Regulating virtual worlds : considering participant-driven approaches

There are a number of pressing issues facing contemporary online environments that are causing disputes among participants and platform operators and increasing the likelihood of external regulation. A number of solutions have been proposed, including industry self-governance, top-down regulation and emergent self-governance such as EVE Online’s “Council of Stellar Management”. However, none of these solutions seem entirely satisfying; facing challenges from developers who fear regulators will not understand their platforms, or players who feel they are not sufficiently empowered to influence the platform, while many authors have raised concerns over the implementation of top-down regulation, and why the industry may be well-served to pre-empt such action. This paper considers case studies of EVE Online and the offshore gambling industry, and whether a version of self-governance may be suitable for the future of the industry.

Transforming saltbush : science, mobility and metaphor in the remaking of intercolonial worlds

The movement of exotic biota into native ecosystems are central to debates about the acclimatisation of plants in the settler colonies of the nineteenth century. For example, plants like lucerne from Europe and sudan grass from South Africa were transferred to Australia to support pastoral economies. The saltbush Atriplex spp. is an anomaly-it too, eventually, became the subject of acclimatisation within its native Australia because it was also deemed useful to the pastoralists of arid and semi-arid New South Wales. When settlers first came to this part of Australia, however, initial perceptions were that the plants were useless. We trace this transformation from the desert 'desperation' plant during early settlement to the 'precious' conservation species, from the 1880s, when there were changes in both management strategies and cultural responses to saltbush in Australia. This reconsideration can be seen in scientific assessments and experiments, in the way that it was commoditised by seeds and nursery traders, and in its use as a metaphor in bush poetry to connote a gendered nationalist figure in Saltbush Bill. We argue that while initial settlers were often so optimistic about European management techniques, they had nothing but contempt for indigenous plants. The later impulses to the conservation of natives arose from experiences of bitter failure and despair over attempts to impose European methods, which in turn forced this re-evaluation of Australian species.

Expanding worlds of early childhood education for sustainability : Looking back, looking forward

This chapter draws together the key themes and perspectives from the chapters and offers a critique of the theoretical reframing - underpinned by children's rights and child agency - that has informed the book. Additionally, the documented research is situated within broader international contexts of ECE research, thus offering insights that can inform the field more generally. This is a forward looking discussion of current research that offers clear directions for ECEfS and future research in this field.

Educating for sustainability in virtual worlds : does the virtual have value?

Two key elements of education for sustainability (EfS) are action-competence, and the importance of place and experiencing the natural world. These elements emphasise and depend on the relationship between learners and their real world contexts, and have been incorporated to some extent into the sustainability cross-curricular perspective of the new Australian curriculum. Given the importance of real-world experiential learning in EfS, what is to be made of the use of multi-user virtual worlds in EfS? We went with our preservice secondary science teachers to the very appealing virtual world Quest Atlantis, which we are using in this paper as an example to explore the value of virtual worlds in EfS. In assessing the virtual world of Quest Atlantis against Australia’s Sustainability Curriculum Framework, many areas of coherence are evident relating to world viewing, systems thinking and futures thinking, knowledge of ecological and human systems, and implementing and reflecting on the consequences of actions. The power and appeal of these virtual experiences in developing these knowledges is undeniable. However there is some incoherence between the elements of EfS as expressed in the Sustainability Curriculum Framework and the experience of QA where learners are not acting in their real world, or developing connection with real place. This analysis highlights both the value and some limitations of virtual worlds as a venue for EfS.

The laws of the virtual worlds

What if you could check out of your world, and enter a place where the social environment was different, where real world laws didn't apply, and where the political system could be anything you wanted it to be? What if you could socialize there with family and friends, build your own palace, go skiing, and even hold down a job there? And what if there wasn't one alternate world, there were hundreds, and what if millions of people checked out of Earth and went there every day? Virtual worlds - online worlds where millions of people come to interact, play, and socialize - are a new type of social order. In this Article, we examine the implications of virtual worlds for our understanding of law, and demonstrate how law affects the interests of those within the world. After providing an extensive primer on virtual worlds, including their history and function, we examine two fundamental issues in detail. First, we focus on property, and ask whether it is possible to say that virtual world users have real world property interests in virtual objects. Adopting economic accounts that demonstrate the real world value of these objects and the exchange mechanisms for trading these objects, we show that, descriptively, these types of objects are indistinguishable from real world property interests. Further, the normative justifications for property interests in the real world apply - sometimes more strongly - in the virtual worlds. Second, we discuss whether avatars have enforceable legal and moral rights. Avatars, the user-controlled entities that interact with virtual worlds, are a persistent extension of their human users, and users identify with them so closely that the human-avatar being can be thought of as a cyborg. We examine the issue of cyborg rights within virtual worlds and whether they may have real world significance. The issues of virtual property and avatar rights constitute legal challenges for our online future. Though virtual worlds may be games now, they are rapidly becoming as significant as real-world places where people interact, shop, sell, and work. As society and law begin to develop within virtual worlds, we need to have a better understanding of the interaction of the laws of the virtual worlds with the law of this world.

