bertramonline.com

• London A-Z Nice…
• Soviet bus-stops Eh: interesting…
• Once was England Nostalgia.

+++

Music in the air “To hear accurate, forceful music filling up a space with great acoustics is a very different experience. It’s like the difference between artificial vanilla and natural, or between Two-Buck-Chuck and a high-end Pinot Noir.” Yes, indeed. There is a place for iPods and their ilk, but…

Via Norman Geras: Citizen Philosophers: “A 2008 law requires Brazilian teenagers to study philosophy because it is ‘necessary for the exercise of citizenship.’”.

Social democracy and equal opportunity John Quiggin ignites an important discussion.

Sherwood Anderson – Lift Up Thine Eyes “The following article, written in 1930 by American author Sherwood Anderson lays bare the essential nature of exploiting society – the utter subordination of human beings to an alien will in the process of production.”

Is this the twilight of blues music? ‘Majestic art form needs help to sing another day’. Unfortunately.

Fine Art Photography – Pah, Really ‘I’m not paying you $5.0 million for your bush picture unless you poop on the grass to make it “ironic.”’

+++

It is not at all surprising that Elsevier would be a vocal SOPA supporter… If I wanted to wax lyrically, I would say that the winds of the Arab spring are now blowing through the dusty halls of academia — but that is not correct: the whole Open Access thing started before all that. But there is a another pattern, though: Big Content, that for decades needed to do little to see revenue pouring in, suddenly notices that something is going on, that society and technology have moved on, and that their ways of doing business are beginning to become obsolete. And instead of adapting to or exploring these new ways, their impulse is to run for legal cover — merrily assisted by, it seems, US Democrats more often than not.

Universities have to pay thousands of dollars every year to read their own research online. Blame the broken economics of academic publishing. “This morning, I searched for an article about autism on JSTOR, the online database of academic journals. I have a child on the autistic spectrum, and I like to be aware of the latest research on the topic. I could not access any of the first 200 articles that contained the word “autism.” That’s because, for the most part, only individuals with a college ID card can read academic journal articles. Everyone else, including journalists, non-affiliated scholars, think tanks and curious individuals, must pay a substantial fee per article, if the articles are available at all.
I later found one article that was available for $38. I’m not sure why one twelve page article costs $38. It takes me about eight minutes to scan a twelve page article. The researcher receives no royalties. Why does it cost so much to read one article?”

Putting the nix on open access? — has links to a few open/close access discussions.

Friends Really Don’t Let Friends Publish in Elsevier Journals “This is a plausibly effective form of collective action, since these journals, published by a notably rapacious and demonstrably dishonest commercial enterprise, rely on a lot of volunteer work to keep going. If academics stop working for Elsevier journals for free, either because they sign up to these commitments, or because they get the broad feeling that Elsevier is bad news, then the company’s business model collapses.”

Cracking Open the Scientific Process “Dr. Madisch, of ResearchGate, acknowledged that he might never reach many of the established scientists for whom social networking can seem like a foreign language or a waste of time. But wait, he said, until younger scientists weaned on social media and open-source collaboration start running their own labs.”

Elsevier = Evil ‘Along with SOPA and PIPA, our government is contemplating another acronym with deplorable consequences for the free dissemination of information: RWA, the Research Works Act. This is a bill to, it says, “ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector”, where the important phrase is “private sector” — it’s purpose is to guarantee that for-profit corporations retain control over the publication of scientific information.’

Information wants to be free. Congress wants it to be held for ransom. “Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) is trying to end taxpayer access to publicly-funded research.”

A science-centric SOPA boycott “Here’s another SOPA supporter for you to boycott: Elsevier, publisher of many medical and scientific journals. You might also remember them from a 2009 scandal where Elsevier published fake journals as covert advertisements for pharmaceutical companies.”

+++

A few things that I have found enjoyable/objectionable/vaguely interesting:

Even if it is not happening right at this moment after all — worth pondering:

SOPA, Internet regulation, and the economics of piracy // SOPA/PIPA mashup: how much Hollywood money did your lawmaker take? // Chris Dodd to Obama: Hollywood will stop supporting you because you were soft on SOPA and PIPA

Seems like the real special interests to whom the Dems are in thrall are… well, big business. Not surprisingly.

In the offices of today:

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature. (Susan Cain)

And related to this:

Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. At such moments, brainstorming can seem like an ideal mental technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is one overwhelming problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work. (Jonah Lehrer)

Two things worth reading, too:

• Caroline Fourest: A Feminist Against Multiculturalism — “For a believer in universalism the Kantian problem of how a world-wide ‘republic’ of right (as law) is compatible with the existence of separate political republics remains unresolved. This perhaps, remains the hardest issue of them all.”

• Apple for the Teacher — I am a fanboy of sorts myself, but this is a nice dose of some anti-Koolaid.

+++

A few things to watch:

• Watch Errol Morris’ Tribute to Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
• The Richard Feynman Trilogy: The Physicist Captured in Three Films
• 15 Free Charlie Chaplin Films Online
• Ingmar Bergman’s Soap Commercials Wash Away the Existential Despair
• New York in the 80s

+++

Huh?

The charge on the police docket was “disrupting class”. But that’s not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were bullying her with taunts of “you smell”.

The US schools with their own police

+++