Category Archives: copyright

Vampires, nanotechnology and derivative works

A vampire versus silver nano rap, eh? The Oct. 28, 2011 item on Nanwerk titled, Nano Halloween Special – Vampires and nanotechnology don’t mix, offers one up (about 1 1/2 mins. long) just in time for the Halloween weekend.

Continuing with the vampire theme but on a completely different topic, Tim Cushing in his Oct. 28,2011 posting on Techdirt offers this story in his discussion of derivative works,

Jonathan Bailey of the Plagarism Today blog has written up a fascinating piece on the early copyright battle between Bram Stoker’s estate and Albin Grau, the producer of the 1922 film “Nosferatu.”

Film producer Albin Grau originally got the idea to shoot a vampire movie in 1916. Serving in Serbia during WWI, Grau was inspired to make a film about vampires after speaking with local farmers about the lore.

Grau, however, hit a major snag. He had wanted to do a expressionistic retelling of the story of Dracula but the estate of Bram Stoker, spearheaded by his widow, Florence Stoker, would not sell him the rights. Though the book was already in the public domain in the U.S. due to an error in copyright notice (similar to the one that caused Night of the Living Dead to lapse 45 years later),

The film was made and,

… Since early prints still contained the name “Dracula,” the court ordered that all prints of the film be destroyed. Grau was forced to file for bankruptcy and his film studio was shuttered. “Nosferatu” would have been nothing more than a tiny footnote in film and copyright history, but one copy had already made its way to the U.S., where Stoker’s work was public domain.

If the estate had been 100% successful, we likely wouldn’t have performance pieces such as the “Vampires vs Silver Nano” rap. Lucky for us all that Dracula/Nosferatu made his way into popular culture to spawn so much creativity and fun.

Technology impact on creativity contest and the day radio killed music

I’ve been meaning to post this for a couple weeks now. There’s a video contest being run by the Insight Community (it’s affiliated with Techdirt a website where they publish information about copyright and other intellectual property issues, innovation, and more) with a $1000 US prize. From the Oct. 6 (?), 2011 posting,

A few weeks ago we wrote about a contest that NBC Universal was putting on, officially through New York City, asking students to make propaganda films, repeating NBC Universal/MPAA talking points about how copyright infringement was damaging NBC Universal.  In going through the fine print on the contest, we noted a few oddities.  First, you were not supposed to actually use facts or data and make a case.  Instead, the rules flat out told you what your position was.  You had to support the claim that “piracy costs jobs.”  Think the data shows that the real problem is legacy companies like NBC Universal not adapting to embrace new opportunities?  Too bad.

Even worse, the detailed fine print in the contest (which is pretty difficult to dig out), shows that if you win, you lose the copyright on your video.  Seriously.  It’s pretty amazing that a video contest promoting the supposed importance of copyright to creators involves requiring creators to give up their copyrights.  The prize?  A measly $500.

So we’re offering a competing contest, here via our Insight Community platform.  We’re asking people to create PSA videos showing the impact of technology on creativity today.  We’re not asking you to advocate any specific position at all, because unlike that other contest, we’re pretty secure in our beliefs and won’t melt like the wicked witch of the west should someone submit a PSA that challenges some of them.  We believe that the best videos will be both creative and have a factual basis.

Complete details and comments are available at the link I’ve provided. Note that the deadline is coming up soon.

Following on this theme of creativity being destroyed by new technologies and industry panics, there’s this from an Oct. 6, 2011 posting titled, Radio Is Killing Music, on Techdirt,

But what was a lot more entertaining about the article [in an August 1932 issue of Time Magazine] was the paragraph above this, in which it seemed to suggest that radio was absolutely killing music. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the refrain may be familiar:

Tin Pan Alley is sadly aware that Radio has virtually plugged up its oldtime outlets, sheet music and gramophone discs. The average music publisher used to get $175,000 a year from disc sales. He now gets about 10% of this. No longer does a song hit sell a million copies. The copious stream of music poured out by Radio puts a song quickly to death. The average song’s life has dwindled from 18 months to 90 days; composers are forced to turn out a dozen songs a year instead of the oldtime two or three.

Has there ever been a time, ever, in which the music industry’s established players weren’t complaining about the industry dying?

