- How’s That Three Strikes Thing Working Out? (Paul Brislen) — The rights holders in New Zealand put together an ad campaign based on the destruction of value of New Zealand content, yet it hasn’t defended a single New Zealand artist.
- USTR Telling You Where To Stick Your Data — A number of US companies had expressed concerns that various departments in the Australian Government, namely, the Department of Defence, The National Archives of Australia, the Department of Finance and Deregulation, the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) and the State of Victoria’s Privacy Commissioner had been sending negative messages about cloud providers based outside the country, implying that “hosting data overseas, including in the United States, by definition entails greater risk and unduly exposes consumers to their data being scrutinised by foreign governments”. Negative message, but a true one. (via Slashdot)
- On Flipping the Classroom (Wired) — Moving a lecture online changes where that information is consumed, not necessarily the degree of student engagement or its effectiveness. Curricula provider Mathalicious critiqued Khan Academy as “one of the most dangerous phenomena in education today.” Hear, hear. Praise Khan for the feedback it provides teachers on where their kids are at, but even in Stanford’s trials in schools they find kids use the videos as absolute last resort for learning something.
- What Simon Wardley Is Up To (Google Plus) — I’m researching and writing a tactical playbook for competition in an open world based upon concepts of evolution, value chain and ecosystems using techniques such as choke points, barriers, tower and moat, ILC, inertia, economic phases (build, peace, war), new organisational methods etc etc. WANT. (Apologies, don’t know if O’Reilly is publishing this or not–I’m arm’s length from the publishing side of things)
"copyright" entries
Four short links: 23 April 2012
Three Strikes, Cloud Sovereignty, Flipped Classroom, and Open Tactical Playbook
Four short links: 2 April 2012
Wind Viz, CS For Fun, Software Defined Radio, and Copyright's Collateral Damage
- Wind Map — beautiful visualization of the winds across America.
- Computer Science for Fun — magazine for beginning students of computing.
- Cheap SDR — software defined radio for as little as $11. (via Slashdot)
- The Missing 20th Century (The Atlantic) — check out those graphs for a glaring hole caused by an overdose of copyright.
Creativity isn't one size fits all, so why is copyright?
Google's Bill Patry on market signals and copyright terms.
In this video interview, Bill Patry, senior copyright counsel at Google, addresses the one-size-fits-all concept and says it doesn't make sense for copyright terms. He also talks about piracy and whether or not we should eliminate copyright.
Four short links: 14 March 2012
Data Beats The Flip, Copyright Cretins, Clustering Tool, and iOS UI Gallery
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Lessons Learned from a Blended Learning Pilot — the end-of-pilot report from using Khan Academy for 80-90% of class time. Most interesting is the growing feeling that K.A.’s value comes from analytics on exercises and not the videos: The students greatly preferred working through the problem sets to
watching the videos. Students turned to their peers, the hint, and
the classroom teacher much more often than they did the linked Khan
video. (via Dan Meyer) - Belgian Copyright Society Are Titanic Assholes (BoingBoing) — demanding that public libraries pay royalties when volunteers read to groups of ten or so small children. SABAM is demanding €250 per year from each cash-strapped library. Most authors are great people. Most collecting societies seem to become cultural ass cancer. See also Access Copyright in Canada.
- Bayon (Google Code) — a simple and fast [GPL v2] hard-clustering tool. Bayon supports Repeated Bisection clustering and K-means clustering. (that’s what she said)
- Pttrns — gallery of iOS UI patterns.
Four short links: 8 March 2012
Compete on Convenience, Minimal Viable Operating System, Awesome Font, Collaboration Integration
- Add Torrent Links to IMDB (Userscripts) — a glimpse at what the Internet could look like: from the site you research movies on, with one click you could then launch the download. If only the company that ran the movie research site had rights to the OneClick patent and the ability to offer movies for download. Oh wait, those aren’t the barriers. If only the movie companies would cease being nutjobs insisting on flogging their DRM-hobbled nags when the black market has x264 racehorses for less. They’re not competing on price, they’re not competing on convenience, they’re competing on the expected value of litigation. Now *that’s* a business model!
- JeOS — I hadn’t heard this term before: Just Enough Operating System. Take a standard distro, and strip it down to the bare essentials that you actually need.
- Font Awesome — a font with a zillion pictograms and icons. “An iconic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap”.
- Collabograte — a collection of integration recipes for collaboration tools so you aren’t broken on the “how do I get this thing set up with LDAP auth?” wheel which others have reinvented with their nose to the mixed metaphor grindstone. (via Kartik Subbarao)
Four short links: 5 March 2012
Video Encoding, Content Identification, Mobile Numbers, and Unicode Fun
- Pirates Adopt H.264 — no more XViD encoded avi files, now it’s x264. I’m impressed by the rigid rules and structure of The Scene.
