Jamilah's Life in IST... Watch Me Work

Well making objects in SL isnt easy. I wish I could just find things and put them together but it is necer that easy. I have to make everything by scratch. It sucks so much.I made quite a few things but nothing fancy. I know how to make the basics like tables, chairs, lamps, rugs, computers (of course right!), ummm I think that is about all I have made so far. But I know i can make ANYTHING if I put my mind, time, and effort into it.

There are over 60 libraries already established in Second Life. Many are private and you have to be members of a particular group or area in order to visit the library. However, plenty of them are available for you to teleport to and explore. Second Life also has a place called Info Island. On Info Island, you can learn all kinds of things about the island and the game in general. It gives you tips on getting around, teleporting and anything else you could want to know about Second Life. (It’s also decorated for Christmas right now – it’s so pretty!) Info Island has its own library. They have many different things in the library. There are codes for objects you can create or own, and there are links to actual websites on the Internet (one of them is even Facebook!).

There are bookstands so you can preview pages of books. You can get ideas for classes, view picture or message boards, or go through filing cabinets to find information. There are note cards, areas to teleport to other parts of Second Life, and pictures or advertisements for teachers and other people heavily involved in Second Life. There is even a feedback desk, so that you can tell the creators what you like and do not like about the library, so they can adjust it according to what users would like.

Talis Cybrary City has a public library. You can read books, hold a conference, or visit the science library. The Kuhrang Public Library has free books, as well as freebies for other things, like radio stations or moves to help you relax. They have big comfortable chairs for you to sit in. There are several other libraries with services similar to these. Some are basic, and others are more ornately done, like the Cleveland Public Library. There are also a few libraries based on schools and colleges. There is a library for the McMaster University (in Ontario, Canada) and for Tufts University (in Massachusetts). These libraries serve as places for students to meet up with and get information from other students and their professors.
During research, I came across a website called “Second Life and Libraries: What’s the Point?” (http://infoblog.infopeople.org/2007/02/second_life_and_libraries_what.php) It is a blog post written by a woman who volunteers her time as a librarian in one of the libraries within Second Life She explains that what she does in the Second Life library, which is much of what a librarian in a real-world library would do. She helps people to find books and information. She goes on to say that in today’s day and age, more people use Google or MSN or other internet searches to find out what they’re looking for. It has been several years since people have headed to an actual library to do some research. If you can find that information by searching the internet or teleporting to another library, what is the point of going through all the work of building and setting up another library?

Penn State would have many options on purchasing land in Second Life. If they wanted to purchase a total new island for the library, they would have to follow several steps. First, they would have to purchase a Premium Second Life account, which includes the signing bonus of 1,000 Linden Dollars (L$) and the weekly allowance of L$300 (for upkeep costs). This option minimally cost $9.95 per month. However, if they wanted to spread out the payments they could pay either $22.50 each quarter or $72.00 each year. Those options, eventually, would save the school money. The Quarterly plan breaks down to cost $7.50 per month and the Annual plan breaks down to $6.00 per month. With the Monthly plan, the school would end up paying $119.40 per year. With the Quarterly plan, they would pay $90.00 per year. And, with the Annual they would pay $72.00. The savings between the Monthly and Annual are $47.40. After 10 years with the Annual plan, Penn State would save $474.00. That can be used for the upkeep of the library if turned into Linden Dollars, which would be L$12,324 ($1 = L$26).
Also, remember that every week the “Library Island” would receive L$300 every week for an allowance. After 10 years, if saved, that would equal L$156,000 or $6,000. After subtracting the Annual bill of $72.00, the school could actually make $5,280. If Penn State could build and upkeep the library with L$12,324 for 10 years, they would end up making money. That could be used to pay the students helping with the project (which I am sure there will be) or even help pay for upgrades in the library.

Those possible savings may have to be used for buying the actual island. After doing further research, I found that an island is not included in the Annual membership price. Islands cost $1,675.00 each and $295.00 per month for land fees and maintenance. However, there is a sunny side to all of these dollar signs. Second Life offers “a 50% discount to verified real world educators and academic institutions…that will be using the regions to support their organization's official work” (http://secondlife.com/community/land-islands.php#edu_fineprint). That would allow PSU to pay $837.50 for the island.

