VRprofessor

Freya Mokusei wrote: Malanya wrote: I would AR someone that "claimed" to be abble to cousel or offer guidance to anyone here in sl. This isn't an ARable offence, LL wouldn't action it. It might be, if the suspected fraudster was taking advantage of the charity/edu discount for sim tier by using fake documentation. Otherwise you're SOL. I don't think even regulatory bodies in the RL region of the potential fraudster would investigate. You can't realistically protect gullible idiots from themselves in SL or anywhere else online. Extending Freya's point a bit---in many (most?) states in the U.S. you don't need any credentials to provide counseling services. Certain terms, such as "Psychologist" are legally protected, but most are not. A storefront and a sign are all that is required.

I have landmarks in world and will send you a few next time I am in world if you like. Otherwise you can simply use the search function and look for "male avatar" and/or "male skin" to get a start. You can also do the same on the marketplace. Since everyone's tastes are a bit different I would suggest picking up a bunch of demo skins and shapes from various vendors and trying them on in various combinations to see what appeals to you. Often a skin will look great on one shape and less than good on another shape so if you have not decided on a shape you like, select a skin that looks good on multiple shapes. FWIW I started with a $L300 starter avatar (skin & shape) off the marketplace that was pretty good. Over time I modified the shape and then started looking at skins again.

I agree with what you have been told so far. For a single monitor system my GTX 550ti is a pretty solid video card. I have a dual monitor system that runs well with a GTX 660ti card. The one thing I didn't notice mentioned was your power supply. The GT 630 maybe GT 640 is the best you can hope for if you have a standard factory installed power supply.

Adding to the previous answer: A GT 630 card will run in most computers with a standard factory power supply (300 w) A GT 640 recommends a power supply of at least 350w, occasionally you find power supplies this large in factory standard computers. GTX 650 and up will require larger power supplies--say 500w or above. A GT630 should run SL well enough at low, possibly medium settings. If you can afford more my GTX660ti keeps me happy, but I don't do machinima or similar.

The Nvidia gt630 should be the newest, best card you can get without upgrading your power supply. (Between $60 and $80 online.) If you are fortunate enough to have a 350w (or larger) power supply, you could get a gt640 card. ($80 - $100 online). Beyond that you are likely to need a new power supply and that sounds like it is beyond your budget right now. I currently use multiple computers with different graphics cards. One has the gt520 card in it and it works well enough if the sim isn't overly busy. One generation newer and a step higher the gt630 should be better.

Hi Jane, It would help a bit if I knew what your research goal(s) is(are). Why does it matter if a sim is "too girly?" The two specific questions you ask suggest you are planning to have subjects spend some time setting up an account and doing something in SL--is that correct? If so I have some thoughts. Finally, do you have a faculty supervisor for your research?

I am going to second the suggestion of getting an avatar bundle with modify/copy permissions. You can either pick your favorite off of the marketplace (quick, easy, relatively cheap) or purchase (for free) several demos at in-world stores to try on until you find something you like and purchase a regular copy (time consuming, possibly entertaining, may or may not be cheap depending on where you shop). I am very poorly skilled at shape design/modification, but I found that with a pleasing (to me) shape/skin combination I am able to tweak the shape a little here-and-there. I never do much at any one time, just slight adjustments every couple of months. I

Czari Zenovka wrote: VRprofessor wrote: Just wanted to add my sympathies to the list. I have certainly had my share of issues in recent months. I had DVI ports on both card and monitors, but I had the wrong DVI cable--so I had to order new. I had a power supply upgrade partially installed to support installation of a better graphics card before I noticed that the computer in question was using obsolete power connections. I couldn't even find an adapter. Sigh. The joys of upgrading never end. Thank you, Professor. How did you resolve your issue with the better graphics card for the PC without the proper connectors? I'm feeling your pain too. :smileysad: Since I already had the power supply and graphics card as well as some RAM and an old hard drive I did the only sensible <cough, cough> thing--I bought the rest of the things I needed and built another box. (of course the old hard drive had been designated "old" for a reason--it crapped out a few months later, so now I have a new HD in that box.)

Just wanted to add my sympathies to the list. I have certainly had my share of issues in recent months. I had DVI ports on both card and monitors, but I had the wrong DVI cable--so I had to order new. I had a power supply upgrade partially installed to support installation of a better graphics card before I noticed that the computer in question was using obsolete power connections. I couldn't even find an adapter. Sigh. The joys of upgrading never end.

