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It’s about time that faculty woke up and realized their interests aren’t different from those of the librarians.» via University of Pittsburgh Library System director Rush Miller, quoted in the U Pitt University Times on the Elsevier boycott. Right on! (via arlpolicynotes)
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9 February 2012
at 12:13 pm -
Source: utimes.pitt.edu
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via arlpolicynotes
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libraries
scholarly communication
faculty
publishing
librarians
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The first royalty payments from iMatch are in, and they got me excited – the total amount is over $10,000 for the first two months.
This is magic money that Apple made exist out of thin air for copyright holders.
» via tunecore blog
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8 February 2012
at 9:42 pm -
music
royalties
itunes
copyright
business
artists
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The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, testified in a courtroom Tuesday for the first time in his life. The web pioneer flew down from Boston, near where he teaches at MIT, to an eastern Texas federal court to speak to a jury of two men and six women about the early days of the web.
His trip is part of an effort by a group of internet companies and retailers trying to defeat two patents — patents that a patent-licensing company called Eolas and the University of California are saying entitle them to royalty payments from just about anyone running a website with “interactive” features, like rotating pictures or streaming video.
» via Wired
- 8:55 pm
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Google paying users to track 100% of their Web usage via little black box
Google is working to collect information about Internet users that it can’t get from just monitoring its own browser, services, and Android devices. The company has set up a new program called Screenwise, which offers money to users who install a black box on their home network to “measure Internet use.” A smaller amount of money will go to those who install a browser extension on their computers that will do the same thing.
Google quietly started up the Screenwise data collection program Tuesday night, taking the e-mail addresses of people who are interested in “add[ing] a browser extension that will share with Google the sites you visit and how you use them.” For their participation, Google offers the extension users a $5 Amazon gift card for signing up and another $5 gift card for every three months they stay with the program. Less publicly, Google also started looking for people who would install a piece of hardware on their network to do more extensive monitoring.
» via ars technica
- 8:24 pm
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Source: Ars Technica
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google
internet
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privacy
tech
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The hyperbolic mistruths, presented on the home pages of some of the world’s most popular Web sites, amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power. When Wikipedia and Google purport to be neutral sources of information, but then exploit their stature to present information that is not only not neutral but affirmatively incomplete and misleading, they are duping their users into accepting as truth what are merely self-serving political declarations.» via What Wikipedia Won’t Tell You - NYTimes.com
- 4:24 pm
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Source: The New York Times
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29 notes
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Nearly a month after the police department switched to a digitally encrypted radio signal, city leaders still have no plans to allow local media live access to police chatter, officials said.
Pasadena began employing the system on Jan. 7, switching from an analog radio signal to an encrypted signal that prevents journalists and hobbyists from monitoring the police signal.
On Friday, Pasadena police Lt. Phlunte Riddle said the department was unsure whether it could accommodate the media with digital scanners.
Riddle said the greatest concern remains officer safety.
» via Pasadena Star News
- 3:29 pm
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information
access
law enforcement
data
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Proponents of peer-to-peer car sharing say it could easily outstrip traditional car-sharing services like Zipcar over time. Whereas Zipcar either owns or leases the 9,500 vehicles in its fleet, peer-to-peer car-sharing companies like RelayRides, Getaround and newcomer JustShareIt (which launched this January in San Francisco) let people rent out their own autos to others at rates set by the car owners themselves. With more than 250 million vehicles already on the road today, that’s an enormous pool to choose from. A 2010 report from Frost & Sullivan estimated that some 4.4 million people will join car-sharing networks by 2016 in North America.» via Will Car-Sharing Networks Change the Way We Travel? - Entrepreneurial Insights - TIME
- 3:05 pm
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Source: TIME
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p2p
cars
sharing
transportation
future
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Yes, it’s bothersome to rights-holders that they can’t just shut down foreign websites or block them. But think of what they already have: no such website can be created in the United States; U.S.-based users of the website can be sued for huge damages; Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will send Internet users warning letters and potentially cut them offline with no due process or government oversight; owners of infringing foreign websites can’t come to the United States or hold assets here, for risk of seizure or arrest; and as evidenced by what’s just happened to Megaupload, American prosecutors will even extradite people from other countries for copyright offenses.» via Enough, Already: The SOPA Debate Ignores How Much Copyright Protection We Already Have - Margot Kaminski - Technology - The Atlantic
- 2:39 pm
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Source: The Atlantic
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Ancient seagrass: ‘Oldest living thing on earth’ discovered in Mediterranean Sea
Australian scientists sequenced the DNA of samples of the giant seagrass, Posidonia oceanic, from 40 underwater meadows in an area spanning more than 2,000 miles, from Spain to Cyprus.
