Abstract
While much information is available on pedagogic uses of virtual worlds, with Second Life being the most common virtual world platform in current educational literature, an organization must consider its presence in this environment as more than the mere sum of individual educational efforts. Resources need to be shared between educational stakeholders, visual navigation needs to make sense, and the sense of being within an actual organization should be conveyed (not just the sense of being within a collection of personal spaces). But there is little information on how a virtual campus for an educational organization should be structured. Virtual campi in Second Life for adult education institutions don't typically reproduce their physical counterparts. While spaces such as lecture halls, amphitheatres, meeting places, and libraries are commonly found, the specific features of the medium imply an organization of spaces and usage that differ from physical campi. For instance, navigational affordances are different (ability to fly and gravity-immune objects, for instance), as are communicational features (specific limits on the reach of voice and text communication), and user involvement (how students and teachers use the spaces). We conducted a survey of several existing Second Life campi of adult education institutions (mostly universities), to establish what spaces are present in each and how they are used and organized. In this paper, we present the overall process, and the structure and instructions for data collection by all people involved. Then we detail the various kinds of spaces (by function, not by aesthetic) found in the campi and their prevalence. We also present data on user-oriented features of the campi, and cross-analyse this with their occurrence per space and campi. This survey was part of the process for specification and development of the virtual Second Life campus for project VITA, a EC-funded project to create and experiment learning actions directed to SME' managers for development of entrepreneurship competences. Thus, we conclude with an example of how the survey results can be used to support the development of campi, by briefly presenting the campus that was developed specifically for this project.

Abstract

Abstract
Hollow-core photonic crystal glass fibers have a high potential for gas sensing applications, since large light-gas interaction lengths can be effectively attained. Nevertheless, in order to enhance effective diffusion of gas into the hollow-core fiber, multi-coupling gaps are often needed, which raise coupling loss issues that must be evaluated prior to the development of practical systems. In this paper, a study on the coupling losses dependence on lateral and axial gap misalignment for single-mode fiber and two different types of hollow-core photonic crystal glass fibers is carried out. In addition, an experimental technique on splicing these glass fibers is also described and some results are presented showing that low splice losses can be obtained with high reproducibility. © (2010) Trans Tech Publications.

Abstract
It is recognized by the Information Retrieval community that context affects the retrieval process. Query formulation and relevance assessment are stages where the user role is central. The first determines what the system will search for and the second is frequently used to evaluate how the system behaved. With a large human involvement, these stages are expected to be largely influenced by user and task characteristics. To analyze the influence of these context features on the specified stages of health information retrieval, we conducted a user study in which we collected user features through two questionnaires. User characteristics include features like age, gender, web search experience, health search experience and familiarity with the medical topic. Task features include the medical specialty, the question type, the task's clarity and the task's easiness. Besides user and task features, the relevance assessment analysis also covered features related to the query and document. We found many variables do indeed affect query formulation and relevance judgment. Some of our results question evaluations using test collections and ask for evaluation models that incorporate other kind of success measures. Copyright 2010 ACM.

Abstract
We have conducted a user study to evaluate several generalist and health-specific search engines on health information retrieval. Users evaluated the relevance of the top 30 documents of 4 search engines in two different health information needs. We introduce the concepts of local and global precision and analyze how they affect the evaluation. Results show that Google surpasses the precision of all other engines, including the health-specific ones, and that precision differs with the type of clinical question and its medical specialty.

Abstract
A CMOS-compatible SiGeC superlattice design is proposed that offers the possibility of generating a range of direct bandgaps smaller than Ge's, down to broken-gap provided that sufficient substitutional carbon content can be incorporated. ©2010 IEEE.