In May of this year the World of Warcraft (WoW) will host its first Scientific Conference. Although I am a frequent visitor to the virtual world of Second Life and have even ventured into a few other virtual worlds, I have yet to visit WoW. However, after hearing about this conference, my curiosity was stirred…
Control the Snow
In today’s world, rapid changes in technology are even reaching into the world of snow and ice control. I just spend three days at the annual APWA Snow Show in Louisville, Kentucky, and learned an incredible amount of new information to take back home. On the first day, Richard Hanneman from the Salt Institute introduced…
Popular Mechanics – Not your father’s magazine anymore
This week I was reading an e-mail with an interesting link that ended up taking me to the Popular Mechanics Magazine Web site. Wow, was I surprised at the content I found there. You have to understand my father was an service manager for an automobile dealer and a loyal subscriber of Popular Mechanics. Therefore,…
Avatars for Web sites
Today I was told about a new application (thanks Mal Burns!) that allows someone to establish a tiny avatar, called a weblin, that is displayed on each Web page that is visited. If anyone else with a weblin is visiting that page at the same time, each person can see the others weblin and chat…
Virtual SCADA – A Real and Virtual World Mashup
Physicist Alfred Hubler, a professor at the University of Illinois, has created the first mixed reality state in a physical system. Hubler and Vadas Gintautas, a graduate student at the school, set up a system that passed data between a virtual pendulum and a real pendulum about the physical state of each. While the real…
Using Second Life to Teach Building Codes
Because I initially joined Second Life as a means of promoting the awesome community that I live and work in, my primary focus was always to find displays or builds that would help our city reach out to the community. One of the ideas I had thought about implementing was a “Code House” – a…
Can you communicate as well as a fourth-grader?
One thing that I have learned from my time in Second Life is how much all of us have in common even though we all work in different professions. Sometimes I think it is because all the work that we do, no matter the field, is based upon communication. Whenever anything goes wrong at work,…
Earth Hour 2008
Just a quick note to call everyone’s attention to the Earth Hour 2008 Web site and movement. Find out more and register your commitment at the Earth Hour 2008 site.
Second Life Build as a Deliverable
Over the last year or so since my first introduction to Second Life, I have found myself trying to think of ways that this technology can improve or prevent problems or issues that I have at work. As I blogged about the other day, we had a terrible problem with the design/builder of our water…
Knowledge Networking Group
Today I attended one of the three weekly meetings of the Knowledge Networking Group that was set up by Farnham Farrjones in Second Life. Farnham lives in Texas and works for the EPA. He has set up the group to help all of us meet and discuss what is going on with integrating the new…