Very quick note to Second Life readers that we will shortly be starting a team blog for all the residents of the SkyLabs and Village to talk about their projects. As soon as the new platform goes live, the residents will take it away: to keep you going until then, we have written a brief pictorial history of the development of the Village.

The condensed version

Following Martin’s and Henry’s interesting post-mortems on Science Online 2010 and the comments about virtual conferencing, I thought I would post some of our experiences and the feedback from broadcasting Science Online London 2009 (SOLO 09) in Second Life. For those unfamiliar: it was a one day conference held in London last August with individual speakers and panel sessions video-streamed live. The conference will be held again this summer, and will be streamed for virtual attendees, although how is yet to be decided.

The feedback was interestingly consistent, and I start with some general points about virtual conferencing which came out of it. Apologies in advance for length: I have tried to put highlights in bold for skim-readers.

• For extended listening, audio quality is crucial.

• Video quality is less important, however, the majority of viewers preferred to have a poor quality video over no video at all. Several people commented that seeing the video gives you a sense of engagement with the proceedings missing from audio only

• Having a good, clear view of slides is very important, especially when a session is highly dependent on them.

• With that all in mind, I think an ideal way of doing it is to have two distinct screens: one playing the video of the speaker, but not attempting to cover the slides; the other showing the slides moving in time with the speaker. An alternative I’ve seen done in some webinars is to have a video of the speaker in the bottom right hand corner of the main screen which shows the slides.

As well as details of exactly what to show, there were lots of comments on the platform and the experience in general.

• Almost without exception, attendees appreciated the ability to talk to other people both during and between sessions. For several of the SOLO09 sessions, there was a really good conversation going on during the sessions between attendees, which could be much more in-depth than the largely twitter-based communication between physical attendees. This also showed in one of the sessions which was heavily reliant on a projection and couldn’t be easily followed in SL. We thought the SL attendees would be frustrated and just come back for the next session, but they didn’t: in fact, a really fascinating discussion ensued, prompted by the audio they could hear, but then spiralling off into a broader discussion of science communication.

• Knowing who you’re talking to is still important in a virtual world: at the beginning of the SOLO day, conversation was quite stilted, until someone suggested a role call. Everyone introduced themselves, some people realised there were people they knew, or knew of, there and immediately conversations began to spring up.

• When the conference has multiple simultaneous sessions, ability to choose which session you attend is important: unless there is a clear keynote, to not have a choice gives the distinct impression of the virtual attendee being less important than the physical attendees.

• The feeling of engagement is really important, and Second Life scores highly here. Almost all attendees felt that SL was a more immersive medium than, say, a video stream with chatroom (although still no-one really knows why), but they were split pretty much 50:50 on whether this benefit outweighed the technical difficulties and the reduced number of attendees.

• An observation based on dozens of events, including SOLO 09: Second Life seems to create a really good atmosphere for talking to the speakers and attendees. The level of separation leaves users more willing to ask questions of expert speakers and introduce themselves to others. Several of our guest speakers commented that the questions from Second Life audiences are both more involved and more challenging than real life questions. We think that this breakdown of barriers between “experts” and “general public” is reflective of social media in general opening up communication channels.

So was SOLO09 in SL a success?

The Good Things

• More than 30 people who otherwise couldn’t have attended were able to attend and interact

• The video (after a shaky start) worked well and attendees could see and hear

• We were able to put up slides and video, and provide handouts about speakers and sessions all in the same environment

• There was a lot of interaction between attendees

• The level of discussion was in-depth and continued after sessions

• Dave Munger was able to present live, despite passport problems stopping him coming to London.

The Bad Things

• The video quality was poor (this was down to an unexpected equipment failure – the cameras wouldn’t hook up to the laptops)

• Some people could not view SL and the video stream simultaneously.

