Roo Reynolds - What's Next?

Flying high with IMB, apparently

Posted by Roo - 19/02/07 at 02:02:33 pm

I have traveled quite a lot recently, but must confess to never having opened the British Airways inflight magazine, ‘Business Life’. It was something of a surprise to be informed by Andy that my name gets mentioned in the February edition, and it makes me wish I was a regular reader, and had discovered it for myself.

It’s a six-page article on business in Second Life (which starts on page 26 by the way, in case you happen to be reading this on a domestic or European BA flight) and includes quotes from and mentions of…

• Philip Rosedale aka Philip Linden aka ‘El Presidente’
• Ailin Graef aka Anshe Chung
• Alyssa LaRoche aka Aimee Weber
• Justin Bovington
• Stefano Marzano of Philips Design
• Brian McGuinness of Aloft
• Reuben Steiger of MOU
• Andrew Reynolds, “Metaverse Evangelist at IMB [sic] labs”

I wonder if IBM know about this unexpected job move? :-)

The brief quote about me says that I’m “helping [companies] explore the potential of becoming v-businesses” and mentions that I’m “very busy indeed.”

So they got everything spot on with the very minor exception of the name of the (supposedly rather famous) company I work for then. Superbrand indeed.

Good news for Southampton

Posted by Roo - 10/02/07 at 10:02:25 am

A story in other people’s Flickr photos…

Can you guess what it is yet? Mouseover for clues. You got it.

NMK conference: “My so-called 2nd life”

Posted by Roo - 26/10/06 at 02:10:16 pm

So speaking at the NMK event was fun. I’ve done a longish writeup about it on Eightbar already, which I won’t repeat here.

Who was blogging about it? Well,

• Mike Butcher who chaired the event made some notes.
• Gauti Sigthorsson was speaking, and was wondering in advance about the best way to pronounce MMORPG
• Esther MacCallum-Stewart was speaking, and has put her presentation up (must do this).
• Tom Hume was there, and has writeups for the talks given by Michael Smith, Esther, and myself
• Alan Patrick was there, has a thought-provoking piece on Web 3.D
• Helen Keegan has a comprehensive review of Michael’s presentation.
• Jemima Kiss put up a piece on paidContent.org.

For some reason, this particular post attracts a lot of spam. For my own sanity, I’m turning off comments on this one. Email me (contact details in the sidebar) if you have anything to add. Thanks

Testing

Posted by Roo - 12/07/06 at 09:07:36 pm

Tap tap.. Is this thing on?

Right then. I’ve been writing on Eightbar, and other places, for a while, but I sometimes itch for a personal blog of my own. Darren, Richard and Andy (to name but a few fellow IBMers brave enough to blog in public) make a pretty good job of it. It’s time to finally join the party and try it for myself. Bear with me while I find my feet and get some content flowing.

Important update: I’ve been importing old stuff. Anything on this site older than this post has been imported from an older blog. That is all.

Election night links

Posted by Roo - 05/05/05 at 09:05:05 pm

Below are some tools to help with your election night enjoyment…From the BBC:

• Scorecard – refreshes annoyingly frequently, but keep you up-to-date with results.
• Map – watch your constituency, or the overall picture.
• Blog – BBC blog content has traditionally been excellent
• Seat-by-seat results
• Streaming news player – watch headlines and election news online.
• News Alerts app – get election news flashes on your (Windows) desktop.

Play with Ordnance Survey’s election-maps.co.uk

Nick and I kept some notes until sleep got the better of us.

Seven mice, forced to listen to music by The Prodigy, died

Posted by Roo - 23/08/02 at 01:08:46 am

“Seven mice, forced to listen to music by The Prodigy, died” was the wonderful phrase I heard while listening to BBC Radio 4′s news recently.

Cambridge University has received “formal admonitions” from the British Home Office for an experiment it undertook involving 283 mice, some methamphetamine and some music. It seems the scientists at Cambridge were testing the consequences of music on the chemical effects of the drug methamphetamine (or ‘speed’). To this end, the mice were divided into two groups. Half were injected with a methamphetamine preparation, while the ‘clean’ mice were injected only with saline. The two populations were then exposed to different sounds.

