative value conclusion, even if you twist around the narrative to demonize the perceived opposition.

If some condition independent of consciousness that exists out there in the universe is somehow a morally BETTER configuration, in all it's independently existing isolated betterness, without anything existing, any unavoidable prognosis, prescription, or proscription, that may be proposed, will all be subtraction transactions. That's antinatalism, and that's the common understood consensus as to what the definition of nihilism is. There's no way around it. If you’re an antinatalist, then you are at least nihilistic. Period.

Yeah. A dirty stinking value negating nihilist.

And I understand why antinatalists want to reject nihilism, for, while suggesting the negation of a commonly held meaningful value, they do so under the banner of a righteous pro-value. Which is all well and good, but it still doesn't change the fact that it's aim is still to negate a value.

And I'm not against antinatalism, in fact I agree that, for people who are serious about discovering the truth about reality and seek to walk the path of self recognition, of which, is the only existential function for why we are here, procreation isn't helpful. It's an investment, which is a distraction, and that's passing the buck to someone else. And for the people who are NOT serious about reality, the truth and self recognition, you definitely shouldn't be procreating either, because you are just recklessly creating giant amounts of demand and deprivation just for it's own sake, and that isn't a requirement. If one is not seeking to understand the reality, then why should one be ignorantly pushing more lives into existence, for the mere sake of selfish gratification? It's an abuse of power. You don't have any way to obtain consent for the life you are causing to manifest, so therefor this is indicative of an immoral act, like it or not.

And I know there are a lot of people out there that are grateful to have been pushed into existence and appreciate it deeply, but just ask yourself, for what? Pleasure seeking activities? Is that what it is? Just raw hedonism? Back dropped against a life of mundane routine and pointless empty lives of quiet desperation and frustrating futility? To endure large amounts of suffering, boredom and tedious undertakings, just to have a small sip of ecstasy? It seems that we have forgotten that this realm should be treated as a training ground, and not like a lounge for fat cats and lazy lizards.

I won't go too far into depth about the positive aspects of choosing not to procreate, perhaps reserving these thoughts for a future video, for the main idea of this exposition is to show how antinatalism is a nihilistic philosophy. As if antinatalism was somehow something else other then nihilism? Yeah right. If you think so, then you must somehow have your narrative about the logic twisted up.

I know, I know, you have a certain subjective feeling about certain facts, and since the fact is a fact, how you feel about those facts must also be facts! I know, I know. Anything less would be a case of mental illness.

But, one should always try to understand who one's allies are. And one should also try real hard to try and stop maligning and demonizing an adjacent ally; in exactly the same way everyone else tries to malign and demonize you. Atheism, antinatalism, nihilism, post modernism, deconstructionism, futurism, transhumanism, are all relative philosophies existing within the same ideology cluster, despite having some differences. Maybe what they all share in common, in a broad sense, is a rejection of an old world and an old way of doing things.

You do know that, in theism's mind, atheism, and thereby also antinatalism by default, are considered nihilist philosophies simply because they both reject theism. And you know that this is where nihilism primarily got it's bad name from. It was a label frequently used to malign those that rejected theism. And I say 'antinatalism by default" because I think it's safe to assume that if you are antinatalist, you certainly can't be any kind of theist worth his salt. What kind of theist would think that being fruitful isn't in accord with a sky daddy's wishes? Unless there are theists out there, that I don't know about, who believe in an incompetent fucked up god who can't be trusted, but if that's the case, why bother with remaining a theist? Overthrow that motherfucker. If believing in a loving all powerful god, while having an attitude that the world is too fucked up a place to bring children into, isn't cognitive dissonance, then what is?

And I wonder, just as a side note, who was worse for the theists; the atheists, the heretics, or the nihilists?

But anyway... Yeah. Antinatalism is a form of nihilism. So it's truly quite very bizarre that antinatalism tries to take the high road; goes holier then thou, and plays the role of moral warden against another philosophy that, in fact, represents some of the same concepts and positions.

Nihilists advocate victimization and/or ignoring victimization? Bullshit. That isn't even the case, so it isn't true in the first place. It isn't nihilists who are the ones responsible for the horrors of the world, nor the ones ignoring the horrors. So maybe instead of trying to straw man a scapegoat, antinatalism should either redirect this false characterization right back from whence it came, or try focusing the vitriol upon that which is more befitting of these tragic poetic condemnations. It would seem to me that Theists and statists are the violators of innate human morals.

And don't let the religious aspect of theism create some false sense of a dichotomy existing between theism and it's slave atheism. They are both materialists. Only one is justified by a belief in God, and the other is justified by a lack of a belief in God. The "materials" are on a pedestal in both of these so called diametrically opposed polar opposite positions. And post hence, they are both full of shit. Neither one of them are automatically morally upright. Religion, do we even need to go there? If Jesus came back he'd kick the shit out of the Christians; once he matrixed around their gunfire. And atheism, well where does one exactly derive morality when there isn't some scary supernatural force threatening you, or offering obedience rewards, in a world where cash is king; and only the collection and hoarding of objects and resources are the measure of one's well being? From whereforth, and unto what?

Oh, I know. From empathy. From compassion. From a sense of charity. From a sense of duty, integrity, justice, service, and heroic Herculean honor. Only, this sense of duty is easily derelict when it comes to the raw material reality. In a game of heavy investments and gambling with the margins of profit and loss, wherein the consequence of ignoring dysfunction and not running the risk to do what's called "right", is rewarded by sustaining a retainer of wealth and resources, the objectively morally thing to do, is to do what most benefits yourself and your immediate group. And that's what I mean when I say “objectively moral.” I mean so in the sense that, there will be groups of individuals who feel they have a special status to make decisions on behalf of everyone else, because this self elected special status also affords one a superior perspective to decide and execute what's BEST for everyone...

Sound familiar? And it isn't nihilism that is doing this. It's hard materialism; cause, hey, its logical, it's objectively moral, it's very utilitarian, all of which the nihilist knows, doesn't really exist, and therefor doesn't invest into the motivated fervor of this material passion play. And yet the criminal trouble making shit stirrer uppers have the audacity to point out at the audience and blame them for the stage theatrics. And antinatalism, who sits in section B, points over to section A, where nihilism sits, and passes the blame on to them. It's a joke.

But I can see why everyone's so upset with nihilism. True nihilism upsets the whole apple cart. The passion whores don't want people to resign and give up on the Game of the lemmings, cause jeez, what would happen if everyone became nihilists? It would be unprofitable. We'd have a bunch of peaceful generous self sufficient people who had relaxed forgiving caregiving dispositions, who mind their own business, but share and help others, and who don't want to victimize their fellow humans. And we couldn't have that now, could we? Pointing the finger at you and saying it's all your fault, is so much more convenient and fun!

[micaramel]

Artist: Jumana Manna

Venue: SALTS, Birsfelden

Exhibition Title: Adrenarchy

Curated by: Samuel Leuenberger

Date: June 15 — August 25, 2018

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of SALTS, Birsfelden. Photos by Nicolas Gysin.

Press Release:

The title of Jumana Manna’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland, Adrenarchy is a take on “Adrenarche”, an early sexual maturation stage in some higher primates, which similarly takes place in humans before the age of 12. During this phase, the body, its smell and oiliness dramatically change, following an increase in cortisol levels, resulting in what is commonly known as puberty. A fabricated combination of -adrenalin and -anarchy Manna’s title aims at transposing this uncomfortable moment of transformation and awe into an installation which combines anthropomorphic elements, whose shape and formal qualities incarnate ambiguity.

Manna is a sculptor and filmmaker, whose main interests address how various forms of power are articulated through relationships, often focusing on the body in relation to narratives of nationalism, and histories of place. Manna’s work uses often a poetic and fragmented visual language in order to address biographical experiences. Individuals play the central roles in narratives where the body becomes a political tool addressing more global concerns, as exemplified in her recent feature film Wild Relatives (2018), which follows a batch of seeds that were sent from Aleppo, Syria, to the Global Seed Vault, in the Arctic island of Svalbard, and recently back to Lebanon to be planted. Following the path of this transaction, a series of encounters unfold a matrix of lives between these two distant spots of the earth. The film captures both the violence and melancholy of both climate and war induced disasters on earth, alongside practices of care that manifest resilience it.

For this exhibition, the artist has created a new body of work comprising sculptures laying over a sauna-inspired construction. Evoking strength and eroticism, these structures seem like archeological fossils sweating out some tension. Armpit (2018) and Armpit Shell (2018) continue the Muscle-Vase series, which she began in 2014; a body of androgynous and dismembered hollow vessels that are juxtaposed with found furniture or simple structures. On the right side of the wall, Torso II (2017), a white skin-shell sculpture resembling the shape of a torso is leaning against the wall. Accompanying the sculptures, one finds piles of towels that introduce softness to the hard bodies, as well a a tablet and smart phone playing short-looped animations, Balls and Flutter (both 2014). These comical and grotesque videos add an additional layer to the over-sized bodies and their surfaces, into the digital, haptic realm. They linger in the space like left-behind objects, adding to the general uncanniness. Jumana Manna’s sculptural work simultaneously appears to be strong in their materiality, while also bearing a fragile and deconstructed presence. This ambivalence is also palpable in the contrast between the delicate and candid way she captures the sheer beauty of every day human moments and landscapes in her films, and the tension brought by her use of humour and criticism in other installations. Manna’s artworks are conceived as surrogate vessels, through which a psychological journey takes place.

Additionally, in the adjacent room, SALTS presents Manna’s Blessed, Blessed Oblivion, her first film from 2010, inspired by Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), which weaves together a portrait of male thug culture in East Jerusalem, manifested in barbershops, auto-shops and body building.

Link: Jumana Manna at SALTS

Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art Group, a not-for-profit organization. We rely on our audience to help fund the publication of exhibitions that show up in this RSS feed. Please consider supporting us by making a donation today.

from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/2w8Unql

[netunleashed-blog]