• Not all speakers had provided their slides in advance: this meant they could not be pre-loaded for SL and so we were dependent on the poor quality camera footage of the RL slides

• Trying to navigate between multiple (virtual) rooms for breakout sessions was confusing for people unfamiliar with SL

• Attendance was undoubtedly limited by the use of Second Life. Several would-be attendees did not have good enough computers; others couldn’t spare the time to get familiar with it.

• Almost every attendee was a SL newbie and required an orientation ahead of time, which was time intensive for the organisers.

Overall, SOLO in SL was a really interesting experience and I believe that the majority of the attendees got a lot out of it. However, using a virtual world as a conference tool remains a serious technical hurdle for anyone unfamiliar with them. One of the main questions that remains is to decide what the appropriate trade off is between a highly engaged experience for a few more-experienced users versus a less interactive experience for a more general audience.

We’re thinking a lot about the best way to do conferences like this and virtual events in general, and I’d be really interested to hear any other views and experiences as well.

Tonight is the first Ask a Scientist in its new home, the Horatius restaurant way down south on 16th Street.

I’d stopped going before Christmas because it was getting so busy there was no seating even on the outside terrace, but this promises to be bigger, and tonight’s topic looks really fascinating, so we’re giving it another go. If any SF people are planning to go too, let me know!

Topic: Your Brain on Computers

Back in the 70s, did you ever fantasize about the idea of a Bionic Man who could play Pong using only his mind? Here in the 21st century, microelectrodes planted inside quadriplegics’ brains translate the neural activity of thoughts into signals that can move a computer cursor, control a robotic arm, and yes, play Pong! Although in their infancy, the exciting innovations of neuromodulation and brain-computer interface have already helped people with spinal cord injuries, blindness, deafness, depression, and disorders like epilepsy and Parkinson’s. For example, devices like NeuroPace’s RNS Neurostimulator, implanted in the brains of epileptics, are able to detect abnormal electrical activity in the brain and attempt to prevent seizures. This incredible technology may also lead you to wonder about bioethically sticky non-therapeutic applications like enhancing cognitive ability or athletic skill. Biomedical engineer Brett Wingeier will lead what promises to be a fascinating discussion.

Speaker: Brett Wingeier, Principal Biomedical Engineer, NeuroPace

In extremely unfestive style, I have Second Life news which may not come as a great surprise to many of you.

We have spent the last few months assessing NPG’s presence in Second Life and we have decided to significantly scale back our activities. The following is the official “party line”.

After 3 years of experimenting with Second Life, initially as a community building tool and more recently as a revenue generating venture, NPG has decided to put its Second Life project into maintenance mode for the time being. It is NPG’s opinion that there is a growing demand for cheap, time-efficient alternatives to international travel and both live streaming of real world and online-only meetings will continue to grow. However, we do not believe that Second Life is the ideal solution for virtual conferencing at this time.

NPG will continue to maintain its Elucian Islands sims which include conference and meeting facilities, a Charles Darwin-themed educational area and a virtual science park. However, the project will no longer be staffed full time, we will no longer be actively seeking business opportunities nor continuing community building activities such as free lectures and workshops. The website is no longer being updated; however, we hope you will continue to enjoy the archive of past events and other resources available there.

Should any of the in-world facilities be required for promotional events or one-off business activities, these can be arranged by contacting elucianislands@nature.com

The SkyLabs will continue to be freely available to any scientist or educator wanting to use them – to join the community, email elucianislands@nature.com. The Notes From The Voyage game has been heavily used by educators and will remain available. All our meeting areas including conference hall, underwater bar and amphitheatre will remain and if you would like to hold an event, regular group or anything else scientific there, please do get in touch. Nymf’s Science Circle will remain on the Elucian Islands and as it seems a horrible waste not to use good resources, we’d love anyone who would like make use of them to do so.

The weekly lectures have now finished and will not restart. The weekly Nature Podcast will also finish in January, unless a volunteer organiser can be found to take it on. If anyone’s at all interested in running the podcast or organising any other kind of activity, please do give me a shout. I think this is the right decision for a whole variety of reasons, but I do think it’s a shame to lose such a wonderful community, so I would be very interested in any initiatives which could benefit from it.