British Library’s new iPad app

How do I love thee, British Library? Let me count the ways. (I know it’s a cheap move paraphrasing these lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning but it’s a compromise since it can take me years to come up with the perfect poetic line by which time this news will be ancient history.)

The British Library has announced an iPad application (app) which will make over 60,000 19th century titles from their collection available through Apple’s iTunes store later this summer. At this point, there are approximately 1000 titles available in the app they are calling the 19th Century Historical Collection. Neal Ungerleider on the Fast Company website writes in his June 15, 2011 article,

The British Library is launching a new library-in-an-iPad application that gives tablet users access to tens of thousands of 19th-century books in their original form. The app, called the 19th Century Historical Collection, is taking a notably different tack to putting classic literature online than rivals such as the Kindle platform: Antiquarian books viewed through the British Library application will come in their original form–complete with illustrations, typefaces, pull-out maps and even the occasional paper wear.

This project follows from the British Library’s previous mobile app project, Treasures. Here’s a video about that one,

Getting back to the most recent project the 19th Century Historical Collection (from the British Library June 7, 2011 news release),

The British Library 19th Century Historical Collection App forms a treasure trove of classics and lesser known titles in fields ranging from travel writing and natural history to fiction and philosophy. The app represents the latest landmark in the British Library’s progress towards its long-term vision of making more of its historic collections available to many more users through innovative technology. [emphasis mine]

I’m happy to see that the staff at the British Library remain open to ideas and experimentation. As I noted in my July 29, 2010 posting (Love letter to the British Library) about copyright, I’ve been having an affair with the British Library since 2000. Here’s an excerpt from that posting which relates directly to these latest initiatives,

Dame Lynne Brindley, the Chief Executive Officer for the British Library had this to say in her introduction to the [British Library’s] paper [Driving UK Research — Is copyright a help or a hindrance?],

There is a supreme irony that just as technology is allowing greater access to books and other creative works than ever before for education and research, new restrictions threaten to lock away digital content in a way we would never countenance for printed material.

Let’s not wake up in five years’ time and realise we have unwittingly lost a fundamental building block for innovation, education and research in the UK. Who is protecting the public interest in the digital world? We need to redefine copyright in the digital age and find a balance to benefit creators, educators, researchers, the creative industries – and the knowledge economy. (p. 3)

In this case, the action matches what’s been said. Bravo!

ETA June 21, 2011: The British Library has recently made a deal with Google to digitize 250,000 texts. All of the books are in the public domain. You can read more about the project/deal in Kit Eaton’s June 20, 2011 article for Fast Company, Pulp, Non-Fiction: On The British Library’s Book-Digitizing Deal With Google. From the article,

Google’s got several other high-profile deals with other libraries, but the British Library deal is significant because the BL is the second biggest library in the world, after the Library of Congress (if you’re counting books, rather than periodicals). There are 14 million books among 150 million texts in a variety of formats and three million are added every year–because the BL is a legal deposit library, so it gets a copy of all books produced in the U.K. and Ireland, including many books from overseas that are published in Britain.

The Library’s chief executive Dame Lynne Brindley has commented on the new deal, highlighting the original mission of the Library to make knowledge accessible to everyone–the Google deal is “building on this proud tradition.” Since anyone with a browser can now access the material for free from anywhere in the world, the deal sets an important precedent that may be expanded in the future.

Making 60,000 texts immediately readable on your iPad is one thing, and adding another 250,000 is another. The British Library is sending a big signal out about historic texts, and it could subtly change how you think about books. For one thing, student’s essays are going to be peppered with even more esoteric quotes from obscure publications as they ill-advisedly Google their way through writing term papers. It also boosts Google’s standing in the “free” books stakes compared to competitors like Amazon, and it does imply that in the future even more of the 150 million texts in the British Library may make it online.

Interesting development!

 

Synthetic biology bumps up against James Joyce and copyright

Who knew? Well, apparently the James Joyce estate found out that J. Craig Venter coded a quote from Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ into some synthetic DNA in May 2010 and the JJ estate didn’t like it.

Venter and his team made headlines internationally in May 2010 because they replaced the DNA in a bacterium with DNA they had created, i.e., synthetic DNA. Here’s how the problem with the James Joyce estate arose (from the March 14, 2011 David Ewalt article on Forbes),

In order to distinguish their synthetic DNA from that naturally present in the bacterium, Venter’s team coded several famous quotes into their DNA, including one from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

After announcing their work, Venter explained, his team received a cease and desist letter from Joyce’s estate, saying that he’d used the Irish writer’s work without permission. ”We thought it fell under fair use,” said Venter.