Best free iPad games 2018

http://www.internetunleashed.co.uk/?p=13326 Best free iPad games 2018 - http://www.internetunleashed.co.uk/?p=13326 So you've got an iPad, but have come to the dawning realisation that you've got no cash left to buy any games for it.Have no fear, because the App Store offers plenty of iPad gaming goodness for the (unintentional or otherwise) skinflint. Haven't bought an iPad yet and not sure which is best? We've got them listed on our best iPad ranking - or you can check out the best tablets list to see the full range available now. Our updated pick of the best free iPad games are listed right here. New this week: Look, Your Loot! Look, Your Loot! is a free-roaming RPG reworked as a sliding puzzler. It’s an odd combination, but it works brilliantly, mixing Threes!-style tile-shifting, scraps with monsters, and accumulating bling and skills.You play as a mouse in a dungeon, surrounded by murdery foes. Flick and you move to an adjacent tile. The tiles behind follow, and something new appears at the other end of the grid. Attack an enemy and you win if your energy level’s high enough. Otherwise: bye bye, mouse.The game feels more premium than freebie, and as you get better at planning your routes, you’ll survive to see dangers that force new approaches. One boss, Jack (as in O’ Lantern), unhelpfully turns nearby tiles into death-dealing pumpkins. In short, then, top stuff for RPG fans of all stripes. Watch the video below for our 48hr review of the new iPad (2018) Kind of Soccer is more a combination of relief and revenge than a digital take on actual soccer. There’s still a pitch and a ball to kick about, but no goals. Instead, you get points by booting the ball slingshot-style at the referee’s head.That’s not especially sportsmanlike, but it is amusing, not least when you get power-ups like bombs and lasers to take on the hapless official. Fortunately for him (and giving the game extra challenge), your team’s not alone on the field.Defenders will try to take the ball from you, and the ref lurks behind them when possible. Also, ping the ball out of bounds and you lose a point. Success therefore hinges on keeping calm and a careful aim – in other words, don’t lose your head before the ref loses his. Cubor is a puzzler that features trundling cubes. The aim is to get each cube to its corresponding target. Sometimes, cubes have only one colored side, which must be placed face-down over its intended home.That probably doesn’t have you already stabbing an install button, but Cubor’s a game that quietly takes hold, gradually sucking you in as you become engrossed in its simple, smartly designed puzzles.It’s got something for everyone, too. Casual players can tinker with levels until they’re complete – and that might be reward enough. But for more hardcore puzzle fans, each level offers bonus stars for meeting move limits – many of which are extremely tough to crack, not least when you’re juggling five cubes on a decidedly claustrophobic level layout. Shadowgun Legends gives you a big, dumb, brash first-person shooter for your iPad. It looks superb, whether you’re mooching about the neon-bathed central hub world, or merrily blasting hordes of evil aliens.From a gameplay perspective, it’s no Call of Duty or Doom, but that’s fine for touchscreen play. After all, when you don’t have a gamepad in your hands, you’ll be glad you only need two thumbs to control movement and gaze, your guns discharging automatically when a foe’s in your sights.But just because Shadowgun Legends is streamlined for mobile, don’t mistake it for being simple. There’s tons to do, a slew of power-ups to get you kitted out for tougher later missions, and an entertaining emphasis on ‘fame’ over character and story that if nothing else seems like savvy commentary on a great deal of modern media. MMX Hill Dash 2 is a one-on-one monster truck racer, with tracks akin to roller coasters, full of unlikely peaks and crazy dips. Helpfully, then, the physics is so bouncy vehicles often feel like they’ll bound off of the screen, never to be seen again.At first, this makes for an off-putting experience. It can feel like you’re fighting the physics with the two-button control system that deals both with braking and also rotation when a vehicle’s airborne. But grab vehicle upgrades and properly plan how to tackle a track, and you start making progress.The game then becomes strangely absorbing – almost puzzle-like as you gradually figure out the choreography and upgrades required to crack a track. It is, however, best for players with a slightly masochistic streak, since you’re often hitting the same track time and again, until you get the kit and brainwave to defeat it. Ava Airborne is a one-thumb endless survival game. It features the titular protagonist hurling herself through a suspiciously hazardous sky, putting off for as long as possible the inevitable moment when she plummets back to Earth and face-plants into the dirt.Holding the screen raises your altitude, and your aim is to burst balloons, zoom through hoops, and bounce off of trampolines – and definitely not to hit massive bombs or get horribly electrocuted by weird floating boxes.Ava Airborne feels effortless, although you can see the care that went into it. This is especially apparent when you acquire and experiment with alternate transport, such as a giant yo-yo and a jet-fueled trombone. The beautifully rendered visuals also make it ideally suited to the iPad’s large display. Runventure is a streamlined platform game that finds your little hero darting through trap-laden jungles, temples and castles. However, rather than use a traditional D-pad or have you auto-run and tap to jump, Runventure tries something new.At the foot of the screen is the run-jumping bar. Drag across it and the hero runs, and the game previews the jump you’ll make on lifting your finger. With deft timing, you’ll leap on enemy heads, rope-swing across deadly ravines, and totally not die by falling into a spike-filled pit like an idiot.That’s the theory. Initially, you’ll fail often as you get to grips with what seems like a needlessly awkward control system. But stick around, discover the nuance in the leapy action, and Runventure proves compelling. If nothing else, grab if if you’re tired of the same old thing. Hue Ball is a strategic shooting game that features a little turret that oscillates back and forth at the foot of the screen. Tap and it fires a ball that bounces about. Other balls it hits disappear, and you must also ensure your ball doesn’t zip over the line of death, robbing you of a life.There’s another ball, though – one you can’t hit. It fills the screen with color and shrinks towards the center. When it vanishes, every static ball gets another layer. When any end up with five, they become indestructible skulls.This combination of clever mechanics makes for an entertaining experience, which works well on the iPad’s larger screen. And although the noodly chill-out audio seems at odds with Hue Ball’s take-no-prisoners claustrophobic end-game panic, it may calm you for long enough to make that perfect shot. Score! Match reimagines the beautiful game (as in, soccer – or football if you’re British and the S-word sends you into apoplectic fury) as a turn-based match of wits where you draw passes and attempts at goal with a finger.The basic premise will be familiar to anyone who’s played other Score! games, but in this one you’re not attempting to recreate history’s greatest goals. Instead, you go head-to-head against other players online, in two-minute first-to-two-goal bouts.There’s a lot of freemium gunk lurking: currencies, timers and loot boxes. Also, the AI’s a bit wonky and the commentary is laughably awful. But the underlying mechanics are great to the point none of that really matters – not least when you’re one-nil down and have but seconds to get the equalizer that will secure you a penalty shoot-out. Drop the Clock features a grinning timepiece that’s hurled into single-screen challenges, with the goal of reaching an exit as quickly as possible. The snag: this world is full of angry red hammers, teleportation pipes, and other hazards.You can’t control the clock as such – its path is predetermined. Instead, you control time. Press the screen and the clock’s own movement slows down, Matrix-style (if The Matrix featured a moustachioed clock rather than leather-clad, shades-wearing protagonists). With deft fingerwork and a little luck, you’ll figure out how to avoid your enemies and reach your goal.Given that Drop the Clock resembles pinball in how its hero pings about, you’ll fail often. But levels are so short, and the game’s so relentlessly jolly, that having another go is a no-brainer – after all, you’ll be having a great time. Dancing Line is a rhythm action game controlled with a single finger. You help a wiggly line carve its way through isometric worlds. Its survival is down to you tapping the screen at opportune moments, to make the line change direction rather than smack into a wall.If that was it, Dancing Line would be easy to dismiss, but beautiful design ensures it’s a winner. One level features a piano, with keys moving to the soundtrack’s notes; part-way through, you’re suddenly inside the instrument, hammers raining down all around you. Elsewhere, you blaze through gardens and a savannah at sunset.The game can frustrate when you fail near the end of a minutes-long level, and its ad-heavy freemium trappings can grate, but if you’ve a sense of rhythm, and a penchant for great-looking games that marry immediacy and elegance, Dancing Line is well worth a download. The Battle of Polytopia is akin to turn-based strategy classic Civilization in fast-forward. You aim to rule over a tiny isometric world by exploring, discovering new technologies, and duffing up anyone who gets in your way.The game is heavily optimized for mobile play. Technology stops evolving before anyone gets guns, you can only expand your empire via conquest rather than founding new cities, and there’s a 30-move limit that stops you dawdling. (For more bloodthirsty players, there’s a Domination mode, too, where you win by being the last tribe standing.)You get the entire core game for free, but buy extra tribes and everything expands. You gain access to new maps, but also an online multiplayer mode, where you quickly discover whether you’re a powerful despot or one of history’s also-rans. However you play, Polytopia is one of the very best free games on mobile. Tekken is a giant of console fighters, but this iPad take is rather different from previous entries in the series. Without a gamepad in your mitts, Tekken becomes a button masher of sorts, with you frantically hammering the screen to wallop your opponent.However, it’s not without some nuance. You can charge attacks by holding a thumb down, block, and scoot backward and forward with swipes. There are also cards to collect and play, which unleash special moves. Combine them into combos and whoever you’re fighting won’t know what’s hit them.If you’ve played Marvel’s Contest of Champions or Transformers: Forged to Fight, you might get a sense of deja vu – Tekken is in similar territory, down to its semi-baffling progression, power-up, and currency systems – but as a dip-in touchscreen brawler, it hits the mark. Mekorama is a path-finding puzzle game where you help a little doddering robot reach its goal. There are 50 hand-crafted diorama-like levels in all, which you spin with a finger. You then tap to make the robot head to a particular spot.The pace is slow, but the game is charming and relaxing rather than dull. Wisely, it always provides you with several levels to tackle in case you get stuck on one, and new hazards and ideas regularly appear, such as sections of buildings that move, and patrolling robots that may help or hinder.It works particularly well on iPad, largely because the bigger screen makes it easier to see what’s going on when you’re peering into a complex structure’s nooks and crannies, but the real prize is a level designer. There’s huge scope for long-term play through the ability to download levels and create your own. Tako Bubble has roots in classic arcade games, but at its heart is a cleverly designed turn-based puzzler that straddles the divide between casual and challenging play.You play an octopus, popping bubbles and aiming to recover a collection of beetles. Grab all of the colored bubbles and you finish a level, but only by popping them all do you get the satisfaction of a job well done.The snag is the turn-based bit. You move, and then the ferocious monsters dotted about get their go. Get your timing wrong and the octopus is ejected from the screen.Success is therefore about pathfinding – learning how enemies react and move, and planning accordingly. There’s no timer and no time limit, so it’s just you against the game. And while it’s approachable enough for all, getting every bubble is a very tough test indeed. Slide the Shakes recreates the bartender slide, where a beverage is sent to a patron at speed – only in Slide the Shakes, the bars have been built by a maniac. They’re full of humps and gaps, set on slopes, and often covered in sticky goo and slippy ice.In each level, you’re tasked with sending a milkshake to several precise destinations. Fall short and the game generously gives you another shot (albeit at the expense of a perfect score); smash the glass and you must start that round again.This is a bright, breezy, immediate game, with intuitive catapult controls. It also avoids the irritating randomness of an Angry Birds, because the pull-back mechanism affords you plenty of accuracy. Just as well when you’re confronted with bar-top designs akin to motocross tracks. Beat Street is a love letter to classic scrolling brawlers, where a single, determined hero pummels gangs of evil-doers and saves the day. In Beat Street, giant vermin are terrorizing Toko City, and will only stop when you’ve repeatedly punched them in the face.On iPhone, Beat Street is a surprisingly successful one-thumb effort, but on iPad you’re better off playing in landscape. With your left thumb, you can dance about, and then use your right to hammer the screen (and the opposition).The iPad’s large display shows off the great pixel art, but the fighty gameplay’s the real star – from you taking on far too many opponents at once to gleefully beating one about the head with a baseball bat. It turns out they do make ’em like they used to after all. Carmageddon is in theory a racing game, but is really more a demolition derby set in a grim dystopia where armored cars smash each other to bits and drivers gleefully mow down ambling pedestrians and cows.It’s a game of questionable taste and a brains-free approach. You may not be surprised to hear it ended up banned in several countries when originally released on PC back in 1997. These days, though, its low-res over-the-top feel seems more cartoonish than gory – and the freeform driving is a lot of fun.The maps are huge, the physics is bouncy, and your opponents are an odd mix of braindead and psychotic. There’s no nuance, but loads of laughs to be had – assuming you’re not the type to get offended when a game congratulates you for power-sliding a startled cow into a wall. Turn Undead: Monster Hunter is a spooky run-and-gun platformer, in the same territory as arcade classic Ghosts ’n Goblins. Hordes of zombies, vampires and werewolves need offing by way of your trusty supply of stakes, before you make for an exit – and a few moments of feeling smug.But Turn Undead has another trick up its sleeve: it’s turn-based. This means time only moves on when you do, which upends everything you thought you knew about this kind of game.In theory, the stop-start action should make things easier, enabling you to plan when to kill each nasty, but the clockwork nature of Turn Undead often transforms proceedings into a brain-smashing puzzler. Just try to make sure the brains getting smashed are those of the undead – and not your own. To The Castle finds tiny knight Sir Petrionius doddering about gloomy dungeons, attacking monsters, pilfering bling and making for the exit.The twist in this platform game is the limited controls; the knight runs of his own accord, and you can only make him either jump or unleash a devastating thrust attack that propels him forward, killing anything in his way.These restrictions, married with tight level design, make for a fast-paced path-finding-tinged arcade platformer. Timing and good reflexes are key as you leap into the air, and then thrust attack to obliterate enemies or leap over spike pits. And if you get particularly good at all that, blazing through the 60 built-in levels, you can make your own in the game’s editor. Breakout