Tuesday 15 July 2008

The Slews - 7/15

Lights dim and music swells….From the top of what rises in the east to the bottom of what falls in the west, covering the metaplace, the marketplace and wherever else inquiring minds are…..This…Is…The>…Slews!

P: Good evening Second Nation & here now The Slews

P: Astronomers say that Saturn’s rings will disappear from view on Earth on September 4, 2009. That is officially before the 2009 SecondLife Convention, think we know where they are heading?

H: No Pooky, The gases, ice, and rocky material that make up the rings will remain in place, but be invisible from the vantage point of Earth, as they do about every fifteen years. The rings are so thin that stargazers will be unable to see them through small telescopes.

P: I always wondered, What are Saturn’s rings made of? Light? Gases? Water and ice? Rock and debris?

H: Rocks to boulder size objects, even up to small minivan size objects, all in orbit around Saturn, & at how many gallons per mile, that takes some Lindens to get there.

P: Until now, astronomers have failed to identify where asteroids come from, because of what happens after the meteorites are ejected from their asteroidal parent body.
Most of the meteorites that we collect on Earth come from the main belt between Mars and Jupiter

H: . Why do we want to know this? Meteorites are a major tool for knowing the history of the solar system because their composition is a record of past geology that occurred while they were still incorporated in the parent asteroid.. Like when I used to live at home.

P: Undersea volcanic rocks offer vast repository for greenhouse gas, says study A group of scientists has used deep ocean-floor drilling and experiments to show that volcanic rocks off the West Coast and elsewhere might be used to securely imprison huge amounts of globe-warming carbon dioxide captured from power plants or other sources.

H: In particular, they say that natural chemical reactions under 30,000 square miles of ocean floor off California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia could lock in as much as 150 years of US CO2 production.

P: Research scientists have now presented a new generation of household robots, the “Care-O-bot® 3”. Stereo-vision color cameras, laser scanners and a 3-D range camera enable Care-O-bot® 3 to register its surroundings in three dimensions in real time. Just like in SecondLife, but I will smack anyone who calls me their robot!

H: If a person moves into the radius of its arm, it stops moving. Another feature of the small, flexible helper is that it can move in any direction. It can also learn to recognize new objects. The user simply places the unfamiliar object in the robot’s hand so that it can gain a three-dimensional impression of the item.

P: However, the new robot does not look like a human being. humanoid service robots were deliberately moved away from, when we designing Care-O-bot® 3,” But can they hold a human hand? Never mind a human heart?

H: A U.S. watch list of terrorism suspects has passed 1 million records, corresponding to about 400,000 people, and a leading civil rights group said on Monday the number was far too high to be effective.

P: President George W. Bush ordered in the current list in September 2003 as a way to wrap several growing terrorism watchlists into a single government database compiled and overseen by the FBI, through a Terrorist Screening Center. Now is we could only get them all into a social network that would be an instant 1 million registered users.

H: Telescopes looking back in time to more than 12 billion years ago have spotted a star factory — a galaxy producing so many new stars that they have nicknamed it the “baby boom” galaxy.

P:The remote galaxy is — or was — pumping out stars at a rate of up to 4,000 per year. In comparison, our own Milky Way galaxy gives birth to an average of just 10 stars per year.This galaxy is undergoing a major baby boom, producing most of its stars all at once,

H: If our human population was produced in a similar boom, then almost all of the people alive today would be the same age.

P: Speaking of babies - A baby’s smile does more than warm a mother’s heart — it also lights up the reward centers of her brain, according to the results of a brain imaging study. The investigators found that when the mothers saw their own infants’ faces, key areas of the brain associated with reward lit up during the scans, suggesting increased blood flow to that area.

H: These are areas that have been activated in other experiments associated with drug addiction, or SecondLife addiction.

P: Cymbals don’t clash of their own accord – in our world, anyway and diaper spelt backwards is repaid. But the quantum world is bizarrely different. Two metal plates, placed almost infinitesimally close together, spontaneously attract each other.