Last but not least, I’m in the process of writing a paper on our experiences, successes and failures (although that word will undoubtedly be edited out!), and I will talk more here in the new year about some of the things we’ve learnt.

This will probably be my last post of the year, so it remains only for me to give you a departing reindeer and wish you all a very happy Christmas!

A reindeer leaving; no metaphor intended, simply that images of reindeer walking away from the camera are hard to find!

Apologies for neglecting this blog for so long. As many of you probably know from my incessant twittering about it, I have been busy writing a novel for NaNoWriMo. And I won!

The novel itself is absolutely dreadful, of course, but it is 52,614 words long, and that’s achievement enough for me. Congratulations are also due to Ken and Eva, fellow Nature Network winners.

Writing the novel was actually a really fascinating experience. I obviously have no talent at all for writing fiction, but I did enjoy it, and I feel bizarrely very proud of the finished work, even though it’s so terrible. Writing a book was always something I thought I’d like to do one day, and I still would. I’m not sure fiction is my calling, but the actual writing, I enjoyed, so I think I’d like to try my hand at non-fiction next – topic suggestions on a postcard!

Apart from how not to write dialogue, I have learnt some interesting things over the past month or so.

1. Writing in Google Docs is inexplicably quicker than writing in NeoOffice, even though using GD implies that you have wifi and therefore increased procrastination potential.

2. Letting go of work for five whole days is not just possible, but is good for the soul, and is something that I have not done for too long.

3. November will henceforth be renamed Science-and-Accuracy-Are-Very-Unimportant month: if I say a grizzly bear’s favourite food is human, it is! For the rest of my life, I shall preach scientific communication and education 335 days a year: the remainder of the time, I shall happily change the laws of nature to suit my needs. And 58 will be a perfectly normal lifespan for a lion. I also – unrelatedly, of course – promise never to become a published murder mystery author…

Thank you for indulging me. NaNoWriMo obsession is now officially ended for this year: normal virtual world service to resume shortly.

Quite exciting news today – the latest issue of Nature Materials has devoted its first four pages to Second Life! There is a freely available editorial and a commentary which is unfortunately behind the pay wall. Both are in the print journal as well, right at the front.

Nature Materials, our new favourite Nature-branded journal

They’re both definitely worth a read: the one-line summary of the commentary (written by Nature Networker Tim Jones) seems to be that critical mass hasn’t quite been achieved in scientific applications yet, but amazing things are happening, particularly in education and communication, and it’s only going to get better. MICA, NASA, NOAA, SciLands and many other old SL friends make appearances in the article and Tim makes a very eloquent point which pretty much sums up my feelings on the difficulty of explaining Second Life to skeptics:

“There is a fundamental quality to virtual worlds that makes their use so attractive… this special quality is akin to a sense of space and, strange to say, something akin to a feeling of physical presence. Regrettably, this defining quality is also the most difficult to convey – you really have to experience it.”

The editorial is also positive, but perhaps slightly more circumspect. A slightly mangled line from the editorial: “For the moment, the burden of proof rests on scientific institutions that need to make full use of the opportunities offered”.

So that would be me, I guess!

Have spent much of today panicking about having no plot, characters or even a genre for NaNoWriMo which starts tomorrow, so have just been browsing the forums hoping for an abandoned plot bunny. Didn’t find one yet (not ideally timed maintenance!) but I did discover there is a Second Life NaNoWriMo group! I did briefly consider setting my novel solely in Second Life, but I’m still not sure it will have the mass appeal I’ll need to become the next J.K. Rowling. Perhaps I’ll reconsider my ambitions a few days in and a family of Wombats will yet appear.