Ninja teaches us you shouldn’t imprison angry, green-eyed, immensely powerful ninjas. Here, the masked protagonist auto-runs, leaping over fences, kicking guards in the face, and occasionally smashing up entire buildings.Your entire interactions with the game involve tapping the screen when the hero is atop yellow circles, whereupon he gets all punchy or leapy. That might sound reductive, but it’s an interesting take on the genre, lending a sense of choreography to each level.It’s a pity what you do isn’t synchronized to a beat (this could have been an amazing rhythm-action title), but it’s nonetheless enjoyable and a bit different. And when you’re done with the initial dozen levels, you get to tackle them in ‘hard’ mode at breakneck speed. Cally’s Caves 4 is a free game that appears so generous that you wonder what the catch is. The Metroid-style run-and-gun shenanigans find you leaping about, shooting anyone in your path. However, the hero is a girl with pigtails and a surprising arsenal of deadly weapons, neatly subverting convention.The plot’s a tad more mundane - something about finding a cure for a curse. But the game retains its oddball credentials with a gaggle of strange enemies - everything from footballers to cleaver-lobbing chefs.The jumping, blasting, and exploring is compelling stuff, which is just as well, because this is a big game, with hundreds of sprawling levels, 11 bosses, and stints where you temporarily control a psychotic ninja bear. No, that last bit isn’t a typo; and, yes, those bits are particularly great. Up the Wall is an auto-runner with an edge. Or rather, lots of edges. Because instead of being played on a single plane, Up the Wall regularly has you abruptly turn 90-degree corners, some of which find you zooming up vertical walls.The speed and snap twists make for a disorienting experience, but the game’s design is extremely smart where, most notably, each challenge is finite and predefined. Up the Wall isn’t about randomness and luck, but mastering layouts, and aiming for that perfect run.It nails everything else, too. The game sounds great, and has sharp, vibrant visuals, with imaginative environments. It’s not often you’re frantically directing a burger in an abstract fever dream of milkshakes and ketchup bottles, nor a skull in a world of flames, lava, and guitars. Into the Dead 2 finds you in a race to save your family, in a world overrun by zombies. Unfortunately, because you’re a massive idiot, you crash your truck while heading their way, and must then travel on foot. Across 60 stages, you grab ammo, dodge the lumbering undead, and occasionally shoot them in the face. It’s a frequently exciting, nerve-racking experience.Also, it’s an auto-runner. So instead of stealthily sneaking about or being able to hide, you’re always blundering onwards (apart from during odd moments where you find a massive gun to satisfyingly mow down dozens of zombies in seconds).The controls feel a bit weird – you kind of ‘drift’ left and right; but these limitations the game imposes ramp up the tension when you’ve dozens of undead before you, and are down to your last bullet. Twisty Board 2 is an excellent example of how to make a sequel. The original was a throwaway effort, with you zig-zagging like a maniac on a hoverboard, to throw pursuing missiles off the scent. It got old fast.But it turns out that was a training ground for the real fight. Twisty Board 2 dumps you in an alien war-zone, where – for some reason – the protagonists mostly jet about on hoverboards.You’re still scything about, but now blast endless hordes of enemies, trying to carve a path to hostages. Once they’re all rescued, you set about blowing the living daylights out of a massive boss. It’s a tough, intense challenge, and you’ll need the skills of a dozen Marty McFlys to succeed. Flipflop Solitaire is another of designer Zach Gage’s attempts at subverting a classic game. This time, spider solitaire caught his eye, and has been revolutionized by way of a couple of tweaks.Like the original table-based card game, Flipflop Solitaire still has you arrange columns of cards in descending order. But now you can send cards to foundation piles, and also stack them in either order. (So a 4 or a 6 can be placed below a 5.)These may seem like small changes, but they prove transformative. Every hand is possible to complete, if you can find the right combination of moves. This turns Flipflop Solitaire into a fascinating and surprisingly fresh puzzler, with you utilizing endless undos to untangle your web of cards. San Giorli is a strange arcade game set in a neon city that’s seemingly been deserted. Mostly, it involves you plugging things in (or unplugging them), which doesn’t sound terribly exciting – but trust us on this one.The levels scroll horizontally, and at any given point bits of cabling are strategically positioned. You must connect cables to activate machines that clear the way forward for your ship – which often requires careful timing and plugging/unplugging in a specific order. Also, your character rotates around your ship, attached to it by a cable, rather than having free movement.It’s the limitations and the game’s slightly unusual nature that make San Giorli work – and especially on iPad. It’s tense when you need to perform a bunch of actions in order, spinning this way and that, your little hero’s head missing nearby scenery by a whisker. In cmplt, every challenge is a blocky object with a bit of it missing. The entire game looks like it’s been crafted out of paper squares and dumped on your iPad’s screen.You tap squares to ‘draw’ the object’s missing parts, which you’d think would be easy. And sometimes it is. One picture is a gamepad, and merely requires you to mirror the side you can already see.But sometimes the shapes are abstract to the point of confusion. It’s embarrassing to think how long during testing it took us to crack a decidedly minimal take on the Statue of Liberty.Still, ad-funded hints exist if you get stuck, and you’ll often chuckle on figuring out a level’s subject matter, before quickly tapping out its missing squares so that you can see what’s next. Stranger Things: The Game is a rarity: a free tie-in videogame that’s not rubbish. In fact, it’s a really good old-school action-adventure that should delight old-timers and also click with people who follow the TV show.The idea is to figure out what’s going on in Hawkins, Indiana, where things have gone deeply weird. You start off playing Officer Hopper, who scowls and punches his way about, but soon find kids to join your crew, including Lucas and his wrist rockets, and bat-swinging Nancy.Occasionally, the game echoes old-school fare a little too well, with set-piece sections that are tough to crack (although you do get infinite attempts) – and the map is if anything too big; for the most part, though, Stranger Things: The Game is a clever, engaging, and compelling slice of mobile adventuring. AuroraBound is a puzzle game that’s all about matching patterns. Each level provides you with a tiled board, onto which you place colorful pieces. The aim is to ensure that all the lines and colors join up.This isn’t the kind of puzzler designed to smash your brains out – for the most part, it’s a rather relaxing experience. But as the boards increase in size, with patterns on each tile that are only very slightly different, you may eventually find your ego and complacency handed back to you.Even so, AuroraBound never becomes frustrating. There are no time limits, and you can experiment by shifting pieces around at will. Neatly, the level select screen is a tiny puzzle to complete as you go, too. Power Hover: Cruise is an endless arcade treat loosely based on the boss levels from the superb Power Hover. Your little robot gets to tackle four distinct environments on his hovering board, weaving between hazards. The aim is to last as long as possible before being smashed into scrap metal when you inevitably mess up and fly head-on into an obstacle at insane speed.The game is visually stunning on the iPad’s large display, whether descending into Dive’s hazardous underwater tunnel, or zooming along Air’s tubular road that winds snake-like through the clouds.But controls make or break this kind of game, and Power Hover: Cruise is blessed with a simple left/right system with plenty of inertia. Initially, it feels unresponsive, but before long you’ll be scything through levels like nobody’s business, in one of the most beguiling endless games on iPad. Drag’n’Boom is a breezy, fast-paced arcade game that marries Angry Birds, Tiny Birds, Sonic the Hedgehog, twin-stick shooters, dragons and The Matrix. No, really.Each level finds your baby dragon zooming about hilly landscapes packed with castles and tunnels, roasting guards and grabbing coins. Movement and unleashing fiery breath alike happen by way of ‘drag and fling’ directional arrows, and everything slows down while you aim, Matrix-style.This all makes for an interesting combination, enabling deliriously fast zooming about and violence across the tiny worlds, but precision when you need it. Over its 40 levels, Drag’n’Boom could perhaps do with more variety – there are scant few enemy types to defeat. But it’s an exhilarating thrill-ride while it lasts. Little Alchemy 2 is an exploratory logic game. You start off with a small number of items, which can be dragged to the central canvas. Items are then merged to create new ones.At least that’s the theory. If you just set about randomly shoving items together, nothing happens. Instead, you must utilize rational thinking – or a little whimsy. For example, combine a couple of puddles and you’ll get a pond. Obvious, really. But also you can create a blender from a blade and ‘motion’, and a rocket from ‘metal’ and ‘atmosphere’.In all, there are over 600 items to discover, and although Little Alchemy 2 can irk if you hit a brick wall, you can always pay for hints via IAP if you get stuck. Alternatively, tough it out and feel like a genius when you hit upon a suitably clever combination. Battle Golf Online is a golfing game that’s thrown out the rulebook. You still use a stick to smack a tiny ball into a distant hole, but there’s no mucking about with fairways and club selection. Instead, you and an opponent stand at different edges of a lake, from which holes periodically appear. The first to five wins.Play is fast and furious – more a race than precision sport. And fortunately, the controls are easy to grasp, merely requiring two taps to set your shot’s direction and strength.But it’s the ‘online’ component that really helps this one shine – knowing you’re facing off against a human rather than your iPad adds an edge that’ll have you frantically blasting shots at everything from sea monsters to submarines, and wondering whether real-life golf could do with a similar blast of high-octane weirdness. Silly Walks is a one-thumb arcade game, featuring wobbling foodstuffs braving the hell of nightmarish kitchens (and, later, gardens and gyms), in order to free fruity chums who’ve been cruelly caged.The hero of the hour – initially a pineapple cocktail – rotates on one foot. Tapping the screen plants a foot, causing him to rotate on the other foot and changing the direction of rotation. Charitably, this could be called a step, and with practice, it’s possible to put together a reasonable dodder.And you’ll need to. Although early levels only require you to not fall off of tables, pretty soon you’re dealing with meat pulverizers, hero-slicing knives, and psychotic kitchenware in hot pursuit.It’s admittedly all a little one-level – Silly Walks reveals almost all in its initial levels – but smart design, superb visuals, and a unique control method make it well worth a download. Topiary is a game of concentration, involving a single digit, and an on-screen plant you’re aiming to grow into a mighty oak – albeit a decidedly odd-looking, geometric, psychedelically colored oak.You start off with a pulsating disc, and the aim is to prod the screen when it’s at its largest, thereby giving you the biggest base on which to build. Once that’s done, you get the next slice, which you try to tap when it exactly matches its predecessor.Fail and your tree gradually narrows until you drop the final, super-skinny twig on top. Get five perfect matches in a row (which is no mean feat) and that tier will grow again. It’s all really simple stuff, but Topiary proves to be an entertaining and relaxing one-thumb arcade test of timing and nerve. finds you hurling dangerous knives, mostly at wooden objects. Which we admit doesn’t sound particularly thrilling – and you might also have had your fill of ‘Verby Noun’ games with colorful, chunky visuals, whatever the hook. But Flippy Knife does plenty to demand a space on your iPad.The basic Combo mode has you drag upwards to hurl your pointy weapon into the air, Angry Birds style, aiming for it to flip and stick into a wooden platform on landing. It’s a good way to get a feel for your virtual knife.Beyond that, there’s the thoughtful Arcade mode (lob a knife through an endless cabin), the frenetic Climb (a vertically scrolling pursuit of a thieving drone), and the archery-like Target. That is, if archery involved lobbing bloody great big knives at bullseyes strapped to trees – which we totally think it should. is a sort-of rally game. We say sort-of, because although you’re pelting along a twisty-turny track, it happens to be at the top of a wall so high its base is lost in the clouds below.Also, you’re barreling along in old-school muscle cars, to a classic guitar rock soundtrack, and you can’t steer.Instead, the game does the steering for you, leaving you merely able to prod the accelerator or slam on the brakes, to stop your car plunging into the abyss. This transforms the game into a decidedly oddball take on slot racing, reimagined as a roller-coaster. Or possibly the other way around.Either way, it’s fun, even if handling and camera issues make progress in later tracks tough. Still, the upgrade path is smart (with a generous dishing out of virtual coins to upgrade your cars and buy new tracks), making for hours of grin-inducing arcade action. is an iPad reimagining of a classic Dreamcast tennis game. Although Sega claims it’s the most realistic game of its type on mobile, Virtual Tennis Challenge is in reality very much an arcade outing, with you darting about, attempting to defeat your opponent by way of lobs, top spins, and dramatic ‘super shots’.The gestural controls leave a lot to be desired, resulting in tennis as if your player had downed a few too many drinks in the bar prior to their match.But plump for the on-screen virtual D-pad and buttons (or use an external MFi gamepad) and you’ll find an entertaining take on repeatedly smacking a ball over a net, while the virtual crowd presumably gorges itself on virtual strawberries. is a puzzle game that wants to unleash your inner artist. It takes place on canvases with a number of dots sprinkled about. Your task is to figure out a path from the start to the end point that takes in every dot.This is a familiar concept – there are loads of similar games on the App Store, but the execution of Splashy Dots ensures it stands out. Every swipe you make smears paint across the screen; and these brushstrokes and splats fashion a little slice of geometric art as you play.Over time, the canvases become increasingly complex, as you slowly build a gallery of abstract virtual paintings. A relaxing jazzy soundtrack and unlimited undos add to the relaxing vibe – only interrupted with a jolt when ads appear. But if those irk, you can silence them with a single $0.99/99p/AU$1.49 IAP. is a hybrid endless runner/shooter, featuring a little UFO blazing along space lanes populated by hordes of deadly creatures who’d very much rather the UFO wasn’t there. You tap left and right to avoid being horribly killed, attempting to scoop up bonus coins and stars along the way.The stars are the key to Rocklien Run. Pick up a green one and your little ship starts spewing bullets. Grab a yellow one and you zoom along, temporarily indestructible. Keep on shooting, dodging, and picking up stars, and Rocklien Run transforms from a frustrating staccato experience into an exhilarating high-octane arcade blast.Just be aware that for every breezily crazy game where you’re belting along at insane speeds, you’ll probably have another where you’re killed in approximately three seconds. is a platform puzzler, with a firm emphasis on the puzzling. It features some cartoon slime molds, who’ve got on the wrong side of the villainous Moon Men. These rogues have taken the heroes’ kids, and so parents Hoggy and Hogatha vow to get them back.The Moon Men’s fortress is a huge maze peppered with