Bits and Bytes

Harry Potter and Copyright Law

2008-04-21T23:44:00.001-05:00

Via Austin360.com and the Associated Press:

Harry Potter case illustrates blurry line in copyright law

For a time, "Harry Potter" superfan Steven Vander Ark seemed to be living a geeky dream.

His Web site — an obsessive catalog of spells, characters and creatures in J.K. Rowling's novels — was a hit among fellow fanatics. He spoke at conventions. Journalists sought him out for interviews. He was a guest on NBC's "Today" show.

Better still, Rowling knew who he was. She gave his site, The Harry Potter Lexicon, an award and confessed that she occasionally used its online encyclopedia as a reference. Warner Bros. invited him onto the set of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." He even made it on to the DVD, appearing in a documentary included as a special feature.

But all that changed after a little-known publishing company, RDR Books, announced it would release a print version of the lexicon. The author and Warner Bros. sued, asking a judge to block publication on the grounds that it violated copyright law, and the case went to trial this week.

The dispute has thrust Vander Ark into the middle of a closely watched case that illustrates the muddled state of copyright law enforcement when it comes to the Web.

[...]

Psychology of Facebook at Stanford

2008-04-21T10:58:00.002-05:00

Via the BBC:

Eyes have it
A group of students at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley have turned their attention towards a unique course that blends popular culture with the more time-worn principles of psychology. The Psychology of Facebook is the brainchild of Professor B J Fogg, a pioneering persuasion psychologist who founded the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford.

[...]

Robots for the Elderly

2008-04-21T10:46:00.003-05:00

Via Science Daily:

New Robots Can Provide Elder Care For Aging Baby Boomers

Over 77 million baby boomers will retire in the next 30 years, and robots are ready to assist with elder care. Engineers have created a robotic assistant that can recognize medical emergencies and call 911, remind clients to take their medication, help with grocery shopping and cleaning and allow retirees to communicate with loved ones.

Facebook and the Lebanese

2008-04-21T10:44:00.002-05:00

Via Global Voices Online:

Lebanon: Show-off all the time
‘In Lebanon, everybody live in community. Everything you’re doing have to be known, by your friends, your family, your neighbors… it is show-off all the time,’ observes élodie while writing about Lebanese fascination with social networking such as Facebook.

Relationships, Blogging and Change

2008-04-20T20:42:00.002-05:00

Maria Niles writes at BlogHer about:

The Changing World of Blogging: Community, Friendship, Business & Ideas
Online communities, publishing and connections have been around for more than a decade now and are constantly evolving. Over time the reasons any of us chose to get into blogging can change, the response to our blog can change and circumstances can arise which lead us to rethink the whole blogging enterprise and then not just changing but deleting our blogs.

Online life is not much different from face-to-face life in that regard. I struggle with questions about my blogging all the time. I have several blogs on different topics and which show different aspects of my life, interests and personality. I constantly go back and forth between the idea of continuing to maintain the separation or having a single blog that's just me (which are the blogs I most enjoy reading) or getting down to one blog for business and one for everything else (feel free to way in!) Any changes would change my online relationships. Some would like what they see, some new folks might come along for the ride and others would be bored silly and probably drift away. Although we face these issues in our 'real life' relationships (see BlogHer CE lauriewrites great post on friendship break-ups) there is an added dimension with blogging. Do we change or delete our blogs when relationships or circumstances change?

Recently I have seen several posts from women who are dealing with those questions.

[...]

Visual Literacy

2008-04-20T20:41:00.002-05:00

Leslie Brooks on BlogHer asks:

Are you visually literate? Are your kids?
What's going on in this image from the U.S. Library of Congress? What do you see? What is the image's significance? Its context?
[See original post for image]
If you can answer these questions with any skill or accuracy, you possess a variety of literacies, including U.S. cultural literacy, U.S. historical literacy, and visual literacy. But it's visual literacy that gets you started 'reading' the image. If you're visually literate, you know what to look for in this photo, what questions to ask, and can begin to deduce its meaning and significance. Historical and cultural literacy will help you to refine and evaluate these deductions, as well as indulge in what the material culture scholar Jules Prown has called 'cultural daydreams'--brainstorming about the larger meaning of the photo before diving into actual research on it.
Map reading, diagramming, making sense of charts and graphs in the business section of the newspaper--all of these require some degree of visual literacy. Simply put, visual literacy is the ability to 'read' images for information, as well as to create them to transmit information.
[...]

Visual literacy is especially important in the digital age. Software and online tools have made it easy for anyone to create or manipulate images and to disseminate those images widely. As a result, we're introduced to more images now than at any point in history. The ability to interpret these images becomes increasingly crucial as we rely less on text and more on image and video to convey information.

