Quotulatiousness

May 19, 2013

IP lawyers whine about patents and 3D printing

Filed under: Books, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:52

Cory Doctorow appears to have been plagiarized by real life:

Two minor characters from my novel Makers have apparently come to life and written an article for 3D Printing Industry. These two people are patent lawyers for Finnegan IP law firm, Washington, DC, which I don’t recall making up, but this is definitely a pair of Doctorow villains (though, thankfully, I had the good sense not to give them any lines in the book — they’re far too cliched in their anodyne evil for anyone to really believe in).

These patent lawyers are upset because the evil Makers (capital-M and all!) are working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to examine bad 3D printing patents submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office. The problem is that 3D printing is 30 years old, so nearly all the stuff that people want to patent and lock up and charge rent on for the next 20 years has already been invented, and the pesky Makers are insisting on pointing out this inconvenient fact to the USPTO.

This breaks the established order, which is much to be preferred: the UPSTO should grant all the bullshit patents that companies apply for. The big companies can pay firms like Finnegan to file patents on every trivial, stale, ancient idea and then cross-license them to each other, but use them to block disruptive new entrants to the marketplace. The old system also has the desirable feature of arming patent trolls with the same kind of bullshit patents so that they can sue giant companies and disruptive startups alike, and Finnegan can be there to soak up the tens of millions of dollars in legal fees generated by all this activity.

May 18, 2013

The “most balanced gender studies textbook available”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Cathy Young has some concerns with a popular gender studies textbook:

A few months ago, a post with a shocking claim about misogyny in America began to circulate on Tumblr, the social media site popular with older teens and young adults. It featured a scanned book page section stating that, according to “recent survey data,” when junior high school students in the Midwest were asked what they would do if they woke up “transformed into the opposite sex,” the girls showed mixed emotions but the boys’ reaction was straightforward: “‘Kill myself’ was the most common answer when they contemplated the possibility of life as a girl.” The original poster — whose comment was, “Wow” —identified the source as her “Sex & Gender college textbook,” The Gendered Society by Michael Kimmel.

The post quickly caught on with Tumblr’s radical feminist contingent: in less than three months, it was reblogged or “liked” by over 33,000 users. Some appended their own comments, such as, “Yeah, tell me again how misogyny ‘isn’t real‘ and men and boys and actually ‘like,’ ‘love‘ and ‘respect the female sex‘? This is how deep misogynistic propaganda runs… As Germaine Greer said, ‘Women have no idea how much men hate them.'”

Yet, as it turns out, the claim reveals less about men and misogyny than it does about gender studies and academic feminism.

I was sufficiently intrigued to check out Kimmel’s reference: a 1984 book called The Longest War: Sex Differences in Perspective by psychologists Carol Tavris and Carole Wade. The publication date was the first tipoff that the study’s description in the excerpt was not entirely accurate: the “recent” data had to be about thirty years old. Still, did American teenage boys in the early 1980s really hold such a dismal view of being female?

When I obtained a copy of The Longest War, I was shocked to discover that the claim was not even out of context: it seemed to have no basis at all, other than one comment among examples of negative reactions from younger boys (the survey included third- through twelfth-grade students, not just those in junior high). Published in 1983 by the Institute for Equality in Education, the study had some real fodder for feminist arguments: girls generally felt they would be better off as males while boys generally saw the switch as a disadvantage, envisioning more social restrictions and fewer career options (many responses seemed based on stereotypes — e.g., husband-hunting as a girl’s main training for adulthood — than 1980s reality). But that’s not nearly as dramatic as “I’d rather kill myself than be a girl.”

Update, 19 May: Welcome to all the visitors from Reddit. I think this is the first time one of my posts got linked from Reddit (and several thousand of you have dropped by in the last 24 hours). To mark the occasion, I’ve added a Reddit link to the Sharing options on all posts.

May 17, 2013

Rob Ford already immortalized in Taiwanese news animation

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:04

Toronto mayor denies crack cocaine allegations

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:47

I woke up to some fascinating news … Toronto’s Mayor Rob Ford is alleged to have been videotaped while smoking crack cocaine:

The U.S. website gawker.com published an article late Thursday alleged it had been offered a video of Ford “smoking crack cocaine” — and the Toronto sellers were hoping to get six-figures for the video.