jars. Within each jar is a room filled with platforms, enemies, hazards, and fruit. Eat all the fruit and you get a key. Get enough keys and you can venture further into the maze.The snag is that getting at the fruit can be tricky. Hoggy 2’s levels are cunningly designed, often requiring you perform actions in a specific order and manner, making use of power-ups that transform the protagonists into trundling granite squares or screaming infernos.Add in lush console-style visuals and a level editor, and you’ve got one of the biggest bargains on mobile. You know a game’s not taking itself too seriously when it begins with the hero trudging through a blizzard, only to be faced by a giant heavily armed walrus guarding the fortress of a megalomaniacal genius.But is just warming up, and subsequently revels in flinging all manner of mutated madness your way in its hard-nosed top-down arcade battles.For each, you dart about using a virtual joystick, while two large on-screen buttons activate weapons. Unfortunately, your bosses are colossal idiots, and have armed you with the likes of dynamite and Molotov cocktails. Bouts often therefore involve dodging bullets to fling wares at a giant foe, before running away like a coward.It’s silly, relentless arcade fun – or at least it would be relentless if the ‘fuel’ based freemium model didn’t butt up against one-hit-death and tough later levels. Still, if the stop-start nature of playing becomes irksome, fuel limitations can be removed with a $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99 IAP. With a name that sounds like something an angry railway employee would yell before slapping you, actually starts out as a fairly sedate railway management game. Little trains amble along, picking up passengers you have to direct to stations that match their color.The controls are extremely simple: tap a train and it halts until you tap it again; and switches can be triggered to send a train the most optimum way at a junction.However, the layouts you face very quickly become anything but simple, with multiple trains to control and vehicles to avoid – both of which sometimes unhelpfully disappear into tunnels.This is a smart, colorful mix of arcade smarts and puzzling – even if it does have the capacity to drive you loco(motive). If you’ve ever played the last level of PC classic Driver, with its psychotic police vehicles, you’ll have an inkling what you’re in for in . You pick a car and barrel about a little wraparound city, driving around like a maniac, until your inevitable arrest.Well, we say ‘arrest’, but these police are crazed. SWAT vans will hurl themselves at your vehicle, oblivious to the carnage around them. Eventually, airstrikes will be called in, at which point you might question if the law’s applying a bit too much zeal towards grand theft auto these days.Over time, the game’s repetitive nature palls a bit, and the physics is a bit floaty; but otherwise it’s a great fun freebie for virtual joyriders armed with an iPad. This one’s all about counting really quickly. That admittedly doesn’t sound like much – but stick with it, because is actually a lot of fun.It begins by displaying a bunch of neon shapes. The aim is to prod a shape that belongs to the most numerous group, and work your way to the smallest. Do this rapidly and you build a combo that can seriously ramp up your score. Now and again shapes also house credits, which can be used to buy new themes.On iPad, the game looks great, and although some themes (such as gloopy bubbles) make the game easier, that at least gives you a choice if the minimal original theme proves too tricky.And despite Estiman’s overt simplicity, its odd contrasting mix of relaxation (chill-out audio; zero-stress timer) and urgency (if you want those combos) proves compelling. Its overhead viewpoint and tiny players might evoke arcade-oriented soccer games of old, like Sensible Soccer and Kick off, but is very much a mobile oriented affair. In part, this is down to the main mode taking you through loads of challenges, rather than a league, but mostly it’s about the controls.There are no virtual buttons and D-pads here – everything in Retro Soccer is about taps and gestures. You tap to move somewhere, dribble with the ball or pass. A swipe unleashes a shot if you’re within sight of the goal, or a scything sliding tackle that carves up a fair chunk of the field if you’re near an opposing player with the ball.It takes a fair bit of getting used to and really needs the iPad’s large screen for you to have any hope of mastering the game. But stick around and you’ll find Retro Soccer an entertaining take on the beautiful game. With its chunky graphics and silly demeanor, isn’t an entirely accurate recreation of the Wild West – but it is a lot of fun.You hop about tiny towns, deserts, and mines, shooting bad guys and being rewarded for being the kind of sheriff who doesn’t also shoot innocents.Although the controls mirror (albeit with a tap to shoot rather than leap forward), progression is more akin to , with you having to complete each miniature room (as in, shoot all the bad guys) before moving on.The net result is a game that’s ultimately an entertaining arcade title, but that somehow also feels like you’re exploring a tiny universe – and one with character. It’s amusing when you’re facing a duel, and a pianist is rather conspicuously outside, furiously playing an ominous score. We’re in broadly familiar territory with , which twins with bomb disposal. This means you get chunky graphics and a swipe-based take on Frogger, but must also quickly locate and deal with high-explosives that are soon to go off.This twist transforms Bomb Hunters into a relentlessly frantic experience, and keeps you on your toes regarding the route you’re taking. Everything becomes markedly tougher when enemy snipers and grenadiers appear, and when some bombs only disarm when you complete a dexterity mini-game.The swipe controls can be a touch iffy at times, but otherwise this is a smart take on an otherwise tired genre – and one that rewards repeat play through unlocks that boost your survival rate during subsequent games. The clue’s in the title in this entertaining and arcade-oriented engineering test. In , you’re faced with a vehicle, a gap over which the vehicle would like to travel, and some materials to build your bridge. You lay down a structure on virtual graph paper, press play, and see what happens.If your bridge falls to bits – as it invariably will on the first few attempts – you can go back, rebuild and try again. Should you want to properly test out your engineering skills, you must minimize the materials used to get a three-star award – tricky when you hit levels requiring outlandish solutions that incorporate jumps and hot-air balloons.Some of the building can be a bit fiddly, but on an iPad Build a Bridge! proves a compelling test of your engineering skills. Yes, we know: you’ve seen a dozen games just like this, essentially endless runners with a puzzle solving edge, complete with teleporters and multiple routes. But wait – all is not quite as it seems.One thing does have in common with several other games is you auto-tumbling about an isometric world, prodding the screen to abruptly change direction. Get it wrong and chances are you’ll fall off of a narrow elevated pathway into oblivion.But unlike the competition, DROP NOT! isn’t algorithmically generated; instead, it has 20 handcrafted levels, transforming the game into an adventure you can master.Beating it in one go from the start requires some serious memory and timing skills; if that all seems too much, points buy keys to unlock checkpoints you can start from, in order to discover all of the game’s secrets. Either way, this title’s far more than it first appears to be. Here we have another endless runner mining gaming’s past for a hook to hang everything on. This time, Bomberman has been shoe-horned into the genre. Fortunately for , this works.The basic premise, as ever, is your little character must keep running, lest they be eaten up by a game world falling into the abyss. To push ever onward, they can obliterate walls and other hazards by dropping bombs and then fleeing before they explode.During each game, you can grab power-ups, collect coins to spend on new characters, and coo at the pretty graphics. From a longevity standpoint, Tiny Bombers is probably not another Crossy Road, but even so it makes for a fun and explosive change. We shouldn’t encourage them, really. is packed full of horrible free-to-play trappings: timers; gates; a baffling currency/resource system. And yet it’s a horribly compelling title. Much of this is down to how much fun it apparently is to watch giant robots punching each other in the face.If you’re unfamiliar with Transformers, it’s based around robots that disguise themselves as cars and planes as a kind of camouflage - and then they forget about all that, transform into bipedal robots, and attempt to smash each other to bits.This game has various Transformers universes colliding, which for fans only increases the fun – after all, old hands can watch with glee as old-school Optimus Prime hacks Michael Bay’s version to pieces with a massive axe. But for newcomers hankering for one-on-one Street Fighterish brawls on an iOS device, it’s still a freebie worth grabbing. With , you rather generously get the entire arcade mode from superb blaster . What this means is a slew of fast-paced and eye-dazzling shooty action, where you blast everything around you to pieces, while trying very hard to stay in one piece yourself.The twin-stick shenanigans echo the likes of Geometry Wars (or, if you’re really old, Robotron) in terms of controls, but the setup is more Asteroids, obliterating space rocks – and also the spaceships that periodically zoom in to do you damage.The entire thing’s wrapped around planetoids floating in the void, making for a dizzying, thrilling ride as you attempt to locate the last bit of flying rock before some alien attacker swoops in and rips away the last of your shields. This one’s from the folks, but this time the classic titles being mined appear to be Dig-Dug and Mr. Driller. And, yes, that was a terrible pun, because is all about mining, your little hero drilling deep into the ground on a quest for bling, trying to avoid regular cave-ins and various underground ‘one touch equals death’ denizens.Bar a baffling card power-up system, Digby Forever is a breezy arcade blast. Its little world feels very alive, with explosions blasting pixels across the screen, and various creatures going about their business. Intriguingly, it also deftly deals with that problem in endless games of starting from scratch – here, you always restart from where you were last defeated. There’s a good chance would make a scientist angrily hurl their iPad at a wall on their first experience with the game, on account of how fast and loose it plays with the laws of nature.However, this portal of discovery, thinking outside the box, and, frankly, random guessing, is nonetheless a lot of fun.You start with the classical elements (air; fire; water; earth), and combine them to create new objects. The aim is to figure out how to make over 500 things, from volcanoes to unicorns.Some combinations are logical and amusing – a vacuum cleaner is a broom combined with electricity. But a helicopter? That requires you merge an airplane and a windmill. And now we really want to see someone combine those things in the real world. For the most part, side-on endless runners tend to be ideal iPhone fare, but has a twist that makes it a much better bet for your iPad. In this world of retro-style pixelated graphics, a little archer dashes along, aiming to scoop up blue gems, and jumping to avoid getting fried on electrified fences.The twist here is the ‘archer’ bit – drag across the left-hand side of the screen and time temporarily slows, so you can aim and unleash an arrow to destroy obstacles or collect out-of-reach bling. Now and again, there’s a frantic boss battle to survive.On iPhone, the game works fine, but only on iPad are you afforded the precision needed to have a lengthy dash rather than a short sprint. With , the iPad shows bigger (as in, the screen) really can be better. The basics involve swiping to avoid traffic while hurtling along a road. New vehicles are periodically won, each of which has a special skill (such as the UFO abducting traffic, and the taxi picking up fares); and there are also random events to respond to, such as huge dinosaurs barreling along.On iPad, the gorgeous visuals are more dazzling than on the smaller iPhone, and in landscape or portrait, it’s easier to see what’s in front of you, potentially leading to higher scores.Also, the game’s multi-touch aware, so you can multi-finger-swipe to change several lanes at once – fiddly on an iPhone but a cinch on a tablet, making for an addictive, just-one-more-go experience. We shouldn’t encourage them. is yet another endless game, almost entirely bereft of innovation – and yet it has two really clever bits that transform it into a surprisingly absorbing offering.First, the visuals include plenty of large characters bursting with personality. But more importantly, the controls are clever. You get two buttons – ‘turn’ and ‘climb’ – for working your way up a zigzagging staircase to the heavens. ‘Turn’ not only flips you round, but also has you climb a step.That might not sound like much, but as the timer rapidly depletes, you’ll mess up often in the more winding sections of staircase, curse your thumbs, have another go, and realize you’re once again glued to another endless runner. Although has the visual appearance of Amiga classic Sensible Soccer, this is a much more sedate affair, with decidedly strange controls that have more in common with Angry Birds than footie games.As your little players scoot about the pitch, you use drag and release gestures to tackle and shoot, or drag back and slide left and right to dribble.This all feels a bit floaty, but a few games in everything clicks, and you’ll have fun kicking off against online opposition. There is a sense of shallowness, however – there’s no offline mode and none of the extensive depth found in the likes of . Still, as a freebie iPad kickabout, Solid Soccer manages a scrappy win. Snake meets land-grabbing in . On entering the arena – populated by other players – you swipe to guide your little square about. Encircle a section of space and it fills with your color, boosting your territory score.You must be careful to not collide with the walls surrounding the arena. Also, square trails are player’s weak spots. Run over an opponent’s and they’re removed from the game, leaving gems you can munch. But the same’s true for you – so watch out.Paper.io’s a bit heavy on ads and bereft of audio, but the game itself is nonetheless compelling, not least because you can dive right back in for revenge should someone abruptly terminate your go. Here’s yet another game with a ‘Verby Noun’ moniker, and blocky voxel graphics. But although riffs off of Crossy Road in those areas, it’s in fact a nicely-designed trivia game, in which you have to guess 300 famous faces, grouped into 12 item rounds.In each case, you get a basic clue and a figurine to spin. Tap in an answer (using a suitably blocky custom keyboard) and the figurine explodes all over the screen if you guess correctly. If you’re close – just a small misspelling away – the game amusingly moves into game show host mode, asking “Can we take that?”Should you get stuck, ask for more clues – but note: replenishing your clue token stash requires IAP or watching ads. On consoles, fighting games tend to need millions of buttons and players to have an eidetic memory to recall all the various combinations for special moves. Mercifully, simplifies things for the touchscreen, and gives you the added bonus of having your favorite comic characters smack each other’s faces off.The plot’s thin, but the side-on one-on-one scraps pack a punch, with you swiping to unleash attacks and holding the screen to block. Visually, it’s a treat, and the fighting element is entertaining and accessible.And the freemium angle? Well, that can irk in the long term, but – like a Marvel movie – this one’s good for a quick blast every now and again, even if it’s a bit lacking in depth and longevity. The world’s stretchiest canine’s found himself in a world full of sticky desserts and a surprising number of saw blades. His aim: get to the other end of this deadly yet yummy horizontally scrolling world. The snag: the aforementioned blades, a smattering of puzzles, and the way this particular pooch moves.In , the canine hero doesn’t pootle along on tiny legs – instead, you swipe to make his body stretch like an angular snake until he reaches another surface, whereupon his hind quarters catch up.The result is an impressive side-scroller that’s more sedate puzzler than frantic platformer – aside from in adrenaline-fueled time-based challenge rooms, which even Silly Sausage veterans will be hard-pressed to master.  