Lars Juhl Jensen

I guess it's not fixed yet, just got 30 "random" papers - Paulo Nuin

Yes, I also just got another 30 papers - each in two copies, namely one from BMC Bioinformatics and one from BMC Systems Biology - Lars Juhl Jensen

Had the same problem for a week or two now. - Neil Saunders

Also wondering why automated emails from PLoS CB are all empty - anyone else seen that? - Neil Saunders

I just got some urology papers in BMC Bioinfo feed. - Paulo Nuin

I had the same problem with BMC - Pedro Beltrao

I find it entertaining: Opportunities to learn and barriers to change: Crack cocaine use in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver - marcin

Hey, the crack cocaine was a good one. Good catch. - Paulo Nuin

My main worry: making this piece of spy equipment was way too easy! - Lars Juhl Jensen

If you're getting into scripting try to catch Hiro Sheridan and Eloise Pasteur inworld - Jean-Claude Bradley

Any chance on boosting the range? - Egon Willighagen

The sensor cannot hear things that I my avatar would not have been able to hear from the same position. So I can hear normal talk at 20m, whisper at 10m and shouting at 40m. However, if you have permission to create objects in a given area, you could put down as many sensors as you please. - Lars Juhl Jensen

Another evil trick to consider is to use a combination of a sensor and a microphone to make microphones that automatically follow avatars :) - Lars Juhl Jensen

Evil trick implemented - I now have a tracker that follows around people, listens to their chat, and passes it on to a protected Twitter account. And it even continues to do so after I have logged out of Second Life! - Lars Juhl Jensen

I wonder how long it takes them to kick Lars for breeching EULA :) - Egon Willighagen

BTW, Jean-Claude... wouldn't this be a great way of crowd-sourcing what people have to see about molecules? ;) - Egon Willighagen

Lars, that is against the Community Standards, unfortunately http://secondlife.com/corporat... - I have used a chat logger occasionally (eg to show public chat on a separate screen) but was thinking of writing and asking for permission. - _alf

(mine posts to a Google Spreadsheet) - _alf

Considering that I informed the people I tested it on, I doubt it is against the rules ;) In any case, you generally cannot create objects on other people's parcels, so the tracker only works in a sandbox. And there all objects are usually auto-deleted after a short time. - Lars Juhl Jensen

Actually, as I read the Community Standards it is not against the rules to use a chat logger. What *is* against the rules is to share the resulting log with third parties (unless you have their consent, that is). - Lars Juhl Jensen

"Remotely monitoring conversations, posting conversation logs, or sharing conversation logs without consent are all prohibited in Second Life" - _alf

No, but the problem was not that I didn't find nice looking places. What bothered me was that the whole navigation just seemed so inefficient. Somehow I get the feeling that by attempting to (largely) emulate the real world, Second Life ends up bringing a lot of unnecessary limitations into the navigation. (cont'd) - Lars Juhl Jensen

For example, I went to NPG's Elucian Islands and took a look at the Scifoo presentations. While doing so, it occurred to me how incredibly inconvenient it was compared to using SlideShare: I had to run around in a 3D world desperately searching for the presentations that I could just have been scrolling through in a list on a web page. I'm not sure that qualifies as "progress" ;) - Lars Juhl Jensen

I found it ok for live meetings/presentations, but otherwise if you're a science or library person, you usually find yourself wandering empty islands. - Richard Akerman

Lars - the experience of moving around should be fluid - if it isn't it is probably because your video card is not good enough - Jean-Claude Bradley

Second Life is really a social medium - there is no point in going there to look at presentations alone. You should go with a few people and have them show you some things that are of interest. If you find people alone they are likely building things. - Jean-Claude Bradley

The experience is mostly fluid on my less than one year old MacBook Pro - except when everything hangs for a couple of seconds, but that is only a minor irritation. - Lars Juhl Jensen

I think what bothers me is that by using virtual reality, you automatically and unnecessarily get many of the bad sides of a real conference: it may be hard to find the people you want to talk to, it may be hard to find the poster you are looking for, there is only room for a certain number of people in front of a poster at the same time, you might get a bad seat at a presentation etc. My gut feeling tells me that trying to simulate "the old way" on a computer is not the best way to go digital. - Lars Juhl Jensen

Some things work and others don't. But giving a poster to about 30 people using chat really does work well in my experience http://scifooliveson.wikispace... - Jean-Claude Bradley

Sure, but my question is: would it not work even better if you were presenting your poster using a web interface where people could pan and zoom on the poster and you can chat with them? Imagine a virtual poster session that is essentially a Flickr gallery plus a chat interface to talk to the presenters. - Lars Juhl Jensen

The more worrisome issue about second life, and this is true of video presentations as well, is that they're not indexable and searchable, so the main way people find things on the web doesn't ever return these things in their results. Simply returning a link via indexed tags isn't good enough, either, because the content can't be easily skimmed. - Mr. Gunn

True, that is also a big issue. And speaking of Second Life-specific problems, it is also rather impractical that you cannot register a character under your actual name. I'm trying to imagine how it would be to participate in a conference where everyone wear name tags with wrong names on them ;) - Lars Juhl Jensen

A poster session on Flickr would completely miss the avatar effect. It turns out that being able to walk towards and face people (their avatar's at least) has a strong psychological effect on the interpersonal interaction. - Jean-Claude Bradley

The inability to use your real name is a nuisance. But since the value of SL is about the networking (not the technology or policies) and it is the only serious game in town most of us just get over it. Making lookup pages can help too, e.g. http://drexelisland.wikispaces... - Jean-Claude Bradley

SL is not meant to be skimmed - it is more a place to socialize - Jean-Claude Bradley

I guess that is the point we just have to agree to disagree on: avatars do nothing for me. I personally don't feel any closer to a person I chat with on SL than to someone I chat with in other ways not involving avatars. Maybe I'm unusual in that respect ;) - Lars Juhl Jensen

Lars - it may be possible that different types of people react in different ways. But I was very negative on Second Live for a long time until the right person showed me something that clicked. - Jean-Claude Bradley

I kind of agree with Lars. Where I find SL to be really interesting is really for 3D visualization at scale. For example doing reconstructions of cities of ancient civilizations or future urban development projects. The same could apply to biological models (cellular, ecology etc ?) but the ones that I saw in second nature where not that detailed. The Nature SL presentations are not bad but I don't think it improves on something like a "live" slideshare presentation. - Pedro Beltrao