Acoustic, electric and virtual noise : the cultural identity of the guitar

Guitar technology underwent significant changes in the 20th century in the move from acoustic to electric instruments. In the first part of the 21st century, the guitar continues to develop through its interaction with digital technologies. Such changes in guitar technology are usually grounded in what we might call the "cultural identity" of the instrument: that is, the various ways that the guitar is used to enact, influence and challenge sociocultural and musical discourses. Often, these different uses of the guitar can be seen to reflect a conflict between the changing concepts of "noise" and "musical sound."

Adopting virtual production for animated filmaking

Virtual Production is a rapidly growing approach to filmmaking that utilises 3D software, virtual camera systems and motion capture technology to visually interact with a real-time virtual environment. The use of these technologies has continued to increase, however, little has been done to document the various approaches for incorporating this new film making technique into a production. This practice-led research project outlines the development of virtual production in the entertainment industry and explores possible strategies for adopting aspects of this new film making technique into the production of short animated films. The outcome is an improved understanding of possible strategies that could be utilised to assist producers and directors with the transition into this new film making technique. - See more at: http://dl4.globalstf.org/?wpsc-product=adopting-virtual-production-for-animated-filmaking#sthash.DLzRph4Z.dpuf

A Cyber-Physical System Simulator for risk-free transport studies

The article introduces a novel platform for conducting controlled and risk-free driving and traveling behavior studies, called Cyber-Physical System Simulator (CPSS). The key features of CPSS are: (1) simulation of multiuser immersive driving in a threedimensional (3D) virtual environment; (2) integration of traffic and communication simulators with human driving based on dedicated middleware; and (3) accessibility of multiuser driving simulator on popular software and hardware platforms. This combination of features allows us to easily collect large-scale data on interesting phenomena regarding the interaction between multiple user drivers, which is not possible with current single-user driving simulators. The core original contribution of this article is threefold: (1) we introduce a multiuser driving simulator based on DiVE, our original massively multiuser networked 3D virtual environment; (2) we introduce OpenV2X, a middleware for simulating vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure communication; and (3) we present two experiments based on our CPSS platform. The first experiment investigates the “rubbernecking” phenomenon, where a platoon of four user drivers experiences an accident in the oncoming direction of traffic. Second, we report on a pilot study about the effectiveness of a Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems advisory system.

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.

Mothers influencing mothers : the use of virtual discussion boards and their influence on consumption

Mothers represent a large segment of marketing dollars and traditionally, word of mouth was spread from mother to mother in a face-to-face environment, such as the school car park or mother’s groups. As families have evolved, so too has the traditional mother’s group. Limited academic studies have explored online mothers’ groups and how they impact on consumption. In order to explore the nature of this online influence and how mothers are influenced by other mothers online, a study was conducted through the use of observation and qualitative questioning. The data suggests that trust between mothers is generally high and mothers tend to trust the opinions of other mothers when they recommend a product. This is similar in other reference group contexts, however, mothers are communicating about brands frequently and influencing behaviour. This leads to a number of managerial and theoretical implications discussed in the paper.

Australian Aboriginal virtual heritage

The thesis uses creative practice and Indigenous knowledge frameworks with design methods to explore the ways in which virtual technology can represent Indigenous history and culture.

International virtual networking capabilities and firm performance: A study of international entrepreneurial Australian SMEs

The Internet is a critical resource for a new generation of small and medium sized enterprise. Specifically, the Internet is important for small entrepreneurial firms in pursuing international opportunities through increased digital integration. As such, the Internet has been identified as a key enabler of international entrepreneurship (Reuber & Fischer, 2011). By facilitating international business for many entrepreneurial SMEs, the Internet has the ability to increase the quality and speed of communications, lower transaction costs, and facilitate the development of international networks. Although the Internet has been found to play a pivotal role in the creation of international relationships and is a mechanism for the creation of international growth opportunities in SMEs (Mathews & Healy, 2008), the role of the international entrepreneurial decision-maker in the development of international virtual networks for leveraging opportunities in internationalisation remains unclear. The findings of this research indicate that developing an ‘international virtual network capability’ forms an important part of the firm’s resource and more specifically dynamic capability base, which is just one component of a firm’s resource bundle that builds towards successful internationalisation via an Internet platform.

Virtual resistance based active damping solution for constant power instability in AC microgrids

With ever-increasing share of power electronic loads constant power instability is becoming a significant issue in microgrids, especially when they operate in the islanding mode. Transient conditions like resistive load-shedding or sudden increase of constant power loads (CPL) might destabilize the whole system. Modeling and stability analysis of AC microgrids with CPLs have already been discussed in literature. However, no effective solutions are provided to stabilize this kind of system. Therefore, this paper proposes a virtual resistance based active damping method to eliminate constant power instability in AC microgrids. Advantages and limitations of the proposed method are also discussed in detail. Simulation results are presented to validate the proposed active damping solution.

Augmenting and assisting model elicitation tasks with 3D virtual world context metadata

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. Theories of situated cognition indicate that interactive 3D representations of real work environments engage and prime the cognitive state of the viewer. In this paper, our major contribution is to augment a previous process elicitation methodology with virtual world context metadata, drawn from a 3D simulation of the workplace. We present a conceptual and formal approach for representing this contextual metadata, integrated into a process similarity measure that provides hints for the business analyst to use in later modelling steps. Finally, we conclude with examples from two use cases to illustrate the potential abilities of this approach.

Facebook Versus Ghaddafi : social networking as a tool for democratic change in Libya

The emergence of the Internet is one of the most significant leaps in the history of humanity. Information, knowledge and culture are exchanged among masses of people through interconnected information platforms. These platforms enable our culture to be analysed and rewritten, and fundamentally opens our perceptions to a wide variety of concepts and beliefs. The connected networks of the Internet have shaped a virtual — but communicative — space where people can cross borders freely within a realm characterised by the ability to go anywhere, see anything, learn, compare and understand. This chapter focuses on the Libyan experience with social networking platforms in actualising democratic change in the uprising of 17 February 2011. After briefly outlining the political and economic situation under the regime of Colonel Mummar Ghaddafi, the chapter discusses the role that social networking platforms played during the struggle of the Libyan people for democratic change. Finally, it points out the positive changes that resulted from the uprising and the potential role that social media might play in the ongoing democratization and development of Libyan society.

A random key genetic algorithm for live migration of multiple virtual machines in data centers

Live migration of multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) has become an integral management activity in data centers for power saving, load balancing and system maintenance. While state-of-the-art live migration techniques focus on the improvement of migration performance of an independent single VM, only a little has been investigated to the case of live migration of multiple interacting VMs. Live migration is mostly influenced by the network bandwidth and arbitrarily migrating a VM which has data inter-dependencies with other VMs may increase the bandwidth consumption and adversely affect the performances of subsequent migrations. In this paper, we propose a Random Key Genetic Algorithm (RKGA) that efficiently schedules the migration of a given set of VMs accounting both inter-VM dependency and data center communication network. The experimental results show that the RKGA can schedule the migration of multiple VMs with significantly shorter total migration time and total downtime compared to a heuristic algorithm.