My computer science degree is really, really old. But I do operate SL on two different desktops and a laptop depending on where I am so I have a lot of first hand experience with SL on different computers. My laptop is an Asus N53S with an i7 processor and an NVidia GT 550M graphics processor. Using it I can run SL on high settings, but I use medium settings to reduce the load on the processor and the heat in my system. I also leave it plugged in when running SL. If your video processing software is capable of making use of multiple cores, make sure you get a quad-core processor. If not, an i5 dual core is probably good enough. When running on my home wifi I don't actually notice any network related issues. When I run on my University's wifi system I want to scream and break things because SL runs so poorly. I have a cable port on my laptop, but after discovering wifi the Uni stopped installing wired ports in classrooms. The chatter about the newest intel chips is interesting but I don't know how well they handle graphics--it will be interesting to find out how good they really are. I did once check a benchmarking website and found the intel HD 3000 benchmarked similarly to the NVidia GT 520. I have a GT 520 in one of the computers I use--it works, but only on low settings, and somewhat slowly. If you get a GT 550m (or larger number) you should get acceptable performance at medium settings in SL as well as reasonable performance with your other graphics needs. Laptops are expensive and with an x5x coprocessor even more expensive. If you have time to shop, shop a lot. It took me three - four months to find the laptop I purchased on sale at a pretty good price at a big box retailer. Given the number of graphics/video files you report dealing with you MUST have some sort of external storage. Cloud storage or an external hard drive. That not only provides you with a back up, it also allows you to get by with a smaller internal hard drive since seldom used files can be stored externally. Some folks I know use an external hard drive for their music files.

I have noticed more problems teleporting over the last 4-6 weeks than I have ever seen before. I have no idea why this might be or if it is widespread, but you aren't the only one.

Madelaine McMasters wrote: I vote for not. An elderly RL professor (your profile says 25 years in academia, you fossil! ;-) ... Hey! I resemble that remark! Although I do have a couple of years before full fossilization sets in ;-) Madelaine McMasters wrote: ...who becomes an SL regular can't be all bad! Oh, it is even worse than that---I was requiring students to get SL accounts as part of a class project. I even make them try a bit of gender swapping along the way. (I suppose that I should mention that my students "made me" take them into SL.) I've been told the students found the half-semester unit a bit on the short side so I have been strongly encouraged to develop something appropriate for a full semester! The proposal is due sometime this coming fall--if approved I'll have student in world again fall of 2014.

Zenephobe wrote: If a person called VRProfessor responds, please ignore him, he is a hack. Maybe I am, maybe I am not. But the information I provide is correct. OP: Many students show up having tossed together a quick survey for a class paper or such. Most are unaware that in the US, and much of the rest of the world, researchers are expected to follow some fairly basic ethical principles--such as obtaining informed consent. I routinely suggest that those folks contact their institutional review board, or its equivalent, for proper procedure. The nature of your posts so far suggest that you are likely aware of the ethical requirements in your country and at your university so I have said nothing. Good luck on your project.

The upgradability option is nice, but unless you are already someone who routinely upgrades computers you are unlikely to become one. For me a 17" display is more desirable than a 14"--but that's me. Either should do a reasonable job of running SL unless you have other heavy duty software running. The PC gamers I am familiar with argue that the power of the i7 relative to i5 is generally wasted unless you have some fairly computational intensive software running--video processing, "big data" data modeling, that sort of thing. For most mere mortals the i5 series is plenty.

My first online PC purchase was a x286 machine in either 1986 or 1987. I occasionally purchase a PC in a store--closeout or refurbished, but most of my pc purchases I make online. Part of my purchasing decisions are based on the fact that I live in a small community so running a PC back to the store (distance ~50 miles) is a greater hassle than packing and sending the machine back to where ever it needs to go should it fail (only one return that I remember). Except for the refurbished machines--we have a nice store right in town that deals in refurbs and has a repair shop in the store. If I need something for general surfing and word processing I feel comfortable purchasing from them.

There are some privately funded newbie spots where people who enjoy helping the relatively helpless hang out. I'll leave it to others to recommend their favorite, but all hold classes on a variety of topics to get you started and usually there is someone around who will help complete newbs with "silly" questions.

I don't have a good answer for you, but since no one more qualified has come by yet I'll take a shot. My guess is that a new card with more memory won't help all that much. In order I'd try 1) Set SL to low/medium settings 2) Reinstall the GPU drivers 3) Bump RAM to 8GB

Some folks have "social" alts so that they can enjoy SL when they are not working in SL. I've heard rumors of a professor that actually assigned his students to undergo a temporary gender change. I heard that he created a female alt to try it out himself before making the assignment.