Over a 10-year span, the Penn State Second Life Library would cost over $36,957.00. That is a very large amount of money in my opinion. However, keep in mind that PSU has enough money to pay Joe Paterno $512,664.00 each year, so I think they can manage to afford a Second Life library. It would be very helpful to PSU students for a Second Life library, especially in the winter (as long as the book were available on line). They could check out the books with their ID # and download it in a .pdf file. This could be a huge success but, as always, there will be complaints.
Second Life is pretty cool—or it is in theory anyway. Who wouldn’t want to be able to run around in a virtual world doing the things you want to be able to do in real life without any of the consequences? It is an excellent tool for simulations, social networking, and creative expression. At least it would be with some major improvements. The fact of the matter is that although Second Life has the potential to be an amazing tool, it isn’t there yet, and the Penn State Library has better things to do with its time and money than invest in an unstable, unpopular online presence.
Many see Second Life as the wave of the future; however, it is a wave that not enough people are choosing to ride. After a high point in October 2006, growth in Second Life membership has been underwhelming, especially compared to the explosive growth rates of Facebook and MySpace (http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/10/research-firm-d.html). This seems to indicate that Second Life hasn’t exactly achieved “trendy,” and probably won’t without a major overhaul. There’s a lot not to like. Although the ability to build nearly anything is an amazing feature, the building process is difficult and not exactly easy to learn. The creators obviously tried to strike a balance between simplicity of use and the ability to freely manipulate objects, and customizability won out. Also, the program is prone to crashing unexpectedly, and even while enjoying periods of glitch-free time, the few areas that are actually populated are typically full of idiots or labeled “mature” for a very good reason. Due to the significant amount of adult content, it can be hard to take Second Life seriously, especially due to the cartoon-like avatars that contribute to the impression that the entire thing is a joke. While there may be emerging businesses presence on Second Life and simulations and even other libraries, when most people who even know what Second Life is hear about it, the first thought that comes to mind is sexual deviance. Is this really what we want the Penn State Library associated with?

Having the library available online would make it easily accessible and much more convenient. If our library existed in Second Life, we would have the benefit of being at the forefront of a new technology. Supposedly, even if some other virtual world rises up to succeed where Second Life has failed, having experienced Second Life would give Penn State an edge in the new virtual world. Still, no matter how valuable that experience would be, would it be worth sinking actual money into a virtual world that may or may not hold out in the long run? Although many will defend the idea of a virtual world, most people seem to agree that Second Life, while foreshadowing what is to come, is not going to be the virtual world that catches on. Apart from the money spent on creating a Second Life presence, there is also a time investment to consider. What would it take to develop the library? To make it appealing and easily accessible? Would Penn State staff and students be put to the arduous task of building such an area, or would more money be spent on having one built for us? Time and money spent on something that probably won’t hold out for many years, and for the time it does last, will likely be unpopular, seems somewhat foolish to me. Creating and maintaining this presence would be an experience which may or may not be useful when newer, better virtual world technology comes around, depending on how similar the new technology is to Second Life. If the virtual world that eventually catches on is nothing like Second Life, everything put into it would be a waste.


As I have indicated, a workable virtual world, one worth putting the library into, would require some significant changes to be worthwhile. It would probably be best if this program’s beginning years of development were restricted to the military, research facilities, and educational uses, which would create a more solid, respectable foundation for the new world. Obviously, once it is open to the general public, this virtual world would be teeming with idiots and mature content just like Second Life, but at least its original purpose would have been focused toward being useful, so this kind of obnoxious behavior may get less attention. Also, while access to this virtual world is restricted, many of the kinks can be worked out of the interface before it hits the masses. This will hopefully lead to better, less annoying “game play,” which should also help it catch on. In addition, there should be just a tad more structure to it, or at least to the social networking aspects of it. If networks could be somehow brought to par with, or at least near the standards of Facebook and MySpace, it would be a much more useful to more people, and although it wouldn’t be a “game” there would at least be more of a purpose.

She is pretty cool! You can now use this as an avatar for AIM. Here is the link to the site:
www.aim.com and www.meez.com
She updates everytime I change her too!

I am going to post the top 15 top 25 links ever (just to be safe)

1. Top-25.com

Top 25.com is the only place to find the best information and entertainment sites. From the menu on the left, you can choose which topsite to view. We are constantly adding new lists and features to Top-25.com, so if you have any suggestions, please feel free to contact us using our contact forms. If you are a webmaster, then you have found one of the best resources for traffic around. This is one of the best places for website promotion. If you are interested in joining one of our topsites, you can do so from the menu on the right.