[...]

Police Use of Facebook

2008-04-20T15:14:00.002-05:00

Via Slashdot:

British Police Use Facebook to Gather Evidence
Amy Bennett writes 'Move over police scanner and most-wanted poster. The Greater Manchester Police force has created a Facebook application to collect leads for investigations. The application delivers a real-time feed of police news and appeals for information. A 'Submit Intelligence' link takes a Facebook user to the police Web site where they can anonymously submit tips. Another link leads to the videos on YouTube featuring information on the police force, ongoing investigations and other advisories.'
[...]

Learned Helplessness and Technology Use

2008-04-19T23:48:00.004-05:00

Via the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Tech Therapy: Helpless or Hopeless?

[...] In the latest edition of Tech Therapy, Warren Arbogast, a technology consultant, and Scott Carlson, a Chronicle reporter, talk about the ‘learned helplessness’ that pervades technology use on campus.

Habitual Blog Reading

2008-04-19T23:46:00.003-05:00

Via the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Reading Blogs Can Become Habitual, Like Smoking (but Safer)
Warning: This blog could become habit-forming.
A study of blog readers’ behavior found that for many people, checking favorite blogs is part of a routine that they feel compelled to repeat each day.

[...]

I do have a routine of having a cup of tea and checking news sites, a weather site, online comics and a list of blogs everyday, sort of like the old cliche of a having a cup of coffee and a newspaper every morning.

Divorce in the Digital Age

2008-04-18T23:59:00.005-05:00

Two items. First, from WIRED:

Angry Wife Lashes Out in 'YouTube Divorce' Video
Breaking up is hard to do. But it's easy to bust out the bile online, as proven by a wild-eyed New York wife who smears her hubby in a nasty six-minute clip.

And then from the New York Times:

When the Ex Blogs, the Dirtiest Laundry Is Aired

[...] in an era when more than one in 10 adult Internet users in the United States have blogs, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, many people are using the Web to tell their side of a marital saga. Despite the legal end of a marriage, the confessions can stretch toward eternity in a steady stream of enraged or despondent postings.
[...]

Judy Breck writes about the Times article on SmartMobs:

Blogging about divorce
How smart is blogging about your divorce? A New York Times article this morning describes the mob that are doing it, and suggests there may be long run consequences beyond settling scores in marriages.

Flickr Culture

2008-04-18T23:55:00.002-05:00

Via WIRED:

Lore Sjöberg's Alt Text: Flickr Fans Flustered Over Video Posting
Why are Flickr denizens in such an uproar over being allowed to post videos? It's a cultural thing.

Cellphones, Public Transportation and New Social Rules

2008-04-18T23:54:00.005-05:00

Via WIRED:

Cellphones Challenge the Zen of Public Transportation
The ubiquity of mobile phone access is causing friction in the tight quarters of public transport, where everyone is a captive audience to your 'Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gansta' ringtone. More and more systems are enforcing 'zen zones' where silence is the golden rule.

Identity Theft of the Dead

2008-04-18T23:52:00.005-05:00

Via WIRED:

Feds Charge California Woman With Stealing IDs From the Dead
Prosecutors say a Southern California woman used a genealogy website to target the dearly departed in a ghoulish identity theft scheme.

Darwin's private papers online

2008-04-18T23:52:00.004-05:00

Via WIRED:

Complete Darwin Papers Debut on Internet
Cambridge University has put the complete works of Charles Darwin online. The originator of one scientific revolution is paid tribute by the fruits of another.
[...]

Geek Speak

2008-04-18T23:51:00.002-05:00

Via WIRED:

'Nerdic' Geek Speak Taking World by Storm?
Technocentric terms like mashup and googling make up an essentially new language, according to a European retailer.
[...]

Help via Twitter After Egypt Arrest

2008-04-18T23:46:00.003-05:00

Via San Jose Mercury News:

U.C. Berkeley student's Twitter messages alerted world to his arrest in Egypt

When Egyptian police scooped up UC Berkeley graduate journalism student James Karl Buck, who was photographing a noisy demonstration, and dumped him in a jail cell last week, they didn't count on Twitter.

Buck, 29, a former Oakland Tribune multimedia intern, used the ubiquitous short messaging service to tap out a single word on his cellular phone: ARRESTED. The message went out to the cell phones and computers of a wide circle of friends in the United States and to the mostly leftist, anti-government bloggers in Egypt who are the subject of his graduate journalism project.

The next day, he walked out a free man with an Egyptian attorney hired by UC Berkeley at his side and the U.S. Embassy on the phone.

Twitter, the micro-blogging service for cell phone users, allows messages up to 140 characters long. Twitter users can allow anyone they wish to join their network and receive all their messages. Buck has a large network, so Twitter gave him an instant link to the outside world.