Do you like brick-bashing Breakout? Do you like ball-whacking pinball? If so, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy , which mashes the two together. Here, you get flippers to smack the ball around but also a little bat you move back and forth at the foot of the screen. Oh, and there are power-ups, too, which can be triggered to blow up hard-to-reach targets and bricks.If that all sounds a bit like patting your head while rubbing your stomach, that’s not far off. Super Hyper Ball 2 can be like playing two games simultaneously.Curiously, given its heritage, it can also be oddly pedestrian at times, but it’s mostly giddy fun, whether facing off against a laser-spewing skull boss, or smashing your way through a whirling disc with colorful bricks glued to its surface. We’ve lost count of the number of puzzle games where you swipe to force a couple of blocks simultaneously slide about, aiming to make them both reach a goal. And on first glance, that’s .But this title cleverly differentiates itself from mundane contemporaries by welding itself to the guts of an endless runner.In Waiit’s vertically scrolling world, a universe-devouring entity is in hot pursuit. You must rapidly figure out routes to the next exit and deftly perform the swipes required to get both of your squares through unscathed.Tension is mixed with charm as the little squares holler to each other by way of comic-style balloons. And although you’ll initially fail quickly and often – perhaps even hankering for a hazard-free zen mode – it’s Waiit’s relative toughness that’ll keep you coming back to beat your high score. The best way to think about is as a radically simplified Tetris where you happen to be hurtling along at insane speeds. There’s just one shape here – a rectangular brick – and it must be fired along one of four columns, with you aiming to complete rows and make them disappear.For the first fifteen shots, it’s pretty much impossible to mess up. The screen scrolls slowly, ensuring your aim is always true. Then Brick Shot ups the pace considerably, and even only having four columns to decide between can sometimes feel like three too many.On the iPad at least, your fingers have space to rest and your eyes can more easily track incoming walls. Ongoing success unlocks alternate modes, although the straightforward original’s probably the best. If you know your arcade history, you’ll know that Galaga is one of the earliest single-screen shooters. The sequel to Galaxian – where aliens started fighting back by way of dive-bombing – Galaga added ‘Challenging Stages’, where strings of ships would flit about rather than marching back and forth in formation. combines both approaches, increases the pace, adds glossy modern cartoonish graphics, and gleefully ends your war should your ship take a single hit. You must therefore weave through projectiles, efficiently offing opponents, and grabbing power-ups whenever they appear.Regular boss battles up the ante in what’s a vibrant and compelling shooter. The excitement does eventually wane – levels never change and it’s a grind to reach later ones – but for a time this is a solid free blaster for your iPad, and for many of us that’s just the way we like our tablet gaming. The original Flappy Golf was a surprise hit, given that it was essentially a joke – a satire on Flappy Bird. While is a more polished and considered effort, it’s essentially more of the same, giving you courses from the most recent Super Stickman Golf, and adding wings to the balls.Instead of smacking the ball with a stick, then, you flap it skywards, using left and right buttons to head in the right direction. If you’re a Super Stickman Golf 3 aficionado, Flappy Golf 2 forces you to try very different approaches to minimize flaps and get the scores needed to unlock further courses.For newcomers, it’s an immediate, fun and silly take on golf, not least when you delve into the manic race mode. The permanent ad during play also makes this a far better bet on iPad than iPhone, where the ad can obscure the course. (Disappointingly, there’s no IAP to eradicate advertising.) This fast-paced rhythm-action game has you swiping the screen like a lunatic, trying to help your tiny musicians to the end of a piece of classical music without them exploding. Yep, things are tough in the world of – one bum note and a violinist or pianist will evaporate in a puff of smoke.The entire thing is swipe-based. Arrows descend from the top of a narrow column at the centre of the screen, and you must match them with a gesture. At lower difficulty levels, this is insanely easy.Ramp up the speed, though, and your fingers will soon be in a twist, despite the apparent simplicity of the task. A $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99 IAP unlocks more songs, but you get five for free. One of the most ludicrous one-thumb games around, features a car hurtling along the road. You can hold the screen to brake, and if you don’t, the car speeds up. Sooner or later, it’ll be hurled into the air and start spinning, thereby awarding you with huge points – unless you land badly and smash your vehicle to pieces.There’s a lot of risk-versus-reward and careful timing here, with gameplay that offers a smattering of Tiny Wings and a whole lot of weird.Most of said oddness comes by way of the environment, which lobs all kinds of objects at your car, and regularly has it propelled into the air by a grinning tornado. Stick out the game long enough (or open your wallet) and you can unlock new worlds and cars to further shake things up. Instead of blazing through larger-than-life takes on real-world cities, takes you off-road, zooming through dunes, drifting across muddy flats, and generally treating the great outdoors in a manner that will win you no favors with the local authorities.As per other entries in the series, this is ballsy arcade racing, with bouncy physics, simple controls, an obsession with boosting, and tracks designed to make you regularly smash your car to bits.It’s also, sadly, absolutely riddled with freemium cruft: timers; currencies; nags – the lot. But if you can look past that and dip in and out occasionally to allow the game to ‘recharge’, there’s a lot to like in this racer that’s decided roads and rules are so last season.   There’s a delightful and elegant simplicity at the heart of . The game echoes iPad classic Desert Golfing, in providing a seemingly endless course to explore. But rather than smacking a ball, you’re blasting a little astronaut between landing pads.The controls also hark back to another game – the ancient Lunar Lander. After blast-off, you tap the sides of the screen to emit little jets of air, attempting to nudge your astronaut in the right direction and break their fall before a collision breaks them.Smartly, you can have endless tries without penalty, but the game also tots up streaks without death. Repeat play is further rewarded by unlocking characters (also available via IAP), many of which dramatically alter the environment you’re immersed in. Like a simulation of having a massive migraine while on a stomach-churning roller-coaster, is a rhythm action game intent on blasting your optics out while simultaneously making your head spin.It flings you through dizzying, blazing-fast tracks, asking you to tap or hold the screen to the beat of thumping techno and catchy J-Pop.The game looks superb – all retro-futuristic vector graphics and explosions of color that are like being stuck inside a mirror ball while 1980s video games whirl around your head.Mostly you'll stick around for the exhilarating tap-happy rhythm action, which marries immediacy with plenty of challenge, clever choreography tripping up the complacent on higher difficulty levels.It never becomes a slog though – tracks are shortish and ideal for quick play; and for free, you can unlock plenty of them, but loads more are available via in-app purchase.   So crazy it has an exclamation mark in its name, is essentially a reverse Flappy Bird. Your blocky vehicle bounces around like a hyperactive hybrid of a 4x4 and a flea, abruptly returning to terra firma when you hold the screen.This sounds simple enough, yet the controls are oddly disorienting, not least when your chunky vehicle's tasked with avoiding waves of deadly bombs and rockets that litter the screen.. which is at pretty much every moment.Games are therefore very short; and, frankly, we shouldn't encourage this kind of iPad game, given that there are so many of them. But Crazy Truck! is colorful – if frequently frustrating – fun, and neatly has you tackle the same 'course' until you beat a virtual opponent. (Well, we say 'neatly'; whether you'll think that on your 27th attempt…) Initially, baffles. You're served some colored rings and told to place them on a three-by-three grid.But you soon realize you're in color-matching territory, rings exploding when colors match on a horizontal, vertical or diagonal line.The twist is that there are three sizes of ring, and sometimes pieces have multiple rings with different colors. You must therefore carefully manage where you place each piece, otherwise the board fills up in a manner that will have you desperately hoping for a tiny green ring before the game bats away your trifling wishes and mercilessly ends your game.That won't happen for some time though – the games tend to go on for too long, unless you're paying no attention whatsoever.However, if you can carve an hour out of your day, a session with Rings should prove a satisfying and relaxing diversion that gives your brain a bit of a workout.  Rather than requiring you to build a tower, is all about demolition, tapping to blast Tetris-like shapes from a colorful column. The tiny snag is a hexagon sits at the top, and the second it falls into the void, your game is over.In theory, Six! is the kind of game that should be ridiculously easy. In reality, the hexagon is big and unwieldy and the tower narrow enough that you must take care removing blocks, lest the plummeting shape spin and fling itself to certain doom.When that happens, the simple fun rather nicely concludes with a frantic 'last call', where you tap like a maniac to grab a bunch of extra points before the screen dims.   We have absolutely no idea what’s going on in . What we do know is that this is a deeply weird but thoroughly compelling game.According to the game’s blurb, Masky’s all about some kind of grand costume ball, with you dancing to mystic sounds and inviting other masked dancers to join you. What this means in practice is shuffling left and right, adding other dancers to your merry band, and ensuring the balance meter never goes beyond red. If it does, everyone falls over – masks everywhere.Beyond the lovely graphics and audio, there’s a smart – if simple – game here. Some masks from newcomers added to your line shake things up, flipping the screen or temporarily removing the balance meter.Inevitably, everything also speeds up as you play, making keeping balance increasingly tough. We don’t doubt the unique visuals count for a lot regarding Masky’s pull, but the strange premise and compelling gameplay keep you dancing for the long haul. Perhaps our favorite thing about is that it’s, really, very silly indeed. The premise is to balance things on a massive plank, precariously perched atop the pointy bit of a tower.Said plank’s position is shifted by tapping water at the foot of the screen, launching massive bubbles. These counter whatever’s lurking on top, unless you mess up and everything slides into the sea and explodes.Tasks come thick and fast, often lasting mere seconds. You must quickly figure out how to balance 10 people when they’re being chased by zombies, construct a hamburger when its component parts are being lobbed from the heavens, and pop balloons by using a trundling hedgehog.The themes admittedly repeat quite often, but everything’s so charming (and your games are so short) that this doesn’t really matter. It’s safe to say that subtlety wasn’t on the menu of whatever service represents. This is a brash endless runner of the tap head/rub belly variety. You control a delivery vehicle, smashing its way along a road, attempting to hurl takeaways at waiting hungry people who might think otherwise about ordering from you in future.This is a two-button effort, one lobs food and the other switches lanes. Games mostly involve frantically mashing the throw food button, hoping for the best, while maniacally weaving between parked cars and avoiding idiots driving into the middle of the road without looking.It’s part Paperboy, part Flappy Bird, and while the action eventually palls, it’s always good for a quick blast – especially when you start unlocking vehicles and get to deliver pizza using a massive tank. The BAFTA-winning rethought pinball for mobile, breaking it down into bite-sized simple tables that were more like puzzles. Precision shots – and few of them – were the key to victory. thinks similarly, while simultaneously transforming the genre into an against-the-clock endless runner.The idea is to always move forwards, shooting the ball up ramps that send it to the next miniature table. Along the way, you grab dots to replenish the relentlessly ticking down timer, find and use power-ups, and play the odd mini-game, in a game that recalls basic but compelling fare once found on the LED displays of real-life tables.PinOut! is gorgeous – all neon-infused tables and silky smooth synth-pop soundtrack. And while the seemingly simplified physics might nag pinball aficionados, it makes for an accessible and playable game for everyone else. There's not a lot of originality in King Rabbit, but it's one of those simple and endearing puzzle games that sucks you in and refuses to let go until you've worked your way through the entire thing.The premise is hackneyed — bunnies have been kidnapped, and a sole hero must save them. And the gameplay is familiar too, where you leap about a grid-like landscape, manipulating objects, avoiding hazards, finding keys, unlocking doors, and reaching a goal.But the execution is such that King Rabbit is immediately engaging, while new ideas keep coming as you work through the dozens of puzzles. Pleasingly, the game also increases the challenge so subtly that you barely notice — until you realise you've been figuring out a royal bunny's next moves into the wee small hours. From the off, it's obvious Ollie Cats isn't taking itself seriously. The aim is to 'ollie' (jump) an endless number of cats heading in your rad skateboarder's direction. You can perform all manner of tricks (including grinding along fences when loads of cats suddenly appear), but the game in miserly fashion only bestows a single point per cat cleared, regardless of your amazing skills.However, you can also be the cat. That's right - it's possible to play the game as a black moggie on a board, aiming to become the coolest feline around. There are fewer stunts in this mode, but it's so ridiculous that the cat version of the game fast became our favorite. In a marked departure from the impressive Phoenix HD and its procedurally generated bullet hell,Phoenix II shoves you through set-piece vertically scrolling shoot 'em up grinders. Every 24 hours, a new challenge appears, tasking you with surviving a number of waves comprising massive metal space invaders belching hundreds of deadly bullets your way.A single hit to your craft's core (a small spot at its center) brings destruction, forcing you to memorize attack and bullet patterns and make use of shields and deflectors if you've any hope of survival. You do sometimes slam into a brick wall, convinced a later wave is impossible to beat.To lessen the frustration, there's always the knowledge you'll get another crack at smashing new invaders the following day. Regardless, this is a compelling, dazzling and engaging shooter for iPad. Sharing DNA with Super Hexagon and ALONE…, Barrier X is the kind of game that merrily smacks you in the face for having the audacity to blink.Hurling you at insane speeds along minimal 3D tracks that some idiot's peppered with walls, all you have to do is head left and right to avoid crashing. But this isn't so simple when blazing along at about a million miles per hour.Comically, Barrier X speeds up every 15 seconds; and if you survive long enough further challenges are unlocked. Suddenly, you're told to travel through (rather than avoid) certain barriers, and to shoot rivals, all