2. Top 25 Highest Paying Jobs

Saving my readers from the pagination hell of Forbes’s website, here’s the list in friendly form. Forbes has one of the worst websites out there: cluttered, crammed with tiny-print links and ad-packed, it’s just plain awful.

3. Top 25 Songs
The Billboard Top 25 songs of 2006. This is where you can go to view the most popular songs from 2006.

4. Top 25 NFL players
Okay so we all love football and I know that you want to know who the best of the best was.

5. Top 25 Movie Stars

These STARmeter™ rankings were not based upon critical assessments or box-office performance, but the actual search behavior of over 42 million users of IMDb.com. These results are an aggregate of weekly STARmeter rankings from IMDbPro.com, IMDb.com's professional subscription service designed specifically for people in the entertainment industry.

6. Top 25 Most Emailed Articles

Most popular articles sent by NYTimes.com readers in the last 24 hours.

7. Top 25 Innovations

So it should come as little surprise that the Internet (as we know it) headlined the top 25 innovations of the past quarter century, according to a panel of technology leaders assembled by the Lemelson-MIT Program, which promotes inventiveness in teens.
In creating the list, the group hoped to single out "25 non-medically related technological innovations that have become widely used since 1980, are readily recognizable by most Americans, have had a direct and perceptible impact on our everyday lives, and/or could dramatically affect our lives in the future."

8. Top 25 Fastest Growning Tech Business

Our annual rankings show another banner year for the businesses leading the tech revival.

9. Top 25 Urban Legends
Sometimes people believe things that are just not true. On about.com, there is a top-25 list for the top urban legends.

10. Top 25 SEO Blogs

Once again the list should be useful because it is based on objective factors. There are many “Top SEO Blogs” lists around the web, but most of
them are based on the preferences of the author.

11. Top 25 Blogs About Blogging

The “Top 25 Blogs About Blogging” list ranks blogs according to their Google Pagerank, Alexa rank, number of Bloglines subscribers and Technorati authority.

12. Top 25 People Searched on the Internet
This shows the name of ther person, the number of searchers the have, weather they had web, images, news, or videos.

13. Top 25 Movie Directors of All Time

In art, politics and history, each generation finds its own heroes. In the motion picture industry, is that really the case? The innovators who shaped the art form are the ones still asserting the most influence on moviemakers today. That is according to a poll of directors, writers, actors, critics and others who were asked : Who are the 25 most influential directors of all time?
Influence is defined as that intangible power which can affect a person, thing or course of events. Many believe that motion pictures, more than any other art form in the past century, have had a profound influence on modern life. I would say it was hard to argue against that. If one also accepts the generally held premise that directors, more than any other creative force in the film industry, are responsible for steering and shaping motion pictures, then perhaps film directors as a group have had a vastly underestimated effect on the way society thinks and behaves.
But who has had the most influence on other directors, as well as the public? In the past 100 years, which directors have made an indelible impact on our lives, and on the face of the movie industry? In what ways have these directors helped to define cinema as we know and see it today? With the help of some of our most celebrated moviemakers and industry professionals, we have counted down the directors who made the most difference—and continue to do so today.

14.Top 25 Most Influential Executives

What, exactly, is influence? This year, CRN editors took a slighly different tack with the long-running Top 25 Most Influential Executives report, building a list of the executives and technologists that got people talking in 2006. What more telling sign of influence than the ability to inspire a debate or conversation?

15. Top 25 Horror Movies
You can not say you love horror movies until you have seen these 25. They are the scariest horror movies of all time.

The Second Life Dance Party was great.

I am so glad that our class pulled this off. I just wish that I could have been there earlier. The costume contest was amazing. I thought that here would be more than 5 entries but those people won some major Linden Dollars. The wolf face Gerry Santoro won first place for Original Design and that Blue Blob thingy won second place. I thought that it was an amazing creation and I loved the way it danced.

My costume was a glow in the dark stringy thing. It moved great with my dance moves.

Andrea looked great with her red dress. It looked like something I would totally wear to the prom (It was actually kind of similar).

I had a lot of fun being a judge and I am glad that I got to be a part of this historical step in PSU’s dabble with technology.

I want everyone to visit the offical web site for our IST110H Dance Party @ http://istdanceparty.weebly.com/

So last night around 9:45PM, Shannon White came to my door in PennyPacker Hall and said

“Oh my gosh guys, my friend just told me that there is a gunman loose on campus. He shot someone on North Atherton and in the HUB. I’m really scared and you need to stay inside.”

