This would be a great Christmas gift for all of those who are reading this entry! :) If you sorta know me, you'd know what I am talking about and why I chose this medical gadget to talk about, haha!

The Alliance Library System (ALS) announced that the National Library of Medicine/Greater Midwest Region has awarded ALS a $40,000 grant to provide consumer health information services in the virtual world of Second Life in 2006. ALS is working on the project in partnership with the University of Illinois Library of the Health Sciences-Peoria, Central Medical Library, Unversity Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) in the Netherlands, and TAP Information Services (Info Island website).

The current library efforts in Second Life are collectively known as Info Island. The ALS bought a large space of real estate in Second Life, and sublet pieces of that island to universities and libraries around the world for a small monthly fee. This was done to unite the digitalization efforts of libraries across the world. For example, one island in the archipelago is dedicated to the study of anatomy. Utilizing virtual reality, future doctors are being trained to study the human body. Instead of the traditional cadaver approach, Second Life provides the medium for virtual tours of external and internal parts of the body, from first and third person perspectives.

The San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science has a blog containing a passionate discussion regarding the use of Second Life in their program. Paul highlighted a post from Alynn, student in the university with limiting disability, who voiced her opinion that Second Life is a double edged sword. She has benefited from the virtual world that has allowed her intellectual and digital proximity to her classmates and work. However, according to Alynn, Second Life is unreliable in that it doesn't support technology required to bypass her disability. This puts her at a disadvantage with her classmates because effectively, this disables her within Second Life as well as real life.
Benefits that other current libraries have from their Second Life presence are publicity, expansion, workforce unlimited by location, resources unallocated by location, and the ability to share, collect and collaborate information globally. The scripting advantages that Second Life permits, creates the potential for information to be conveyed in almost any digital manner. This infinite capacity makes Second Life revolutionary.
The most imperative question that needs to be answered is whether or not Penn State Library's move onto Second Life will return profits or generate some source of income. In order to answer this question, one needs to have basic understanding of the Second Life economy. The currency in Second Life is referred to as Linden Dollars. Linden Labs makes the economy independent of pricing by freezing the exchange rate on a market-based currency exchange with US dollars and other international monetary currencies. Linden Labs reports that the Second Life economy generated about 3.6 million dollars in the month of September 2005. The 2006 Second Life gross domestic product (GDP) was 64 million US dollars. Estimates of the 2007 GDP are between 500 million and 600 million US dollars. If you would consider Second Life a country of its own, that would rank it at 166 just below Grenada. Second Life has a larger GDP that 20 other countries. The Second Life economy is no joke. The estimated economic activity in 2007 will create about 550 million US dollars. Money can definitely be made on Second Life.
Linden Labs has a very interesting exchange system set up. They call it LindenX. To control LindenX Linden Labs has set up "circuit breakers". They are market mechanisms that basically freeze the exchange levels if market acts in certain ways. If the average exchange rate in any given day increases or decreases more that 10% the Exchange market freezes for one hour. 20% for two hours. 30% until noon of the next day. These circuit breakers help keep the exchange rate stable. One thing to look out for is Linden Labs handling of monetary policy in Second Life. Linden Labs maintains a currency peg of about L$270 for $1. This is similar to what the Chinese do with Yuan. This practice could be argued to inhibit change in value. Currently, the exchange rate is US$1.00 US dollar for L$267. L$51 million changed hands today.
The Second Life market is a free market or laissez-faire economy. There are two types of costs to to be taken into account when doing business in Second Life: Membership plans and Virtual Land Use Fees (Tier Fee). In order to own land in Second Life, a Premium membership is required. A Premium account comes with advanced technical support and a 512m2 parcel (if you donate 512m2 to a group). These issues are really insignificant compared to the amount of space. If the Penn State Library were to move onto Second Life they would need at least a 1/4 Region or more. An entire region costs $1675 US dollars and an additional $195 per month in Tier fees.
From this brief economic analysis of Second Life, one can assume that the Second Life economy is growing at a stable rate, and under the eyes of Linden labs, the exchange rate between Linden dollars and US dollars has stayed the same over the past few years. This makes it a safe environment for the Penn State Library to do business on without having to worry about the Linden exchange market crash. The facts about increasing annual GDP also prove that profits and revenues are possible.
After examining the research and data collected, we decided that we would not recommend that the Penn State Library invest in Second Life at this time. Firstly, we believe a database would most accurately benefit that majority of students at Penn State. Many students researching for courses wouldn't opt to overcome the learning curve of Second Life to utilize a Penn State Second Life library. A database is more accessible to the Penn State community because not only is it accessible from any technology connected to the internet but also because its faster and much more efficient to access. The benefits a virtual world would bring to a library system don't necessarily align with the needs of a reference research facility at the present.
Throughout history, all innovative technologies have challenged the traditional methods that they are attempting to replace, reconfigure or enhance. The innovators responsible for those technologies had to think far enough outside the box past what has been considered effective. Virtual worlds have the potential to reinvent the way we interpret information. For example, instead of reading a piece of fiction, imagine being immersed in that work that is interacts with you engaging your imagination and senses. Instead of traditionally reading Dr. Seuss' Cat and the Hat to a six year old, envision having them hop on Second Life, and virtually walk through the story while they read and learn.
We found it necessary that the Penn State Library not only digitize their resources, but their collections of print books, encyclopedias, journals, manuscripts, newspapers, documents dissertations, media (music, video, audio) and more. There are current databases online where a two dimensional approach is taken- meaning that the data online is in PDF format or plain text. The Penn State Library as a collective whole should start formatting its resources digitally. When this happens, the Penn State Library will have a diverse set of options. Regardless of how the Penn State Library decides to proceed, this is the first step to making its resources available to its users digitally and requires a significant financial investment. It is our recommendation that any capital they have to invest be invested in this effort. The return on this investment is that the information is immortalized- it can be updated at any time and will outlast its paper form.
Our group opinion is that the current library efforts in Second Life are that they aren't returning the investments put into them. While exploring InfoIsland, we talked to various librarians in all parts of the island, asking to see what information was typically stored there. The librarians had trouble locating actual data for our avatar. Furthermore, other than InfoIsland, our investigative efforts were unable to discover another large library presence on Second Life, with the exception of a few individual libraries (extended versions of their physical forms). Therefore, we do not recommend that Penn State invest in technology that has yet to be utilized to the specifications proposed.