Carl Zimmer over on The Loom (a Discover magazine blog) offers some additional commentary in his March 15, 2011 posting,

Last year I wrote about how Craig Venter and his colleagues had inscribed a passage from James Joyce into the genome of a synthetic microbe. The line, “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life,” was certainly apropos, but it was also ironic, since it is now being defaced as Venter’s microbes multiply and mutate.

Man, do I wish this would go to court! Imagine the legal arguments. I wonder what would happen if the court found in the Joyce estate’s favor. Would Venter have to pay for every time his microbes multiplied? Millions of little acts of copyright infringement?

I was under the impression that the JJ estate folks are very protective and litigious and sure enough I found an item confirming that impression this morning. Mike Mangan in his March 16, 2011 post on Techdirt offers some perspective on this state of affiairs and on Venter’s own IP (intellectual property) adventures,

Craig Venter, who is no stranger to advocating stronger and stronger IP laws — especially in the area of “synthetic life” — apparently learned recently how those laws can reach ridiculous levels. In a recent presentation, he noted that his team had encoded a James Joyce quote in the DNA of the “synthetic life” he’s been trying to create. However, the James Joyce estate was not amused and sent him a cease-and-desist. Venter notes that he felt that it was fair use to include a quote.

This isn’t the first time that the Joyce estate has done stuff like this, including an attempt to stifle a biography by use of a copyright claim. In that case, the estate finally learned that they had no claim when they actually had to pay up to settle the case.

I think Mangan is in the right when he calls it ridiculous. By the way, Venter inscribed another quote in the synthetic DNA, this one from Richard Feynman. Here’s what Venter wrote,

“What I cannot built, I cannot understand.”

Venter got it wrong. As per Ewalt’s article, Feynman’s quote should have been (apparently the folks from the California Institute of Technology, where Feynman worked, sent Venter an image of the blackboard where Feynman composed the quote),

“What I cannot create, I cannot understand.”

What fascinates me in all this is that quote no longer exist. From Zimmer’s May 21, 2010 posting about Venter, James Joyce and synthetic life,

The fate of Joyce’s DNA points up something important about this project. There have been lots of headlines over the past day about how the scientists who made this cell were playing God. Yet our power, even over synthetic cells, is limited. Once this new cell came into existence, it started changing through evolution, slipping away from its original form. In fact, evolution is the great enemy of all scientists who want to use synthetic biology to supply us with medicine, fuel, and other valuable things. Once they engineer a microbe, they start to lose control of their handiwork. Life takes its own course from there. It is life, ultimately, that recreates life from life.

I previously posted about Venter’s synthetic biology project on May 21, 2010 and posted about Venter’s upcoming visit to Vancouver on March 7, 2011.

Love letter to the British Library

It happened in 2000 and I had no hint of it when I stepped through the doors of the British Library on the last afternoon of my trip to London. A fellow traveler had raved about one of the exhibits (I think it was called 1000 years of English literature) the day before my visit, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered.

It awoke in me a passion I don’t often share but was roused again when I came across an article on Techdirt (by way of Michael Geist) about the British Library’s latest publication on copyright. From Mike Masnick’s article,

The paper brings together 13 different researchers to all share their opinions, and the general consensus appears to be that copyright today is a serious problem in need of reform (and, no, the “Digital Economy Act” in the UK didn’t help at all). Basically, the key points are that copyright shouldn’t be allowed to get in the way of research activities.

You can download a copy of the paper, Driving UK Research — Is copyright a help or a hindrance?, from Techdirt.

Dame Lynne Brindley, the Chief Executive Officer for the British Library had this to say in her introduction to the paper,

There is a supreme irony that just as technology is allowing greater access to books and other creative works than ever before for education and research, new restrictions threaten to lock away digital content in a way we would never countenance for printed material.

