The Creature Cases
"Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case" is a short story entry in the Old Kingdom series by Garth Nix. A follow-up to Abhorsen, it tells of Nicholas Sayre's encounter with a Free magic creature in Ancelstierre and his return to the Old Kingdom. Published initially as a stand-alone story for World Book Day, it was later released as part of Nix's short story anthology Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories.
The Creature Cases
Nicholas Sayre is sent by his Uncle Edward to a party at Dorrance Hall to observe the workings of a clandestine government organisation responsible for gathering information about the Old Kingdom. The organisation's head, Alastor Dorrance, has covertly obtained a Hrule that has been telepathically contacting him since his childhood, and intends to free it across the Wall. Dorrance intends to feed the creature Nick's blood; however his blood is too strong for it and it runs amok. After the creature rages out of control and runs north, Nicholas gives chase, ordering telegrams sent to Wyverley College for help. He catches up with the creature at the Perimeter and attempts to poison it with too much of his blood. He passes out. When he awakens, Lirael is present, and defeats the creature with a thistle.
In The Creature Cases, Sam Snow and Kit Casey are the lead agents of CLADE: the Covert League of Animal Detective Experts, who solve animal mysteries by exploring the habitats and behaviors of fascinating, sometimes bizarre creatures. Armed with top-secret intel from their miniature contacts, the Mice Squad, these brilliant animal sleuths travel a world populated exclusively by animals, solving mind-boggling animal mysteries that mix real zoological facts with wild detective action.
The series follows Sam Snow and Kit Casey, the lead agents of CLADE: the Covert League of Animal Detective Experts, who solve animal mysteries by exploring the habitats and behaviors of fascinating, sometimes bizarre creatures. Armed with top-secret intel from their miniature contacts, the Mice Squad, these brilliant animal sleuths travel a world populated exclusively by animals, solving mind-boggling animal mysteries that mix real zoological facts with wild detective action.
Sam Snow and Kit Casey are the lead agents of CLADE: the Covert League of Animal Detective Experts, who solve animal mysteries by exploring the habitats and behaviours of fascinating and sometimes bizarre creatures. Armed with top-secret intel from their miniature contacts, the Mice Squad, the sleuths travel a world populated exclusively by animals, solving mind-boggling animal mysteries that mix real zoological facts with wild detective action.
These two specialize in solving animal mysteries/ cases using real-life zoological facts. This show is suitable for preteens as they can watch this action-packed animated show, and also get an adequate amount of knowledge and information about zoos and animals all while enjoying and having fun.
In terms of protection, silicone cases have protected mobile phones for as far back as I can remember. These Case-Mate Creature cases are just as protective and feature good overall coverage and shock protection. They cover the back and all edges of the iPhone 5 and wrap around the screen a bit to protect the edges of the screen. This also means that you can lay the iPhone flat and it will not touch the surface you are laying it on.
The blue crab has achieved iconic status throughout the Chesapeake Bay area, while the pugnacious crustacean and the majestic estuary are national treasures. The shallow waters provide optimal habitat for the species that has been deeply woven into the bay's economic and cultural fabric. Last year, after a respected committee ascertained that the crab was in jeopardy, anticipated future deterioration, and proffered extreme recommendations, Virginia and Maryland imposed draconian strictures which could reduce harvests by one third and help ameliorate the creature's depletion. A recent Executive Order, ambitiously designed by President Barack Obama to safeguard and restore the Chesapeake, illuminates the problem's significance and offers promising strategies. The attempts to halt precipitous decline-which exemplifies the "Tragedy of the Commons" and illustrates numerous acute complications that undermine the ailing watershed's health--constitute bold experiments in aquatic species resource management. These propositions demonstrate that the new efforts merit scrutiny, which this piece undertakes.
However, in order to compute behavior for virtual creatures it is not enough to take emotions into account. For instance, there are situations where emotions must be regulated in order to reach an objective. In this case, the third appraisal must consider the emotion regulation needed to reach an objective. In other words, if the computed emotion does not contribute to reaching the objective, the emotion regulation process helps to modify the emotional behavior in order to reach the objective [3].
An emotion regulation mechanism is a bridge between emotion and cognition in the neurosciences. In human beings, it helps to achieve objectives through a cognitive change [1, 4, 5]. Appropriate behavior is defined in this paper as the behavior that best serves a virtual creature's objective to achieve the maximum possible reward in a given situation. Emotion regulation is achieved by modifying the virtual creature's body and facial expressions and/or by modifying the cognitive meaning of the objects within the setting in order to direct the behavior [4]. For instance, if the leader of a project in a company is angry with a key worker, his emotions might suggest to him firing the worker. However, the leader must regulate his emotions to keep him from firing the key resource, thus ensuring the successful completion of the project; otherwise, the project will not be completed satisfactorily. This example shows the importance of the emotion regulation process.
SOAR has not fully implemented the emotional process. However, it proposes implementing the generation of several hypotheses based on appraisal theory. This architecture uses the three steps of appraisal theory; however, it does not implement these steps and reduces deployment to a simple tool for improving the virtual creature's learning through a greater reward function when it selects a good action in a specific scene. SOAR does not contemplate different meanings of the perceived stimulus.
Regarding the implementation and results of the case studies presented, we can underline first the use of an LCS named GXCS proposed by M. A. Ramos and F. Ramos [45], which allowed us to use a structure that summarizes the six basic emotions defined by Ekman [6] as well as a field that associates the emotions with a specific situation (which provokes the emotional state, e.g., desert, sea, and field). This structure is simplistic and overlooks multiple aspects of emotion regulation, such as social interaction or risk situations, but it is a first approach to explore the functionality of an LCS in learning appropriate behaviors for creatures subjected to situations requiring emotion regulation.
Second, behaviors simply refer to Ekman's 6 basic emotions and are the virtual creature's calculated and displayed behavior in each experiment. This behavior receives a high evaluation if it approaches the appropriate behavior for the situation and a low evaluation in the opposite case.
Third, from the results we must emphasize that, in the unfamiliar case study, the system does not know the appropriate behavior and only has the creature's internal state and a specific context. In this case, the first rules are randomly generated to initiate the evaluation of behaviors; each of these rules is evaluated within the system using the same situation, thus setting off an iteration using the rules that had better performance in the specific situation. The iteration runs until an appropriate behavior is obtained.
In Figure 9 we can see a summary of the results obtained: the number of rules formulated in each situation. Each situation is shown by means of 3 columns, which represent different emotions. We can also observe that there are considerably high numbers of generated rules, reaching 145 rules evaluated. This was expected since technically the answers given by the virtual creature are almost random, but in all situations it was possible to get to the behavior that was appropriate to the situation presented. 041b061a72