Fair Use Lab

• Scripting News: New header on Scripting News 082211
  Dave Winer: “ you might want to click this link and have a look at the home page, because there's a new header here. It's notable not just because it looks good, but it's text, not a graphic. I knew when I saw Google Web Fonts that I was going to use it, but it took a bit of experimentation and thinking to figure out how. It's always a good idea to let things settle-in a bit before moving. Your first intuition is not always so good. But after a while, you figure it out. “
• Musicians Reclaim Their Copyrights – On The Media 092611
  In 1976 Congress changed copyright law so that any musician who wrote a song after January 1st, 1978 could apply to reclaim rights to those songs after 35 years. So in 2013 there’s a long line of 1978 hitmakers who stand to regain their valuable songs and albums. Duke professor James Boyle explains to Brooke why the windfall for Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Funkadelic and others is being fought tooth and nail by the record industry.
• Oscar Pistorius win 100m at Beijing Paralympics – YouTube
  Oscar Pistorius, the Blade Runner, win the gold medal at 100m (class T44) at the Beijing Paralympic Games 2008
• BBC Sport – World Athletics 2011: Pistorius denies blades will give an advantage
  South African Paralympian Oscar Pistorius tells BBC Radio 5 live's Mark Pougatch that he is feeling "nervous" but insists he is ready to compete in the 400m at the World Athletics Championships in Daegu. Pistorius will become the first ever amputee to race at the highest level after shaving nearly half a second off his personal best to qualify for the Championships. The man known as 'Blade Runner' also insists his prosthetic limbs do not give him an unfair advantage over his able-bodied competitors.
• The ghostwritten op-ed: an unacceptable deception | Dan Gillmor | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk 082611
  Dan Gillmor: “Society has a blind spot about this practice – and applies a double standard. If we catch a student paying someone to write his or her paper for a class, or even if the actual writer does it for free, we give the student a failing grade. Or, in some cases (such as in a journalism school), we might well invite the student (and perhaps the collaborator, too, if it's another student) to quit altogether. One school of thought says ghostwritten op-eds are a lot like speechwriter-written speeches. Since we all know that most famous people don't write all their own lines for speeches, goes this defence of the practice, we should assume the same with a byline – whether on a book or an op-ed. It's a tempting analogy, but wrong in a key way: a false byline is an outright, direct lie. And news organisations that run these pieces are encouraging dishonesty, which they compound, albeit with good motives, by helpfully editing often turgid prose to make it more compelling.
• Major ISPs agree to "six strikes" copyright enforcement plan
  American Internet users, get ready for three strikes "six strikes." Major US Internet providers—including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable—have just signed on to a voluntary agreement with the movie and music businesses to crack down on online copyright infringers. But they will protect subscriber privacy and they won't filter or monitor their own networks for infringement. And after the sixth "strike," you won't necessarily be "out." Much of the scheme mirrors what ISPs do now. It would be much easier to see "education" focus as a principled stand by content owners if they hadn't spent years suing such end users, securing absurd multi-million dollar judgments in cases that they are still pursuing in court. As it is, the shift looks more like a pragmatic attempt to solve a real problem through less aggressive measures after the failure of scorched earth tactics.

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• Barefoot into Cyberspace – The Book! | The Barefoot Technologist
  Barefoot into Cyberspace is an inside account of radical hacker culture and the forces that shape it, told in the year WikiLeaks took subversive geek politics into the mainstream. Including some of the earliest on-record material with Julian Assange you are likely to read, Barefoot Into Cyberspace is the ultimate guided tour of the hopes and ideals that are increasingly shaping world events. Beginning at the Chaos Communications Congress of December 2009, where WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg first presented their world-changing plans to a select audience of the planet’s most skilful and motivated hackers, Barefoot Into Cyberspace interweaves an insider’s take on the drama that ensued with a thoughtful mix of personal reflections and conversations with key figures in the community aimed at testing the hopes and dreams of the early internet pioneers against the realities of the web today. [available as free CC accessible texts HTML, PDF, ePub]
• The Barefoot Technologist | Becky Hogge’s website
  Becky Hogge is a freelance optimist. Her writing on information politics, human rights and technology has appeared regularly in UK political magazine the New Statesman, and she has also been published in, among others, Index on Censorship, the Guardian, Prospect, Dazed and Confused and The Face. View her porfolio. For two years, Becky was the managing editor, and then technology director, of the award-winning global politics magazine openDemocracy.net. During her time with openDemocracy she helped establish the China environment website chinadialogue.net – the world’s first truly bilingual blog – along with editor Isabel Hilton.
