Cody Taylor

MJackson writes “The UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has published a draft set of proposals for tackling illegal broadband file sharing (P2P) downloads by persistent infringers, among other things. The proposals form part of a discussion piece concerning the role that a UK Digital Rights Agency (DRA) could play. UK Internet Providers will already be required to warn those suspected of such activity and collect anonymised information on serious repeat infringers, though they could soon be asked to go even further. The new discussion paper, while not going into much detail, has proposed two potential example solutions to the problem. UK ISPs could employ protocol blocking or bandwidth restrictions in relation to persistent infringers. In other words, P2P services could be blocked, or suspected users might find their service speeds seriously restricted.”

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I Believe in Unicorns writes “Red Hat’s patent policy says ‘In an attempt to protect and promote the open source community, Red Hat has elected to… develop a corresponding portfolio of software patents for defensive purposes. We do so reluctantly…’ Meanwhile, USPTO Application #: 20090063418, ‘Method and an apparatus to deliver messages between applications,’ claims a patent on routing messages using an XQuery match, which is an extension of the ‘unencumbered’ AMQP protocol that Red Hat is helping to make. Is this a defensive patent, or is Red Hat cynically staking out a software patent claim to an obvious extension of AMQP? Is Red Hat’s promise to ‘refrain from enforcing the infringed patent’ against open source a reliable contract, or a trap for the unwary? Given the Microsoft-Red Hat deal in February, are we seeing Red Hat’s ‘Novell Moment?'” Reader Defeat_Globalism contributes a related story about an international research team who conducted experiments to “quantify the ways patent systems and market forces might influence someone to invent and solve intellectual problems.” Their conclusion was that a system which doesn’t restrict prizes to the winner provides more motivation for innovation.

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volume4 writes “The switch has been flipped and Jaiku has been moved to App Engine. Google will no longer be developing Jaiku, so the code and the future of Jaiku is in the hands of the open source community. From the Jaiku blog: ‘Today, we are open sourcing the Jaiku code base under the Apache License 2.0. The code is available as JaikuEngine on Google Code Project Hosting as of now. Anyone can set up and run their own JaikuEngine instance on Google App Engine.'” We discussed Google’s purchase of Jaiku in 2007, and their subsequent decision to halt development a few months ago.

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theodp writes “Just when you thought annual reviews couldn’t get worse, BusinessWeek reports that HR departments at companies like Microsoft and IBM are starting to use mathematical analysis to determine the value of each employee. At an undisclosed Internet company, analysis of (non-verbal) communications was used to produce a circle to represent each employee — those determined to generate or pass along valuable info were portrayed as large and dark-colored circles (‘thought leaders’ and ‘networked curators’), while those with small and pale circles were written off as not adding a hell of a lot. ‘You have to bring the same rigor you bring to operations and finance to the analysis of people,’ explains Microsoft’s Rupert Bader. Hey, who could argue with what Quants did for finance?”

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hessian notes a Cornell survey, published in the Psychological Bulletin, of 35 years of sociological studies that concludes that women tend to choose non-math-intensive fields for their careers not because they lack mathematical ability, but because they want flexibility to raise children or prefer less math-intensive fields of science. “‘A major reason explaining why women are underrepresented not only in math-intensive fields but also in senior leadership positions in most fields is that many women choose to have children, and the timing of child rearing coincides with the most demanding periods of their career, such as trying to get tenure or working exorbitant hours to get promoted,’ said lead author Stephen J. Ceci… The authors concluded that hormonal, brain, and other biological sex differences were not primary factors in explaining why women were underrepresented in science careers, and that studies on social and cultural effects were inconsistent and inconclusive. They also reported that although ‘institutional barriers and discrimination exist, these influences still cannot explain why women are not entering or staying in STEM careers,’ said Ceci.”

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An anonymous reader writes “A few days ago, Inner Fence released a paid iPhone app called Infinite SMS, which let iPhone users employ Google’s free SMS gateway to send SMS messages without paying their service providers. The resulting surge in traffic on Google’s SMS gateway forced Google to block all third-party applications from using the free SMS feature — including Google’s own GTalk client.”

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rsk writes “For the last few weeks I’ve been experiencing terrible streaming video performance from Netflix on both my Xbox 360 and PC. While my Xbox 360 would at least stream at a lower resolution, my PC cannot seem to avoid 2-hr. buffering times before playback even started. I smelled shenanigans and started digging. With some help finding the debug menu for the streaming video player, I set out to figure out why playback was so slow. It seems that Netflix is significantly throttling Watch Instantly users (on the PC) down to an unusable cap — in my case, 48 kbps — on a per-connection basis.”

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Reader Hugh Pickens sends in news from the NYTimes a few days back of what is believed to be a 500-year-old portrait of William Shakespeare, painted 6 years before his death. No existing portrait, that most experts consider to be genuine, was captured during Shakespeare’s lifetime. “It shows Shakespeare as a far more alluring figure than the solemn-faced, balding image that has been conveyed by previous engravings, busts and portraits. ‘His face is open and alive, with a rosy, rather sweet expression, perhaps suggestive of modesty,’ said a brochure for an exhibition opening in Stratford. The portrait came to light when Alec Cobbe visited the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2006 to see an exhibition, ‘Searching for Shakespeare,’ and realized that the Folger portrait, whose authenticity had been doubted for decades, was a copy of the one that had been in his family’s art collection since the mid-18th century, with the family unaware that the man depicted might be Shakespeare. Scientific studies at Cambridge showed that the oak panel on which the Cobbe portrait was mounted came from trees felled in the last 20 years of the 16th century, pointing to a date for the painting in the early 1600s.” For balance, the New Yorker disputes some of the claims in the NYTimes account, and for good measure tosses in another purported Shakespeare portrait from life, this one discovered 3 years ago in Canada.

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Defeat Globalism writes in with a Canadian court decision that has ordered a man suing over injuries from a car accident to answer questions about content on his private “friends only” Facebook page. “Lawyers for Janice Roman, the defendant in the lawsuit, believe information posted on John Leduc’s private Facebook site — normally accessible only to his approved ‘friends’ — may be relevant to his claim an accident in Lindsay in 2004 lessened his enjoyment of life. As a result of the ruling by Justice David Brown of Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice, Leduc must now submit to cross-examination by Roman’s lawyers about what his Facebook page contains. Brown’s Feb. 20 ruling also makes clear that lawyers must now explain to their clients ‘in appropriate cases’ that postings on Facebook or other networking sites — such as MySpace, LinkedIn and even blogs — may be relevant to allegations in a lawsuit, said Tariq Remtulla, a Toronto lawyer who has been following the issue.”

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NigelTheFrog writes “Researchers in England have used fMRI to map the activity in volunteers’ hippocampuses. From these scans, they could pinpoint exactly where they were in a virtual reality landscape. ‘Specific parts of each participant’s hippocampus were active after that person had navigated to particular places in the room. A few practice rounds provided fodder for creating algorithms for each participant that correlated different brain activity patterns with different virtual locations. The algorithms, the team found, could in turn “predict” new virtual locations, not those used during practice rounds, based on each person’s pattern of brain activity.'”

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