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

We love house and all of it links. HAL 9000

Team HAL-9000
Abby Assetto
Jocelyn Ialacci
Jamilah Matthews

Penn State Security and Risk Analysis Students

Penn State University has recently introduced a new major, Security and Risk Analysis (SRA) (B.S.). More and more students are flocking to this major every day, and our team thought there should be somewhere online for students to meet. Therefore, we created “Penn State Security and Risk Analysis Students”, a social networking site dedicated to helping new and old SRA students connect and network. We used ning.com create our site. The web address is psusra.ning.com. Hopefully, all students majoring in SRA will join the site.

Currently, there are 8 members. We are inviting other students from our SRA courses, and peers or mentors in the major, as well. Because the site is new, many people are not joining because they feel that it is SPAM or something that is not important to them. We are sending out emails explaining what the site is, so that they will join and benefit from its purpose. However, the chart below shows how many people have viewed it and have linked to it.

The website is set up so that students in the major (and even students who are not in the major but are taking one of the classes) can communicate about classes, projects, etc. SRA is a fairly new major here at Penn State. We are blazing a new trail, so every bit of information and support is extremely helpful. There is a section of links to other websites. Sometimes they are sites our SRA teachers show us. Sometimes they are things we find on our own. Other times, the website list includes news articles about something involving security or information technology. But the sites can all be helpful in different ways.

We opted to make the site public. This was so that anybody in the SRA major could join and take advantage of the network. By accessing their personal webpages within the network, members can contact their peers or mentors whenever they need to, from anywhere with an internet connection. Students no longer need to worry about looking up information since he or she might not have their personal computer with them at the time. There are options to send members private messages, or a student can write on a certain member’s “comment wall.” Also, the student could start a new discussion or topic in the forum. That way, other members can provide information or their opinions on that topic. When a student wants to create a member account, he or she must answer a few basic questions. These answers can be edited at any time once the student is a member. The official first question is asking for the student’s email address. This is the way he or she will log in to the page, and it is a way of notifying the student of any changes to his or her profile or to the main page. Once they are members, students can go into their settings and customize what they would like to receive notices about. The first required question asks what year the student is. This way, we can keep track of how many seniors, juniors, etc, that we have on the site. Seniors will be extremely valuable due to their higher levels of experience. The next question asks the student which Security and Risk Analysis courses he or she is taking or has taken in the past. This is listed on each member’s personal webpage within the network. If, for example, you had questions regarding the SRA 111 final, you could look through other members’ pages to see who else has taken that class. Not quite as important, but still interesting is our next question. We ask the student what his or her favorite SRA course is or was. Obviously, freshmen will not have so much of a say in this question, since they will have only taken one or maybe two classes in the subject. But for upperclassmen, students will have much more input for a class that they favored than they might say about a class they did not like or were indifferent about. Our final required question is asking students what their career goals are. Eventually, we hope to get this site up and flourishing within the Penn State community. Graduate students (and hopefully some employers) can log onto the site and check out member pages. They can see what the members are interested in and what they hope to do in the future. After students enter this information, they are asked one final question. They are not required to answer it, but it is just a box to tell everyone else in the network a little bit about themself. They did not get a chance to really explain themselves in the previous questions, since those questions focused primarily on the major and courses. So they can give us some other background information that might be helpful.

There is also a section on the website for groups. The website administrators can set up groups. Right now, we have four groups established. Three of these groups are for options within the major. Everyone majoring in Security and Risk Analysis has to choose one of these three options. The first option is Intelligence Analysis and Modeling. This option focuses on developing a more thorough knowledge of the strategic and tactical levels of intelligence collection, analysis, and decision-making. This includes examining the foundations of decision analysis, economic theory, statistics, data mining, and knowledge management, as well as the security-specific contexts in which such knowledge is applied. There is also and option for Information and Cyber security. This option includes a set of courses that provides an understanding of the theories, skills, and technologies associated with network security, cyber threat defense, information warfare, and critical infrastructure protection across multiple venues. The final option is Social Factors and Risk. This option includes the legal, regulatory, ethical, and other theories associated with security and risk. Such an examination is focused on understanding the social factors and causes that are linked to transnational terrorism, investigations and litigation involved in business, and other security-related environments.* On our network, there is also a fourth group, designed for SRA students who have not yet decided which option they wish to pursue. For the first couple of years in the major, students take some basic courses before they start narrowing down what they would like to do. Underclassmen, especially, are most likely to be undecided about this part.