The analysis, published in the journal PLos ONE, found the seagrass was between 12,000 and 200,000 years old and was most likely to be at least 100,000 years old. This is far older than the current known oldest species, a Tasmanian plant that is believed to be 43,000 years old.
Prof Carlos Duarte, from the University of Western Australia, said the seagrass has been able to reach such old age because it can reproduce asexually and generate clones of itself. Organisms that can only reproduce sexually are inevitably lost at each generation, he added.
» via The Telegraph
- 1:59 pm
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Source: telegraph.co.uk
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Over all, AT&T subscribers in the area used 215 gigabytes of data during the Super Bowl. Customers made about 75,000 calls and sent about 723,000 text messages, he said.» via At Super Bowl Stadium, More Mobile Uploads Than Downloads - NYTimes.com
- 1:11 pm
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Source: The New York Times
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data
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The skies are going to look very different pretty soon, and it’s been a long time coming. Congress finally passed a spending bill for the Federal Aviation Administration, allocating $63.4 billion for modernizing the country’s air traffic control systems and expanding airspace for unmanned planes within three and a half years.
By Sept. 30, 2015, drones will have to have access to U.S. airspace that is currently reserved for piloted aircraft. This applies to military, commercial and privately owned drones — so it could mean a major increase in unmanned aircraft winging through our airspace. That’s airspace to be shared with airliners, cargo planes and small private aircraft.
» via Popular Science
- 3:06 am
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39 notes
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future
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Some claim liberal education should be about what’s required to be a productive citizen. I’ve already said that the case that liberal education makes us more productive is weak. The case that it can contribute to citizenship is stronger. To be a citizen is to be a part of a particular place in the world with its own traditions, customs, understanding of justice, and both privileges and duties. A citizen needs to do a lot of untechnical reading unrelated to most work to experience himself or herself as properly at home. So citizenship really does require “civic literacy,” as long as that phrase is understood broadly enough. That education might be called liberal education insofar as it’s required to be a free man and woman located particular, political place in the world. Still, to be a citizen purely speaking is to be all about service to a country (or “city” in the Greek sense). Each of us knows that he or she is more than a productivity machine and more than a mere citizen. It’s finding out who we are when we’re not working for money or our country (or even our family) that liberal education is all about. In the pure sense, liberal education isn’t about citizenship—although it far from abolishes the duties of citizenship, just as it as far from abolishes the duty to work.» via Liberal Education for the Twenty-First Century | Rightly Understood | Big Think
- 2:20 am
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Source: bigthink.com
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News of raids, arrests, seizures, extraditions and jail time in the file-sharing world hasn’t gone unnoticed by the operators of major BitTorrent sites. Yesterday, the owners of BTjunkie decided to close their site because the stress became too much, and there are others who consider doing the same. While there are still plenty site owners who are determined to continue, doubt and uncertainty are more present than ever before.
» via TorrentFreak
- 1:33 am
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46 notes
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p2p
file sharing
copyright
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future
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A one-of-a-kind website enabling the online sale of pre-owned digital-music files got a legal boost late Monday when a federal judge refused to shutter it at the request of Capitol Records.
It could be short-lived boost, however.
» via Wired
- 12:47 am
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9 notes
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music
law
tech
mp3
resale
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Online dating has only become more ubiquitous and socially acceptable since the first sites launched in the mid-’90s: in a 2007-2009 study, 22 percent of couples surveyed formed as a result of dating websites, and it’s now the second-most common way for people to meet. But a meta-analysis of online dating and psychological studies shows that while some people are successful using those services, the sites themselves oversell their benefit. There are also a number of downsides, from wrong impressions gotten from too much Internet interaction to unnecessary pickiness from an abundance of potential dates to choose from.
» via ars technica
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7 February 2012
at 11:14 pm -
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tech
internet
dating
relationships
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