Whale explodes in Taiwanese city: “A dead sperm whale has exploded while being delivered to a research centre near the southwestern city of Tainan. Passers-by and cars were soaked in blood and body parts were sprayed over a road after the bursting of the whale, which was being carried on a trailer.” [Universal Rule]
That must have been something. I hope the research center can find a replacement. Whales do not appear to travel well.
The Pig and the Python. Some thoughts on today’s fourth quarter GDP report: The growth rate — what the British call the “headline number” — was a bit lower than expected: 4% versus a consensus forecast of just under 5%. That’s less than half the… [Whiskey Bar]
More economics than you might want to read but check out the Baefoot and Naked link in the forst comment. It has some very nice graphs of capital utilization and the employemnt rate. Not very encouraging.
The Humanitarian Case for War in Iraq. Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, has written a commentary effectively skewering the Bush administration’s “humanitarian” justification for invading Iraq: War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention Now that the war‰s proponents are relying so significantly on… [Whiskey Bar]
Read the entire article. It should make for some very interesting discussions on the role of the military in police actions.
Why Are We Ruled by These Fools?: Part CCCVIII. The MinuteMan notes that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia, and that the chocolate ration has been raised again: JustOneMinute: Rumsfeld Completes The Slow Flip-Flop: After months of “we don’t need a bigger army”, we are told that we do need a bigger army. Temporarily. People who worry about the planning process in Washington (or the connection with reality) will worry about this. I’ll stop calling this administration “Orwellian” when they stop using 1984 as an operations manual…. [Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)]
Nice to read about this 20 years after 1984 was supposed to happen. So Orwell got the dates a little wrong.
The “Besides That” Game!. From Sadly, No! A fun party game for all ages. Sadly, No!: The Besides That Game Returns!: GOP Wake-Up Call Besides the fact that Republican presidents accumulate record-setting deficits every time they are in office, the GOP truly is the party of fiscal discipline. Rules of the game can be found here…. [Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)]
SOunds like a really fun game ;-)
The Clown Show Continues. John S. Irons covers the clown show that is Bush administration fiscal policy: ArgMax Economics Weblog: Painful cuts and bigger deficits: the president’s budget will require painful cuts in programs, and no progress on deficit reductions… and these are the Republicans’ complaints!… [Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)]
How in the workd could the Medicare package skyrocket over 30% higher? These guys were selling a load of cr#p to everyone and when it really hits the fan in a few years, Bush and his adminstration will not be remembered fondly.
How Industry Hijacked ‘Sound Science’… (Oliver Houck). How Industry Hijacked ‘Sound Science’… (Oliver Houck) [Common Dreams]
This Administration will continue to degrade science until it is totally worthless. Which apparently is their plan. Then sound science will really be whatever they want it to be. Read Deceit and Denial to get an idea of how government abuses science in order to help corporations to the detriment of of the people it supposedly serves.
It’s Mine Mine Mine, All Mine, Every Little Factoid in My Database! Mine!. Updated post: Recommended: The Coming of the Anti-Feist, Part II (Donna Wentworth @ Copyfight). Congress is talking about locking down data in databases. Feist was this case where the Supreme Court ruled that facts (like the temperature, the score of the local hockey team, the number of voters in a state) are not copyrightable, only special arrangements of those facts in databases, collectively are, and then it’s the arrangement, not the facts themselves that are… [bIPlog]
What exactly is this bill designed to protect? What problem is it designed to fix? What benefit do the citizens of this country derive by this bill? Copyright and patents are a contract between the people’s government and creators. Providing some IP protection in these cases furthers society’s goals. What goals are furthered here, other than the greed of certain companies.
Latest Pointless Patent: Redirect Page For WiFi Logins. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go just one week without hearing about yet another ridiculous patent? These days, that seems to be wishful thinking. The latest, dug up by the always excellent WiFi Networking News is the fact that someone has actually gone and patented the concept of using a redirect to force you to a login page when you connect to a WiFi network. How is this possibly patentable? It seems like an insanely obvious idea – and one that plenty of companies use because it’s obvious – and not because they ripped off someone’s “intellectual property”. The point of the patent system is to encourage innovation. The point of this patent (like so many others we’ve been hearing about recently) is to hold companies hostage for doing something obvious.
[Techdirt]
Patents are being abused and the PTO just lets it go. It is so much harder to fix these after the fact. But it apparantly is cheaper for the PTO to just push them out.