On our network pages, there are options to upload pictures and videos. You can start blogs and forums to pose questions and learn opinions. There is a section that shows all the members of the network, so that other members can easily find each other’s webpages. There is also an option to make a “profile badge” to add to a student’s facebook or myspace account that we can use to promote our website.

In formatting, we selected a pre-made style (in this case, entitled “Los Angeles”). We chose this style because the layout included a picture at the top, and it matched closely a picture that we felt would be appropriate for the website. We used this icon picture as the basis for the website’s colors. A logo was made by modifying the picture using Adobe Photoshop. A specific tool in the Photoshop program, called “eyedropper,” extracted the colors from our original picture, and the program created HTML codes for those colors. We copied and pasted this code into the appearance editor in the Ning website. We shifted and edited the colors until we settled on a visually appealing color scheme. Towards the middle of the page, there is a full, unedited version of our original picture. The picture is pretty neat, and we agreed that having the full picture showing somewhere else on the page would bring the colors together and would clear up any initial confusing regarding the images in the picture. We also organized the website so that related features are grouped together. For example, videos and photos are together, and the features for blogs and forums are together. We put the Latest Activity section in the middle, so that when members sign in, the first thing they see is changes and new content.

Our conclusions regarding the page were positive. Ning was pretty manageable to use, but it was rather slow. Some of this may be due to the Penn State servers not being the most reliable or able to handle so much. A lot of the features are customizable, but it is not the easiest thing to do. If someone in our group was not proficient in Photoshop and designing, we might have had some difficulty in getting our website to look the way we would like it to.
As this is a new website, there is not much activity on it yet. We have a few members, and some of those members have joined groups and left comments for each other. Members of our group have started a few forum questions and discussions, which some other members have responded to. We are in the process of inviting more people to join, and encouraging the people who have already joined to participate more.

Hopefully, during this semester and the school year, our site can grow to include most of the people in the Security and Risk Analysis major. As more students get involved, teachers and professors might get interested, as well. Having instructors involved will greatly increase the information that gets passed around on the webpage. Also, most instructors have colleagues in the field, as well. These people could greatly contribute in their own ways, as well. And if so many established people are a part of something, employers are bound to catch on. Our goal is to get as many people as possible onto and using the network, and that their experiences will only be positive.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Jamilah Matthews actually set up the website. She used the Ning database to create and do some general editing and set up. She added features and created groups and forums. She was responsible for the site’s content i.e. the question, blog posts, forum discussion, and groups.

• Abby Assetto designed the site. She used Adobe Photoshop to edit pictures, create codes, and some underlying editing. She chose the colors and pictures. She added the links. She also worked on the layout.

• Jocelyn Ialacci composed the paper. She explained what the sites purpose is and how people can use it. She also invited people to join and explained to them what the site is about.

*SRA Option Descriptions Borrowed From: http://bulletins.psu.edu/bulletins/bluebook/college_campus_details.cfm?id=29&program=sra.htm

Hal900’s Flickr gallery is located here. For this project, the division of our team’s workload was:

Jocelyn – took pictures, titled, tagged, and wrote descriptions for said pictures
Jamilah – took pictures, titled, tagged, and wrote descriptions for said pictures, provided her Flickr account for the team’s use
Abby – wrote the paper

We chose these roles because Jamilah already had a Flickr account, so it made sense to just use hers instead of all creating our own accounts. Jocelyn and Jamilah both had digital cameras already, which made it follow naturally that they would take the pictures and Abby, who sadly has no digital camera, would write the paper. Since photography is an art form that sometimes requires a context unavailable to the viewer, the duty falls on the photographer to accurately describe and title his pictures in such a way that helps the viewer to understand what he is seeing. This is why the photographers (Jocelyn and Jamilah) were also responsible for the picture titles, descriptions, and tags.

In retrospect, it might have made more sense to have a team account with a generic password so that Jocelyn could have uploaded her pictures directly to the site instead of having to email them along with their titles, tags and descriptions to Jamilah. Overall, it probably would have been less work. Also, if everyone on the team had access to the account, we could have all added tags to the different pictures so that different perspectives could have filled out the list of tags.