H: What seems like magic is known as the Casimir force, and it has been well-documented in experiments. The cause goes to the heart of quantum physics: Seemingly empty space is not actually empty but contains virtual particles associated with fluctuating electromagnetic fields.

P: However, only virtual particles of shorter wavelengths — in the quantum world, particles exist simultaneously as waves — can fit into the space between the plates, so that the outward pressure is slightly smaller than the inward pressure. The result is the plates are forced together. What about virtual plates?

H: Now, tiny “microelectromechanical” systems — so-called MEMS devices that are already used in a wide array of consumer products — become so small they are affected by quantum forces. More specifically, the finding could one day help reduce what MEMS engineers call “stiction” — when two very small, very close objects tend to stick together.

P: how small do you have to get to be Stuck on you? A new report is the first to describe the principles behind the stability and electronic properties of tiny nanoclusters of metallic gold. The study, which confirms the “divide and protect” bonding structure, resulted from the work of researchers at four universities on two continents.

H: In the Heart of Gold effect – this Study reveals principles behind stability and electronic properties of gold nanoclusters that confirms ‘divide and protect’ bonding structure.

P: BabyCenter.com has launched a social network for what it calls “the largest parenting community online.” many blogs and matching with people who share common interests or childrens’ ages, and tag photos and profiles.

H: I am bit suspicious of anyone who shares that much common interest with a child. But the moms just keep on coming! New moms and pregnant women have over 109 word-of-mouth conversations per week about products, services, and brands, most of them positive and considered highly credible by other moms,

P: Nielsen is expected to announce its long-awaited new service that will deliver standardized metrics for out-of-home video networks. It will deliver free reports to agency clients,

H: Speaking of which, The world’s largest digital sign - commissioned by Walgreens - is nearly completed in Times Square. The sign, which is comprised of 23 synchronized digital screens to create a solid animation, wraps three sides of a 25-story T the building from which the New Year’s Eve ball is dropped.

P: Weighing in at 250,000 pounds, it spans 43,720 square feet making it significantly larger than the old champion from NASDAQ, which covers just 11,000 square feet.

H: More Out of Home marketing! A futuristic, inflatable, transformer-style giant graced New York’s Times Square yesterday. The 60-foot gift monster is heading to Phoenix today, to take its place outside of the University of Phoenix stadium where the Super Bowl will be played in two weeks.

P: In response to the complaints of a pastor of a church in Times Square, a New York state Supreme Court Justice has ordered a temporary restraining order against a company that proposed to put up ads that would have shown naked bottoms with smiley faces.

H: The advertisements for the Washlet - a bidet-toilet seat that uses warm water and air - were to go up July 1 for 30 days on the two sides of the building that houses the nondenominational church.

P: Storage vendors are scrambling to keep up with the demand from Hollywood special-effects houses and surveillance companies. Digital video storage is the single fastest-growing sector in the storage industry and it is being driven by the demand from filmmakers and security companies, both producing thousands of hours of video that needs to be held indefinitely;

H: The first iPhones won praise for their sleek design and elegant touchscreen, but Apple’s latest will be celebrated for the software applications it enables. & sold a million over the weekend.

P: Last weekend there was, an ultra technorati blowout generously sponsored by the folks at O’Reilly Media at their spacious campus in Sebastapol Among them were folk from Get Satisfaction, a site that fosters dialog between companies and their customers. You post questions there, offer advice to others, and when it’s something company employees can address, they respond.

H: Linden Lab also has a Get Satisfaction company listing, with five Lindens interacting. A bit like JIRA, the Lindens’ feature tracking software, but way more user-friendly– and perhaps just as important, publicly viewable.

P: It’s a family Affair! Night Morrisey has a fascinating and keenly observed profile of a Second Life family, seven adult-age Residents who roleplay as a caring nuclear household, with a mother and father, and five kids. I bet there is a lot of smiling going on.

