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Google Books allows users to search a massive database of books — Google has digitized more than 15 million, and its ambition is to eventually reach all the books ever printed.  Google does not allow access to copyrighted books unless it has an agreement with a book’s publisher. Instead, users receive a list of books that include their search term.  Click on a book, and Google shows as much as its publisher has authorized, or, if there is no agreement with the publisher, Google shows only a few lines of text containing the relevant terms.

Google Books also provides — for the first time — access to millions of what are called  “orphan works.”  These are books that are out of print, but remain under copyright.  Google Books makes orphan works searchable too.  And that turns out to be extremely important.

The orphan problem arises because most books go out of print very quickly. A few copies may be available in used book stores or filed away in library stacks.  But for most purposes, these books might as well not exist.  Copyright, on the other hand, lasts a very long time — currently, the life of the author plus 70 years.  So for millions of books that are out of print and remain under copyright, would-be users — i.e., anyone who wishes to re-print the book, or to use it in a derivative work — must seek permission.

Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a "culture war of fact." In other words, paradoxically, you don't lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.

Kahan's work at Yale. In one study, he and his colleagues packaged the basic science of climate change into fake newspaper articles bearing two very different headlines—"Scientific Panel Recommends Anti-Pollution Solution to Global Warming" and "Scientific Panel Recommends Nuclear Solution to Global Warming"—and then tested how citizens with different values responded. Sure enough, the latter framing made hierarchical individualists much more open to accepting the fact that humans are causing global warming. Kahan infers that the effect occurred because the science had been written into an alternative narrative that appealed to their pro-industry worldview.

If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.

We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed the TV and other high-tech gadgets. Why had he bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat? He laughed, and said, "Oh, but television is more important than food!"

For many in the West, poverty is almost synonymous with hunger. Indeed, the announcement by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2009 that more than 1 billion people are suffering from hunger grabbed headlines in a way that any number of World Bank estimates of how many poor people live on less than a dollar a day never did. COMMENTS (7) SHARE: Twitter   Reddit   Buzz   More... But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night?

unfortunately, this is not always the world as the experts view it. All too many of them still promote sweeping, ideological solutions to problems that defy one-size-fits-all answers, arguing over foreign aid, for example, while the facts on the ground bear little resemblance to the fierce policy battles they wage.

Those students who argue for No Platform seem to be in two camps. The first suffer from some sort of Kim Jong Il-esque paranoia that the BNP or Islamofascists are at the gates of our university campuses just awaiting the opportunity to turn the nation’s students racist. This patronisingly assumes that students are an uncritically receptive bunch capable of being whipped into a crazed mob at the merest hint of BNP or Islamist rhetoric. 

The other camp of students in favour of No Platform, while less obviously hysterical than their fellow no-platformers, is in fact far more insidious. This group talks of creating a safe space to ensure that people do not feel intimidated or feel unable to make their voices heard. They point out that if ‘dangerous radicals’, in this case Hizb ut-Tahrir, are allowed to debate on the same platform, many people might not be able to ‘access’ the events. They’ll feel excluded, picked on. The types of student that need protection from such radical views range from the traditional, such as black students or women, right through to the absurd, such as socialist or ‘nervous’.

Yet I have seen black, women and even nervous students take the stand, as I have myself at the NUS annual conference, and say ‘I don’t want or need your “protection”’. And they have argued this for a good reason. The idea of ‘protection’ assumes that people have a right not to be offended, that they have a right not to hear students with views influenced by Hizb ut-Tahrir. But there is no right not to be offended. Why should there be? These are students after all; they are at university to experience new and often offensive ideas.

When chicks were exposed to puffs of air, they showed signs of distress that were mirrored by their mothers. The hens' heart rate increased, their eye temperature lowered - a recognised stress sign - and they became increasingly alert. Levels of preening were reduced, and the hens made more clucking noises directed at their chicks.

Researcher Jo Edgar, from the School of Veterinary Sciences at the University of Bristol, said: ''The extent to which animals are affected by the distress of others is of high relevance to the welfare of farm and laboratory animals. ''Our research has addressed the fundamental question of whether birds have the capacity to show empathic responses.