- YouTube’s ContentID Disputes Are Judged By The Accuser (Andy Baio) — the last couple years have seen a dramatic rise in Content ID abuse, using it for purposes that it was never intended. Scammers are using Content ID to steal ad revenue from YouTube video creators en masse, with some companies claiming content they don’t own, deliberately or not. The inability to understand context and parody regularly leads to “fair use” videos getting blocked, muted or monetized.
- The Month of 50% in Mobile (Luke Wroblewski) — 47.6% of mobile Internet users use native mobile apps and 47.5% use the Web browser on their devices. This is the first time (in ComScore data) native apps have had more use than the browser.
- Fake Unicode Consortium — excellent collection of better names for Unicode characters. My favourite: U+0CA0: MONOCLE OF DISAPPROVAL. (via Tom Christiansen)
Four short links: 20 February 2012
Bad Licensing, Learn to Code Again, Facebook Data, and iPad Security
- University Copyright Fail — This week, the University of Western Ontario and the University of Toronto signed a deal with the licensing group Access Copyright that includes: provisions defining e-mailing hyperlinks as equivalent to photocopying a document; a flat fee of $27.50 for each full-time equivalent student; and, surveillance of academic staff email. (via Fabiana Kubke)
- Peanutty — I’m not sure it’s perfect yet, but it does the best job I’ve seen of motivating people by connecting code with curiosity. Most of the other “learn to code” systems are big on bite-sized increments of knowledge but short on motivation unless you, for some reason, want to “learn to code”.
- Why Facebook’s Data Will Change Our World (Pete Warden) — You just can’t resist Facebook data can you? Like a dog returning to its own vomit. Great list of reasons why Facebook’s data is scary interesting.
- Digital Exams on the iPad — how to lock down an iPad for use in an exam. Love the explanation of how the security-paranoid mind works in action: both evil and methodical at the same time.
Four short links: 3 February 2012
Investigating Page Speed, The Web Commons, Community and Popularity, and GPL Enforcement
- Page Speed (Google Code) — an open-source project started at Google to help developers optimize their web pages by applying web performance best practices. Page Speed started as an open-source browser extension, and is now deployed in third-party products such as Webpagetest.org, Show Slow and Google Webmaster Tools.
- What Commons Do We Wish For? (John Battelle) — trying to understand what the Internet would look like if we don’t pay attention to our core shared values. Excellent piece from jbat, who is thinking and writing in preparation for another book.
- The Trouble with Popularity — this blog post on StackOverflow does a great job of explaining why moderators are necessary, and why it’s not in everyone’s interest to give them what they want. Sad to see this come out just as Yahoo! continues to gut and fillet Flickr, which used to be the benchmark for all things community.
- The Ongoing Fight Against GPL Enforcement — interesting! Software Freedom Conservancy, who have pursued several cases against manufacturers who ship GPLed code but do not release their source and modifications to it, have used busybox as a fulcrum for their GPL code release lever. Manufacturers may be attempting to replace busybox with non-GPLed code to take away the fulcrum. In other news, engineering metaphors are like a massless body at light speed before the bigbang: unknowable.
Four short links: 26 January 2012
More iPhones Than Babies, Pirate Bay Book, New Corporation Types, and Big Zynga Data
- Every Day, More iPhones Sold Than Babies Born — Malthusian explosion of iPhones predicted once there’s an iPhone-to-3D-printer dongle. (via Luke Wroblewski)
- No Safe Harbour — a collection of political essays, texts, and discussions that help explain and educate about Pirate Party positions. Available for purchase or free download, natch. (via BoingBoing)
- Patagonia Roadtests New Sustainability Legal Status — California has new corporation types: Flexible Purpose Corporations and Benefit Corporations, which are aimed at permitting directors to consider more than purely “maximizing shareholder value” (e.g., environmental impact, social consequences, etc.).
- Zynga Adds 15Tb/Day of Data (Dell) — Zynga’s goal is to drive player actions that improve financial conversion (i.e. player paying real money for elements of the game) and player retention. To accomplish this Zynga uses the results of continuous data analyses of player actions to test, iterate, and fine tune features in their games. Don’t bother clicking through–the rest of the post is basically PR for Dell’s analytics partnerships. That data point is awe-inspiring, though.
Four short links: 24 January 2012
Facebook Apps, Google+ Remover, Mind Hacks Books, and Pirate Bay Adds Physical Objects
- fbootstrap (GitHub) — HTML, CSS, and JS toolkit for Facebook apps based on Twitter’s popular Bootstrap library.
- Focus on the User — adds a bookmarklet “Don’t Be Evil” which shows your Google search as it would have been before Google+ began artificially inserting itself into Google search results. Written by Facebook engineer and Firefox co-creator Blake Ross, this is a gloriously subtle commentary on the pollution of search results from the privileging of Google+.
- Treasure Hunt for Mysteries of Mind and Brain (Mind Hacks) — one of the coauthors of Mind Hacks, Tom Stafford, has written two small self-published books on the cool things you can do with your brain: exploring your blind spot, and lucid dreaming.
- Pirate Bay Launches Physical Object Category — We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare parts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years. We at O’Reilly believe this too. (via Annalee Newitz)