Archives for 2008

More musician jokes

ow do you get two piccolo players to play in perfect unison?
Shoot one.

What’s the difference between a fiddle and a violin ?
Who cares – neither one’s a guitar

How do you know when the stage is level ?
The drummer is drooling out of both sides of his mouth ..

Did you hear about the guitarist who was in tune ?
Neither did I

Why are so many guitarists jokes one liners ?
So the rest of the band can understand them

What do you call a guitarist who breaks up with his girlfriend ?
Homeless ..

What’s the definition of a minor second?
Two oboists playing in perfect unison.

How do you get a guitar player off of your front porch ?
Pay for the pizza.

How many guitar players does it take to cover a Stevie Ray Vaughn tune ?
Evidently all of them.

What do you do if your bassist is drowning?
Throw him his amp.

Australians in Second Life Update – small gains locally, declines overall

The Linden Lab metrics up until end of November 2008 have been released, showing a jump in total number of Australian user hours to 747,158.40 (2.04% of total), up from 686,872.48 in September although a small drop to 2.04% of worldwide user hours. Not that number of hours means a whole lot without knowing the number of users creating those hours.

Tateru Nino as always summarises the stats nicely, and the news is far from good. The Second Life economy isn’t declining anywhere near as much as the real-world ones are, but it’s declining all the same.

Twinity: 100K users and Mac version on the horizon

Twinity has just in the past hour passed one hundred thousand registrations. That was the reason I headed to Twinity’s website. What caught my attention were four new words:

twinitymac

It’s obviously unclear on how progressed Twinity are with Mac development (something we’ve now sought clarification on), but if things are progressing in that regard, kudos to Metaversum. That, and the regular growth in registrations bodes well for Twinity at this stage.

Update: I’ve misinterpreted the message on 100K – the actual number is 95K and “approaching 100K” – apologies.

Strip Club

Bob is a hard working guy who works long hours and splits his free time between his bowling league and his wife. On his 50th birthday his wife decides she’s going to do something extra special for him and take him to the strip club. So on his birthday she tells him “come on Bob, I’m taking you somewhere very special tonight” and they get in the car and go to the strip bar. When they get there the wife says “here we are…the strip bar!” and Bob goes “uh..umm..oh. Thats great honey, thanks…”

They walk up to the door and the bouncer goes “hey bob, how’s it going tonight?”
The wife gives Bob a ‘look’ and says “Bob have you been here before??!!!!” Bob says “no honey, this is Jim he’s on my bowling team.” So his wife says ok and they go inside.

The waitress comes over and says “the usual bud light bob?” Now his wife starts flipping out a little “I thought you said you’ve never been here!!! Are you LYING TO ME????” and Bob says nononono baby, this is Sandy, she also waits tables at the bowling alley. The wife says “oh…ok.”

Stripper comes over and says “Another lap dance tonight Bob?” The wife flips her lid, starts screaming and runs out of the bar. Bob chases her out and comes out the door just to see her jump into a cab and he jumps in after her. They’re sitting in the back of the cab and the wife is throwing every four letter word at him when the cab driver turns around and goes “jeez Bob, you picked up a real bitch this time!”

Sex in Sony’s Home?

The YouTube video below has been doing the rounds of the social media sites. If very close dancing and the odd suggestive comment equals sex, then indeed Sony’s new virtual world for the PlayStation 3 is a hotbed of fornication:

Thanks to numerous sources for the link, including Dizzy Banjo and Pavig Lok.

Weekend Whimsy

1. Second Life: Porcelain and Pink

2. Pipedream @ Hambone Flux

3. Anthrocon 2008 Masquerade – Furs on Second Life

Feeling festive yet?

A Christmas Story for people having a bad day ……………

When four of Santa’s elves got sick, the trainee elves did not produce toys as fast as the regular ones, and Santa began to feel the Pre-Christmas pressure.

Then Mrs Claus told Santa her Mother was coming to visit, which stressed Santa even more.

When he went to harness the reindeer, he found that three of them were about to give birth and two others had jumped the fence and were out, Heaven knows where.

Then when he began to load the sleigh, one of the floorboards cracked, the toy bag fell to the ground and all the toys were scattered.

Frustrated, Santa went in the house for a cup of apple cider and a shot of rum. When he went to the cupboard, he discovered the elves had drank all the cider and hidden the rum. In his frustration, he accidentally dropped the cider jug, and it broke into hundreds of little glass pieces all over the kitchen floor. He went to get the broom and found the mice had eaten all the straw off the end of the broom.

Just then the doorbell rang, and irritated Santa marched to the door, yanked it open, and there stood a little angel with a great big Christmas tree. The angel said very cheerfully, ‘Merry Christmas, Santa. Isn’t this a lovely day? I have a beautiful tree for you. Where would you like me to stick it?’

And so began the tradition of the little angel on top of the Christmas tree

A better system? Teaching healthcare virtually

A story from our sister site, Metaverse Health.

MyCaseSpace data image

Rather than assessing their students through a paper-based examination, or even by having real, live people come in to pretend to be patients, it is starting to become more common to hear of healthcare educators asking their students instead to use computer applications and tools featuring digitally-created patients.

There are a myriad decisions that need to be made surrounding patient care. Students need to be able to wield a large amount of technical data, be able to think well on the fly, and be able to make quick yet considered decisions as healthcare professionals. These digitally-created, or virtual, patients can assist in building these skills.

