Month: May 2004

picturing the groove

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > What’s Next: Playing Old Records (No Needle Required):

“The real excitement for me is that the method has the potential to rescue recordings,” said Daniel P. Sbardella, a sound engineer at the Rodgers and Hammerstein archives of recorded sound of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. A recording could even be scanned in bits and pieces, Mr. Sbardella said, and then converted to audio files that can be edited to reconstruct the whole recording.

“The mission of a sound archive is to preserve as much sound as possible,” he said, “so even if that means rescuing a few seconds that are one of a kind, it’s really worthwhile.”

Interesting. When you consider how many perfectly usable recordings are archived but not accessible, I wonder if these rescued recordings — the libraries will likely make them available as part of their mission — will serve as a goad to the RIAA cartel to liberate similar artifacts from their vaults.

Hey, a music lover can dream . . .

Geneva convention: it’s not just for soldiers

I heard an interesting conversation this afternoon on my local NPR affiliate: a former Air Force attorney and current law professor at Duke was discussing the Geneva Convention and its applicability to the situation in Baghdad.

It occurred to me that the whole “End of official hostilities” declaration on 1 May 2003 may have been intended to take the Geneva Convention out of the picture. The speaker made it quite clear that while torture is not defined in the Uniform Code of Military Justice — the rule of law for uniformed personnel — Article 3 of the Geneva Convention is applicable to anyone.
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the return of feudalism?

1594200068.01.THUMBZZZFree Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig

I just finished this last night. It’s worth reading. It spells out a lot of the background in the copyright wars (a phrase Lessig isn’t fond of but admits is an apt description). What I found most useful was the historical review of how each new medium has built on and derived content from its predecessor.

The last part of the book — detailing Lessig’s failure to win the Eldred case before the Supreme Court — seemed a tad self-indulgent and whiny at the same time. Yes, we know the court was unreceptive to the argument, but part of me wonders if Lessig himself isn’t a lightning rod for issues like this. The whole Special Master business in the MSFT/NSCP case is not so long ago.

Anyway, it dragged a bit. Perhaps that’s an artifact of this being a book for a general audience but having constitutional law as its subject matter: most general readers have managed to avoid taking a graduate level Con Law course.

What did ring true was his unhappiness with the legal profession and its role in fencing off the public domain. And the insight into what kind of money we’re talking about when an estate decides to extend its copyright — a million dollars in campaign contributions and other lobbying expenses might protect a given estate’s annual income of $100,000 — was also informative. A million dollars, even to the millionaires club known as Congress, is still an eye-catching sum of money, and it’s easy to see how the copyright extensions keep on coming.

Between this and the abolition of the inheritance tax, we look to be headed toward a return of the feudal society with aristocrats and their inherited holdings versus the rest of us who have to work for a living.

bloom where you’re planted

The Deep North: Northern Summer:

[ . . . ] we talked to a psychologist in Tromsø who was interested in seasonal affective depression, and she told us that there was no evidence whatsoever that it exists. What drives people nuts is trying to lead inflexible nine-to-five lives when the seasons are definitively against them. The cure for SAD is to embrace dimness, to walk in the twilight, to sit as long as possible enjoying the infinite subtleties of endlessly long evenings without putting lights on, adjusting yourself to the turn of the year. As the Finns have long since done; they have developed a whole aesthetic of twilight, or so we are told by our Finnish friends. Which suggests that, as with so many aspects of modernity, it’s not the weather as such but forcing people to live their lives like battery chickens which causes the actual grief.

This actually makes some sense: I have long thought if you’re not comfortable where you live, you should move. I hated living in the sauna that is the Southeastern US, but I never knew how much until I moved to the opposite corner of the country. We *like* watching the sun march across the horizon from equinox to equinox. The quality of light more than makes up for the difference in quantity, and the variety of wildlife, flowers, and edibles makes it a great place to be.

it’s all about money, not music

Can’t add a thing to this post of Wendy Seltzer’s.

Record Labels Can’t Find Artists, Can Find Grandma

The major record labels couldn’t find some big-name artists to whom they owed royalties, but they could find another grandmother to sue.

Good work from NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer gets the record labels to track down such artists as Luciano Pavarotti and the estate of Elvis Presley, whom they couldn’t seem to find in order to deliver royalty checks. Says Spitzer of the live performers, “It’s not like it’s hard to find them. You could go to a concert and throw the check at them onstage.”

Maybe the failure to find artists comes from the record labels’ other preoccupation, dragnetting John and Jane Does in the war against filesharers. Among the dolphins caught in the last round was a Fayetteville grandmother targetted for her grandson’s music downloads. Let’s get priorities straight here.

[Wendy’s Blog: Legal Tags]

a smaller slice or a bigger pie?

Freedom to Tinker: Is the U.S. Losing its Technical Edge?:

The U.S. is losing its dominance in science and technology, according to William J. Broad’s article in the New York Times earlier this week. The article looked at the percentage of awards (such as Nobel Prizes in science), published papers, and issued U.S. patents that go to Americans, and found that the U.S. share had declined significantly.

The charts that accompany this are carefully designed to buttress the point that US-based scientists are losing their lead against Asian and European counterparts. But it would have been more helpful to see the numbers in context: how many more patents are being filed, how many more papers being submitted, how many more PhDs are being earned, worldwide. The article suggests that all these numbers are rising, but it obscures that by sticking to the argument that somehow US scientists are losing out.
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the chart may be a joke but the facts are not

It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so. — Will Rogers

This is the infamous chart that shows the average IQ of states that were won by Gore or Bush in 2000: the Gore-won states are at the higher end of the scale. Almost certainly not statistically valid, but the correlation between facts that aren’t and support for the president is more likely to be accurate and disturbing.

The American Assembler – States With Higher IQ Vote Democrat:

A significant percentage of Americans are factually incorrect about very important issues. These include whether we found WMDs in Iraq, Iraq’s ties to 9/11, and Iraq’s ties to al Queda and terrorism in general.

What’s more striking is that of those who hold factual misperceptions of one or more of these issues, a vast majority support Bush.

Bush’s support is directly proportional to misperceptions of facts. This should give even the most allegiant Bush supporter pause.