More on the database bill. Declan McCullagh, Tech firms fail to squelch database bill, News.com, January 21, 2004. Excerpt: “By a 16-7 vote, the House Judiciary committee approved an intellectual property bill that had been opposed by Amazon.com, AT&T, Comcast, Google, Yahoo and some Internet service provider associations. The proposal, backed by big database companies such as Reed Elsevier and Thomson, would extend to databases the same kind of protection that copyrighted works such as music, literature and movies currently enjoy….The bill…is controversial because, critics say, it would sidestep a U.S. Supreme Court decision that said facts could not be copyrighted. Wednesday’s vote follows a 10-3 vote last October in a subcommittee. Now the measure likely will go to the House floor in preparation for a possible vote.” More coverage. [Open Access News]
More on this bill which will surely require the Supreme Court to look at it if passed. Facts can not be copyrighted, unless you are an oldtime publisher trying to keep your business alive when its business model is dying.
More on the database bill. Roy Mark, House Panel Sparks Database Controversy, InternetNews.com, January 23, 2004. Quoting Mark Erickson, director of federal policy for NetCoalition: “The Supreme Court ruled in 1991 that facts can’t be copyrighted. All intellectual property has a finite life. Any sort of legislation that creates a new property right in facts can have a profound impact. It can drive up the cost of data and potentially give the owners of the new protection the ability to charge for using the facts in a downstream distribution.” Quoting Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA): “[This bill] is mischievous in that it will lock away facts from public access….This bill is testament to the power that one company can muster,” referring to Reed Elsevier, one of the largest and most energetic backers of the bill. [Open Access News]
This bill is a horrible piece of legislation brought by a publisher trying to maintain its stranglehold as it is dying. The attempt to retain power, even as you screw your customers, must be a disease of current capitalists.
“Copyright horror stories”. Robert S. Boynton, The Tyranny of Copyright, New York Times Magazine, January 25, 2004: The article discusses consequences of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, efforts by Lawrence Lessig and others through Creative Commons and other venues to retain rights for content users, concerns of authors and content creators, and the question of micropayments for content usage. (Source: beSpacific) [Open Access News]
Makes you think. The use of copyright to prevent whistleblowers from dispersing embarrassing information is chilling. We shall more of this I expect.
Pharmaceutical industry and high-priced journals. Users Tell the Rest of the Story, Outsell, January 23, 2004 (only summary available online) reports the frustrations of several pharmaceutical companies with respect to expensive journal subscriptions. Evidently, the American Medical Association generated a furor when raising one institution’s license “900%.” A group of these companies, then, surveyed their users and found that they didn’t regard such journals as “must-haves” and were to consider alternatives, including cancelling expensive subscriptions. The report notes that many of the pharmaceutical companies pay for advertising in journals and then face high subscription prices. (Source: The Virtual Chase) [Open Access News]
WHat will the publsihers do when both universities and companies refuse to pay huge subscription prices. I was on the Library Committee at Immunex and we dealt with this every year. More and more of the expensive journals are becoming less and less relevant. Models whre authors pat for page charges scale much better than models based purely on subscription payments. The former can publish whatever it gets paid to do. The latter must publish first then hope to get paid by subscription.
OA will improve legislation. Janneke Mostert, Diffusing information for democracy: an insight of the South African Parliament, Library Management, 25, 1 (January 2004) pp. 28-38. (Only the abstract is free online.) A nice argument that open access is needed for effective legislation, not just for effective research. From the abstract: “The paper concludes that democracy can only be sustained if information is freely available, and utilised to its fullest potential by the legislators so as to be enabled to actively participate in all the parliamentary functions.” [Open Access News]
While this looks like a very interesting and even important article, the irony is that I have to pay to see it. So I guess some information is not freely available. But we are getting there.
Backlash against OA models?. Stephen Downes, 2004: The Turning Point, Ubiquity v.4,no.46 (January 20-26, 2004). Downes offers an assessment of “issues that will change the way we use the internet.” One section, headlined “Attacking Open Content,” says that media industries will attempt a backlash against freely-available alternatives to their products. Alongside open courseware and open source, Downes mentions “Open access journals are forcing publishers to retrench.” He sees the attack happening on both “legislative” – through intellectual property and legal channels – and “promotional” – or negative advertising on the stability of open content. Finally, Downes calls such attacks “a last desperate gasp before the bottom falls out of the content industry completely… Content is well on its way to being a value-add, something that you might attach to a product, but not something that is the product. Apple uses music to sell iPods, not iPods to sell music.” (Source: The ((sci-tech) library question) [Open Access News]
This is exactly right. The price of content drops to zero. You will attach it to something else or you will make a living filtering after publication. But you will have a hard time making money on the publication itself.I would not have money in Elsevier right now.