Matt Maisel was the best builder of the team, and he spear-headed the creation of our billboard. Martha took pictures, and started building what would be put on the poster. Paul and Eric looked for pictures that described IST accurately.

Going back to our flickr collection from a previous assignment, we used pictures of the IST building to convey our feelings about IST. Matt encountered an interesting dilemma as he tried to picture what the essential components of a billboard actually were. After looking up pictures of a billboard, he began sculpting away at several rectangular prims, making bars, a ladder, and other various components. We are glad that it came out so realistic- Matt is pretty good with that stuff! Martha finished a very professional poster, thanks to the wonders of mac computers, which left one small task... The uploading of textures.

It is 10 Lindens to upload a texture into Second Life. Good thing 10 Lindens only equates to more or less 5 cents! We had to wait more than an hour to get the confirmation that the money had been uploaded correctly, but other than the small wait, everything in this assignment went as planned.

The only thing missing from this document is a picture of the finished product. here it is!!

I chose to visit Dell first and really liked it. The Island was really easy to explore, as in I was able to fly back to where I wanted to go most of the time. To help with that, Dell's space had many teleport stations leading to every island that Dell had. The way you would transport would be really cool! One would click on the poster, then it would tell you to sit on a pod that came out of nowhere behind you. You would sit and then you would teleport to the Island or place of choice.

A button an avatar would touch to teleport to other places.

Dell did a good job setting up ads for their gaming laptops (don't really recall any other product being advertised) because that was one of the things that kept popping into my head when I would think about Dell's space.

An XPS Laptop

Something I really liked was the fact that it was nicely built with the many interesting buildings and big domes with the logo Dell everywhere. Plus the fact that I was able to go to each island rather than not be able to go to some because I was not given permission to made me feel like Dell is showing you what they completely got, making everything accessible to the user.

Something I did not like about Dell's space would be the fact that it did not have as much information about Dell as I had hoped there would be. There were minor pieces of information, but nothing major like a new product coming out, or talks about Dell's next step into computers. All I know is that if somebody asked me if they should visit Dell's space on Second Life for more information about them, I would tell them they are better off reading the wikipedia page on Dell.

For my second Second Life space I'd checked out, I found a lot of things that I did not like about this place after wandering around aimlessly for an hour.
1, IBM's space was waaaaaaaay too big!
2. I was unable to get to certain islands because I did not have access to that island.
3. I kept getting lost everywhere all the time!
4. Boring!
5. WAAAY TOO BIG!

