Tarantino is back, and he brought Rodriguez with him.
Oh hell yeah.
Tom Savini and Zombies? Machete? Rose McGowen as a grindhouse dame? I’m so very, very there.
Categories
Categories
Objects in Space
I am absolutely enamored with physical representations of virtual objects. We’ve skipped over the marvel that a digital photograph can become a physical print (mainly because the digital photo is a mimic of the physical, down to thinking of photos as single objects and talking about something as nonsensical as “digital filmmaking“), but I love the idea of Fabjectory:
Bring your avatar out of the virtual world and into the real world with Fabjectory’s avatar creation services. We’ll fab a miniature statuette of your avatar that you can take with you anywhere.
Create a digital you, and then have your own action figure statuette made, complete with tattoos and pithy t-shirts. I know a lot of WoW players who would jump on this.
According to their blog, they’ll also let you create a customized USB key case in-game (graphics, logos, textures, legs…whatever) and then create it for you IRL. We’re getting closer and closer to The Diamond Age and drawing things off the Feed. I want me a matter compiler!
This is roughly related to my adoration of the new Moo Flickr cards…it somehow makes your photos both weightier and more desireable. These little things are awesome…you want to share them, but you want to keep them all for yourself. I ordered the free sample of 10 cards, and immediately ordered 100 when I got them…they are that cool. My next plan is to take a picture of my Moo cards, upload that to Flickr, and have cards made from it…how many cycles of Meta-Moo can you go?
Categories
$1.65 Billion
That’s what Google reportedly just paid in stock for YouTube. The interesting question is whether Google Video will go away, or will YouTube? The press release says that both will stick around…but that makes little sense. It will be interesting to see, that’s for sure.
Categories
Emerald and TurnItIn
I have difficulty relating my feelings about the announcement by Emerald that they have partnered with TurnItIn (again no link love from me…for my views on TiI, feel free to look at my last post on the matter). I do not believe that a journal publisher would voluntarily show such disregard for the Intellectual Property of their authors.
The partnership with iParadigms allows Emerald to address the problems of plagiarism and copyright infringement in two ways:
- By allowing students, tutors, researchers and editors to compare content that they are submitting, marking, editing or publishing with content previously published by Emerald through the Turnitin and iThenticate services. This will alert the enquirer to possible duplication or plagiarism, and allow them to take the appropriate action, for example revision.
- By allowing Emerald to be proactive and check submitted work for copyright infringement against content it has previously published, plus 8.6 billion web pages, tens of millions of articles in more than 15,000 periodicals, and copyright free material.
Let’s deconstruct this press release, briefly:
- iParadigms is described as: “developers of the Turnitin plagiarism detection product for academic institutions and the iThenticate plagiarism detection product for content publishers”
- This agreement “reinforces Emerald’s proactive stance on plagiarism, and ensures that Emerald content continues to maintain its high standard of integrity.”
- Malik AboRashid, Senior Director of Business Development, from iParadigms makes a statement that includes the phrase “confirms Emerald’s commitment to supporting integrity in scholarship and their position as a publisher of high quality research”
- Emerald’s Editorial Director Rebecca Marsh’s statement includes “…help to promote integrity in academic research …” and “…guard against plagiarized and duplicated work appearing in Emerald journals…”
- Then without warning, we get one mention of copyright: “…Allowing Emerald to be proactive and check submitted work for copyright infringement against content it has previously published…”
The amount wrong with that last bullet could be a novel, but lets start with the fact that they’re now concerned with “copyright infringement” instead of plagiarism. I thought that TurnItIn was a tool used for upholding academic integrity…what sort of “copyright infringement” might be of concern to a academic paper and publisher?
Is Emerald prepared to apply Fair Use principles to these instances? Or will the author simply be told to “fix” the work when nothing is legally wrong? Emerald also, given the above excerpt, appears as if it can’t check its own databases…do they really need TurnItIn to compare a submitted paper to their own holdings?
I, along with other academics, believe strongly that TurnItIn is profiteering off the un-compensating backs of the students. I really hope that a campus student organization at a university where TiI is used takes notice of this soon.
As noted in a comment on ACRLog, this is remarkably humorous when you consider that Emerald has been called out in the past for shady intellectual property treatments:
A librarian at Cornell University has discovered that a major scholarly-journal company, Emerald, has often published the same article in multiple journals without noting that the material had already appeared elsewhere.
“I found journals that were complete copies of one another,” says Philip M. Davis, a life-sciences librarian at Cornell.
He found that Emerald, a British company that publishes journals on management-and-information science, had republished 409 articles in 67 journals from 1989 to 2003. Mr. Davis says that he contacted the authors of the articles and found that, in some cases, Emerald had asked to republish articles, while in other cases authors could not recall whether they had been contacted.
Categories
del.icio.us as social network
Over at Read/Write web, there’s an article today about how del.icio.us is moving towards becoming a social network:
But Joshua has bigger plans for del.icio.us – it will essentially turn into a social network, with more focus on people instead of data. I learned this when I asked Joshua what kind of new functionality we can expect to see from delicious over the coming 6-12 months? Joshua replied:
“One of the amazing things about our users is how smart and far-reaching their interests are. While delicious previously has been very much about just the data, in the future I hope to allow our users themselves to come forward within the system. Additionally, I want to help people connect with others within the system, either to people they already know or discovering new people and communities based on interest.”
(emphasis mine)This points to a social networking future for del.icio.us, perhaps more so than a content bookmarking one (which it currently is). delicious already has a ‘Your network’ feature, but that basically just connects users’ bookmarks. I think what Joshua is talking about is expanding this into a more full-featured social networking system – with commenting, groups, etc. Perhaps similar to Imeem, which combines content browsing with social networking.