Though virtual patients look just like the avatars that represent actual people in virtual worlds, the virtual patients usually have either an artificial intelligence (AI) or a scripted backend behind them. As opposed to an AI, the scripted backend cannot make decisions itself – instead , it follows a decision tree that has already been set before the student engages with it.

Medicine

Source 1, Source 2

MyCaseSpace is a Web-based application which presents virtual patients to students at irregular intervals throughout the span of their course. Virtual patients may contact the student at any time of the day or night, through their computer, and request a clinical consult. The virtual patients use avatars to communicate visually with students; the speech of the virtual patients can be accessed in 13 different languages. These patients use a scripted backend for their interactions, the design of which was based on video-game decision trees.

The application can easily be updated and altered to include virtual family members of the virtual patient to make demands upon the students.

Critical thinking skills used to be tested by setting examination papers; some people believe that the current set of students, being more digitally aware, will respond better to a digital presentation. Others are of the opinion that modern students have an expectation that they will continue to receive paper exams, and may have trouble with digital resources.

Though it has not been proven that this method of assessment results in either better or poorer results for the students, the professors and tutors find the system to be most beneficial for them. The application collects, stores, and processes data generated by the students’ assessments, cutting down on time and tedium, and increasing accuracy, for the marking individual.

Nurses

Source

“Nurse Island” has been set up inside Second Life by the Glasgow Caledonian University. Apart from the virtual representation of the university, built so that prospective students can learn to find their way around campus, the Nursing Skills Laboratory has been recreated and populated with virtual patients. These patients can be controlled either by an AI or by a tutor, and use text to speech synthesis rather than recorded voices.

The conversations held between patients and students are recorded, so that students can be debriefed later by a tutor. This facility will open early next year.

Paramedics

Source 1, Source 2

This Second Life project represents a partnership between St George’s, University of London and Kingston University.

Paramedic students will work in teams of three or four, and will encounter emergency scenarios in Second Life in which they will need to treat a virtual patients or patients. They will need to perform such tasks as checking the patient’s pulse, dressing wounds and administering drugs. They may also need to be able to use equipment that would typically be found in an ambulance, such as oxygen masks and electrocardiograms (ECG). After assessing and treating the patient, they must load the patient into the ambulance and set a GPS device to take them to the hospital.

On reaching the hospital, students then handover a set of patient notes to their tutor via email.

Emily Conradi, e-Projects Manager, says: “Paramedic students spend a lot of time in work placements, which can be based anywhere in the country, so it can be hard for the students to meet face-to-face with each other and with their tutors.”

CPR and emergency first aid

Source

The Italian Resuscitation Council (IRC) headquarters in Second Life (to teleport there, click here) has been set up as a place that people can be trained and re-trained, whether they be instructors, medical professionals or laypeople.

The IRC training simulations for instructors and medical people would include simulations to improve and test teamwork, leadership and technical skills. The simulations would also impart knowledge concerning CPR and other emergency training procedures.

Some of the information directed at laypeople includes cardiac arrest prevention knowledge and basic life support information.

In conclusion

Effectiveness of learning is not the only reason to use a virtual world or virtual patients. If learning is not less effective than by using other methods, and there are other benefits to the virtual alternatives, they may still be well worthwhile.

Merry Xmas

Dear  Colleagues and  Friends

Just before the end of the year, I wanted to thank you for the e-mails you have forwarded to me over the year.

I must send a big thank you to whoever sent me the one about rat shit in the glue on envelopes, because I now have to use a wet sponge with every envelope that needs sealing.   I now also wipe the top of every can I open for the same reason.  
 
I no longer have any savings because I gave it all to a sick girl (Penny Brown) who is about to die in the hospital for the 1,387,258th time. But that will change once I receive the $15,000 that Bill Gates/Microsoft are sending me for participating in their special email programs.  I can also sell the free laptop I am about to receive for forwarding my details to forty friends and HP. Not forgetting the senior bank clerk in Nigeria who wants to split seven million dollars with me for pretending to be a long lost relative of a customer who died intestate.

I no longer worry about my soul because I have 363,214 angels looking out for me.

I have learned that my prayers only get answered if I forward emails to seven friends and make a wish within five minutes.

I no longer drink Coca-Cola because it can remove toilet stains.

I no longer can buy petrol without taking a friend along to watch the car so a serial killer won’t crawl in my back seat when I’m filling up.

I no longer go to shopping centres because someone will drug me with a perfume sample and rob me.

I no longer answer the phone because someone will ask me to dial a number and then I’ll get a phone bill with calls to Jamaica , Uganda , Singapore and Uzbekistan .

I can’t use anyone’s toilet but mine because a big brown African spider is lurking under the seat to cause me instant death when it bites my bum.

I can’t even pick up the $5.00 I found dropped in the car park because it probably was placed there by a sex molester waiting underneath my car to grab my leg.

If you don’t send this email to at least 144,000 people in the next 70 minutes, a large dove with diarrhoea will sit on your head at 5:00pm this afternoon and fleas from the crotch of 12 camels will infest your back, causing you to grow a hairy hump.

I know this because it actually happened to a friend of my next door neighbour’s ex-mother-in-law’s second husband’s cousin’s beautician.

By the way….a South American scientist after a lengthy study has discovered that people with low IQ who don’t have enough sex, always read their emails while holding the mouse.

Don’t bother taking it off now, it’s too late.

Your online dating application

We regret that your application to join our online dating agency has been rejected.

One of the questions was:’What do you like most in a woman?’

‘My Dick’ is not considered an appropriate answer

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