One part of Matthew Nisbet's recent report that has received very little attention is its comparative analysis of ideological and partisan perspectives of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Nisbet shows that AAAS members are extremely partisan and ideological.  The word "extremely" is mine, and what do I mean by it?  Look at the figure above:  AAAS members are more partisan than MSNBC viewers and even Tea Party members.  AAAS members are more ideological than evangelical churchgoers but less so than Fox News viewers.  In both cases AAAS members are very different than the public as a whole.

Dan Sarewitz has discussed the problems with the ideological and partisan likemindedness of our scientific community, which has been exploited and reenforced in political debates: During the Bush administration, Democrats discovered that they could score political points by accusing Bush of being anti-science. In the process, they seem to have convinced themselves that they are the keepers of the Enlightenment spirit, and that those who disagree with them on issues like climate change are fundamentally irrational. Meanwhile, many Republicans have come to believe that mainstream science is corrupted by ideology and amounts to no more than politics by another name. Attracted to fringe scientists like the small and vocal group of climate skeptics, Republicans appear to be alienated from a mainstream scientific community that by and large doesn't share their political beliefs. The climate debacle is only the most conspicuous example of these debilitating tendencies, which play out in issues as diverse as nuclear waste disposal, protection of endangered species, and regulation of pharmaceuticals. How would a more politically diverse scientific community improve this situation? First, it could foster greater confidence among Republican politicians about the legitimacy of mainstream science. Second, it would cultivate more informed, creative, and challenging debates about the policy implications of scientific knowledge. This could help keep difficult problems like climate change from getting prematurely straitjacketed by ideology. A more politically diverse scientific community would, overall, support a healthier relationship between science and politics.

It should come as no surprise that the increasing politicization of science has come to make science more political rather than politics more scientific.  At the same time, the more partisan and/or and ideological that you are, the more welcome and comfortable that you will find the politicization of science, as it reenforces your preconceptions.

Scores of Spaniards lay claim to a 'Right to be Forgotten' because public information once hard to get is now so easy to find on the Internet. Google has decided to challenge the orders and has appealed five cases so far this year to the National Court. Some of the information is embarrassing, some seems downright banal. A few cases involve lawsuits that found life online through news reports, but whose dismissals were ignored by media and never appeared on the Internet. Others concern administrative decisions published in official regional gazettes. In all cases, the plaintiffs petitioned the agency individually to get information about them taken down. And while Spain is backing the individuals suing to get links taken down, experts say a victory for the plaintiffs could create a troubling precedent by restricting access to public information.

In a case that Google Inc and privacy experts call a first of its kind, Spain's Data Protection Agency has ordered the search engine giant to remove links to material on about 90 people. The information was published years or even decades ago but is available to anyone via simple searches.

n the present era with the ubiquitous cellphone camera and rapid distribution channels that are well beyond blogs, such as twittering and Facebook, the old editorial policy is no longer viable. Even Straits Times’ journalists have said as much. If the newspaper does not publish such pictures, others will, and its credibility can only suffer.

Here is the front page for Friday 29 April 2011:

Yes, you will notice that there is a wide-angle photo of the crowd at the Workers’ Party rally the previous night that was held at exactly the same location as the iconic rally in 2006.

Yesterday, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, issued a finding of research misconduct for Vipul Bhrigu, a former postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, debarring him for three years from involvement in US federally funded research and from serving as an advisor to the US Public Health Service. The federal register carried the note today. Bhrigu, now in India, was caught on videotape sabotaging the experiments of a graduate student in his lab at the univeristy last year. And today, Nature releases exclusive surveillance tapes, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in Michigan.

Video: This video, obtained by Nature via the Freedom of Information Act, shows Vipul Bhrigu carrying a spray bottle full of ethanol into the refrigerator where Heather Ames had stored her cell culture media and contaminating her reagents.

Further, grumblings on Facebook accounts are hardly ‘anonymous’. Lastly, how anonymous can bloggers be, when every now and then a racist blogger gets arrested by the state? Think about it. These sorts of cases prove that the state does screen, survey and monitor the online community, and as all of us know there are many vehement anti-PAP comments and articles, much of which are outright slander and defamation.

Yet at the end of the day, it is the racist blogger, not the anti-government or anti-PAP blogger that gets arrested. The Singaporean model is a much more complex and sophisticated phenomenon than this Guardian writer gives it credit.