Let’s not wake up in five years’ time and realise we have unwittingly lost a fundamental building block for innovation, education and research in the UK. Who is protecting the public interest in the digital world? We need to redefine copyright in the digital age and find a balance to benefit creators, educators, researchers, the creative industries – and the knowledge economy. (p. 3)

Thirteen researchers and writers discuss how copyright has an impact on all kinds of research (music, theatre, law, the sciences, etc.) and some of the problems associated with using laws designed for print  in a digital world. Dr. Dave Roberts and Vince Smith of the Natural History Museum offer their take on the problems with copyright and scientists along with suggestions for improvements,

For working scientists copyright is at best an irritation and at worst an obstruction. The process of science requires the sharing of results so that both the individual researcher and their institution build reputation and the esteem of their peers through recognition of the quality of their work. Traditionally this has been done by publication on paper and has been characterised as a workflow where scientists, the majority of whom these days are publicly funded, create manuscripts that they submit to publishers, who get other scientists to evaluate and comment on the work (peer review). The publisher sells the result back to the scientists. In the classic model, used to defend copyright, the money made by publishers is apportioned between the creator (author) and the publisher. In science, not only does the author not see any money from their work, but the publisher demands an exclusive right to that income in perpetuity.

For scientific publishing:

• We urgently need to separate cases where there is substantial loss of income to a content creator though content dissemination (e.g. a professional musician) from those that make no income from dissemination and rely on this as part of their scholarly activities (e.g. a professional scientist). A positive start could be made by removing copyright restrictions on material older than, say, two years from its original publication date.

• Orphan works should be placed in the public domain.

• Making copies for strictly archival purposes should not be subject to copyright control. Libraries in particular should be able to preserve digital copies in perpetuity, which technologically means regularly making copies.

I’m not sure I buy their musician example as someone who suffers from a loss of income as a consequence of content dissemination when many musicians (including some famous ones) are giving away downloads of their music and exploring new business models but the suggestions themselves seem quite reasonable.

Thank you British Library for reminding me how much I love you. (blowing kisses from Canada’s West Coast).

ASME’s introductory nanotechnology podcast doesn’t mention the word billionth

It’s a landmark moment, I have never before come across an introductory nanotechnology presentation where they make no reference to ‘billionth’ as in, nanometre means one billionth of a metre.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers now known as ASME offers a series of podcasts about nanotechnology on its website. This page is where you can sign up to get free access. (You might want to take a look at that agreement before submitting it. More about that later.) I saw the first installation on Andrew Maynard’s 2020 Science blog here. Andrew is prominently featured in this first podcast.

I enjoyed the podcast and found this new approach to introducing nanotechnology quite intriguing and I suspect they’re going in the right direction. 1 billionth of a metre or of a second doesn’t really convey that much information for most of us. Personally, I visualize the existence of alternate realities, tiny worlds of atoms and molecules which I believe to be present but are not perceptible to me through my senses.

It’s been decades since I first saw a representation of an atom or a molecule but the resemblance to planets has often played in my imagination since. They will always be planets for me, regardless of the fact that more accurate representations exist than the ones I saw so many years ago.

I think it’s the poetic aspect of it all, as if we carry worlds within us while our own planet may be simply an atom in someone else’s universe. One of these days when I have a better handle on what I’m trying to say here,  I will write a poem about it.

Actually, I’ve been meaning to do a series of poems based on the periodic table of elements ever since I saw a revisioning of the periodic table, The Chemical Galaxy by Philip Stewart. The desire was reawakened recently on finding Sam Kean’s series Blogging the Periodic Table, for Slate Magazine. From Kean’s first entry,

I’m blogging about the periodic table this month in conjunction with my new book, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements. Now, I know not everyone has fond memories of the periodic table, but it got to me early—thanks to one element, mercury. I used to break those old-fashioned mercury thermometers all the time as a kid (accidentally, I swear), and I was always fascinated to see the little balls of liquid metal rolling around on the floor. My mother used to sweep them up with a toothpick, and we kept a jar with a pecan-size glob of all the mercury from all the broken thermometers on a knickknack shelf in our house.

But what really reinforced my love of mercury—and got me interested in the periodic table as a whole—was learning about all the places that mercury popped up in history. Lewis and Clark hauled 600 mercury-laced laxative tablets with them when they explored the interior of America—historians have tracked down some places where they stayed based on deposits in the soil. The so-called mad hatters (like the one in Alice in Wonderland) went crazy because of the mercury in the vats in which they cleaned fur pelts.