I would argue that del.icio.us is already a social network. It’s possible to identify users with similar interests (a la Facebook), you can “subscribe” to a users information, you can send links to users in your network, your network acts as a sort of friends list…it’s all there already. If what Read/Write means is that the individual user will become the focus rather than the user’s content…I hope desperately that’s not the case. Del.icio.us is nearly perfect at what it does. I would hate to see any of the functionality buried or de-prioritized for the sake of becoming more social.
Now what I would like to see is a collaborative folksonomic site that merges del.icio.us and flickr (both owned by yahoo now). Not inside the current site of either of them, but some new site where you could see how the tags interacted…search for “cats” and get flickr pictures of cats along with del.icio.us links on cats. Hell, if del.icio.us returned relevancy ranked links, you’d have a sort of human-powered Google…both sites and pictures that have all been vetted by an actual human to relate to tag X. I’d love to see how that would look…Yahoo? Pretty please?
Categories
Photos and licenses
Twice in the last two months, I’ve found myself re-examining my Flickr account and my photos. I’ve had two instances of people wishing to use my some of my pictures for various things. One, a website about Sewanee, and the other a publication about the Immersion program.
All of my pictures are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, and in both cases the first two criteria are fine for the uses. The Share-Alike is where stuff starts to break down…people seem unwilling to ensure that the resulting work is licensed in the same way. In some ways, it’s a sort of educational issue…most people are still not aware of Creative Commons.
So I’m torn. On one hand, I certainly do want people to use my photos. On the other, I also want to push the Creative Commons message, and requiring that the resulting works Share Alike is the right thing to do, I think.
Has anyone else dealt with this friction? How did you resolve it?
Categories
The strange continues
So, dear readers, you might remember my post from a few weeks ago that brought into your awareness the existence of the Otherkin.
Well, evidently, they’re lonely.
I give you: OtherKin Dating.
Yes, really.
I shudder at the power of the Interweb, and fear the day it becomes sentient.
Categories
Renaissance
Another must-see film for those who might have missed this (I know I did until today)…Renaissance. This came out in France in March, and is just now making it over to the US.
In 2054, Paris is a labyrinth where all movement is monitored and recorded. Cut off from the world for its own protection, the city has nonetheless continued to expand. Now, 21st century skyscrapers overlay centuries-old architectural masterpieces. And below street level, a sophisticated network of streamlined plazas push up against the city’s ancient, deteriorating tunnel systems. Casting a shadow over everything is the city’s largest company, Avalon, which insinuates itself into every aspect of contemporary life to sell its primary export – eternal youth and beauty. When 22-year-old Ilona (Romola Garai), one of Avalon’s most promising scientists, is abruptly kidnapped, Avalon calls on Barthélémy Karas (Daniel Craig), a Paris cop with a hard-fought reputation for finding anyone, no matter what sacrifices he has to make along the way. As the trail gets hot, Karas senses he’s not the only one looking for the beautiful enigma, and every witness he digs up seems to turn up dead. To find Ilona and unlock the secs of her disappearance, Karas must plunge deep into the parallel worlds of corporate espionage, organized crime and genetic research – where the truth imprisons whoever finds it first and miracles can be bought but at a great price.
I recommend hitting Apple’s Trailer site to get the full HD goodness of the film…WOW this looks good. Like Blade Runner meets Sin City.
Categories
Facebook takes down libraries
Facebook seems to be getting touchy in their new-found attempt to take over the social network world…they took down the University of Kentucky’s profile with no warning, citing breach of ToS:
Facebook profiles are intended for use by a single individual. Groups, clubs, and other types of organizations are not permitted to maintain an account. I apologize for the inconvenience, but you will no longer be able to use this account. I will not be able to reinstate the account under a different email address.
—text from email from facebook support
So Facebook won’t give them back their content? This seems like a BAD idea on the part of Facebook support, and I’m guessing this will get fixed in short order.
I’m friends with a few libraries…curious how long it will take Facebook to get rid of them all. Here at MPOW, we’ve not created a page just for the library, instead having the library as Group, as Facebook suggests. This wasn’t done with any forethought…just seemed to make sense at the time.
All I can say is that it’s about time some students got upset about TurnItIn (no link love from me). I expected that it would be a university student somewhere that realized what they were doing, but nope…it was high school kids.
The for-profit service known as Turnitin checks student work against a database of more than 22 million papers written by students around the world, as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. School administrators said the service, which they will start using next week, is meant to deter plagiarism at a time when the Internet makes it easy to copy someone else’s words.
But some McLean High students are rebelling. Members of the new Committee for Students’ Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to Turnitin’s automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights. And they contend that the school’s action will tar students at one of Fairfax County’s academic powerhouses.
Indeed. I asked TurnItIn representatives years ago at an ALA Midwinter conference how long they thought they could maintain their business model without compensating students for increasing their databases…no suprisingly, they didn’t really respond to my question.
I have long thought that they were getting away with something in the IP arena. Yes, I’m sure they’ve covered their legal bases with click-through licenses and such, but everyone knows those are only good until challenged. I see a class action suit on the way…students who’s work was used to produce profits for TurnItIn should see some of that profit, I think.
I actually spoke up here at UTC during my last faculty plagiarism workshop against TiI. Several of the faculty knew of it, but didn’t understand how it worked or what you got from it…although there were a couple of strident defenders of it in the room, I got across my rather strong feelings on the subject. It’s just wrong, even apart from the IP issues, in the same way that strip searches at the airport are wrong…trading liberties for an illusion of security (or in the case of TurnItIn, trading trust and honestly for guilty until proven innocent) is not the sort of image that our institutes of higher education should be dealing in.