• BBC – Outriders: Barefoot with Becky Hogge 081711
  Becky Hogge’s book – Barefoot into Cyberspace follows her journey through Germany’s legendary Chaos Computer Club through meetings with extraordinary hackers like Rop Gonggrijp and Julian Assange and asks some tricky questions about the nature of online new radicals and activists. We talked about the politics of code and the people who work on making our online environment open.

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• How Music May Help Ward Off Hearing Loss As We Age : Shots – Health Blog : NPR 082211
  Older people often have difficulty understanding conversation in a crowd. Like everything else, our hearing deteriorates as we age. There are physiological reasons for this decline: We lose tiny hair cells that pave the way for sound to reach our brains. We lose needed neurons and chemicals in the inner ear, reducing our capacity to hear. So how can you help stave off that age-related hearing loss? Try embracing music early in life, research suggests. “If you spend a lot of your life interacting with sound in an active manner, then your nervous system has made lots of sound-to-meaning connections” that can strengthen your auditory system, says Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University. Musicians focus extraordinary attention on deciphering low notes from high notes and detecting different tonal qualities. Kraus has studied younger musicians and found that their hearing is far superior to that of their non-musician counterparts.
• PLoS ONE: Musical Experience and the Aging Auditory System: Implications for Cognitive Abilities and Hearing Speech in Noise | Parbery-Clark et al. 2011
  [from abstract] Given that musical experience positively impacts speech perception in noise in young adults (ages 18–30), we asked whether musical experience benefits an older cohort of musicians (ages 45–65), potentially offsetting the age-related decline in speech-in-noise perceptual abilities and associated cognitive function (i.e., working memory). Consistent with performance in young adults, older musicians demonstrated enhanced speech-in-noise perception relative to nonmusicians along with greater auditory, but not visual, working memory capacity. By demonstrating that speech-in-noise perception and related cognitive function are enhanced in older musicians, our results imply that musical training may reduce the impact of age-related auditory decline.
• ‘Porgy And Bess’: Messing With A Classic : NPR 082111
  Porgy and Bess, the classic American folk opera about love and life in an African-American fishing community, was the culmination of a great dream for collaborators George Gershwin, his brother Ira, and author Dubose Heyward. But it wasn’t as successful as they’d hoped when it premiered in 1935. So, 76 years later, the Gershwin and Heyward estates are bringing Porgy and Bess back in a new adaptation. The piece is now in previews at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., with plans to move it to Broadway in December. | Bess is still a beautiful drug addict torn between her brutish boyfriend Crown and her growing love for the charming, disabled beggar Porgy… the opera never explains why Porgy is disabled, so playwright Suzan-Lori Parks turned to the source. “In the book, you go to … Dubose Hayward’s original novel — and you realize he’s crippled from birth, so he put in the line,… ‘I’m crippled from birth, God made me to be lonely.’
• Social Security disability on verge of insolvency – Politics Wires – MiamiHerald.com 082111
  AP: Laid-off workers and aging baby boomers are flooding Social Security’s disability program with benefit claims, pushing the financially strapped system toward the brink of insolvency. Applications are up nearly 50 percent over a decade ago as people with disabilities lose their jobs and can’t find new ones in an economy that has shed nearly 7 million jobs. The stampede for benefits is adding to a growing backlog of applicants – many wait two years or more before their cases are resolved – and worsening the financial problems of a program that’s been running in the red for years. New congressional estimates say the trust fund that supports Social Security disability will run out of money by 2017, leaving the program unable to pay full benefits, unless Congress acts. About two decades later, Social Security’s much larger retirement fund is projected to run dry as well.
• Is It Ever OK To Block Social Media? – On The Media 081911
  When an authoritarian government blocks access to social media, democratic governments are quick to call foul. But this summer’s wave of flash mobs, looting and disruptive demonstrations are prompting authorities in democratic societies to explore cutting off access as well. Faced with a large demonstration on a subway platform, San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit recently cut off some cell phone service to block protesters from communicating. Bob spoke with BART deputy police Chief Daniel Hartwig about that decision and with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jillian York about the potentially dangerous precedent.