H: The details of their virtual domestic life are intriguing, especially as they relate to their real world identities. MOM & DAD have accumulated I mean adopted, the children, and even extendplay into their real lives with telephone calls- I am sorry Pooky but I think I’m just going to call that a real relationship

P: The mom remembers when her smallest was “three days old, and looked it. So I took him shopping, then home - I wouldn’t take him home with noob hair!”
but he didn’t intentionally become a kid, “I started playing with the slider settings and without realizing it I was making my av smaller and smaller, and it felt more natural to me. He bumped into other kids on a playground my first day as a boy and the other kids there were picked up by their mother, and I immediately knew I had to have that same thing.”

H: I got mine from slexchange, she’s a beauty. And cleans up better than a robot. Will virtual diapers be that far in the future?

P: diaper spelt backwards is..

H: Okay Pooky, we know…..Today was the Tour of the IBM Virtual Green Data Center
& IBM has announced it has accomplished virtual teleportation. That’s correct. The company known as the world leader in supercomputing teamed up with Second Life to make sure that users of virtual worlds can “teleport” their avatars between them.

P: “Teleporting an avatar between platforms has the potential to have a significant impact on the future of virtual worlds. An open standard for interoperability would allow users to cross freely from one world to another in a seamless transfer, just as they can go from one Web site to another on the Internet today.”

H: while Developing this protocol is a key milestone and has the potential to push virtual worlds into the next stage of their evolution.so is getting the teleportation device that transports a real human into Second Life as an avatar, that just might be very worthwhile.

P: I thought that was called logging in? The “Partner” option in Second Life enables you to list another Resident as such in your avatar profile (if that person accepts your proposal, that is), and doing so is a bargain deal, literally costing pennies: listing cost is $L10 (around 3.7 US cents), and L$25, if the couple decides to get divorced. but who gets the kids?

H: The designation means different things to different Residents. Sometimes it’s just romantic roleplay. For others, it’s a connection that’s real in some meaningful way. (The Linden Partner page acknowledges as much, offering it as an option for partnerships that certain real world governments forbid: “Can’t be married in real life? Try Second Life!”)

P: What about polygamy? Is that legal here? Recently CeNedra Rivera ran a survey on her blog, asking “What does ‘Partner’ mean to you in SL?”, 27% said nothing I will never get partnered here, and you dont have to be married to get virtually pregnant either.

H: In other virtual headlines – yes Lively reminds me of something like IMVU, an instant messaging program that enables 3D avatar chat, in that it provides off-the-shelf avatars with teen appeal for socializing.

P: However, imagine if Google Earth became a portal to other virtual spaces. If you were in business mode, you could fly in via Google Earth to check the name of that company whose building you keep driving past, find its real-world buildings, use them to launch its webpage, and then enter its Lively virtual space to interact with some real employees.

H: As a tourist, you could fly into New York, check out the hotels in the area near where your friends live, and then fly your avatar into the hotel’s Lively space to talk to someone about getting a deal on a weekend break.

P: It’s this integration of 2D and 3D which is so powerful, and Google, which dominates the world’s text-based information and has hell of a leg up in 3D via Google Earth, seems to me well placed to create the ultimate mash-up of real and virtual world content. It will be interesting to see how Lively develops, but for now, we don’t need another stand alone virtual space: the real magic will happen when these worlds start to collide.

H: And The perception of most business people (if they’ve even heard of virtual worlds) is that virtual worlds are games. It’s hard for many business people to imagine using them for work.

P: . But with large companies like Diageo, Unilever, BP, IBM and others using virtual worlds the case studies will start to come out and perception will gradually change.”

H: A Gartner report shows that 90% of corporate attempts to use virtual worlds fail within the first 18 months. Despite this finding, Gartner says that virtual worlds could still play a vital role in the future with 70% of organizations developing a private internal virtual world by 2012.

P: The projects so often fail either because they are launched for the wrong reasons

H: for the cool factor or to keep up with competitors, or because they replaced the bright sociable go-getter with the IT guy who has the personality of a mushroom.

P: or because marketers don’t understand at a fundamental level how virtual worlds are different from the rest of the Web (the pages that compose the “2-D Internet”).

H: “Realistic graphics and physical behavior count for little unless the presence is valued by and engaging to a large audience. and unless they smile Pooky, at least somewhere deep inside.

P: yeah & certainly if you don’t have to clean up your room. And that…it…the …slews!

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