Rotating Brains / Beating Heart:International collaborative performance with Stelarc, the virtual reality ensemble Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, Pauline Oliveros, Martin Parker and saxophonist Franziska Schroeder.

The work ROTATING BRAINS / BEATING HEART was specifically developed for the opening performance of the 2010 DRHA conference. The conference’s theme ‘Sensual Technologies: Collaborative Practices of Interdisciplinarity explored collaborative relationships between the body and sensual/sensing technologies across various disciplines, looking to new approaches offered by various emerging fields and practices that incorporate new and existing technologies. The conference had a specific focus on SecondLife with roundtable events and discussions, led by performance artist Stelarc, as well as international participation via SecondLife.
The collaboration between Stelarc, the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse (AOM) and myself as the DRHA2010 conference program chair was a unique occurrence for this conference.

Internet banking and Irish credit unions

The purpose of this paper is to examine IT adoption by Irish credit unions. Using probabilistic models, we explore one aspect of IT, that of internet banking technology, and assess the degree to which characteristics specific to the credit union and to its potential membership base influence adoption. Our
analysis suggests that asset size, organisational structure being a member of the Irish League of Credit Unions and the loan to asset ratio are all important credit union specific drivers of internet banking adoption. We also find that characteristics of the area from where the credit union captures its members are important. Factors such as the percentage of the population that is employed, the proportion of the population in the age bracket 35 to 44, the proportion of the population that have access to broadband and the level of familiarity with a local ATM facility are all identified as influencing the probability of adopting internet banking.