Clippings

Cultral globalisation and music, film and software piracy

March 7th, 2011 by Graham Attwell
I’ve not read this report. But it is certainly high on my list of reading. The report on ‘Media Piracy in Emerging Economies’ claims to be the first independent, large-scale study of music, film and software piracy in emerging economies, with a focus on Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Bolivia. The report has been produced by the Social Science Research Council based in New York. As the report points out enforcement has not worked and commercial pirates and transnational smugglers face the same dilemma as the legal industry: how to compete with free.
Gilberto Gil, musician and former Brazilian minister of culture says “This remarkable study should be required reading for anyone concerned with copyright and enforcement, or with the challenges of cultural globalization.”
clipped from piracy.ssrc.org

Based on three years of work by some thirty-five researchers, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies tells two overarching stories: one tracing the explosive growth of piracy as digital technologies became cheap and ubiquitous around the world, and another following the growth of industry lobbies that have reshaped laws and law enforcement around copyright protection. The report argues that these efforts have largely failed, and that the problem of piracy is better conceived as a failure of affordable access to media in legal markets.

“The choice,” said Joe Karaganis, director of the project, “isn’t between high piracy and low piracy in most media markets. The choice, rather, is between high-piracy, high-price markets and high-piracy, low price markets. Our work shows that media businesses can survive in both environments, and that developing countries have a strong interest in promoting the latter. This problem has little to do with enforcement and a lot to do with fostering competition.”
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Trusted Data Hubs?

March 7th, 2011 by Graham Attwell
Interesting article on the use of data by newspapers. i am not sure if I agree with the thrust of the argument about trust. trust seems to me a rather nebulous concept in the way it is being used for web development initiatives.

But I certainly agree about the growing importance of data and sense making around such data.

clipped from owni.eu

There is hope. What we are seeing at The Guardian, The New York Times and some others are the early signs of a transformation. Right now, there are only a few stories based on deep data analysis in stream of more traditional reporting. But some journalists already see that exploring data provides an important opportunity, and the practice is growing. From the use of standard deviation to show that movies are getting more polarizing to setting up pseudo-correlation analysis and bulk geocoding to spot the representatives claiming more than others or building indexes on the fly, data and stats are getting sexier by the day.
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Is there a future for lectures?

February 23rd, 2011 by Graham Attwell
Of course Jonathon Wolf is right when he says there are different techniques for performing in front of a live audience and for video. But performance art is only a part of being a good lecturer. Probably the content is important too and how the content is addressed.

I do not see any real problem in performing for camera in front of a live audience. However, the big question is if the lecture is being recorded what is the added value of turning up for the live lecture? The answer I guess is in any interactions which take place. And that is going to be much more difficult to meaningfully record on video.

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk

Using new and cheap forms of information technology to enhance the ‘”learning experience” sounds an excellent idea. “Web-casting” lectures provides students who failed to get out of bed with another chance. But there might be hidden costs. Video and live performances differ, not unlike spoken and written language. The video is on your permanent record, the lecture is here only for today. Might we see lecturing styles change to look better on the video, possibly to the detriment of the live performance? Or should I find something else to worry about?
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Education and Design

February 22nd, 2011 by Graham Attwell
Gove and the UK ConDem government dismiss teh role of design in school buildings, preferring instead to promote an industrial factory development for new schools.

Why? Because Gove sees schools as part of an industrial and business process to deliver to industry the skills and competences they require. And that does not require design!

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk

In the architect-free ConDem future, we can use catalogue designs to build cheap, under-sized state schools occupied on a rotational basis. People will care less about quality and more about profit margins and “shareholder value”. But the factory schools of the future will have little regard for the appropriateness of the design to the school’s educational aspirations – why should they? We are told that this is the teachers’ responsibility. But the question remains: why would a teacher want to teach in such an environment? What message does it send to our kids? Both would soon know their place: they don’t matter. How can this possibly aid learning?
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Dealing with information

February 22nd, 2011 by Graham Attwell
Neat post in the Guardian newspaper by Cory Doctorow on how to deal with the overwhelming volume of social networking goodness available to us today. And I have to admit its the same way I deal with things – I try to read all the emails I get but have long given up any idea of reading every Tweet, Facebook message or RSS feed.
clipped from www.guardian.co.uk

Again and again, this pattern re-emerges: once I could read all the tweets emitted by everyone I followed on Twitter; now I just skim the last 20 or 30 a few times a day and rely on retweets to bubble the good stuff to the top (I do my bit by retweeting things when I think they deserve it).

Once I could read every item in my list of RSS feeds; now I periodically mark them all as read without looking at any of them, just to clear the decks: if there’s something good in the missed material, someone will repost it and I’ll see it then.
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Time for new public thinking – the social web comes of age?

February 4th, 2011 by Graham Attwell
Now this is interesting. hot on the heels of purpos/ed – launching a public campaign and conversation around education comes another UK public space seeking to promote a better conversation. Yet another sign of how thinking and ideas are escaping the dead hand of the university and of how social networking is being used for collaborative knowledge development.
clipped from newpublicthinkers.org

Given the speed at which history seems to be happening right now, there is an urgent need for a better public conversation. We need critique and analysis of Wikileaks, the Big Society or the student protests from people who have an intuitive understanding of how networks change things, but who are also able to bring longer historical and theoretical perspectives to the conversation. We need thinkers ready to puzzle through the world as we find it, rather than forcing it to fit the shape of familiar arguments.

The hope is to host a growing community of such thinking, a public space whose participants are neither united by a party line nor divided by battle lines, a common ground on which to explore ideas together – and in doing so, to reflect the emerging culture of ideas and conversations, informal spaces of learning and connection, which we see as one of the most exciting things going on in Britain today.
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