The IST-related pictures that our group chose were technological points of interest, selected for their photogenic qualities. Subjects ranged from air conditioning vents in the IST classrooms to keyboards, to the jumbled mess of wires behind all of the computers in the IST building. Certain objects were photographed at dramatic angles, and certain effects, such as blurring, black and white, and color inversion, were used to add interest and depth to the pictures. These effects made a picture of something as mundane as a keyboard, which IST students probably look at every day, seem interesting and different. Titles for some pictures are generally direct. The picture of a remote is titled simply “remote,” and the left hand side of a Dell keyboard is titled “Dell Left Hand Keys.” However, other pictures have less direct titles that still capture the essence of the picture, such as the picture entitled “Num Lock” which shows the number keys on a Dell Keyboard, or the picture “Time Passes,” which compares two different clocks found in a room, one on a microwave and one that’s an alarm clock. Descriptions elaborate on what the picture shows, adding more context for the image, and explaining some of the effects used (inverted, blur, etc.).

We tried to use as many tags as possible to make the pictures easy to find. As mentioned above, if other group members had had access to the account, we might have had more, but the ones that are there do cover a broad spectrum of possible tags. Flickr allows users to label their photos with as many tags as they like, and they can be changed, added to, and deleted from at any time. While viewing a picture, users can click on tags to see pictures that the same user has submitted with the same tags. Also, users can see every picture the public has submitted with the same tag. For interest, I clicked on the picture “Num Lock” and selected the first tag, “keys.” The rest of the pictures of keyboards came up in our gallery. The public pictures were an entirely different story. Not surprisingly, the first picture was of a piano. Pianos have keys; that makes sense. Interestingly, the next few were of pictures that came up were of crocodiles. After the initial shock, one realizes that these pictures were taken in the Florida Keys, but this just goes to show how very broad tags can be, and how homonyms can very quickly become tricky. A computer keyboard does not show up until the second page of pictures labeled with the tag “keys.”

This tagging structure gives users a broader base to search through pictures instead of just in titles, and a more specific method than searching through descriptions. Still, as with the “keys” example, it is an imperfect system. “Keyboard” returned more accurate results, but there were still piano keyboards as well as computer keyboards. The tagging structure does bring in a community element—being able to look at the public pictures relating to given keywords allows users to see where there are other people taking pictures of the same things. Because the tags are links instead of just words associated with the pictures, this encourages browsing around others’ galleries, bringing the community closer together than tags without links would.

Today, Hal 9000 will present a video game addiction awareness video. Our group consists of Jocelyn Ialacci, Jamilah Matthews, and Abby Assetto. We chose video game addiction because the majority of our group has been a victim of this addiction. We have researched cases where people have actually died as a result of playing video games for a long period without nutrition. We want people to be aware of the dangers of video game addiction.

We chose to address this issue with a public service announcement video. We took many steps to create this video. During the last couple f weeks, we have been meeting in the IST building. We had a very clear vision of how we wanted the video to progress. We did not want to physcially be in the video, therefore we deciede to use out voices, still shots from popular games, and video clips from the Sims 2.

In order to achieve our dream video, we had to spilt the responsibility between the 3 of us. Abby was responsible for creating the movie clips from the Sims 2 and creating the script. Jocelyn was responsible for combining the pictures and movie clips with our voices. Jamilah was responsible for documenting the paper and uploading the video to YouTube. We all shared the responsibility of finding a place to record out voices and arriveing to that place on time.

After Abby wrote the script, we did not waste any time before finding a place to record. We heard that there was a “recording studio” in the IST building so we wandered around aimlessly on the third floor until someone asked us if we were lost. This very nice lady pointed us in the direction of this recording studio. There we discovered Joe Zupka. He is a graduate student working on his PhD in game research. About a year ago, he was pursuing sound recording. He worked in that industry as a Semi-Pro for 6 years. Now, he is a TA for SRA 111 and 211.

Joe was essential in us having quality sound for our project. He dusted off IST’s sound recording booth and let us record our script. Our script was developed by Abby and you can read it in the quoted text below.

“WARNING! This is a public service announcement: recent research suggests that videogames may cause psychological dependence in the weak-minded! This may lead to severe health problems in those who have defective survival instincts! Does playing videogames consume time you might have otherwise spent with real people? Do you find that videogames sometimes interfere with your daily life, such as causing you to be late for work or school, or preventing you from eating and sleeping as much as you should? Do you feel that you prefer playing videogames to your real life? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may be at risk! Please pay attention to the following….

Over the years, videogames have evolved and changed, becoming more impressive, more fun to play, and more dangerous. They started out as relatively benign beasts. No one had anything to fear from Pong. Pacman offered gamers cutting-edge 8-bit graphics, but even that dashing yellow hero and his pixilated contemporaries did not achieve the same level of addictiveness as the games available to players today. When pixels became polygons and videogames moved into the realm of 3D, this spelled the beginning of the end. After all, if an entire generation could be sucked into the Pokémon phenomenon, gamers obviously stood no chance against the hours upon hours of endless leveling up that awaited them in such games as World of Warcraft and NeverWinter Nights.

