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Author: Paul (Page 99 of 147)

Strumpf at Duke: Economic effects of P2P file sharing

Koleman Strumpf will be speaking at Duke on “The Economic effects of P2P file sharing.” Amazing that I have to go to Duke to hear Koleman speak. Jennifer Jenkins of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain writes:

In 2004, Professor Koleman Strumpf co-authored an empirical study concluding that downloading has no statistically significant effect on record sales, and can even boost them. The study was called everything from “heretical” to “absolutely astounding” to “incomprehensible” (by an industry spokesperson). Come hear Professor Strumpf discuss his continuing work on the economic effects of file sharing at our first Information Ecology lecture of 2006. It will take place on Monday, January 23, at 12:15pm. Details are below.

Professor Koleman Strumpf of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

“The Effect of File Sharing on the Sale of Entertainment Products: The Case of Recorded Music and Movies”

Date: 1/23/06
Time: 12:15 p.m.
Location: Duke Law School, Room 3041
Lunch will be served

For industries ranging from software to pharmaceuticals and entertainment, there is an intense debate about the level of protection for intellectual property that is necessary to ensure innovation. In the case of digital information goods, web-based technologies provide a natural crucible to assess the implications of reduced protection because these technologies have drastically lowered the cost of copying information. This talk will discuss empirical evidence of the crowd-out effect of file sharing on entertainment products such as music and movies.

Professor Koleman Strumpf’s research interests are in applied microeconomics with an emphasis on policy applications. His current work focuses on P2P file sharing, prediction markets (such as political wagering markets or sports betting), and the economics of criminal behavior in illegal sports bookmaking. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Financial Times, Science, Economist, Business Week, Rolling Stone, and Variety. He has appeared on ABC News, Nightline, CNN, CNBC, C-Span, NPR, and Bloomberg Radio.

Looking at people looking a photos of people looking at Art

Rosenthal: Big Man and Child
John Rosenthal has a great eye, a steady hand, a wonderful sense of composition and a tendency to reveal humor in a very smart way. Today was the opening of John’s show at Tyndall Galleries. Most of the images were taken in galleries and to good effect like the one above of a child looking at Ron Mueck’s Untitled (Big Man) sculpture in the Hirshhorn Gallery.
There was a very good turn out of writers, photographers and artists as well as lookers.
Next Sunday, John will be giving a gallery talk from 2 – 3 there.

Death to my espresso machine?

Have I been dealing death to my espresso machine by bad grinding? I love my Solis Crema 70 which has been doing a fine job for the past 5 or so years, but a while bad I noticed the flow was slow. I cleaned the machine. That improved things, but occassionally it still slowed. I ground more and more using my Krup blade grinder and that caused things to be worse instead of better. Next the Krup started gasping (not related to the Solis I think). The fine powered coffee had sifted into the power switch. I shook that loose a few times and it kept acting like it would work just a little more.
Today I decided to replace the Krup. There was a nice selection at Southern Season that included a new Krup model. I got a new Krup. When I opened the instructions, I learned that blade grinders are deemed not acceptable for pump espresso machines. Fine for drips and plungers, but no no espresso. Why? The fine powder clogs the wonderful crema pin point holes. Damn, that’s it I thought.
I went back and looked at burr grinders. They are much more expensive and giant. I’m not opening my own cafe with my lovely little two shots at a time Solis. I don’t need a 14 inch high, giant binned, industrial grinder — do I? I’m looking at alternatives now. Solis has a Maestro Plus that looks tempting but a bit steep. What’s a cheapskate coffee snob to do?

UPDATE: I went ahead and picked up a Bodum Antigua (as Badi suggested) tonight. My first cup of espresso out of the Solis Crema is the best I’ve had from that machine. Putting in store-ground espresso was good but this is better.

NBC 17 and Blogs

I just finished talking with Sergio Quintana of NBC 17. The interview will run during sweeps week in February. No one knows what night.