After that, I wasted no time while I texted all of my friends on campus about the event. My text read,

“This is not a joke. There is a gunman loose on campus. 2 people where shot in the HUB and on Atherton Street. Please stay indoors and send this to anyone you know on PSU campus. This is not a joke or a chain letter.”

By the10:15PM, my boyfriend heard about it on the West Side of campus and it had turned into a completely different story. Now, there were two gunmen and they had shot 3 people on Atherton Street, 2 students in the Honors college and 3 people in the HUB. I was shocked but I was too scared to not believe him. Anything could have happened. I called my mother for mental support and she must have called all of the family. And by the time my grandmother called me, terrorist were bombing the BJC. This just shows how stories are twisted and how Penn State needs to work on their communication skills. Around 10:41PM, I received a webmail message from Jason Hunt stating:

“Hi everyone, hopefully you have heard this information from your resident assistant. First and foremost, Atherton hall is completely secure and safe and there is no reason to be alarmed. If you have any comments, questions or concerns, please contact your resident assistant or myself directly.

Apparently, there was a murder in CambriaCounty and the suspects are supposedly in the State College area. State College Borough sent out a code red to all State College residents asking them to remain in their homes and to keep their doors and windows locked. Supposedly, the suspects were spotted on or near the vicinity of Atherton Street. An on campus resident found out and assumed it was Atherton hall which prompted an immediate response by university police. University police did a thorough search of Atherton hall as well as the surrounding exterior areas and EVERYTHING IS SECURE, THERE IS NOTHING TO BE ALARMED ABOUT! If you have not heard an update from your resident assistant, you will soon. I realize that those of you who were around while the police were canvassing may have been taken aback by their presence and response but please understand their diligence was for your safety. Thank you to all of you who immediately complied that made their job a lot easier.

In sum, there is no threat to our building the campus (or any buildings for that matter) is NOT on lock down. As a reminder, if there is an emergency or something looks suspicious, please make sure you dial 911 or contact university police at 863-1111. Safety in Atherton hall is everyone’s responsibility which is why we need to make sure that people ARE NOT piggy backing into our building that do not live here. Please make sure you are doing your part to assist myself, the RAs and the housing staff in keeping our building safe and secure!

Best,
Jason Wade Hunt

Penn StateUniversity, 01'
M.Ed. Candidate, College Student Affairs, 08'
Secretary, PennState Figure Skating Club

Senior Coordinator
Office of Residence Life
The PennsylvaniaStateUniversity
119 Atherton Hall
University Park, Pennsylvania16802”

I was so relieved that everything was okay. This morning in the Collegian, the real story was final told. Click here to read the article.
I hope nothing like this ever happens again.

During my first semester, I have experienced many new things. When I first arrived, I was so stressed thinking that my classes were going to be really hard. I changed my major from Forensic Science to Security and Risk Analysis. I realized that it would just cost way too much to buy all of theses science books. By the time I brought all of my SRA books, the total was $160. I figured that I will save a lot now and make much more in the future.

In the beginning, I really hated living in Pennypacker Hall. However, I found out that living in the honors dorms is so BORING. The quiet hours begin at 6 and no one goes out during the weekend so you have to always be on the hush. I could never do that. Throughout the entire semester, I have been to a party or two or three every weekend. I have even partied on some Thursdays. The semester has been like nothing I expected and I have adapted to college life wonderfully.

Classes have been a breeze and I hope that it just isn’t Freshman luck and that I really am smart. I have joined so many organizations. To compliment my major I joined the SRA Club and to compliment my ethnic background I joined S.M.A.R.T. (Student Minority Advising and Recruitment Team), the Black Caucus, S-Plan, and FastStart. I have been very involved in most of them and I plan to run for the exec board for SMART next semester.

This semester has been a blast. I have met many new people and I have made everlasting friends. I hope next semester is just like Fall 2007.

IST 110H is one of my favorite classes. Andrea Tapia has been a very great teacher. The honors settings have helped me learn and participate in the class. The class was really small, which gave me a chance to speak whenever I felt like doing so. I also feel like my class input was greatly appreciated. I found the majority of the class/home assignments very informative.

My favorite assignment was the video project. I loved going into the sound studio and recording my voice. The group work was a little frustrating but I managed to get through it. Next semester I am taking CAS 100B (Working in small groups) Hopefully, that class will give me better tips on how to be an effective leader. I just hate it when I let where I come from get in the way of my productiveness.

This class really makes me want to participate in more honors classes and I hope they will be a great as this one.