Mercury made me see how many different areas of life the periodic table intersects with, and I wrote The Disappearing Spoon because I realized that you can say the same about every single element on the table. There are hidden tales about familiar elements like gold, carbon, and lead and even obscure elements like tellurium and molybdenum have wonderful, often wild back stories.

There are eight more entries as of 11:25 am PST, July 15, 2010. I wish Kean good luck as he sells his book. By the way, he’ll be blogging until early August 2010.

Getting back to ASME and their nanotechnology podcasts. I haven’t signed up and am not sure I will. They are insisting on copyright in their  user agreement (link to page),

Copyrights. All rights, including copyright and database right, in this Site and its contents (including, but not limited to, all text, images, software, video clips, audio clips) (collectively, “Content”), are owned by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), or otherwise used by ASME as permitted by applicable law or agreement.

Content Displayed on the Website. User shall not remove, obscure or alter the Content. User shall not distribute, rent, lease, transfer or otherwise make the Content available to any third party, or use the Content for systematic downloading, and/or the making of print or electronic copies for transmission to non-subscribers. User may download only the video clips designated on the Website as downloadable and may not share video URLs with non-subscribers. [emphases mine]

If I read those passages correctly, I’m prevented from copying any portion of the materials from their website and reproducing them on this blog to nonsubscribers. (I trust reproducing portions of their ‘user agreement’ won’t land me into trouble.) Since I copy and excerpt with a very high rate of frequency (being careful to give attribution and links while excerpting portions only), I don’t want to be placed in the position of having to ask for permission each and every time I’d like to copy something from the ASME site.  A lot of my entries are timely so I don’t want to wait and, frankly, I don’t understand what their problems with activities such as mine might be.  I suspect that this agreement will prove overly prohibitive and I hope the ASME folks will reconsider their approach to copyright. I really would like to view a few of their podcasts.

Canada’s new copyright bill being introduced June 3, 2010 (we think), NFB, RIP!, and student copyright video

Last week’s handy dandy National Film Board (NFB) newsletter directed me to their blog post about copyright, documentary filmmaking guidelines, and the video, RIP!  From Julie Martin’s May 19, 2010 posting,

The Documentary Organization of Canada (DOC) released a set of guidelines last week that help filmmakers make sense of how to use copyrighted materials in their films. The Guidelines draw on existing fair dealing provisions set out in the Copyright Act.

In addition to finding out more about the guidelines, you can also access, embedded in the posting, a related  NFB documentary RIP! A Remix Manifesto by Brett Gaylor (approx. 85 mins.), if you follow the link.

Meanwhile,  Michael Geist offers two postings of interest, one about a student-produced video (he offers the English language version and a link to the French language version) calling for fair copyright. In his second posting, Geist offers information about the government’s new bill which is to be introduced (according to reports) this Thursday, June 3, 2010. From the posting,

This is copyright week in Canada as multiple reports indicate that the long-awaited copyright bill will be tabled on Thursday. The recent round of reports are noteworthy for several reasons. First, they confirm earlier reports that the government plans to introduce DMCA-style anti-circumvention legislation.

There’s more including possible changes to fair use and the suspicion that the government may try to fast track the legislation by holding summer hearings.

NNI’s clumsy attempt to manipulate media; copyright roots

Is it ever a good idea to hand a bunch of experts at your public workshop on nanotechnology risks and ethical issues a list of the facts and comments that you’d like them to give in response to ‘difficult’ questions from the media after you’ve taken a recent shellacking from one reporter who is likely present? While the answer should be obvious, I’m sad to say that the folks at the US National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) publicly and demonstrably failed to answer correctly.

The reporter in question is Andrew Schneider who wrote a series on nanotechnology for AOL News. I’ve mentioned his series in passing a few times here and I’m truly disheartened to find myself discussing Schneider and it, one more time. For the record, I think it’s well written and there’s some good information about important problems unfortunately, there’s also a fair chunk of misleading and wrong information. So, in addition to the solid, well founded material, the series also provides examples of ill-informed and irresponsible science journalism. (Here’s an example of one of his misleading statements. If you want to find it, you have to read down a few paragraphs as that post was about misleading statements being bruited about by individuals with differing perspectives on nanotechnology.) The Schneider’s series, if you’re madly curious is here.