Doing it better? Overseas online retailers aisles ahead

All the signs are there that Australian retailers are not investing enough in their online operations.

Artists and their worlds

A catalogue essay written for 'Tall Tales and Other Adventures: a University of Southern Queensland, Dogwood Crossing, Miles and Flying Arts research project.'

Security and Privacy in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks : Survey and the Road Ahead

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) can make roads safer, cleaner, and smarter. It can offer a wide range of services, which can be safety and non-safety related. Many safety-related VANETs applications are real-time and mission critical, which would require strict guarantee of security and reliability. Even non-safety related multimedia applications, which will play an important role in the future, will require security support. Lack of such security and privacy in VANETs is one of the key hindrances to the wide spread implementations of it. An insecure and unreliable VANET can be more dangerous than the system without VANET support. So it is essential to make sure that “life-critical safety” information is secure enough to rely on. Securing the VANETs along with appropriate protection of the privacy drivers or vehicle owners is a very challenging task. In this work we summarize the attacks, corresponding security requirements and challenges in VANETs. We also present the most popular generic security policies which are based on prevention as well detection methods. Many VANETs applications require system-wide security support rather than individual layer from the VANETs’ protocol stack. In this work we will review the existing works in the perspective of holistic approach of security. Finally, we will provide some possible future directions to achieve system-wide security as well as privacy-friendly security in VANETs.

The Marrakesh Treaty could bring the world’s books to the blind

An estimated 285 million people worldwide are visually impaired. Some 90% of those live in developing nations, where less than 1% of the world’s books are available in a form they can read. In developed countries, the situation is only marginally better: only around 7% of the world’s books are accessible to print-disabled people. The right to read is part of our basic human rights. Access to the written word is crucial to allow people to fully participate in society. It’s important for education, political involvement, success in the workplace, scientific progress and, not least, creative play and leisure. Equal access to books and other cultural goods is also required by international law. The technology now exists to deliver books in accessible electronic forms to people much more cheaply than printing and shipping bulky braille copies or books on tape. Electronic books can be read with screen readers and refreshable braille devices, or printed into large print or braille if needed. Now that we have this technology, what’s been referred to as the global “book famine” is a preventable tragedy.

Governing virtual worlds : to what extent is it possible to empower players and preserve their rights in virtual worlds, and what is the best method of doing so?

In this paper the author considers the possibilities for establishing democratic governance in virtual worlds. He looks at the freedoms currently available to players in “Second Life”, contrasting these to those established in Raph Koster’s “A Declaration of the Rights of Avatars”, and assess whether some restrictions are more necessary in game spaces than social spaces. The author looks at the early implementations of self-governance in online spaces, and consider what lessons can be taken from these, investigating what a contemporary democratic space looks like, in the form of “A Tale in the Desert”, and finally considers how else we may think of giving players more rights in these developing social spaces.

Introduction : studying Indonesian media worlds at the intersections of area and cultural studies

When preparing this special issue,1 our discussions with the editorial board of the International Journal of Cultural Studies (IJCS) included a moment of simultaneous surprise and reflection, which we would like to use as a starting point for our introduction to the articles appearing here. This occurred during communications about the number and length of the articles required for a special issue. The board’s representative stipulated that a specific number of articles were to be written by Indonesian scholars. The request surprised us. We had neither discussed nor anticipated ethnic or national quotas for authorial participation. But although the request caught us off guard it also stimulated us to think about the two disciplinary terrains traversed in the articles to follow.

Model as you do : engaging an S-BPM vendor on process modelling in 3D virtual worlds

Accurate process model elicitation continues to be a time consuming task, requiring skill on the part of the interviewer to extract explicit and tacit process information from the interviewee. Many errors occur in this elicitation stage that would be avoided by better activity recall, more consistent specification methods and greater engagement in the elicitation process by interviewees. Metasonic GmbH has developed a process elicitation tool for their process suite. As part of a research engagement with Metasonic, staff from QUT, Australia have developed a 3D virtual world approach to the same problem, viz. eliciting process models from stakeholders in an intuitive manner. This book chapter tells the story of how QUT staff developed a 3D Virtual World tool for process elicitation, took the outcomes of their research project to Metasonic for evaluation, and finally, Metasonic’s response to the initial proof of concept.