[...]

Video Lectures? Undergraduate versus Graduate students

2008-04-18T23:44:00.003-05:00

Via the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Harvard Survey Shows Undergraduates -- but Not Graduate Students -- Like Video Lectures
[...]

Students were asked to rate the usefulness of about 16 technologies, including RSS Feeds, wikis, blogs, podcasts, and videos.

One of the most noticeable difference between undergraduates and graduate students was over video lectures. Undergraduates valued them but graduate students worried that undergraduates would use them as a substitute for attendance, wrote Mr. Pino.

[...]

Defunct IT Skills

2008-04-18T23:43:00.002-05:00

Via the Chronicle of Higher Education:

5 IT Skills Almost No One Needs Any More

Just in time for graduation, InfoWorld outlines five skills that just don’t cut it in today’s IT industry:

[...]

I'm not surprised by the list, though I would caution job seekers that, while knowing HTML and the innards of the computer are not enough to get a job anymore, they are still skills that will make your life easier while doing other things. (For example, knowing HTML lets me fix a zillion blogging-type problems that I wouldn't be able to otherwise.)

Virtual Pompeii

2008-04-18T23:29:00.003-05:00

Via National Geographic:

VIDEO: Virtual Pompeii Created
European scientists have combined virtual reality with treadmills to allow users to 'walk through' the ancient city as it looked before the devastating volcanic eruption.
[...]

Personal Health Data and Freedom of Information

2008-04-18T23:23:00.003-05:00

Via Science Daily:

Who Owns Your Medical Tests Results and Personal Health Data?
Who owns your medical tests results and your personal health data? Such a vexing question cuts to the core of personal liberty and freedom of information. Now, researchers have introduced the notion of ownership of medical information and present a basic research model for the adoption of personal health records.
[...]

Egyptian Activism on Facebook

2008-04-18T23:11:00.003-05:00

Via Global Voices Online:

Egypt: Anti-Strike Facebook Group Formed
To circumnavigate censorship, activists in the Arab world are strongly leaning on online tools to get their messages across and expose what they describe as state brutality against civilians. Word about last weeks April 6 strike in Egypt was spread on a Facebook group, which has so far attracted more than 71,200 members. Now Egyptian blogger GEMYHOoOD (Ar) tells us about an anti-strike Facebook group, which has around 1,000 followers.
[...]

Online Videos from Chile

2008-04-18T23:08:00.003-05:00

Via Global Voices Online:

Chilean Shorts: Micro and Mini Movies on the Web
From Chile, three examples of online video creation: first, a Chilean pre-candidate for the presidency takes advantage of online video tools to produce documentaries and interviews for web distribution, next, two independent short film producers with videos which talk about poverty, disabilities, old habits which don't have such a hard time dying and, why not? Love.
[...]

Authentic Blogging

2008-04-17T14:00:00.004-05:00

Dollarshort believes that Martha Stewart is one CEO who "gets" blogging:

A True Blogger is Born

[...]

My fondness for the Martha Stewart aesthetic is partly why I'm very proud to have her blog hosted on TypePad.
Today, however, the pride I felt was not because of our association with the Martha Stewart brand of aesthetic perfection, but about our association with Martha Stewart, the blogger.
The post that inspired this pride? Sadly, it was about the passing of her precious Chow, Paw Paw. So much talk about blogging is about blogs with a capital 'B,' the blogs that are supposed to act as change-the-world media. When the punch line to many a joke about blogging happens to involve a reference to a dog or cat, it's hard to appreciate the impact a post like Martha's could make.
As someone who has written about losing a pet, I know how difficult sharing this sort of news can be. The tribute to Paw Paw's last day was, as a friend put it, 'the sort of post that they wanted to write when their own dog passed away.' My friends and fellow bloggers who read the Paw Paw post were touched by Martha's candid reflection on the animal that meant so much to her. A few of my friends were even moved to tears.
But the best part about Martha's post was its simplicity. It was a real blog post, not something manufactured for a glossy magazine. It was a chronology of Paw Paw's last day. The captions, as written by Paw Paw, were brief and so not about perfection and good things, but about a good life.
[...]

YouTube channel for human rights

2008-04-17T14:00:00.003-05:00

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has it's own YouTube Channel:

"Welcome to the new YouTube channel of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Here you will find all our latest videos about the work we do to promote equality, fairness and human rights for all."

Mosques with High Speed Internet

2008-04-17T13:34:00.002-05:00

Via Global Voices Online:

Jordan: Smart Mosques with High Speed Internet
Zeid Nasser, from Jordan, writes about smart mosques, with high-speed Internet, cropping up in Malaysia and Indonesia.