I talked about blogs. How they are powerful because they have an intimate and personal voice. This is exactly the problem with blogs. They are intimate and personal. We have no ground rules culturally to deal with this new public intimacy. Should blogs be treated like diaries or like billboards? We are circumspect (or should be) about material from a private realm like a diary, but we consider billboard information to be completely public. We spoke a little about Facebook and Fred Stutzman’s research which showed that UNC students highly value their privacy when ask, but in practice on Facebook they reveal all the information that they listed as particularly private.

Also mentioned were last year’s Triangle Bloggers Conference and this year’s Podcastercon (the last covered by Sergio). I got in a little about Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media too.

We didn’t get to talk about car songs tho.

Kids, Language and Tech

I’m up to talk to Sergio Quintana of NBC 17 about a couple of things technical and cultural later today.

One will be about tech savvy kids and their use of tech language. he’s all excited that kids know what a wav file is. Heck, in my day we not only knew the name of every car part and its manufacturer, but that stuff was in our music. “Little GTO” “Little Deuce Coupe” “409 (She’s So Fine)”
Now they don’t make songs like that about computers and cell phones! (and it’s a good thing too ;->).

Talking with Tron Guy

Way back in the day, we hosted some projects being developed by Jay Maynard. Then all hell broke loose. Jay became Tron Guy and a net icon of sorts. Jay still keeps a Public Domain IBM Mainframe software collection on ibiblio, but Tron Guy has taken on a life of his own (appropriately at tronguy.net).
I included Tron Guy as an enrichment link for INLS092 today. A few hours after I added the link to the class blog, I got a note from Jay who is monitoring RSS links to his site. You can’t fool Tron Guy.
After a little conversation, Jay sent me a copy of a top secret Tron Guy video done with the folks down at DAVE in Orlando.
I can’t release the video (Jay says hold on), but I did screen it and I can say that Cindy Morgan is just as lovely as ever and that Tron Guy does a better job than the original Tron actor. In the meantime, Jay aka Tron Guy has some very funny videos on his site.

Bama Librarian Nails Plagiarist

A Warren-Wilson alum alerts us to this Library Journal article:

AL Librarian Catches Plagiarist
By Staff — January 15, 2006

In October, Margaret Butler, a librarian at the Tuscaloosa Public Library (TPL), AL, chose for her collection Brad Vice’s short story volume The Bear Bryant Funeral Train (Univ. of Georgia Pr.), winner of its publisher’s Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. But Butler, an avid reader in Southern literature, noticed similarities between Vice’s text and Carl Cramer’s Stars Fell on Alabama (1934; reprint. Univ. of Alabama Pr., 2000) and notified TPL’s assistant library director Elizabeth Bradt. They contacted both publishers, and Georgia agreed to recall all copies, pulp the book, and rescind the award. “I’ve lived here a long time and read most everything about Tuscaloosa or Bear Bryant or Alabama that I see,” Butler told LJ. “I just had a feeling that [Vice] felt nobody would’ve read Cramer’s book.” While the remaining copies of Bear Bryant are now collectibles, several libraries around the country still have it. Said Butler, “We pulled them off the circulating shelf, but since it’s local history, we’ll probably keep them.”

But Wikipedia has a more fleshed out version of the story of the story here. Vice has his defenders.

One of Vice’s defenders is Jake York the editor of Thicket ,where both Carl Cramer’s “Flaming Cross” and Vice’s “Tuscaloosa Knights” were printed together in the same issue. York and those who comment on his defense “Fell In Alabama: Brad Vice’s Tuscaloosa Night” at storySouth blog conflate the concepts of copyright and plagiarism — they are not the same.

One of the Vice offenders, Robert Clark Young (who is not a completely pure character himself), wrote in a tough piece in New York Press that there were additional plagarisms from Vice and pointed out another story which had appeared in Atlantic Monthly was plagarised. Young went to Vice’s University of Cincinnati dissertation and found the same plagarisms in place.

But Young also took shots at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Barry Hannah, Tony Earley and others. This lead to Jason Sanford of StorySouth pointing out that Young had previously attacked the Sewanee Conference. In Sanford’s mind, Young had a vendetta against the conference.