Soon to be the world’s second most famous literary wombats

Update: Listen to Dr Henderson’s presentation here

Title: Smallpox: The Death of a Disease
Date: Tuesday 3rd November, 10am PST / 1pm EST / 6pm BST
Speaker: D.A. Henderson, Center for Biosecurity
Location: Nature Amphitheatre, Second Life
Contact: Joanna Wombat / j.scott@nature.com

For more than 3000 years, hundreds of millions of people have died or been left permanently scarred or blind by the relentless, incurable disease called smallpox. In 1967, Dr. D.A. Henderson became director of a worldwide campaign to eliminate this disease from the face of the earth.

On November 3rd at 10am PDT, Dr Henderson will join Nature Publishing Group in the virtual world Second Life to tell his personal story of how he led the World Health Organization’s campaign to eradicate smallpox – the only disease in history to have been deliberately eliminated.

In his new book on which this lecture is based, Dr. Henderson tells how the gargantuan international effort involved more than straightforward mass vaccination. He and his staff had to cope with civil wars, floods, impassable roads, and refugees as well as formidable bureaucratic and cultural obstacles, shortages of local health personnel and meager budgets. Countries across the world joined in the effort; the United States and the Soviet Union worked together through the darkest cold war days; and professionals from more than 70 nations served as WHO field staff. On October 26, 1976, the last case of smallpox occurred. The disease that annually had killed two million people or more had been vanquished – and in just over ten years.

The story did not end there. Dr. Henderson recounts the continuing struggle over whether to destroy the remaining virus in the two laboratories still that held it. Then came the startling discovery that the Soviet Union had been experimenting with smallpox virus as a biological weapon and producing it in large quantities. The threat of its possible use by a rogue nation or a terrorist has had to be taken seriously and Dr. Henderson has been a central figure in plans for coping with it. New methods for mass smallpox vaccination were so successful that he sought to expand the program of smallpox immunization to include polio, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, and tetanus vaccines. That program now reaches more than four out of five children in the world and is eradicating poliomyelitis.

In this live event, Dr Henderson will talk about all of this and more, for about 45 minutes and then take questions from the audience. The event is free and open to all, so please do come along to hear this fascinating story. To attend the event, you will need to register with Second Life. Registration is free and easy: to get started, go to Second Life or read our Beginner’s Guide.. Any problems or if you need help getting set up, just let me know.

Photos of women of outstanding achievement in science, engineering and technology on show in Second Life
Join us for free launch event with virtual champagne
Monday 12 October, 6.15pm UK time (10.15am SL time)

For the first time, the six 2009 professional photo portraits are on display in Second Life, at the island run by Nature Magazine (annual photographic award run by UKRC).

Dr Carolin Crawford of the Institute of Astronomy and Wendy Sadler, founder of Science Made Simple, are both recipients of the award and will speak at the event.

Join us for speakers, free champagne, networking and to view the images.
Ideal for newcomers to Second Life as well as experienced visitors.
More information here:
http://www.ukrc4setwomen.org/html/news-and-events/events/?event_id=1306
Second Life venue: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Elucian%20Islands/93/218/22

Carolin Crawford is the October guest blogger on the UKRC’s women in astronomy blog, so you can also read about her on the blog and send questions and comments

Very excited about tonight’s trip: it’s the monthly Ask a Scientist and the topic is The Science of Magic!

The best CC rabbit in a hat I could find

From their website:

From ancient conjurers, to quick-handed con artists, to big ticket Las Vegas illusionists, magicians throughout the ages have been expertly manipulating human attention and perception to dazzle and delight us (or scare us, or steal our watches). Of course you know that the phenomena of cognitive and sensory illusions are responsible for the “magic” of a magic trick, but you’ve got to admit it still kind of freaks you out when some some guy in a top hat defies the laws of nature right in front of your eyes. Tonight Luigi Anzivino will explain how magicians use our brains as their accomplices in effecting the impossible — and what scientists can learn about the brain by studying the methods and techniques of magic.

Speaker: Luigi Anzivino, Neuroscientist, Magician, and Learning Studio Coordinator at Exploratorium

Location: Axis Cafe, 1201 8th Street (btw. 16th & Irwin) San Francisco

Is anyone else local going? I’ll be getting there about six, so give me a shout if you are.