while attempting to not become so much space dust.Minimal visuals and a thumping soundtrack further add to Barrier X's brutal charms - it's an exhilarating, exciting title among the very best of its kind. If you've experienced Colin Lane's deranged take on wrestling (the decidedly oddball Wrassling), you probably know what you're in for with Dunkers. In theory, this is side-on one-on-one basketball, but Dunkers is knowingly mad.You only get two buttons, one of which dodders your player back towards their own basket, while the other lurches them into the air and in the opposite direction. All the while, their arms whirl like a hysterical clock.You battle as best you can, grabbing the ball from your berserk opponent, fighting your way to the basket, and slam dunking victoriously. The entire thing is ridiculous, almost the antithesis of photo-realistic fare like NBA 2K; but we'd also argue that it's a lot more fun. An excellent example in how iteration can improve a game, The Little Fox was almost impossible upon release. But a reduction in speed and some restart points proved transformative, enabling you to immerse yourself in a sweet-natured, great-looking pathfinding arcade outing.The titular fox is on a quest that takes the bounding carnivore through 13 varied lands. Pathways comprise hexagons littered with collectables and hazards, and at any moment you can only turn left or right or continue straight on.At the original breakneck pace (still available as an in-game option), this all feels too much. But when slowed down, The Little Fox reveals itself to be a clever, imaginative, fun title, with surprises to be found on every planet the furry critter visits. It's hard to imagine a less efficient way of building and maintaining a zoo than what you see in Rodeo Stampede. Armed with a lasso, you foolishly venture into a stampede and leap from animal to animal, attempting to win their hearts by virtue of not being flung to the ground.You then whisk beaten animals away to a zoo in a massive sky-based craft - the kind of place where you imagine the Avengers might hang out if they gave up crime-fighting and decided to start jailing animals rather than villains.Despite overly familiar chunky visuals (Crossy Road has a lot to answer for), this fast-paced, breezy game is a lot of fun, with you dragging left and right to avoid blundering into rocks, and lifting your finger to soar into the air, aiming to catch another rampaging beast. Much like previous entries in the series, Super Stickman Golf 3 finds a tiny golfer dumped in fantastical surroundings. So rather than thwacking a ball about carefully tended fairways and greens, there are castles full of teleporters and a moon base bereft of gravity. The Ryder Cup, this is not.New to the series is a spin mechanic, for flipping impossible shots off of ceilings and nudging fluffed efforts holewards on the greens. You also get turn-by-turn battles against Game Centre chums and a frenetic multiplayer race mode.The spendthrift release is limited, though, restricting how many two-player battles you have on the go, locking away downloadable courses beyond the 20 initially built-in, and peppering the game with ads. Even so, you get a lot for nothing, should you be after new side-on golfing larks but not want to pay for the privilege. With more than a hint of Fruit Ninja about it, Bushido Bear finds a sword-wielding teddy defending the forest against endless waves of evil demons. You get a brief warning about where your assailants will appear, and must quickly drag paths to move your bear about; it'll then get suitably slashy and stabby, hopefully not blundering into an enemy in the meantime.It's a fast-paced affair, and you'll need swift reactions to survive. Over time, you unlock additional frenzied furry animals, each with their own particular skills. And, amusingly, when a bear is killed, its colleague can be thrown into the fray, ready for some angry ninja bear vengeance! If you like the idea of golf, but not traipsing around greens in the drizzle, WGT: World Tour Golf is the closest you'll get to the real thing on your iPad. Courses have been meticulously rebuilt in virtual form, based on thousands of photographs, and WGT's control scheme is accessible yet also quite punishing.There's no mucking about spinning balls in mid-air to alter your shot here - mess up and you'll know about it, with a score card massively over par. But this is a game that rewards mastery and perseverance, and you feel like a boss once you crack how to land near-perfect shots.WGT is, mind, a touch ad-heavy at times, but this is countered by there being loads to do, including head-to-head online multiplayer and a range of tournaments to try your hand at. In Clash Royale, two players battle online, sending out troops to obliterate their opponent's three towers, while simultaneously protecting their own. It comes across a bit like animated chess, if chess pieces were armed to the teeth and ranged from a giant robot with a huge scythe to an army of skittering skeletons.The troops you have available come by way of cards you collect, from which you select a deck of eight. In matches, elixir gradually tops up, which can be 'spent' deploying said troops, forcing you to manage resources and spot when your opponent might be dry.Clash Royale is very much a freemium game. You can spend a ton of real-world cash on virtual coins to buy and upgrade cards. However, doing so isn't really necessary, and we've heard of people getting to the very highest levels in the game without spending a penny. But even if you find yourself scrapping in the lower leagues, Clash Royale is loads of fun. Tie-ins between indie game companies and major movie houses often end badly, but Disney Crossy Road bucks the trend. It starts off like the original Crossy Road — an endless take on Frogger. Only here, Mickey Mouse picks his way across motorways, train lines and rivers, trying to avoid death by drowning or being splattered across a windscreen.But unlock new characters (you'll have several for free within a few games) and you open up further Disney worlds, each with unique visuals and challenges.In Toy Story, Woody and Buzz dodge tumbling building blocks, whereas the inhabitants of Haunted Mansion are tasked with keeping the lights on and avoiding a decidedly violent suit of armour.Elsewhere, Inside Out has you dart about collecting memories, which are sucked up for bonus points. And on the iPad, the gorgeous chunky visuals of these worlds really get a chance to shine. This smashy endless arcade sports title has more than a hint of air hockey about it, but PKTBALL is also infused with the breakneck madness associated with Laser Dog's brutal iOS games.It takes place on a tiny cartoon tennis court, with you swiping across the ball to send it back to your opponent. But this game is *really* fast, meaning that although you'll clock how to play PKTBALL almost immediately, mastering it takes time.In solo mode, the computer AI offers plenty of challenge, but it's in multiplayer matches that PKTBALL serves an ace. Two to four people duke it out, swiping like lunatics (and hopefully not hurling the iPad away in a huff, like a modern-day McEnroe, when things go bad).As ever, there are new characters to unlock, each of which boasts its own court and background music. Our current favourite: a little Game Boy, whose court has a certain famous blocky puzzle game playing in the background. At first glance, Looty Dungeon comes across like a Crossy Road wannabe. But you soon realise it's actually a very smartly designed endless dungeon crawler that just happens to pilfer Crossy Road's control method, chunky visual style, and sense of urgency.You begin as a tiny stabby knight, scooting through algorithmically generated isometric rooms. You must avoid spikes and chopping axes, outrun a collapsing floor, and dispatch monsters. The action is fast-paced, lots of fun, and challenges your dexterity and ability to think on the move.As is seemingly law in today's mobile gaming landscape, Looty Dungeon also nags at the collector in you, offering characters to unlock. But these aren't just decorative in nature — they have unique weapons, which alter how you play. For example, an archer has better range than the knight, but no defensive shield when up against an angry witch or ravenous zombie. Touchscreens have opened up many new ways to play games, but scribbling with a finger is perhaps the most natural. And that's essentially all you do in Magic Touch, which sounds pretty reductive - right up until you start playing.The premise is that you're a wizard, fending off invading nasties who all oddly use balloons to parachute towards their prize. Match the symbol on any balloon and it pops, potentially causing a hapless intruder to meet the ground rather more rapidly than intended. Initially, this is all very simple, but when dozens of balloons fill your field of vision, you'll be scrawling like crazy, desperately fending off the invasion to keep the wizard gainfully employed. Time travel weirdness meets the morning rush hour in Does Not Commute. You get a short story about a character, and guide their car to the right road. Easy! Only the next character's car must be dealt with while avoiding the previous one. And the next. Before long, you're a dozen cars in and weaving about like a lunatic, desperately trying to avoid a pile-up. For free, you get the entire game, but with the snag that you must always start from scratch, rather than being able to use checkpoints that appear after each zone. (You can unlock these for a one-off payment of $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49.) With its numbered sliding squares and soaring scores, there's more than a hint of Threes! about Imago. In truth, Threes! remains the better game, on the basis that it's more focussed, but Imago has plenty going for it. The idea is to merge pieces of the same size and colour, which when they get too big explode into smaller pieces that can be reused.The clever bit is each of these smaller pieces retains the score of the larger block. This means that with smart thinking, you can amass colossal scores that head into the billions. The game also includes daily challenges with different success criteria, to keep you on your toes. With iPads lacking tactile controls, they should be rubbish for platform games. But savvy developers have stripped back the genre, creating hybrid one-thumb auto-runner/platformers. These are entirely reliant on careful timing, the key element of more traditional fare.Mr. Crab further complicates matters by wrapping its levels around a pole. The titular crustacean ambles back and forth, scooping up baby crabs, and avoiding the many enemies lurking about the place. The end result is familiar and yet fresh. You get a selection of diverse levels for free, and additional packs are available via IAP. Having played Planet Quest, we imagine whoever was on naming duties didn't speak to the programmer. If they had, the game would be called Awesome Madcap Beam-Up One-Thumb Rhythm Action Insanity — or possibly something a bit shorter. Anyway, you're in a spaceship, prodding the screen to repeat beats you've just heard. Doing so beams up dancers on the planet's surface; get your timing a bit wrong and you merely beam-up their outfits; miss by a lot and you lose a life. To say this one's offbeat would be a terrible pun, but entirely accurate; it'd also be true to say this is the most fun rhythm action game on iPad — and it doesn't cost a penny. We imagine the creators of Smash Hit really hate glass. Look at it, sitting there with its stupid, smug transparency, letting people see what's on the other side of it. Bah! Smash it all! Preferably with ball-bearings while flying along corridors! And that's Smash Hit — fly along, flinging ball-bearings, don't hit any glass face-on, and survive for as long as possible.There are 50 rooms in all, but cheapskates start from scratch each time; pay $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99 for the premium unlock and you get checkpoints, stats, iCloud sync, and alternative game modes. One of the most innovative multiplayer titles we've ever played, Spaceteam has you and a bunch of friends in a room, each staring at a rickety and oddball spaceship control panel on your device's display. Instructions appear, which need a fast response if your ship is to avoid being swallowed up by an exploding star. But what you see might not relate to your screen and controls. Spaceteam therefore rapidly descends into a cacophony of barked demands and frantic searches across control panels (which helpfully start falling to bits), in a last-ditch attempt to 'set the Copernicus Crane to 6' or 'activate the Twinmill' and avoid fiery death. The best puzzle game on mobile, Threes! has you slide cards about a grid, merging pairs to create ever higher numbers. The catch is all cards slide as one, unless they cannot move; additionally, each turn leads to a new card in a random empty slot on the edge you swiped away from. It's all about careful management of a tiny space.On launch, Threes! was mercilessly cloned, with dozens of alternatives flooding iTunes, but 2048 and its ilk lack the charm and fine details that made Threes! so great in the first place. And now there's Threes! Free, where you watch ads to top up a 'free goes' bin, there's no excuse for going with inferior pretenders. "Expect retro graphics and megatons of enemies," says the developer about this twin-stick shooter, adding: "Don't expect a story". With its vector graphics and Robotronish air, PewPew brings to mind Geometry Wars and Infinity Field, but without a price tag.Despite being free, PewPew nonetheless boasts five modes of shooty goodness. These range from the aptly named 'Pandemonium', where enemies spin around the screen on dying, to the more thoughtful (but still manic) 'Chromatic Conflict', where you can only shoot foes whose colour matches your ship. At some point, a total buffoon decreed that racing games should be dull and grey, on grey tracks, with grey controls. Gameloft's Asphalt series dispenses with such foolish notions, along with quite a bit of reality.Here, in Asphalt 8, you zoom along at ludicrous speeds, drifting for miles through exciting city courses, occasionally being hurled into the air to perform stunts that absolutely aren't acceptable according to the car manufacturer's warranty. It's admittedly a bit grindy, but if you tire of zooming about the tracks in this game, there's no hope for you. In Triple Town, you have to think many moves ahead to succeed. It's a match game where trios of things combine to make other things, thereby giving you more space on the board to evolve your town. For example, three bushes become a tree, and three trees become a hut.All the while, roaming bears and ninjas complicate matters, blocking squares on the board. At times surreal, Triple Town is also brain-bending and thoroughly addictive. Free moves slowly replenish, but you can also unlock unlimited moves via IAP. Pinball games tend to be divided into two camps. One aims for a kind of realism, aping real-world tables. The other takes a more arcade-oriented approach. Zen Pinball is somewhere in-between, marrying realistic physics with tables that come to life with animated 3D figures.Loads of tables are available via IAP, including some excellent Star Wars and Marvel efforts. But for free you get access to the bright and breezy Sorcerer's Lair, which, aside from some dodgy voice acting, is a hugely compelling and fast-paced table with plenty of missions and challenges to discover. With almost limitless possibilities in videogames, it's amazing how many are drab grey and brown affairs. Frisbee Forever 2 (like its similarly impressive forerunner) is therefore a breath of fresh air with its almost eye-searing vibrance.There's a kind of Nintendo vibe - a sense of fun that continues through to the gameplay, which is all about steering a frisbee left and right, collecting stars strewn along winding paths. And these are a world away from the parks you'd usually fling plastic discs about in - here, you're hurled along roller-coaster journeys through ancient ruins and gorgeous snowy hillsides. Argh! That's pretty much what you'll be yelling on a regular basis on playing this endless racer. Cubed Rally Redline shouldn't be difficult. You can go left or right on five clearly defined lanes, and there's a 'time brake' for going all slow-motion, Matrix-style, to weave through tricky gaps; but you'll still be smashing into cows, dinosaurs and bridges before you know it.You'll persevere if you're particularly bloody minded, or just to see what other visual treats the developer's created for hardcore players. Source link