• Books Are No Longer An Ad-Free Zone – On The Media 081911
  You might think it’s blasphemy to put advertisements in books, but it’s happening. Still, advertising in analog books simply isn’t very effective. Digital advertising, with its ability to personalize ads and track who’s buying what, may make placing ads inside e-books more effective than advertising inside traditional books. WOWIO is already putting personalized ads at the start and at the end of e-books. Bob spoke with CEO and Chairman of WOWIO Brian Altounian.
• An Early Success From Amazon Publishing – On The Media 081911
  After struggling in vain to try and get her book published through regular channels, author Deborah Read ended up publishing a very successful book through Amazon Publishing. Bob talks to Deborah about how she managed to find success outside of the publishing mainstream.
• What Amazon is Up To – On The Media 081911
  This week, Amazon Publishing announced its first marquee hire, bestselling self-help guru Timothy Ferris. Amazon’s foray into publishing actual books has unnerved some in the publishing industry, who fear that the company’s size (it has more money than all the major publishing houses combined) could lead to a vertical monopoly over the book world. Publishing industry watcher Mike Shatzkin talks to Brooke about the publishing landscape Amazon is entering and how the company may reshape it.
• Don’t Throw It Out: ‘Junk DNA’ Essential In Evolution : NPR
  There’s a revolution under way in biology. Scientists are coming to understand that genetics isn’t just about genes. Just as important are smaller sequences of DNA that control genes. These so-called regulatory elements tell genes when to turn on and off, and when to stop functioning altogether. A new study suggests that changes in these non-gene sequences of DNA may hold the key to explaining how all species evolved.
• Black Researchers Getting Fewer Grants From NIH : NPR 081911
  A study in Science magazine now finds that the black scientists who do start careers in medical research are at a big disadvantage when it comes to funding. Raynard Kington president of Grinnell College, wondered whether black scientists got as much grant support from the National Institutes of Health as do other scientists. He’s a former deputy director of the NIH. Kington and his colleagues took into account factors like the nature of the institutions where black scientists work, their training and their history of landing research grants. The grant gap was quite substantial. Getting a grant is never easy, but in round numbers, white researchers succeeded about 25 percent of the time, and blacks succeeded about 15 percent of the time. An obvious question is whether this is the result of overt racism.
• 8enefits For Severely Disabled Children Scrutinized : NPR 081811
  [Supplemental Security Income program for severely disabled children] Advocates for children and people with mental illness have rallied against the potential cuts. Sixteen of the largest advocacy groups, including the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, have formed a coalition to protect the SSI program for kids and launched a major campaign to lobby Congress. SSI currently provides cash assistance and Medicaid to the families of 1.2 million low-income children who struggle from severe disabilities, at a cost of $10 billion a year. Since 2002, the program has grown by nearly 40 percent.
• Several Reboots Later, The IBM PC Turns 30 : NPR 081311
  Thirty years ago this week, IBM released the first personal computer. It was a computer designed for the average American, and the average American couldn’t get enough of it. Guest host Jacki Lyden talks to Dr. Dave Bradley, one of the 12 engineers who designed the original IBM personal computer and who also invented the control-alt-delete function.
• » Ashif Jaffer Offended by Offence
  York University would not allow Jaffer to write his exams while accompanied by a teaching assistant – the extraordinary accommodation that had enabled Jaffer to graduate from high school as an “Ontario Scholar” (a student who achieves 80% or higher in six Grade 12 courses). It is asserted that Jaffer needs a teaching assistant during exams to “help get the full answers out so that he can write them down” because Down syndrome has “altered” his brain’s “retrieval functions ” (Daniel Girard, “School Denies Access”, Toronto Star, December 5, 2006, p. D6). Although it is not clear if Jaffer was accepted in a degree program at Ryerson, the documentary raises questions about the extent to which universities should accommodate the mentally disabled. It is one thing to allow intellectually challenged people to audit courses and benefit from participating in a university environment; it is another to award degrees that assume that certain skills and learning outcomes have been achieved.
• Ryerson University – School of Disability Studies
  Ryerson University’s School of Disability Studies, established in 1999, is the first in Canada to offer a degree education that is strongly rooted in a disability studies perspective. We offer a distinct undergraduate program that illuminates the extent to which the lives of disabled people are shaped by patterns of injustice, exclusion, discrimination and the rule of social, cultural and aesthetic ‘norms’. Put another way, Ryerson University’s School of Disability Studies does not teach about disability, but rather teaches about social and material worlds, beginning from disability.

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