Maybe its because I'm hungry and the desire to finish this as soon as possible is getting to me, I really was not a fan of IBM's HUGE space on Second Life.
Starting off, I thought IBM's huge space on Second Life would be a positive experience, but after flying around trying to get to know the place, and because I failed at knowing the place, I really grew tired of having to press the map key button to transport to where I wanted to go by flying. It might have been the small attention I get when I am bored, but I kept getting lost after a while as I felt like I kept seeing the same buildings over and over again! It was at this point when I began terribly missing being in Dell's four-island space. Maybe the space isn't boring to investigate, but since I kept getting lost, I was tempted to click the red boxed X on the top-right of the screen and end my misery, and I did after an hour!
Though I really didn't like the place, there were some stuff that I thought were cool and interesting. In my aimless wandering, I came upon the Italy island from IBM. I was surprised to see this because that meant that IBM must have many business through Second Life. I mean I am pretty sure it wasn't their only non-english space, so IBM must have a pretty big radius of business in the world. Plus with all those islands, there must be a lot users may be able to learn about IBM, well hopefully!

Anyone at this point can tell that I did not enjoy IBM, I thought Dell's space was a much more of a delightful experience as to IBM exploration being tiresome and boring and being lost the whole time. But if I ever get some free time over 4 hours, and I am near a computer with Second Life, I would love nothing more than to sit down and waste those four hours exploring IBM's space. I think I would actually enjoy IBM's space more than Dell's space because IBM's many islands will hold a lot more information for me to read rather than Dell's four island space with barely an information.

nowhere near the entire map of IBM's space!!!

Introduction to Security and Risk Analysis is a preliminary course with a broad focus, spanning the areas of security, risk and analysis. In addition to familiarizing the student with basic technical terminology, it will also touch upon social and legal issues, risk analysis and mitigation, crime intelligence and forensics, and information warfare and assurance.

This course will motivate students to understand the requirements for security in any government agency or business organization through the use of case studies. Included in this segment are cases related to cyberterrorism, bioterrorism, and critical infrastructure protection. Some concepts to be covered in the area of information security are: confidentiality, integrity, availability, and non-repudiation. Various methods of safeguarding these security concerns will be discussed, such as: single- and multi-factor authentication, encryption, digital signatures, prevention of denial of service attacks, and so forth. This course also covers social and legal issues related to security, in particular identity theft and social engineering. Topics in this section include identity theft, spam, spyware, and adware. This course also covers the principles and the approaches to risk analysis. Here students study vulnerability analysis, crime and intelligence analysis, forensics, techniques for risk assessment and risk mitigation.

The course will prepare students for more in-depth courses such as SRA 211, SRA 221 and SRA 311

Just reading this makes me can't wait til we get back from our lame, so-called vacation that is only 3 weeks just to attend this class. I mean, I really have no idea what to expect because it is only an introductory to the course, but I doubt that even if this class turns out to be not what I dreamed of, it most definitely kill my spirits about this class. I have became very interested in this field through personal interest, and also my girlfriend is a forensics science major and when she talks to me about her criminology class, I just hear ever word she says (which is rare for guys to do). I also plan on taking a course dealing with world news, like world politics or something like that. I may just be changing majors from IST to SRA. And hopefully, I will be a student of Mr. Gerry Santoro and experience his unique teaching methods!

The subject we chose for our video project was faculty member Dr. Gerry Santoro, professor in the IST/SRA departments. The reason this was chosen was because Matt and Martha have Gerry as a professor for SRA 111 and thought he would be a good choice for a faculty member biography. This was unique from the other group because no other group did a biographical type project.

In order to create a biographical-style video, we realized that we were going to need to interview him with prepared questions and a sense of what we would want to include in our video. We created a general diagram illustrating the topics we wanted to cover, and Gerry’s life in chronological order. This was made to help us figure out where necessary information and data within the video was located, in addition to helping us create a storyboard for the editing process.

We discussed the sort of video we wanted to create, and what we wanted to include. The style we were going for was modeled after a VH1 pop culture production. The interview would be cut and chopped up according to the way we wanted to present the material recorded of Gerry speaking. We would use his personal videos and images as visuals during part of the time that we spoke to illustrate exactly what he was referring to in his interview.

We weren’t sure exactly how Gerry was going to answer the questions we were going to ask him, so we asked more than we knew we’d be using, just to cover all our bases and have enough material. We asked him questions about his entire life story, his early influences, his education, work, research, teaching and personal interests. Gerry enthusiastically answered everything and provided us with an hour’s worth of material.

The Storyboard required a lot of time and energy from our group. We had so much video to get rid of, simply because we could not fit it all, that we had to be sure that what we included counted. We spent the better part of six hours in total working on the storyboard alone.