[telecom-forum]

LTE DRIVE TEST PARAMETERS

RSRP :- Reference signal receive power <<>> RSRQ :Reference signal receive quality <<>> SINR :-Signal to Noise Ratio <<>> RSSI :- Received Signal Strength Indicator <<>> CQI :- Channel Quality Indicator <<>> PCI :- Physical Cell Id <<>> BLER :- Block Error Rate <<>> Downlink Throughput <<>> Uplink Throughput

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

RSRP :- Reference signal receive power.

•      RSRP (dBm) = RSSI (dBm) -10*log (12*N)

where RSSI = Received Signal Strength Indicator

             N: number of RBs across the RSSI is measured and depends on the BW

Significance :

RSRP is the most basic of the UE physical layer measurements and is the linear average power (in watts) of the downlink reference signals (RS) across the channel bandwidth for the Resource elements that carry cell specific Reference Signals. 

Knowledge of absolute RSRP provides the UE with essential information about the strength of cells from which path loss can be calculated and used in the algorithms for determining the optimum power settings for operating the network. Reference signal receive power is used both in idle and connected states

Range :-  -44 to -140 dBm

•      RSRP term is used for coverage same as RSCP in 3G

RSRQ :Reference signal receive quality

RSRQ = RSRP / (RSSI / N)

N is the number of resource blocks over which the RSSI is measured

RSSI is wide band power, including intra cell power, interference and noise.

Significance :- 

 It provides the Indication of Signal Quality . Measuring RSRQ becomes particularly important near the cell edge when  decisions need to be made, regardless of absolute RSRP, to perform a handover to the next cell. Reference signal receive quality is used only during connected states

Range :-  -3 to -19.5 dB

RSRQ term is used for Quality same as Ec/No in 3G.

*  SINR :-Signal to Noise Ratio.

SINR = S / I + N

               S -- Average Received Signal Power

                I  --  Average Interference power

                N --  Noise Power

Significance  : Is a way to measure the Quality of LTE Wireless Connections. As the energy of signal fades with distance i.e Path Loss due to environmental parameters ( e.g. background noise , interfering strength of other simultaneous transmission)

RSSI :- Received Signal Strength Indicator.

•   RSSI = wideband power = noise + serving cell power + interference power

•   RSSI=12*N*RSRP

•   RSSI per resource block is measured over 12 resource elements.

N: number of RBs across the RSSI is measured and depends on the BW

Based on  the above:

                                 RSRP (dBm) = RSSI (dBm) -10*log (12*N)

Significance :– RSRP   Is the parameter represents the entire received power including the wanted power from the serving cell as well as all the co channel power & other sources of noise

CQI :- Channel Quality Indicator

             Range :- 1 to 15                

        Significance:        CQI is a measurement of the communication quality of wireless channels i.e. it indicates the downlink mobile radio channel quality as experienced by the UE .CQI can be a value representing a measure of channel quality for a given channel. Typically, a high value CQI is indicative of a channel with high quality and vice versa.

CQI is measured in the Dedicated mode only.

CQI depends on the RF conditions.

 Better the CQI better the throughput will get and vice versa.

PCI :- Physical Cell Id

   Range :- 0 to 503

Significance - PCI used to identify the cell & is used to transmit the data

PCI = PSS + 3*SSS

PSS is Primary Synchronization Signal ( Identifies Cell Id  ).

PSS value can be 0, 1 & 2

 SSS is Secondary Synchronization Signal ( identifies Cell Id group).

 SSS value can be 0 to 167.

BLER :- Block Error Rate

Block Error Ratio is defined as the ratio of the number of erroneous   blocks received to the total number of blocks transmitted

 Significance:   A simple method by which a UE can choose an appropriate CQI value could be based on a set of Block Error Rate (BLER) thresholds . The UE would report the CQI value corresponding to the Modulation Coding Schemes that ensures  BLER ≤ 10% based on the measured received signal quality

BLER is Calculated using Cyclic Redundancy error Checking method

High BLER leads to loss of Peak rates & efficiency

BLER  threshold should be low i.e. ≤ 10%

         Downlink Throughput

- n E-UTRAN  may use a maximum of 2 Tx antennas at the ENodeB and 2 Rx antennas at the UE ( MIMO ).

   Significance: Target for averaged user throughput per MHz, 3 to 4 times

 Release 6 HSDPA i.e Higher user throughput as compared to 3G ( Over 300 Mbps downlink as compared to 14 Mbps in UMTS)

The supported user throughput should scale with the spectrum  bandwidth.

    Uplink Throughput

-I  n E-UTRAN uses  a maximum of a single Tx antenna at the UE and 2 Rx antennas at the E Node B.

 -  Greater user throughput should be achievable using multiple Tx

     antennas at the UE ( MIMO )

Significance:  Target for averaged user throughput per MHz, 2 to 3 times Release 6 Enhanced Uplink i.e Higher user throughput as compared to 3G (Over 50 Mbps Uplink as compared to 5.76 Mbps in UMTS).The user throughput should scale with the spectrum bandwidth provided that the maximum transmit power is also scaled.

Phone-Based Drive Test for LTE

Phone-based drive test systems are useful for evaluating basic network performance and are essential to characterizing the end-user experience while using the network. Phone-based systems address the need to verify network settings such as cell selection and re-selection boundaries and to measure the voice and data application performance in the live network. Most modern mobile phones chipsets have engineering measurement capabilities built into them, which were used during the mobile phone’s design process.

These same parameters are exploited in drive test software to provide new value to the RF engineers rolling out the final network.

With radio resource management taking place in the eNB, suitably instrumented phones can be used to monitor the performance of the physical layer including modulation schemes, access procedures, synchronization, and power control.

The same types of parameters are measured for LTE as for other cellular technologies. Beyond the essential protocol log, which provides visibility of the fundamental interaction with the network, the initial focus is on RF coverage and quality. Figure 3 identifies the main measurements that are made. In LTE, these equate to reference signal received power (RSRP) and reference signal received quality (RSRQ), which are measures of the strength and quality of reference signals. These two results are the major components of network-based decisions to keep a UE on its current cell or hand it over to an adjacent cell.

Additional measurements used to assess the link quality include call quality index (CQI) and block error rates (BLER). While RSRQ is the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)-defined measure of signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), which all mobiles must make and report, many LTE UEs are also making custom carrier-to-noise ratio (C/N) measurements, which they use internally to assess channel quality. These additional carrier-to-interference (C/I) measurements are not reported back to the network, but they are available within the drive test logs and can be used by RF engineering teams to get extra insight as to how

the mobiles perceive the RF environment.

Instrumented phones can also report the measured channel state information (CQI, pre-matrix indicator [PMI], and rank indicator [RI]) and hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) statistics. The number of resource blocks assigned to a device at a particular time, together with the modulation and coding scheme applied, can be used to evaluate the eNB scheduler performance. These types of tests are of particular interest during early stages of deployment of a new network but also must be monitored as network loading increases and true end-user traffic patterns establish

One of the most interesting LTE network features to RF optimization engineers is the impact that multiple input multiple output (MIMO) with spatial multiplexing and antenna diversity brings to the end-user performance. Drive-test-enabled devices can log the current rank, number of transmit and receive paths in active use, together with the reported availability of antennas. They can also individually report the signal strength and quality from each of the device’s antennas. This information can be correlated with

the measured data application performance to establish the impact MIMO has on network performance.

Because full MIMO is a feedback system, an instrumented mobile that is part of the active channel is the only way to evaluate the true impact that this technology can make.

As LTE networks are deployed alongside existing cellular networks, cellular operators are particularly interested in the efficient use of each network resource and the transition between the network technologies. Drive testing is used extensively to monitor the handover points between LTE and legacy technologies. The signal strength, quality, cell ID, and neighbor information both before and after a handover are analyzed and optimized. The length of time it takes to complete an initiated handover, success rates, and the end-user data-interruption time (during the actual transition between technologies) are key performance indicators that are closely monitored.

End-user data throughput performance and latency are the two key measures of a network’s optimization. If the network is not achieving the expected data performance, it is important to be able to analyze the signaling performance and settings at each signaling layer, including the radio resource control (RRC), radio link control (RLC), and media access control (MAC). Monitoring the resources allocated to a UE together with the measured network conditions, available neighbor cells. and power levels will allow troubleshooting and optimization of network settings

Header (computing)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In information technology, header refers to supplemental data placed at the beginning of a block of data being stored or transmitted. In data transmission, the data following the header are sometimes called the payload or body.

It is vital that header composition follow a clear and unambiguous specification or format, to allow for parsing.

Examples

• E-mail header: The text (body) is preceded by header lines indicating sender, recipient, subject, sending time stamp, receiving time stamps of all intermediate and the final mail transfer agents, and much more. See RFC 5322 for details. Similar headers are used in Usenet (NNTP) messages, and HTTP headers.

• In a data packet sent via the Internet, the data (payload) are preceded by header information such as the sender's and the recipient's IP addresses, the protocol governing the format of the payload and several other formats. The header's format is specified in the Internet Protocol.

• In data packets sent by wireless communication, and in sectors of data stored on magnetic media, typically the header begins with a syncword to allow the receiver to adapt to analog amplitude and speed variations and for frame synchronization.

• In graphics file formats, the header might give information about an image's size, resolution, number of colors, and the like.

