youranonnews:

ACTA in a Nutshell –

What is ACTA?  ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. A new intellectual property enforcement treaty being negotiated by the United States, the European Community, Switzerland, and Japan, with Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Canada recently announcing that they will join in as well.

Why should you care about ACTA? Initial reports indicate that the treaty will have a very broad scope and will involve new tools targeting “Internet distribution and information technology.”

What is the goal of ACTA? Reportedly the goal is to create new legal standards of intellectual property enforcement, as well as increased international cooperation, an example of which would be an increase in information sharing between signatory countries’ law enforcement agencies.

Negotiating Parties - 

• Australia
• Canada
• European Union
• Japan
• Mexico
• Morocco
• New Zealand
• The Republic of Korea
• Singapore
• Switzerland
• United States

Essential ACTA Resources - 

• HOW TO ACT AGAINST ACTA: Make a difference
• Read more about ACTA here: ACTA Fact Sheet
• Read the authentic version of the ACTA text as of 15 April 2011, as finalized by participating countries here: ACTA Finalized Text
• Follow the history of the treaty’s formation here: ACTA history
• Read letters from U.S. Senator Ron Wyden wherein he challenges the constitutionality of ACTA: Letter 1 | Letter 2 | Read the Administration’s Response to Wyden’s First Letter here: Response
• Watch a short informative video on ACTA: ACTA Video
• Watch a lulzy video on ACTA: Lulzy Video
• Reuters: ACTA signed in Tokyo: Article
• United States ACTA: Read
• European Union Trade Commission ACTA: Read
• Australian Gov’t ACTA: Read
• Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic: Read
• ACTA Undermines Access to Medicines: Article

Say NO to ACTA. It is essential to spread awareness and get the word out on ACTA. #ActAgainstACTA

newyorker:

Cartoon of the day. For more issue cartoons: http://nyr.kr/r46had

Parking Ζαππείου on Flickr.

Parking Ζαππείου

pano-mad-201108192100 on Flickr.

Wide panorama of sunset over Nydri village at Lefkas

DSC_1508 on Flickr.

Είναι σαν να ξέρει πότε ερχόμαστε και να μας περιμένει… Δεύτερη χρονιά!

πριν από λίγο, στιχομυθία μεταξύ ηλικιωμένου που ανέβαινε (με την κόρη του) την Βασιλίσσης Σοφίας στο ύψος της Βουλής και ενός ΜΑΤ:

- Το παρακάνατε λίγο τις προάλλες.

- (ΜΑΤ, φωναχτά, να το ακούσουμε καλά) Κι άλλα τόσα κεφάλια έπρεπε να ανοίξουμε.

Τρομακτικό.

Paper textbooks, it seems, may not be quite as obsolete as they appear.

underpaidgenius:

David Blei built an automated system to tag scientific articles, based on lexical analysis. He discovered that his tool would aggregate articles with similar terms, and based on the historical relationship, he wondered about how ideas spread. Put another way, we wanted to understand which papers spread important ideas, something often missing in the actual citations:

Dr Blei found himself wondering if his method could yield any truly novel insights into the scientific method. And he thinks it can. In tandem with Sean Gerrish, a doctoral student at Princeton, he has now produced a version that not only peruses text for topics, but also tracks how these topics evolve, by looking at how the patterns in each topic bin change from year to year.

The new version is able to trace a topic over time. For example, a 1903 paper with the evocative title “The Brain of Professor Laborde” was correctly assigned to the same topic bin as “Reshaping the Cortical Motor Map by Unmasking Latent Intracortical Connections”, published in 1991. This allows important shifts in terminology to be tracked down to their origins, which offers a way to identify truly ground-breaking work—the sort of stuff that introduces new concepts, or mixes old ones in novel and useful ways that are picked up and replicated in subsequent texts. So a paper’s impact can be determined by looking at how big a shift it creates in the structure of the relevant topic.

In effect, Dr Blei and Mr Gerrish have devised an alternative to the citation indices beloved of scientific publishers. These reflect how often a particular publication or author is cited as a source by others. High scores are treated as a proxy for high impact. But a proxy is all they are.

Dr Blei and Mr Gerrish are not claiming their method is necessarily a better proxy. But it can cast its net more widely, depending on the set of documents fed into it at the beginning. Citation indices, which work only where publications refer to their sources explicitly, form a tiny nebula in the digital universe. News articles, blog posts and e-mails often lack a systematic reference list that could be used to make a citation index. Yet they, too, are part of what makes an idea influential.

Besides, despite academia’s pretensions to objectivity, it is as subject to political considerations as any area of human endeavour. Many authors cite colleagues, bosses and mentors out of courtesy or supplication rather than because such citations are strictly required. More rarely, an author may undercite. Albert Einstein’s original paper on special relativity, for example, had no references at all, even though it drew heavily on previous work. The upshot is that the Blei-Gerrish method may get closer to the real ebb and flow of scientific ideas and thus, in its way, offer a more scientific approach to science.