After a general introduction of the group and our subject, Gerry Santoro, in the first and second blocks, we decided to begin the video with the lesser known facts about this well known professor. In the third block of the storyboard, Paul introduces a little background history of Gerry’s origins, and then we placed clips of our interview with Gerry in an order that brought to light his hobbies and interests, such as Astronomy, Harley Davidson bikes, guitar, and comic books. Moving toward his research, we linked his interests with the technology he works with in the fourth block. Gerry talks about recording video of his bike rides and making covers using multi-track layering software of a famous song. After "the hook", if you will, we start to show Gerry talking about his research in the fifth block, introduced formally by Eric. Gerry talks about technology and pop culture, virtual worlds, and the Web2.0 phenomenon. In the sixth block, we talk to Gerry about his teaching methods and what he thinks makes a good teacher. The seventh and final block, composed of the credits and Imagine by John Lennon, ends the presentation with a quote of Gerry's; that he enjoys dreaming of what can be.

In our video imaging project, we used different types of technological devices in order to completely finish our video. Since none of us had a video camera, we went to the Media Lab in the Willard Building and took out one of their video cameras for a week. This camera was compact and very easy to use, and had a touch screen panel. In addition, we also got a camera to help document the process. Once we had our necessary film, we needed to work on the storyboard to aid the editing.

We used iMovie as our video editing program on Martha’s MacBook Pro. Because we did all of our editing on a lap top, our project was permitted to be portable. In order to work on our movie, we needed two computers, and to exchange the information between those computers, we used Matt’s 160 GB external hard-drive, email and multiple flash drives.

Video Script (interview not scripted due to length- rather than type out entire script, we decided to use a brief summary to describe the dialogue. Narration includes typing and vocals.)

Narration: "Who is the real Gerry Santoro?"

Paul: "Since he was a child in Blanux, Pennsylvania, Gerry’s personal interests have influenced his professional research within the realm of information science and technology."

( Gerry answering question about personal life and interests )

Narration: "How Gerry relates technology to his personal interests..

( Gerry talks about using technology and his communities )

Narration: "Gerry’s research includes.."

Eric: "According to Gerry, his professional research includes social informatics, computer-mediated communication, technology policy and future policies."

( Gerry talking about his research: computer-mediated communication, Web2.0 and virtual worlds )

Narration: "What about your teaching? What makes a great teacher?"

( Gerry discusses teaching techniques and what he incorporates them into his classes )

Problems/ Issues

Initially, we didn’t know how long we would be able to take out the camera for, and our interview date wasn’t set. The indefinite dates made the beginning process difficult and frustrating because of all of our other group work.

Taping the material for our video project went smoothly, but we ended up with an hour’s worth of useful, relevant information. Many issues stemmed from this. First, we had to organize the video into clips in order to find anything in the recording. Second, choosing which clips we would use for the time limit down from the original hour took an enormous time. This was facilitated by the storyboard, but as mentioned, the storyboard took over six hours to create and perfect. Thirdly, Gerry gave us plenty of material, but a lot of it we decided wasn’t going to be relevant to our project and time frame. We spent a good deal of time mashing clips to create thought-provoking and coherent new clips from sometimes long or irrelevant material.

We started the project too close to its deadline, and because of this, we spent almost all week and everyday working as a group on it. Due to the intensity of this project, we all have a good portion of Gerry’s hour long dialogue memorized. All in all, we feel this project was worth too little credit in comparison with the amount of work we put in.

Paul had experience with windows video editing software called Nero. Although the group decided iMovie would be better for the task at hand, in retrospect it might have saved us vital editing time if we had a member of the team intimately aware of the program. Using Nero could have saved us some time, because Paul’s computer has more processing power and capability to handle large files than Martha’s laptop.

That said, there is great value in becoming part of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Like our blogs, this project allowed us to explore our creativity and share it with the world using YouTube. It may have been a lot of work, but we are pleased with the final result.

Resources

Gerry Santoro. Personal Interview. 04 November 2007.

Home Page for Gerry Santoro. Gerry Santoro. Pennsylvania State University.
02 November 2007.

* Matt rented the camera
* all of us were present for the interview
* Martha and Paul created the final storyboard
* All members contributed to where certain clips should be placed within the video
* Matt is responsible for all video effects in our movie, and for doing the actual editing to Team Wintermute's specifications
* Martha compiled final paper
* The parts of the paper were written by either Martha, Eric, or Paul, with Martha being the predominant writer
* Eric compiled information from the web posted about Gerry Santoro

The Final Movie