• In Archive file formats, the file header might serve as a fingerprint or signature to identify the specific file format and corresponding software utility.

http://ift.tt/2t4EkZb

[telecom-forum]

RSRP :- Reference signal receive power <<>> RSRQ :Reference signal receive quality <<>> SINR :-Signal to Noise Ratio <<>> RSSI :- Received Signal Strength Indicator <<>> CQI :- Channel Quality Indicator <<>> PCI :- Physical Cell Id <<>> BLER :- Block Error Rate <<>> Downlink Throughput <<>> Uplink Throughput

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

RSRP :- Reference signal receive power.

•      RSRP (dBm) = RSSI (dBm) -10*log (12*N)

where RSSI = Received Signal Strength Indicator

             N: number of RBs across the RSSI is measured and depends on the BW

Significance :

RSRP is the most basic of the UE physical layer measurements and is the linear average power (in watts) of the downlink reference signals (RS) across the channel bandwidth for the Resource elements that carry cell specific Reference Signals. 

Knowledge of absolute RSRP provides the UE with essential information about the strength of cells from which path loss can be calculated and used in the algorithms for determining the optimum power settings for operating the network. Reference signal receive power is used both in idle and connected states

Range :-  -44 to -140 dBm

•      RSRP term is used for coverage same as RSCP in 3G

RSRQ :Reference signal receive quality

RSRQ = RSRP / (RSSI / N)

N is the number of resource blocks over which the RSSI is measured

RSSI is wide band power, including intra cell power, interference and noise.

Significance :- 

 It provides the Indication of Signal Quality . Measuring RSRQ becomes particularly important near the cell edge when  decisions need to be made, regardless of absolute RSRP, to perform a handover to the next cell. Reference signal receive quality is used only during connected states

Range :-  -3 to -19.5 dB

RSRQ term is used for Quality same as Ec/No in 3G.

*  SINR :-Signal to Noise Ratio.

SINR = S / I + N

               S -- Average Received Signal Power

                I  --  Average Interference power

                N --  Noise Power

Significance  : Is a way to measure the Quality of LTE Wireless Connections. As the energy of signal fades with distance i.e Path Loss due to environmental parameters ( e.g. background noise , interfering strength of other simultaneous transmission)

RSSI :- Received Signal Strength Indicator.

•   RSSI = wideband power = noise + serving cell power + interference power

•   RSSI=12*N*RSRP

•   RSSI per resource block is measured over 12 resource elements.

N: number of RBs across the RSSI is measured and depends on the BW

Based on  the above:

                                 RSRP (dBm) = RSSI (dBm) -10*log (12*N)

Significance :– RSRP   Is the parameter represents the entire received power including the wanted power from the serving cell as well as all the co channel power & other sources of noise

CQI :- Channel Quality Indicator

             Range :- 1 to 15                

        Significance:        CQI is a measurement of the communication quality of wireless channels i.e. it indicates the downlink mobile radio channel quality as experienced by the UE .CQI can be a value representing a measure of channel quality for a given channel. Typically, a high value CQI is indicative of a channel with high quality and vice versa.

CQI is measured in the Dedicated mode only.

CQI depends on the RF conditions.

 Better the CQI better the throughput will get and vice versa.

PCI :- Physical Cell Id

   Range :- 0 to 503

Significance - PCI used to identify the cell & is used to transmit the data

PCI = PSS + 3*SSS

PSS is Primary Synchronization Signal ( Identifies Cell Id  ).

PSS value can be 0, 1 & 2

 SSS is Secondary Synchronization Signal ( identifies Cell Id group).

 SSS value can be 0 to 167.

BLER :- Block Error Rate

Block Error Ratio is defined as the ratio of the number of erroneous   blocks received to the total number of blocks transmitted

 Significance:   A simple method by which a UE can choose an appropriate CQI value could be based on a set of Block Error Rate (BLER) thresholds . The UE would report the CQI value corresponding to the Modulation Coding Schemes that ensures  BLER ≤ 10% based on the measured received signal quality

BLER is Calculated using Cyclic Redundancy error Checking method

High BLER leads to loss of Peak rates & efficiency

BLER  threshold should be low i.e. ≤ 10%

         Downlink Throughput

- n E-UTRAN  may use a maximum of 2 Tx antennas at the ENodeB and 2 Rx antennas at the UE ( MIMO ).

   Significance: Target for averaged user throughput per MHz, 3 to 4 times

 Release 6 HSDPA i.e Higher user throughput as compared to 3G ( Over 300 Mbps downlink as compared to 14 Mbps in UMTS)

The supported user throughput should scale with the spectrum  bandwidth.

    Uplink Throughput

-I  n E-UTRAN uses  a maximum of a single Tx antenna at the UE and 2 Rx antennas at the E Node B.

 -  Greater user throughput should be achievable using multiple Tx

     antennas at the UE ( MIMO )

Significance:  Target for averaged user throughput per MHz, 2 to 3 times Release 6 Enhanced Uplink i.e Higher user throughput as compared to 3G (Over 50 Mbps Uplink as compared to 5.76 Mbps in UMTS).The user throughput should scale with the spectrum bandwidth provided that the maximum transmit power is also scaled.

Phone-Based Drive Test for LTE

Phone-based drive test systems are useful for evaluating basic network performance and are essential to characterizing the end-user experience while using the network. Phone-based systems address the need to verify network settings such as cell selection and re-selection boundaries and to measure the voice and data application performance in the live network. Most modern mobile phones chipsets have engineering measurement capabilities built into them, which were used during the mobile phone’s design process.

These same parameters are exploited in drive test software to provide new value to the RF engineers rolling out the final network.

With radio resource management taking place in the eNB, suitably instrumented phones can be used to monitor the performance of the physical layer including modulation schemes, access procedures, synchronization, and power control.

The same types of parameters are measured for LTE as for other cellular technologies. Beyond the essential protocol log, which provides visibility of the fundamental interaction with the network, the initial focus is on RF coverage and quality. Figure 3 identifies the main measurements that are made. In LTE, these equate to reference signal received power (RSRP) and reference signal received quality (RSRQ), which are measures of the strength and quality of reference signals. These two results are the major components of network-based decisions to keep a UE on its current cell or hand it over to an adjacent cell.

Additional measurements used to assess the link quality include call quality index (CQI) and block error rates (BLER). While RSRQ is the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)-defined measure of signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), which all mobiles must make and report, many LTE UEs are also making custom carrier-to-noise ratio (C/N) measurements, which they use internally to assess channel quality. These additional carrier-to-interference (C/I) measurements are not reported back to the network, but they are available within the drive test logs and can be used by RF engineering teams to get extra insight as to how

the mobiles perceive the RF environment.

Instrumented phones can also report the measured channel state information (CQI, pre-matrix indicator [PMI], and rank indicator [RI]) and hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) statistics. The number of resource blocks assigned to a device at a particular time, together with the modulation and coding scheme applied, can be used to evaluate the eNB scheduler performance. These types of tests are of particular interest during early stages of deployment of a new network but also must be monitored as network loading increases and true end-user traffic patterns establish

One of the most interesting LTE network features to RF optimization engineers is the impact that multiple input multiple output (MIMO) with spatial multiplexing and antenna diversity brings to the end-user performance. Drive-test-enabled devices can log the current rank, number of transmit and receive paths in active use, together with the reported availability of antennas. They can also individually report the signal strength and quality from each of the device’s antennas. This information can be correlated with

the measured data application performance to establish the impact MIMO has on network performance.

Because full MIMO is a feedback system, an instrumented mobile that is part of the active channel is the only way to evaluate the true impact that this technology can make.

As LTE networks are deployed alongside existing cellular networks, cellular operators are particularly interested in the efficient use of each network resource and the transition between the network technologies. Drive testing is used extensively to monitor the handover points between LTE and legacy technologies. The signal strength, quality, cell ID, and neighbor information both before and after a handover are analyzed and optimized. The length of time it takes to complete an initiated handover, success rates, and the end-user data-interruption time (during the actual transition between technologies) are key performance indicators that are closely monitored.

End-user data throughput performance and latency are the two key measures of a network’s optimization. If the network is not achieving the expected data performance, it is important to be able to analyze the signaling performance and settings at each signaling layer, including the radio resource control (RRC), radio link control (RLC), and media access control (MAC). Monitoring the resources allocated to a UE together with the measured network conditions, available neighbor cells. and power levels will allow troubleshooting and optimization of network settings

Header (computing)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In information technology, header refers to supplemental data placed at the beginning of a block of data being stored or transmitted. In data transmission, the data following the header are sometimes called the payload or body.

It is vital that header composition follow a clear and unambiguous specification or format, to allow for parsing.

Examples

• E-mail header: The text (body) is preceded by header lines indicating sender, recipient, subject, sending time stamp, receiving time stamps of all intermediate and the final mail transfer agents, and much more. See RFC 5322 for details. Similar headers are used in Usenet (NNTP) messages, and HTTP headers.

• In a data packet sent via the Internet, the data (payload) are preceded by header information such as the sender's and the recipient's IP addresses, the protocol governing the format of the payload and several other formats. The header's format is specified in the Internet Protocol.

• In data packets sent by wireless communication, and in sectors of data stored on magnetic media, typically the header begins with a syncword to allow the receiver to adapt to analog amplitude and speed variations and for frame synchronization.

• In graphics file formats, the header might give information about an image's size, resolution, number of colors, and the like.

• In Archive file formats, the file header might serve as a fingerprint or signature to identify the specific file format and corresponding software utility.

http://ift.tt/2sAvQWe

[thousandmaths]

Observations from SEICCGTC 2017 Part 5

There were a lot of talks at this conference; while I understood most of them pretty well, there were also many which were not amenable to my taking notes (see Day 1 for the long explanation). Hence, my usual “Miscellany” posts have become these “Observations”. To keep things brief, I will refrain from giving many background definitions; providing links instead where appropriate.

(More observations: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8)

[ When the presenter’s name does not have an associated link, I could not find an academic website for them. ]

------

Candice Marshall, On the RNA Riordan Array

This was my first exposure to the Riordan group. A gentle introduction to the Riordan group and its combinatorial interest can be found here. 

A infinite matrix $(L_{n,k})_{n,k\geq 1}$ is called Riordan if it is lower triangular and $L_{n,k} = [z^n] g(z)f(z)^k$ for some formal power series $f$ and $g$ such that $f(0)=0$ but $f’(0)\neq 0$. Such matrices form a group; it has several interesting subgroups including the Bell subgroup which corresponds to the case $f(z)=zg(z)$. 

Note that elements of the Bell subgroup are completely determined by a formal power series $f$. If we choose $f$ to be the generating function of the number of secondary RNA structures, we call the resulting matrix $R$ the RNA Riordan array. Marshall computed several of the standard statistics associated to $R$, and conjectured that $R$ is totally positive (vocab warning: this is a much stronger condition than all entries being positive!).

Adrian Lee, The Weak Closure Algorithm

The algorithm in question is attempting to efficiently certify the lack of a Hamiltonian cycle for a given input graph— that is, it will always return UNDETERMINED if there is a Hamiltonian cycle, but will sometimes return NONE if there is not. This may strike you as a rather flimsy goal, but actually it is pragmatic: determining with certainty the existence (or lack thereof) of a Hamiltonian cycle is known to be very hard (NP-complete).

Lee did not present the details of the algorithm, but they did outline some ideas: the big one is “edges that do not exist cannot be used”. Again, this sounds kind of stupid until you see it in action: for instance, let $q_{v,i}=1$ if the Hamiltonian cycle’s $i^\text{th}$ edge enters $v$, and zero otherwise. Then $q_{v,(n-1)}$ is guaranteed to be zero if $v$ is not adjacent to the starting vertex.

This idea and some less simple extensions were used to produce an algorithm which catches many of the small-sized graphs that it was tested on; it was not clear to me how thoroughly the algorithm was analyzed, but based on the Q&A, that analysis is still in progress.

Miklós Bóna, Counting Vertices in Trees by their Distance from the Closest Leaves

This was an invited talk, but my notes for it are actually awful.

Let $T$ be a rooted tree having its natural orientation (edges point away from the root), and define the rank of $v$ to be length of the shortest path to a root.  It turns out that the following limit

$$\lim_{n\to\infty} \frac{ \text{number of rank-$k$ vertices in $T$}}{n\cdot n!}$$

always exists and in fact is rational (!). Conjecturally, the sequence of limits $(\ell_k)$ for all $k\geq 0$ is log-concave, but the fact that these are limits— instead of just counting problems— makes such statements pretty tricky.

We can also show that the average rank of a vertex, among trees chosen uniformly at random from trees of size $n$, is bounded in $n$. In fact, interpreting the rank of $v$ as a random variable, its variance is also bounded, as are all of its higher central moments.

------

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