Why did this Guardian writer, anyway, pander to a favourite Western stereotype of that “far-off Asian undemocratic, repressive regime”? Is she really in Singapore as the Guardian claims? (“Kate Hodal in Singapore” is written at the top) Can the Guardian be anymore predictable and trite?

The first reductive move made by the writer occurs here: “Singapore is known worldwide for censorship and corporal punishment.” This is the Western media’s favourite trope of our island-nation. A whole political context and dynamic society gets reduced to these two ‘dirty’ words, at least for a ‘Western’ world that prides itself on ‘freedom’ and believes itself to be on a moral high ground because of this veritable self-image. (One could argue that censorship in the ‘West’ exists but in a different form – there, capitalist hegemons control media companies which quite effectively draw the boundaries of public debate.)

The writer first makes the observation that lots of people have started to speak up and speak out against the “clan” that has ruled Singapore for almost 50 years. The People’s Action Party, is for Ms Hodal, not a political party, but a “clan” – which harks back to tribal societies, to tribalism.

Out of all these unsuitable candidates, the writer chose the Arab Spring as the comparative situation of choice for Singapore, despite the fact that the Arab Spring movements did not occur at a time of elections, that much of the physical ‘protesting’ in Singapore was witnessed at political rallies, that there was no bottom-up movement of ‘revolt’. It is the time of the elections; it is a nationally-licensed period of political behaviour and action, for society to perform a cathartic release, for the Bakhtinian carnavalesque to unfold.

The measure, which was adopted with a broad majority in the lower house of parliament, will prevent KPN, the Dutch telecommunications market leader, and the Dutch arms of Vodafone and T-Mobile from blocking or charging for internet services like Skype or WhatsApp, a free text service. Its sponsors said that the measure would pass a pro forma review in the Dutch senate.

The Dutch restrictions on operators are the first in the EU. The European commission and European parliament have endorsed network neutrality guidelines but have not yet taken legal action against operators that block or impose extra fees on consumers using services such as Skype, the voice and video service being acquired by Microsoft, and WhatsApp, a mobile software maker based in California.

Advocates hailed the move as a victory for consumers, while industry officials predicted that mobile broadband charges could rise in the Netherlands to compensate for the new restrictions.

Consistency is a virtue. One cannot attack - in any principled terms - the reactionary and the credulous, the knavish and the foolish, for a casual approach to sources, data, and evidence, or for disregarding normal journalistic standards, if when it is a leading liberal writer that is caught out it is somehow exceptional. It simply smacks of shallow partisanship.

inconsistency also undermines the normative claims for the superiority of a liberal and critical approach.How can one sensibly call out the "other side" on any given issue in terms which one would not apply to one's "own side"?

freedom of information documents suggest that Soon corresponded in 2003 with other prominent climate sceptics to try to weaken a major assessment of global warming being conducted by the UN's leading climate science body, the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.Soon, who had previously disclosed corporate funding he received in the 1990s, was today reportely unapologetic, telling Reuters that he agreed that he had received money from all of the groups and companies named in the report but denied that any group would have influenced his studies.

"I have never been motivated by financial reward in any of my scientific research," he said. "I would have accepted money from Greenpeace if they had offered it to do my research."

Charles G Koch Foundation, a leading provider of funds for climate sceptic groups, gave Soon two grants totalling $175,000 (then roughly £102,000) in 2005/6 and again in 2010. In addition the American Petroleum insitute (API), which represents the US petroleum and natural gas industries, gave him multiple grants between 2001 and 2007 totalling $274,000, oil company Exxon Mobil provided $335,000 between 2005 and 2010, and Soon received other grants from coal and oil industry sources including the Mobil Foundation, the Texaco Foundation and the Electric Power Research Institute.

study co-author and Columbia University psychologist Elizabeth Sparrow said it’s just another form of so-called transactive memory, exhibited by people working in groups in which facts and expertise are distributed.

A direct comparison of transactive learning by individuals in groups and on computers has not been performed. It would be interesting to see how they stack up, said Sparrow. It would also be interesting to further compare how transactive and internal memory function. They could affect other thought processes: For example, someone relying on internalized memory may review and synthesize other memories during recall. One small but intriguing effect in the new study involved students who were less able to identify subtly manipulated facts, such as a changed name or date, when drawing on memories they thought were saved online.