As videogames have evolved, their improved graphics and seemingly endless (or, in some cases, actually endless) gameplay has made them immersive. Some games, such as the infamous Final Fantasy series, will drain away hours of a player’s life; however, at least with these games, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. When the final boss is defeated, gamers are released from the spell and allowed back into the real world. Also, when only one human player influences the game, there is less pressure to stay online to continue quests with a party of other players. Massively Multi-member Online Role Playing Games, more commonly known as MMORPGs, CAN be played in a safe and healthy way. Here are some strategies:

EAT! It’s good for you! If you can’t be bothered to get up in the middle of your game, BRING A SNACK! Anything, as long as you don’t die from starvation. It doesn’t even have to be good for you! Just remember, playing videogames does NOT count as exercise (except for Dance Dance Revolution), so think twice about that bag of chips!

GO TO THE BATHROOM! When nature calls, listen! If you’re in the middle of something important, it’s okay to wait for a little, but be reasonable. The members of your party will understand—they all have to do it too.
SLEEP! When the screen starts to blur, it doesn’t mean it’s time for another energy drink. You’re tired! Go to bed! Similarly to going to the bathroom, you can stretch this one a little, but again, be reasonable. Wouldn’t you rather stop playing at a safe point instead of falling asleep in the middle of combat? If you have trouble with this one, try setting a bedtime for yourself, and when you say “I’ll go to bed at two,” remember to actually go!

Within these very immersive MMORPGs, players create their own avatars, which in some cases are very highly customizable, creating characters who are, in fact, individuals. In the games where leveling up is very time consuming, people will eventually end up with hours, days… weeks of fighting enemies and completing quests into a given character. Some players may even begin to identify more with this avatar and their in-game persona, which may lead to feeling more “at home” in the game than in reality. DO NOT LET THIS HAPPEN. Preferring the fantasy world of an MMORPG over real life is a bad sign. If you begin to have these feelings, it may be a symptom of videogame addiction. Experts suggest: GOING OUTSIDE or GETTING A GIRLFRIEND.

Keep in mind, while videogames have become more and more social over the years, they are not a substitute for actual social interaction. Having online friends is not bad, but these are not people you will rely on in a pinch. They won’t come to your house and take care of you if you get sick, or help you get somewhere when your car’s in the shop. In many cases, they have no idea where you live, and don’t even know your real name! This is not to suggest that you should start giving out your name and address online. Try making real friends. Then, instead of playing games online, you can play multiplayer games together at someone’s house. At parties such as this one, please continue to keep in mind that you should still eat, sleep, and use the bathroom when necessary.

One last suggestion we have for you is the Reality Check. In this exercise, we would like to take the time to point out that your skills in videogames do not necessarily carry over to real life. For example, please note that:

No matter how powerful a mage you play online, you still don’t have magical powers.
Being able to triple A songs on heavy in DDR does NOT mean that you can ACTUALLY dance. While we all commend your arrow mastery, please keep it in the arcade. On the same note: no matter how good you are at Guitar Hero, that does NOT necessarily mean that you can ACTUALLY play the guitar. Deal with it.
As we have mention before, videogames do NOT count as exercise, with very few exceptions. Please keep in mind that, although your avatar may have enough strength to uproot a tree and wield it as a weapon, you should still consider getting up and moving around every so often to work off all those chips and sugary energy drinks.

Videogame addiction is a serious problem, but it can be overcome with these few simple techniques. The best part is, you don’t have to quit entirely! Videogames can be a manageable part of your life as long as you control them instead of letting them control you.

This has been a public service announcement, brought to you by the Cheesy Closing Remarks Foundation.”

On Sunday November 4, 2007 at 2:00PM, our group met in the IST building. Joe connected his computer to the sound recording booth and the magic begun. Abby was the first to record. She was amazing; it only took her one take to record her entire scene. The same goes for Jocelyn. She was terrfied of the litle black sound recording booth she had to stand in. She didn’t want to freak out so she gave it her all and did her part in one take. On the other hand, Jamilah was very nervous. It took her longer because she had to start over every time she messed up a word. By 4:00PM we had finished the recording and Jocelyn had taken the file to Windows Movie Maker.