Yesterday, Clayton Teague, director for the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office, provided a riposte on AOL News where Schneider, a few hours, later, offered a devastating nonresponse. Instead, Schneider focused on the NNI’s recent report to the President’s Council of Science and Technology Advisors (PCAST) getting in a few solid hits before revealing the clumsy attempt to manipulate the media message at the public workshop that the NNI recently held and which Schneider likely attended.

If you want the inside story from the perspective of one of the experts who was at the panel, check out Dr. Andrew Maynard’s latest posting on his 2020 Science blog.

Two more points before I move on (for today anyway), Schneider’s ‘nonresponse’ refers to both Andrew and another expert as ‘civilians’.

  • Maynard [director of the Risk Science Center at the University of Michigan School of Public Health] and Jennifer Sass [chief scientist and nano expert for the Natural Resources Defense Council], both leading civilian public health scientists who participated in the review … [emphasis mine]
  • “Surely it is inappropriate for the federal government to advise independent experts what to say on its behalf when it comes to critical news reports,” added Maynard, who was one of the civilian advisers on the panel. [emphasis mine]

As far as I’m aware, only the police and the military refer to the rest of us (who are not them) as civilians. Is Schneider trying to suggest (purposely or not) a police or military state?

As for my second point. Somebody passed the list of NNI preferred/approved facts and comments on to Schneider. The first thought would be someone from the expert panel but it could have come from anyone within the NNI who had access and is sympathetic to Schneider’s concerns about nanotechnology.

Copyright roots

If you’ve ever been curious as to how copyright came about in the first place, head over to Greg Fenton’s item on Techdirt. From the posting where Fenton is commenting on a recent Economist article about copyright,

The Economist goes on to highlight:

Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right.

Surely there will be copyright supporters who will cringe at such a statement. They believe that copyright is “intellectual property”, and therefore their arguments often confuse the requirements for laws that support copyright with those that support physical properties.

The article Fenton refers to  is currently open access (but I’m not sure for how long or what the policy is at The Economist). The last lines (with which I heartily concur) from the Economist’s article,

The value society places on creativity means that fair use needs to be expanded and inadvertent infringement should be minimally penalised. None of this should get in the way of the enforcement of copyright, which remains a vital tool in the encouragement of learning. But tools are not ends in themselves. [emphasis mine]

Today’s posting is a short one. About time I did that, eh?

Australian government makes an unexpected nano announcement; San Diego, the Olympics of Science, and the AAAS; Manitoba high school student discusses copyright

Late last week I wrote about a new report, Nanotechnology in Australia: Trends, Applications and Collaborative Opportunities, that was supposed to be launched today. The news article which originated the story was by Cheryl Jones of The Australian, who noted,

THE number of Australian companies in a nanotechnology market likely to be worth trillions of dollars within a decade has plummeted, according to an Australian Academy of Science report.

Federal government reports previously put at about 80 the number of companies engaged in the technology underlying a burgeoning global market.

But now there are only 55 to 60, say nanotechnology experts cited in the academy report, to be released next week.

Little work has moved from the benchtop to the market, the report says, and one obstacle to commercialisation is “often dysfunctional” university intellectual property services.

I checked and this item from the Government of Australia was announced instead (from the Azo Materials site),

The Rudd Government is introducing a comprehensive national framework to guide the safe development of new technologies such as nanotechnology and biotechnology as part of a $38.2 million National Enabling Technologies Strategy released today.

“Technologies like nanotechnology and biotechnology have enormous potential, but we can only realise that potential with the community’s support,” said Innovation Minister, Senator Kim Carr.

“Health, safety and environmental protection are paramount for the Government. This strategy is about ensuring we meet the highest standards while at the same time maximising opportunities to develop these cutting-edge technologies.

I’m not sure what happened to the report but this announcement was a bit of a surprise. Given the material cited in Jones’ story, I would have expected the government to pull back rather than invest more heavily. It seems the government has recognized the barriers noted in the report (which has yet to be released or even seen by anyone other than Cheryl Jones [see my posting here] ETA: my apologies to Ms. Jones, I did find the report days later here at a location I failed to check, for penance I will leave my original wrong-headed and now embarrassing comment) and decided to address the issues head on.

