100 Best Arabic Books (according to the Arab Writers Union)
And the best? According to the Arab Writers Union, “The Cairo Trilogy” by Egyptian (Nobel-prize winning) author Naguib Mahfouz. The blog post includes publication data and whether an English translation is available.
The Man who Foresaw Science Fiction
Matthew Lasar writing in Ars Technica’s “Law + Disorder” blog on Hugo Gernsback, “the man who popularized the term science fiction,’ and in whose name the Hugo Awards are given to writers to this day.”
Immigration March in downtown Los Angeles, May 1, 2010.
Photo © 2010 j.r.mchale. More photos at flickr.
Immigration March in downtown Los Angeles, May 1, 2010.
Photo © 2010 j.r.mchale. More photos at flickr.
Immigration March in downtown Los Angeles, May 1, 2010.
Photo © 2010 j.r.mchale. More photos at flickr.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQTxZ_zxAv8
How To Challenge a Wrongful YouTube Takedown Through Fair Use
We’ve been tracking the Hitler Downfall meme and have become very concerned about the recent slate of YouTube takedowns by Constantin Films.
In talking to many of the creators of the Downfall meme videos, we discovered that many of them were unaware of their rights and protections under Fair Use.
To this end, we’ve created a short video that explains why we think that these videos are transformative works, why they should be protected under the Fair Use doctrine and what creators can do to challenge these unfair takedowns.
For additional information on Fair Use and your rights as content creator online, check out the following resources:
- eff.org: A Guide to YouTube Removals
- Center for Social Media: Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video
- The Stanford Center for Internet and Society’s Fair Use Project
Big thanks to Pat Aufderheide of the Center for Social Media and Elizabeth Stark of the Open Video Alliance for their valuable assistance on this.
I can’t vouch for the legal conclusions (e.g., a particular video constitutes “fair use” – often a complicated assessment, ripe with uncertainty and risk), but the video does walk one through some of the mechanics of the youtube takedown dispute process.
Building an Internet of Things
From SingularityHub.com: “Massive data collection could change the world. Companies all over the globe are working on ways to use tracking and internet connectivity to give new digital life to physical objects and locations … Our objects have things to say, and … companies are aiming to get nearly everything you own to share that information. We have an internet of people, now we are starting to build an Internet of Things. Take a moment and imagine a future where every object you own has a presence on the internet.”
1854: The Blog of the British Journal of Photography questions whether there is “a blatant lack of respect for a photographer’s work and copyright” particularly among news agencies which now scour social networking sites for eyewitness images to use.
The Gizmodo Warrant: Searching Journalists in the Terabyte Age
Paul Ohm at Freedom-to-Tinker.com writing on the dangers of police searches of journalist computers and hard drives and suggesting sensible rules for restricting warrants and searches relating to journalists so as not to impede freedom of the press.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg9qnWg9kak
Tiny Hong Kong apartment transforms into 24 rooms using sliding dividers.
I can watch Al-Jazeera live on my iPod Touch anywhere on earth with an internet signal, but I can’t watch CNN. I can view EuroNews in real time from my office computer in Cairo, but not Fox News. I can watch BBC’s Arabic network live in my lap on a Wi-Fi-enabled jet 30,000 feet above the Atlantic, but not NBC. American TV news organizations may claim to embrace the digital age, but this is studio-concocted nonsense. Not a single major cable or broadcast news network in the United States consistently streams their programming in real time.
Soup: “Blogger” Isn’t A Pejorative
“I think it’s funny when some folks try to replace the term ‘blogger’ with ‘online reporter’ because they think that ‘blogger’ is a pejorative. It’s not. There are unique and distinct skills that come along with being a blogger.”
RIP Malcolm McLaren: wreath on the back of the hearse carrying his casket.
So now we know what Zuckerberg’s megalomania is, and he’s brilliant, and hired the right guys … to make it happen. But think about the role he’s cast himself in for a minute. Facebook is to be the identity system for the web. A company? That just can’t work.
Dan Chiasson, writing in the New York Review of Books on The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis: “The stories can seem like impersonal, even cruel personals ads, as though their author were paying for space by the word…. It is possible to regard Davis’s interest in human beings as more forensic than empathic, as though she were running a clinical trial. But I think the days of regarding her this way are now over, with the publication of this magnificent volume. Joyce called his Dubliners style a ‘scrupulous meanness’: Davis is the heir to that style, and to another, earlier heir to it, Samuel Beckett. But this is one bright and comprehensive book of life, a kind of handbook of human paradox.”
Wow, Maryland, that’s some state song you have:
“Maryland, My Maryland!
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb;
Huzza!
She spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! She burns!
She’ll come! She’ll come!
Maryland! My Maryland!”
(via The Volokh Conspiracy law blog)
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/30183073001?isVid=1
James Dean pulls a gun on Ronald Reagan (in newly discovered tv footage)
According to people like Verizon’s CEO, the US is number one in broadband, no question about it. But one only has to look around the world to see just how specious such claims are. Take Hong Kong as an example. City Telecom made waves a few months ago with its US$13, symmetric 100Mbps connections. Today, the company slashed prices on its much faster 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home offering; a fully symmetric, 1Gbps connection costs HK$199… or US$26 a month.
If you had told me, though, that a new science fiction novel had just come out featuring a planet on which vast turbulent structures of glass fly through the global atmosphere, posing a dire threat to machinery and drifting across whole continents in a kind of low-intensity storm of aerosolized crystal, I would, naively, never have assumed that such a thing might also be possible here on earth.