Access

Parallel Production Sucks

Despite being totally aware of the consequences I am now stuck (again) with the job of writing several things in parallel. In the next two weeks I need to finish my open access report for Lund, two book chapters and a licensing booklet. The actual content is not the problem – what is the problem is despite all efforts to the contrary deadlines have a tendency to expand and contract to finally collect themselves in nasty little clusters that force the whole writing process into an attempt to beat text from the dead mind of the writer.

So how does this happen and can it be avoided? To answer the last question first: Of course it can be avoided. The simple trick is to only do one thing at a time. The cost of this approach will be to radically diminish my writing output. So this does not feel like an option.

The first question (why?) is more complex. It can be attributed to bad planning but this is only part of the truth. For many years I would explain my deadline stress with the words bad planning but I have come to realize that this is not the whole truth. No matter how good my planning is life has a way of throwing small surprises (not all pleasant) dates change, new tasks are assigned and often unrealistic work loads lead to delays.

The results of these insights should maybe be to attempt to change – but how can you change the unforeseen? How much planning must be included for that which you cannot know? And in the end isn’t it all a waste of time? After all:

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans – John Lennon

Posted on by mklang

Involuntary Detox

Warning this is just me venting my frustration….

Right. Entering my fourth week without broadband at home. Let me assure everyone this is not a voluntary state of affairs. It all began with me being silly enough to want to move to a better apartment. The move went very well but then the broadband company struck. For reasons which are not really clear to me the technician needs to talk to me. Unfortunately I had registered my old mobile number so I missed the call. Naturally this means that the technician could not call me again for the next two weeks. After several calls to my provider I now have a new date in the middle in this week for the installation of broadband. But this naturally depends on the call from the technician.

Three weeks without broadband has not improved my general mood or enabled me to develop a greater enjoyment of analog technologies. For those of you who think that you will read more if you had less access to broadband this theory – in my involuntary experiment – failed miserably. I read more when I have broadband.

Now I tend to collect lots of broadband related tasks and take them to work. Then attempt to remember what it was I was hoping to do when I had a decent internet connection. Bloody annoying. It’s not that I miss anything in particular it’s just the general basic luxury of having access to a technology upon which I depend heavily.

Posted on by mklang

Powerhouse Photo Collection Online

Old black and white photo’s are strangely interesting. Even the pictures which are bad become interesting given time. That’s why it is good news to read on the Creative Commons blog that the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia has become the first museum in the world to release publicly-held historical photographs for access on the Flickr: The Commons.

Powerhouse has released an initial 200 photographs from its Tyrrell Collection, and will continue to add more from this 7900+ image collection over the coming weeks. The Powerhouse Museum joins the Library of Congress in the ‘Commons’ initiative. The Library of Congress is sharing over 3,300 photos from its vast collection on the Flickr site.

Elizabeth St.

Format: Glass plate negative.
Rights Info: No known restrictions on publication.
Repository: Tyrrell Photographic Collection, Powerhouse Museum www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/collection=The_Tyrrell_Photographic
Part Of: Powerhouse Museum Collection
Persistent URL: http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/?irn=28755

 

Read the Powerhouse announcement.

Posted on by mklang

New book: Wikiworld

The works on the causes and effects on the “new openness” are coming in fast. My most recent find is Juha Suoranta & Tere Vadén (University of Tampere, Finland) who have published an open access book entitled Wikiworld – Political Economy and the Promise of Participatory Media:

In the digital world of learning there is a progressive transformation from the institutionalized and individualized forms of learning to open learning and collaboration. The book provides a view on the use of new technologies and learning practices in furthering socially just futures, while at the same time paying critical attention to the constants, or “unmoved movers” of the information society development; the West and Capitalism. The essential issue in the Wikiworld is one of freedom ­ levels and kinds of freedom. Our message is clear: we write for the radical openness of education for all.

It sounds interesting and  I will download it as soon as I get to a better connection. Right now I am on a train surfing via mobile not the best thing for downloading books… its online here.

Posted on by mklang

Boyle Book Cover Competition

Via an email list I found out that James Boyle, the new Chairman of the Board at Creative Commons and a founder of Science Commons, is holding a contest to design a cover for his new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. In the book, Boyle argues that more and more of material that used to be free to use without having to pay a fee or ask permission is becoming private property — at the expense of innovation, science, culture and politics.

Details, including specs and a link to some great source material for imagery, are available at the Worth1000 website. Both the book and the cover will be distributed under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial license.

Boyle is a great writer and enjoys exploring legal questions surrounding property in a way which makes it accessible and interesting to the reader. His book Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society was a real eye opener for me. I am definitely going to get his new book.

When my PhD was almost finished I announced a similar competition for the design of the book cover and was lucky to get it widely publicized. The whole idea of the competition was actually quite resented and discussed on my blog. Professional designers felt I was cutting them out of the market by asking for free work. Interesting discussions ensued. The results of the competition were posted on my blog and the winner was chosen by popular vote and used on the cover of my PhD.

Posted on by mklang

Moan, moan, moan

Still no broadband at home and the next two weeks are going to be supremely hectic. Today I returned from Norway and gave a lecture, tomorrow I am off to Gävle to interview librarians and discuss Open Access. On Wednesday I am interviewing in Göteborg on Thursday I am going to Halmstad to interview and on Friday I am lecturing in Göteborg.

The next week is a presentation at a Stockholm lecture, Tuesday is a meeting in Lund, Wednesday is Umeå. Thursday & Friday are lecturing in Göteborg. All the while I will be working on a report, a book chapter, and completing a short book.

That makes 2676 kilometers mainly on trains and the first leaves in six hours. Its time to switch of and go to bed.