1. Silence (ambient noise of 55 decibels
2. The Prodigy at 95 decibels
3. The allegro movement from Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor at 95 db
4. White noise at 95 db

Apparently, the concerto was chosen because it represented a tune with a similar beat to the Prodigy. They picked four Prodigy tracks, though no one mentions which ones were used.

Results

The paper contains the following results table. It shows what noise the mice were subjcted to, whether they were drug-free (saline) or drugged with methamphetamine, how many died during the 3 hour experiment. It also shows how many died within 1 day of the end of the experiment and how many of the mice exhibited seizure activity during the experiment. (I’ve added percentage figures for the died during and died within 24 hours columns)

  Noise          Drug     Mice   Died (during)  Died (24h)
  ========================================================
  Silence        Saline   30     0              0
  White noise    Saline   29     0              0
  Bach           Saline   20     0              0
  Prodigy        Saline   29     0              0
  Silence        Meth     49     1 (=2.04%)     0
  White noise    Meth     30     0              0
  Bach           Meth     40     4 (=10%)       0
  Prodigy        Meth     40     2 (=5%)        3 (=7.5%)  

The implications are that something about the beat of the music makes Speed more toxic. To mice at least.

Dr Morton, one of the co-authors of the study, was clearly personally convinced. “I might go to raves, but I wouldn’t take methamphetamine”.

Perhaps someone should tell her that she’ll be pretty safe if she doesn’t do both at once.

Won’t somebody please think of the rodents?

Wendy Higgins, speaking for the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV), was appalled at the “absolutely despicable” experiments.

“Just because people choose to take drugs and go to raves doesn’t justify subjecting animals to suffering and death in the laboratory in procedures that will tell us nothing we don’t already know – taking drugs and listening to excessively loud music isn’t good for you.”

Whether she had read the results and the conclusions of the experiment is not clear. After all, the study would appear to suggest that a drug which might otherwise not kill a mouse becomes more deadly when the mouse is listening to rhythmic music. 95 decibels, by the way, is only as ‘excessively loud’ as the average personal stereo. (That’s a human personal stereo of course. Mice might prefer a lower volume.) How many humans are performing the same experiment on themselves every weekend?

Why oh why?

The Home Office, admonishing the University for the experiment, reminded them about the rules for animal studies. The Home Office also publicly confirmed that Cambridge University had been given a licence to experiment on animals for studies into Huntingdon’s disease but that the mouse experiment went beyond the scope of the original project licence.

Cambridge University’s Dr Jenny Morton defended the experiment, is quoted as saying “If you have an environmental stimulus that enhances the toxicity of a drug which is taken recreationally, I think that makes the research justifiable.”

Whatever your thoughts on animal research, it’s hard to disagree that the results are interesting.

“Minor riot” in Paulsgrove

Posted by Roo - 10/08/00 at 10:08:41 am

Yesterday, I discovered I was completely addicted to Gravilux. It is nifty. It runs as an applet, and by changing the size and fiddling with the params, I have been making art for my desktop. Must stop. Must stop.

My project leader is away for two weeks (getting married). This means that I have to manage my own time. Hurrah. I have several things to do, but the biggest of which is still my University project.

In the news, the lynch mob is still running round the Paulsgrove housing estate in Portsmouth (UK). They are demonstrating outside the houses of local residents whom they think are paedophiles. Some of them probably are (or even were), while some of them are not, nor ever have been. This whole thing is the fault of the News of The World, a tabloid paper which started (and then, happily, under pressure from the police, aborted) a policy of naming hundreds of ‘known paedophiles’. This was (IMHO) very very wrong.

• The list contained factual errors. Mistakes in names, addresses etc. As a result, innocent people are being hounded.
• Some people have similar names and/or addresses to people on the list. These people are now being persecuted too.
• OK, so some of the people on the list were paedophiles. They were known to the police, who at least know where offenders and ex-offenders are. By driving people of a community, all you do is displace them to someone elses community, where the will not make themselves known the the relevant authorities. They are driven ‘underground’. This can’t be any better.

Anyway, I used to live near Paulsgrove. I’m glad I don’t now. Apart from the crowds creating noise (and car-fires, and rock-throwing, and the heavy police presence brought in to monitor these demonstrations) I would be embarassed to say I lived in this area, now synonomous with intolerance and hatred.