In Windows Movie Maker, Jocelyn had to combine our voices with the clips Abby recorded from the Sims 2. For all that do not know,

“The Sims 2 is a strategic life simulation computer game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. The players control their Sims, as they interact with their virtual surroundings, engaging in various different activities and forming relationships in a manner similar to real life. Unlike its predecessor, The Sims 2 does not have a defined final goal; gameplay is open-ended. They do, however, have life goals, wants and fears, the fulfillment of which can have good or bad effects. There is also a wide-range of cheats to be used. All Sims age, and generally live up to sixty five Sim days, if the controller treats their Sim well.

The Sims 2 builds on its predecessor by allowing Sims, the simulated human characters, to age through six stages of life and incorporating a more powerful 3D graphics engine. As of July 2007, the base game has sold more than 13 million units worldwide, making it the 2nd best selling PC game of all time, only behind the original The Sims.[5] A sequel, The Sims 3, was announced in November 2006 by EA to be released sometime in 2009.[6] [7] ”

With that said, Abby arranged for her Sims to interact in a way that showed video game addiction. It is very difficult to control the Sims because they have a finction called free will. Yes, free will. They can do whatever they want whereever and however they want. The user is just there to guide them in the right path, similar to God. From the sound of her blog, she had some problems control her Sims.

“So I think this video project is what's going to officially drive me crazy. Seriously, headdesk doesn't cover this one. I'm ready to slam my face through a wall, and though I don't think my face would be very happy about it, I'm pretty sure the wall would still lose.

Realistically, the only good thing that has come out of this experience, is that it will make a fabulous linkdump SO I'M GOING TO TAKE ADVANTAGE LIKE THE WIND, BABY!

Right, so this has been my day:

Woke up at one. W00t. Then again, I'd been up until 4:30 this morning writing my NaNo. Not so w00t. Roommate and her boyfriend were already out. Very awesome. Opened Sims 2. Took a shower while waiting for it to open. It wasn't finished when I got back –

When I finally got Sims going, I then proceeded to devote the next 5 hours to taking video. It was actually pretty fun, in the way that wrestling with sims and forcing them into submission is fun. For my efforts, I managed to collect all the video we needed for our project and then some. Unfortunately, the "high" quality video setting is a rather misleading label, but you get the idea of what's going on, especially if you've played Sims 2 a lot. Sim videos are much funnier when you know all the different actions the characters are doing. You know, funny in the way that your soul is dying from the knowledge that those brain cells could be devoted to something else.

So I've got my video. Now, a less paranoid person might have just sent it over to the person responsible for putting the video together in Movie Maker and gotten on with her life. However, instead, I opened up Movie Maker and made sure that the files I'd just created were compatible with the program. Go to import files. They show up; all seems well. I click on one, just for fun. A black screen appears in the movie preview screen. I try hitting play. Nothing happens. I add the movie to the timeline. It adds as an AUDIO FILE.

This was still around when "headdesk" was appropriate. However, after searching through official help sites, unofficial help sites, downloading codes (that didn't help), searching for other codes (that also did not help), and most likely exceeding my bandwidth limit, I was no closer to having useable files, and I was frustrated on top of that.

Finally, a friend pointed me to download.com, where I was able to find a converter that allows me to convert my useless files into useable ones. Of course, since I'm not buying the software, it only lets me convert one at a time, and asks me "would you like to buy it now?" between every conversion, but I am still satisfied with my victory.

Unfortunately, due to this aggravation, I'm not going through hell and back AGAIN to find something that will convert Flash files into something useable in Movie Maker. We'll see if anything in the way of animations made by Abby makes its way into this movie, but as of now, I'm converting the files, and recovering for a while.”

As you can see, Abby had plenty of problems. After she got some amazing clips from the Sims 2, she sent them to Jocelyn. Jocelyn then had the trouble of matching our voices with the actions of the Sims. “It’s all about timing - it's kind of hard to make sure all the pictures line up to the words correctly. Just takes some patience.” She also could not add music to the background. “There is only one sound track, so I can't have background music behind us talking.” She compiled the final video and uploaded it to Angel. But as Karma would have it, she forgot to publish it. Now, she is the only person who can open the file. It is 12:52PM, 8 minutes before we have to present the video and she is across campus trying to fix her mess. I hope this works out okay.