Posted on by mklang

Hamster work

Spent the morning doing hamster work – it’s the handling of emails and administrative tasks each so small that they do not really require much thought but taken collectively they can destroy any attempt to carry out real work (writing, researching etc). It’s called hamster work because after a day carrying it out you go home without having produced anything. It feels much like a hamster must feel after running in the treadmill. Lots of movement but no distance.

Photo: Cholate Loving Hamster by Steve_C (CC BY-NC-ND)

After two hours of attempting to empty my inbox, it now contains 92 essential emails (from the original 224). It isn’t fun discovering things have been forgotten but now at least I am (almost) on top of my email again.

By the way have you read Knuth on email? Here is a short quote:

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.

 

Posted on by mklang

Suspicious travel patterns

The MI5 wants access to the Oyster travel card database to be able to trawl it for possible suspects. Today they may demand the data to track specific individuals under investigation but the change will allow them to search for unknown suspects based on “suspicious” travel patterns.

Systems such as these will make sure that people with strange travel patterns around the metropolis will be seen as being suspicious in general. If you are an oddball (in your movements around the city) you will now be able to be classed as a potential threat to national security.

Another step in the loss of anonymity, not to mention the fact that taking the scenic route to work in the morning suddenly becomes more ominous…

More at the Guardian.

Posted on by mklang

Top misleading open access myths

Biomedcentral has a list of top misleading Open Access myths

In the evidence presented to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into Scientific Publications, many dubious arguments have been used by traditional publishers to attack the new Open Access publishing model.

Myth 1: The cost of providing Open Access will reduce the availability of funding for research

Myth 2: Access is not a problem – virtually all UK researchers have the access they need

Myth 3 :The public can get any article they want from the public library via interlibrary loan

Myth 4: Patients would be confused if they were to have free access to the peer-reviewed medical literature on the web

Myth 5: It is not fair that industry will benefit from Open Access

Myth 6: Open Access threatens scientific integrity due to a conflict of interest resulting from charging authors

Myth 7: Poor countries already have free access to the biomedical literature

Myth 8: Traditionally published content is more accessible than Open Access content as it is available in printed form

Myth 9: A high quality journal such as Nature would need to charge authors £10,000-£30,000 in order to move to an Open Access model

Myth 10: Publishers need to make huge profits in order to fund innovation

Myth 11: Publishers need to take copyright to protect the integrity of scientific articles

Posted on by mklang

Law and the pirate bay

On the 29th of January the Frederiksberg county court (in Denmark), at the request of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), ordered (court decision available here) the ISP Tele2 to block access to The Pirate Bay. In 2006 a Copenhagen court ordered Tele2 to shut its customers’ access to AllOfMP3.com, a Russia-based online music site.

According to The Pirate Bay the only other countries to block The Pirate Bay are China and Turkey (Piratbyrån). The Danish Pirate group have already published articles on how to bypass the measures set up by Tele2 and have prepared a letter of complaint for the customers of Tele2 to copy&paste into emails (Also on jesperbay.org).

In Sweden the courts are beginning to move on the Case against The Pirate Bay (BBC News). Similarly in China, three major music industry companies petition courts to order Baidu to remove all links on its music delivery service to copyright-infringing tracks. (PC world, ArsTechnica).

We all know that these organizations are being attacked the question is what is it that they are doing that is so wrong?

First of all it is important to state that these sites, possibly with the exception of AllOfMP3, do not have copyrighted material on their servers without permission. In other words the organizations cannot be sued for direct copyright infringement.

They are being sued for helping others find that material. Some argue that that the role of The Pirate Bay is similar to that of linking (Copyriot). In other words the Pirate Bay is no different to Google or Yahoo. The debate on linking, and in particular on deep-linking & framing, was never really ended. It seems to have fizzled out in the last millennium, with non-cases such as Shetland Times vs Shetland News (in 1996 see for example BBC).

Eventually the whole concept of depth was lost on the Internet – in more ways than one it may seem.

But is The Pirate Bay only linking? The Pirate Bay is a large collection of torrent files. These files (and their protocol) are an ingenious way of utilizing the web to ensure redundancy of information and the a distribution of traffic to remove bottlenecks.

The information contained in these files help to the person wishing to download. With no technical knowledge the user can download copyrighted material seamlessly from several sources at the same time while downloading the user also shares the parts of the material he/she already has downloaded. The actions of the user are a clear case of copyright violation if the original material is copyrighted and is shared without the consent of the copyright holder.

The Pirate Bay stores the torrent files and hands them out to all who want them. They have no way of knowing whether the torrent files contain information about legal or illegal material. Whether it is there with or without the consent of the copyright holder. So are they contributing to copyright infringement?

Contributory infringement analogous to the getaway driver in a bank robbery. Even though he/she did not go into the bank he/she is part of the robbery. There are two parts in contributory infringement: The infringer knew or had reason to know of the infringing activity and active participation in the infringement (for example inducing it, causing it or contributing to it).

It is difficult for The Pirate Bay to claim that they have not had reason to know that their site is playing an important role in the copyright infringement of others and supplying the torrents in a easy to use way could definitely be seen as contributing to the infringement.

Of course the same arguments can be made against many search engines but The Pirate Bay cannot use the argument that it is used mainly for legal purposes as Google would argue. The argument that The Pirate Bay may be discriminated against in the fact that it is being singled out for prosecution may be true but it is hardly a defense that will successfully permit any contributory infringing behavior.

We should expect to see the case against the Pirate Bay move from upwards and onwards until it reaches the highest court. Most probably by the time the case is resolved reality and business models for online content will have changed…

We look forward to many interesting arguments along the way.

Posted on by mklang