Meanwhile, the ‘Olympics of Science’ is finishing today in San Diego (Feb. 18-22, 2010), the 176th annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). From the AAAS site,

The 2010 AAAS Annual Meeting is coming to San Diego for the first time, bringing cutting-edge research and a host of free events for the public in its role as the United States’ largest general scientific conference.

Described in The Times Higher Education Supplement as “the Olympics of science conferences,” the Annual Meeting has long been known as the premier multidisciplinary science gathering in the United States. This year, it will continue its evolution to a prime international affair: When the 176th meeting of the society convenes from 18-22 February, scientists, journalists, and educators from more than 50 nations will be there.

Under the banner “Bridging Science and Society,” top researchers will discuss their findings in the context of global challenges in the environment, economy, health, and education. Attendees can explore research in the neurosciences, energy, astrobiology, public health, and environmental change, and learn how these advances directly affect courtroom trials, care for the elderly, sustainable cities, border security, and other public concerns.

As part of an unprecedented effort to share the excitement of scientific discovery with the public, AAAS’s Family Science Days and other free events offer a chance at hands-on learning for students of all ages.

I mention it not just because I’m currently experiencing Vancouver’s Winter Olympics but because, in 2012, the AAAS  will be hosting its annual meeting in Vancouver.  To get a better idea of what this means, I’ve excerpted parts of a story by Maggie Koerth-Baker on Boing, Boing about attending some of the presentations at the AAAS 2010 San Diego Meeting. First an excerpt from a nanotechnology presentation,

[David] Cahill [University of Illinois] is part of a team working to improve thermal insulation with nanotechnology. His goal: Create some kind of new material that will disrupt the transfer of heat energy between two objects. Getting it right would have big implications. For instance, we could drastically improve our ability to capture the waste heat from electrical generation and put it to use in other ways.One possible solution is silicon nanowires. These structures are normally baby-butt smooth, but as you make their surfaces more and more rough, the nanowires conduct less and less thermal energy. Right now, it’s not exactly clear why that trick works. But understanding it could put Cahill’s team on the right path.

He’s not the only one taking energy technology nano. Another researcher on the same panel, Yi Cui, Ph.D., of Stanford, is applying nanostructures to energy storage, in hopes of developing smaller batteries that can hold more power.

In fact, according to Cui, nanotech is absolutely essential to any future progress with batteries. Storage capacity for size has plateaued, he explained. To go further, we have to start making electrodes out of completely different—and probably completely new—materials.

Note: I’ve mentioned Cui and his work at Stanford University here. More from Koerth-Baker, this time it’s from a science history presentation on measurements and averages,

Before that [1761], obviously, scientists still made mistakes. Multiple measurements or experiments still yielded varying results. But they dealt with the variation in a very different way—they picked the answer they thought represented their best work.

To modern ears, that sounds like cheating—”You just randomly decided on the number you liked best? That’s science?” But, at the time, it was perfectly logical. Historically, scientists viewed themselves as craftsmen,[Jeff]  Buchwald said. If you were building a piece of fine furniture, you wouldn’t make a bunch and pick the average to display. You’d choose the finished version that was the best, and best displayed your woodworking skill.

Intriguing, eh? If you want to find out who introduced the concept of averaging scientific measurements and why he was too embarrassed to publish this in his first research, do read Koerth-Baker’s piece.

For my last bit, I’m back on the copyright trail and thanks to Techdirt for alerting me to this essay on file-sharing and morality written by a grade 12 student at Balmoral Hall School (all girls) in Winnipeg,Manitoba. Kamal Dhillon won the 2010 Glassen Ethics competition,

This year’s essay topic was: “Is it OK to download music, movies and games without paying?” There were about 80 entries from high schools in Winnipeg and across the province. The contest, held annually since 2007, is jointly sponsored by The Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics and The Department of Philosophy at the University of Manitoba. The winner receives $1,000. The Winnipeg Free Press publishes the winning essay.

From the Winnipeg Free Press (Feb.13, 2010 edition), an excerpt from Dhillon’s essay,

MILLIONS of people, mostly but not all young, engage in file sharing.

The multinational corporations who make and sell the material are not happy with this development. Their profits are threatened and they, in turn, are threatening to sue, for huge amounts of money, individuals who engage in file sharing.

I support the act of file sharing and argue that the free sharing of these forms of intellectual property would likely produce, overall, more good than harm for society.

It’s a thoughtful piece and well worth reading.