Now, it is 2:03 and class is over at 2:15. Jocelyn is still not here. She texted me saying she fixed the video and she was on her way. It is 2:05 and Andrea Tapia expects us to sit it out because she knows that we do not have our video ready. However, I refuse to “sit it out”. We have something to say. I decided to give her something and talk about what our video was about, how we made it, and the problem we had. It was extremely difficult to stand in front of the class with nothing to present except excuses. But by the grace of God, Jocelyn walked through the door at 2:09 with the video on her flash drive and we had 6 minutes to present our video, which turned out to be pretty good with the exception of the lack of music.

In conclusion, this project was extremely stressful but it beats a midterm.

When learning to build in Second Life, team HAL 9000 wanted to show our newly found skills and build a model of the Nittany Lion using a laptop. We split up the responsibilities within our group. Jamilah was responsible for creating the table, chair, and laptop for thee Nittany Lion’s use. Abby created the Nittany Lion. Jocelyn was supposed to create the document, however due to her incompetence this task has been reassigned to Jamilah.

When given the assignment in class. We, as a team, thought of many different things to make. Some ideas that crossed out minds included a cheeseburger, a poster of the IST building, a movie theater showing an IST movie created in class, the nerdy Nittany Lion playing golf, and the nerdy Nittany Lion on a laptop buying clothes. We choose the nerdy Nittany Lion on a laptop buying clothes. The reason behind this is that the Nittany Lion represents Penn State and the laptop represents IST. We wanted to convey that everyone including the Nittany Lion uses technology and that technology/Penn State is not exclusively educational. It can used to do fun and useful things such as shopping online for hot clothes.

After thinking so deeply about that matter, we brainstormed about how we wanted to present our Nittany Lion. We thought about having him sit Indian style with the laptop in his lap or even laying with the laptop in front of him. Those poses were too casual for what we were trying to convey. We wanted the lion to be sitting up right in a chair with the laptop on a table in front of him. This shows the intelligent side of the Nittany Lion. The computer screen shows a few women dressed in beautiful clothes. This shows that he was pondering weather or not he should buy his girlfriend those clothes for Christmas.

In order to create the table Jamilah used several cube shapes and altered them in a way she saw fit. She made sure that the arms and legs of the chair matched from each angle. The table took a bit longer to create because she wanted it to look rather modern. She used round shapes and altered them in order to look like a table. The laptop was by far the easiest object to create. It only took 3 cubes altered in different ways and a couple of different textures. The texture for the screen was from an outfit I brought on Freebie Island. When you buy the clothes, you get the poster just in case you want to advertise it yourself. Jamilah didn’t have access to the IST 110H zone, so she created her object in the sand box and Abby kindly brought the Nittany Lion over so it so everything could be resized.

Abby created the Nittany Lion. She used a lot of spheres. She altered them by making them bigger smaller, flatter, and taller. When she put them all together, she found a texture that matched the Nittany Lion’s fur and used it. The Nittany Lion she created very closely resembles the Nittany Lion found on Penn State’s campus.

There were many obstacles we, as a team, encountered while trying to complete this project. First, Jamilah was never able to get access to the IST 110H zone. Therefore, she decided to make her objects in the sand box and save them to her inventory. Then she and Abby were online at the same time and she sold the items to Abby so she could link them all together as one object. Jamilah made sure that all the rights on altering her object were given to the next owner. Then Abby had no problem adjusting the chair and table to fit the lion she had created. Abby had problems building the lion. At one point the entire lion was gone and she had to start over. Another obstacle we faced was the other users in SL. While Abby and Jamilah were trying to take pictures of the finished product, a guy with a motorcycle kept running into them causing the picture to change. It took a while for him to realize that we were trying to do homework. The last problem we encountered was with our team member Jocelyn. She was responsible for creating this document that I, Jamilah, am now creating. When I checked her blog, the posts was nowhere to be found. Earlier this semester, she stated that she was having problems with her blog and I suggested that anytime she has to post something for the group to send to Abby or myself. But she did'nt so this is yet another problem we had to face.

I explained to her that if she does not have the information she needs to finish her part of the project, she should email or call us to ask for help. If that failed, she could have easily gone into SL, examined the object we created, and thought about what we did to create those items. We all learned the same thing on how to create items in class so she should have had a pretty good idea. However, Jocelyn did not put any effort into her part of the project. It seems as if she simply wanted to copy and paste the information given by Abby and myself. In the end, I, as the team leader, tried my best to compose a document that fulfilled all of the requirements stated on Angel.

I am sorry if the above stated problem sounds harsh but thats the way the cookie crumbles. No one is perfect and we all, including myself, have to remember that. Right?

Overall, this project was one of the most creative I have encountered throughout the semester.

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.