But there is more (and this has been played out over several months now. See wikipedia for links to all sides. And more Vice defence seems to come daily from StorySouth.

My take. Perhaps Vice is practicing remix culture which is legal in the eyes of copyright, but by not crediting his sources he was also practicing plagiarism. Unlike say Pound or Eliot who also borrowed, he borrowed heavily and directly enough without crediting his sources and influences.

Goldberg, Wells, Bush and a biorecorder

In class today, we’ll be talking about “As We May Think,” Vanevar Bush’s 1945 Atlantic Monthly article. I’ve also assigned H. G. Wells’ earlier (1937) “World Brain” and Michael Buckland’s article on the near forgotten inventor of a pre-Memex Memex, Emanuel Goldberg, who had most all of what Bush dreamed of already working in the 1920s.
To my mind, Wells better grasped the potential social use of shared knowledge than Bush, while Goldberg operationalized the Memex concepts so much earlier (and I would say from most of my background readings better) than Bush.

My journalism collegue Val Lauder sends a story about a too observant feathered biorecorder that somehow seems to relate.

Turning tables on Journalists

My collegue Chris Roush on his Talking Biz News Blog takes the story of a BusinessWeek reporter who has his email interview questions posted by the interviewee.
I disagree with Chris and point to Dan Gillmor’s book in the comments. Dan touches on the story on his own blog for the Center for Citizen Media.
Also in the comments on Chris’ blog, thesanitycheck.com folks post a comment and a traceback to the interviewee’s reply.
Then Chris publishes this update: BusinessWeek reporter calls and is mad; Overstock head responds on Internet again. The reporter hasn’t caught on yet.
Of course I posted a comment to Dan’s blog telling him and his readers about Chris’s posts.
Got all that?
Hang on there’s more. Chris just posted, when I wasn’t looking, another bit from SanityCheck. This time, we learn that CNBC’s marker guru, Jim Cramer is threatening Sanity Check’s webmaster in More from The Sanity Check: Jim Cramer is mad now.

Shield law for bloggers — or for any Journalist for that matter

Dan Gillmor writes from the American Bar Association’s Communications Law conference where a mock Senate hearing about the so-called “Free Flow of Information Act” was underway.
As I comment on Dan’s blog (can’t see how to do a trackback there):

Jeffery Tobin in the current (Jan 16, 06) New Yorker has a lot to say about the background to this discussion in his article NAME THAT SOURCE Why are the courts leaning on journalists?. Worth a read.

Dykki Preppie?

Our urban Dykki gone preppie for 2006? That’s what the picture shows in this week’s Independent. Unfortunately the pic of Dyk isn’t online, but his resolution is

“I am turning over a new leaf this year and will be wearing polos and khakis, cardigan sweaters and sweatshirts tied around my neck. This resolution will fall somewhere between sobriety and monogamy.”
–Dykki, The King of Downtown Durham

Quickly pick up a copy of the January 11 – 17 issue and turn to page 27. Is there irony at play here?

Let There Be Wifi (and more)

Phil Meyer alerts us to this Washington Monthly article by John Podesta and Robert McChesney, “Let There Be Wifi”.

Let There Be Wi-Fi
Broadband is the electricity of the 21st century—and much of America is being left in the dark.

Two decades ago, the chattering classes fretted about economic upheaval rising from Japan and the Asian Tigers. They feared an invasion of cars, microchips, and Karaoke that would take away American jobs, take over U.S.-dominated industries, and shift cultural norms. In the 1990s, America responded with a boom in high technology and Hollywood exports. But a revolution is again brewing in places like Japan and South Korea. This time it’s about “broadband”—a technology that, in terms of powering economies, could be the 21st century equivalent of electricity. But rather than relive the jingoism of the 1980s, American policy makers would be wise to take a cue from the Asian innovators and implement new policies to close the digital divide at home and with the rest of the world.