Echoing others: The small power supply will prevent you from upgrading your graphics card (or much of anything else) in the future. Different: The GT640 is not a great card, but at low settings it should be okay. It will probably handle medium settings on low traffic sims especially if you limit the draw distance. If you really want all the graphics SL has to offer you'll want to upgrade your card eventually. The i7 is a fine chip, but is more than you need. If you can find an i5 based machine with a larger power supply you should be able to save a few dollars now as well as giving yourself the option of upgrading later. (I started with a 750w power supply and a GT 550 graphics card. Several months later I was able to upgrade to a GTX 660ti. If you have a geek friend, and some tolerance for uncertainty, think about building from parts.

Zenephobe wrote: VRprofessor wrote: The LL terms of service are not the same as federal requirements for the protection of human subjects. Common sense says that you should follow federal requirements for the conduct of research. The only issue I raise with student research is the failure to meet those basic requirements. I say nothing about the research posted that appears to be following those requirements. All of us have some responsibility to assure that students make the most of their education. We do? Since when? What do you propose that we do, alert the Federal Government that a person is asking questions on a video game forum? I propose that we tell students they are not following procedure and suggest (strongly if necessary) that they take corrective actions ASAP. As I said in an earlier post I am not interested in getting these students in serious trouble, but they do need to learn to follow procedures.

Madelaine McMasters wrote: Over the twenty years or so that I've been loosely connected to IRB research, I'd say that efficacy has been a greater problem than ethics. It's been frustrating to see the IRB crawl all over privacy/safety issues for research that crashes to the ground on peer review. I'm surprised by the pervasiveness of innumeracy in academia. But why should academia be different? It's full of people! ;-) Many folks fail to understand the proper place of a survey. They also fail to understand how much work a good survey takes. Graduate programs often spend a good deal of time on experiments, but little or no time on surveys. Surveys are somehow assumed to be trivially easy to conduct and hard to screw up. If we spent more time training folks on the when and how of survey research perhaps we'd see fewer problems with failed efficacy.

Madelaine McMasters wrote: The point I'm flailing to make is that critical thinking continues to be important. I don't know if it's more important than ever before, but it's certainly no less important.. Searching for information on the internet is one example of where critical thinking is more important today than it was in the past. Instead of having a handful of teacher approved sources available, you have the entire world of information and misinformation available at your finger tips. I vote for more important.

Madelaine McMasters wrote: Perrie Juran wrote: Personally speaking I prefer Wikipedia as a launching point when I want to look at a subject in more detail because Wikipedia requires citation and it is those citations that I want to look at. So it becomes my 'card catalogue' on a topic. But even then I do not consider it an 'end all.' Given the increasing use the potentially unverified Internet by everybody, I'm not sure there is an "end all". That's okay though... there never was. <snip> ETA: Your observation about Google's tailored search results is important. Google is turning search into a "yes man". Those fellas are seductive... and dangerous. Am I allowed to agree with people? Hope so. You gotta start somewhere and more often than not Wiki is a reasonable starting point.

Madelaine McMasters wrote: I've no problem with exposing students to the IRB process, but I suppose I'm worried about universities expending IRB resources on research that apparently hasn't been reviewed for efficacy. Is wasting resources to insure ethics... ethical? An interesting question. Some argue that the IRB should evaluate both the ethics and potential efficacy of research. I prefer closer faculty supervision for the efficacy side of the question, but situations like you describe strength the argument for those who want to broaden the IRB's responsibilities. FWIW--the typical student survey would be "exempt" from full review. A single staff member would look it over, decide there was nothing particularly threatening, and approve the study to go forward. Pretty minimal use of IRB resources.

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: I want to know how it is that all of these "students" have been assigned a thesis paper on SL. I highly doubt there are all that many Professors that study Sl or even know what it is. Why aren't there hundreds of "surveys" on the WoW forums pages? Why is it only SL that gets the students? Shouldn't WoW get even more, seeing as they have more players online at any given moment? I have a couple of reasons for all of these surveys: 1) In recent years there has been a push to involve more students in research. A noble goal, but a goal that is an "unfunded mandate" at its core. As long as the student is interested in the research project the faculty member is motivated to allow it without much thought, especially when they have 10 or 15 or more students all needing to conduct research. 2) a failure on the part of lots of people resulting in students who don't know how to use a library. Students are used to just asking their questions on message boards or searching Google. 3) lack of planning. These are most common at the end of the semester because students have failed to plan ahead and are desperate to get a paper in by some deadline in the very near future. They slap together a survey, hope to get 50 or 60 respondents, and impress their professor with their last ditch effort. Sadly this works often enough that students are reinforced for it. These are certainly not the only reasons, but they are some. And I should mention that there are examples of people doing good research on/about/in SL. Not all research efforts are a waste of time and bandwidth. But rarely (never?) are these projects the result of a quick survey. The ones that I am aware of take several months, at a minimum, for data collection.