[…]

With Dr. Stanley

Imagine being 3 feet from Ralph Stanley as he sings O Death (a capella of course). I was there in the Manuscripts Department of Wilson Library about 2 hours ago listening not only to O Death but to Ralph Stanley talking about his early days in music, about learning banjo from his mother, watching him play the old time clawhammer style that she taught him on “Shout Little Lulu.”

Ralph is nearly 80 and has serious hair. He started out singing “Girl From The Green Far Shore” accompanied by his grandson, Nathan, on mandolin and James Shelton on guitar. When Bob Cantwell asked if that was a Carter Family song, he said no it was older. But then owned up that he learned it from T-Bone Burnett.
It was then that we heard a little banjo-playing on “Shout Little Lulu” which turned into a really fast paced romp.
At Bob’s request, Ralph talked a little about his banjo style how he added a finger and played mostly three finger style. These days, he allowed, he didn’t play banjo so much because of arthritis, but he looked pretty damn good to me.
He next sang “Man of Constant Sorrow” which he had first recorded in 1948. In his version, he sings “Farewell to old Kentucky” (I have about 40 versions of this song and each singer says farewell to a different place. Bob Dylan bids farewell to Colorado).
Bob asked about his distinctive vocal style and Ralph said that it was God’s gift and that he hoped he had used that gift wisely. He wouldn’t sang hardly any old Carter Brothers songs because he sings tenor and he needed someone to harmonize with. His son, Ralph 2nd, was in the hospital with flu-like symptoms.
Then he sang “Little Birdie” along with some clawhammer frailling.
Bob asked him about the coming of Elvis which he said “starved out” most of the old time and bluegrass bands. The Stanley Brothers continued because they were (and are) distinctive.
Nathan played lead on “Sandy Ridge” then on another of his own compositions “Papaw’s Mule” named for Ralph’s old white mule.
James Shelton did some crosspicking on “Sunny Side of the Mountain.”
Then the three played “Will You Miss Me” as an instrumental.
After a little discussion, Ralph sang his “scary” song, “O Death” which he later said sold over 10 million copies.
James finally agreed to sing on a song he said he learned from Bob Dylan, “Walking on down the line.”
The group finished up with Ralph on banjo as they played “Old Time Picking”
They’re playing in Memorial Hall with the Red Clay Ramblers right now (I didn’t get tickets in time to go — it’s sold out).

Ralph Stanley this afternoon

Gonna run over and catch Dr Stanley in about 60 minutes.

Musician Ralph Stanley to Speak

A Conversation with Ralph Stanley
Thurs. Jan. 12, 5-6 p.m.
Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, 4th floor

Bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley will discuss his life and work in a free public forum at UNC-Chapel Hill on Thursday (Jan. 12) from 5 -6 pm. in the Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library (4th floor). Dr. Robert Cantwell, an adjunct associate professor in UNC’s Curriculum in American Studies and the author of Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound, will moderate the talk. Space is limited to approximately the first 125 people.

The program is sponsored by Carolina Performing Arts, the Southern Folklife Collection, and the Center for the Study of the American South. For information, contact Steve Weiss, Director of the Southern Folklife Collection, at (919) 962-1345.

Ralph Stanley and The Red Clay Ramblers will perform Jan. 12 in Memorial Hall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The 8 p.m. concert, part of the 2005-2006 Carolina Performing Arts Series, is sold out.

Fredmania – Facebook and Fred on Future Tense

You can’t hear Future Tense on local NPR stations, but you can hear Fred’s interview on the Future Tense website — they even podcast if you’d like to get FT regularly. Here’s what the FT site has to say (but listen too):

Researcher studies Facebook use by college freshmen at UNC

Facebook is an online social networking directory that has become the rage on college campuses since it debuted in 2004. College students have created around six million accounts. Students make personal profiles pages, which typically contain photos. They can exchange messages, and join groups of friends. Profiles often contain a lot of personal information, such as relationship status and sexual preference.

Fred Stutzman, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, has just completed a study of Facebook use by freshman from the class of 2009.

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