“First of all, I’ve spoken to the mayor yesterday and secondly, he denies any such allegation,” Ford’s lawyer Dennis Morris told the Toronto Sun Friday.

Morris wasn’t sure if Ford would address the allegations Friday.

“We’ll just have to see how that unfolds,” he said.

Asked if the mayor plans any legal action, Morris said they’re at the “bottom rung of the ladder of anything of that nature now.”

[. . .]

In the wake of the gawker.com story, the Toronto Star published a story Friday morning by two reporters who state they were shown the alleged video earlier this month and alleging Somali drug dealers are shopping the video around.

While I’m far from a Rob Ford fan, I do find this story to be hard to believe. Ford has managed some awesome face-palm moments during his term in office but I can’t credit that any politician would put himself into this kind of situation. Either way, Toronto politics have been much more interesting since Ford was elected.

Update: Here’s the Toronto Star story:

The footage begins with the mayor mumbling. His eyes are half-closed. He waves his arms around erratically. A man’s voice tells him he should be coaching football because that’s what he’s good at.

Ford agrees and nods his head, bobbing on his chair.

He says something like “Yeah, I take these kids . . . minorities” but soon he rambles off again.

Ford says something like: “Everyone expects me to be right-wing, I’m . . .” and again he trails off.

At one point he raises the lighter and moves it in a circle motion beneath the pipe, inhaling deeply.

Next, the voice raises the name of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau. The man says he can’t stand him and that he wants to shove his foot up the young leader’s “ass so far it comes out the other end.”

Ford nods and bobs on his chair and appears to say, “Justin Trudeau’s a fag.”

The man taping the mayor keeps the video trained on him. Then the phone rings. Ford looks at the camera and says something like “that better not be on.”

The phone shuts off.

Update the second: Popehat calls it the “most wonderful legal threat ever”:

Various journalists are claiming they have seen a video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack.

This led to the most darling legal threat ever from a lawyer named Dennis Morris — who has represented Ford for some time — to Gawker

[. . .]

This is delightful, like that video of the kitten freaking out when it sees a lizard.

First, nobody ever governed themselves accordingly based on a threat from a hotmail account. Second, are you using some sort of comma-based operating system? Third, what the fuck are you talking about?

This sets a high bar.

Reason.tv’s West Wing Weak: Your Guide to Obama’s Scandal-Filled Week

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:22

The Obama White House has released the latest installment of its ongoing and self-congratulatory video series, West Wing Week. But despite touting itself as “your guide to all things 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.,” the new episode seems to be missing some of the key stories that have hit the headlines over the past few days.

There’s no mention, for instance, of Benghazi or the AP phone tapping — and the IRS scandal is barely mentioned in passing.

Perhaps the White House is just too busy completely redacting documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act to fully document its recent highlights.

In a surge of civic pride, Reason TV is happy to offer “West Wing Weak,” our look back at the administration’s past seven days.

“West Wing Weak” is written and produced by Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie, who also narrates.

Zoe Fairbairns’ Benefits

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:55

Neil Davenport talks about the recent re-publication of Zoe Fairbairns’ dystopian feminist novel, Benefits:

Written in the febrile political atmosphere of late-1970s Britain, Benefits is about a future state’s sinister attempts to control women’s fertility, and to encourage responsible parenting, through the introduction of a universal ‘wages for housework’ benefit.

Although rarely out of print since it first appeared in 1979, Benefits has recently been re-issued, with a new introduction by Fairbairns, for the e-reader age. It is now being marketed as a political attack on ‘anti-welfarist Tories’, yet as Fairbairns points out, anyone who views Benefits as simplistically ‘anti-Thatcherite’ is missing its key point: that welfare benefits can become a weapon of social engineering and control. On top of critiquing aspects of welfarism, Benefits lays into radical feminism’s self-defeating slogan, ‘The personal is political’, while passionately championing women’s liberation and equal rights — feminism’s one-time aims.

Like many dystopian novels, Benefits is rooted in the fears, the panics and the politics of the period it was written in. So although it is set in the dying days of the twentieth century, it rather charmingly echoes the late 1970s: all tower-block grime; politico slogans on walls; squats; communes; poorly designed radical pamphlets. It also speaks to the more alarmist rhetoric of that period of the mid- to late 1970s. From ecologists predicting Europe-wide famine to the New Right’s panic over single mothers to respectable racists complaining about ‘coloured immigration’, the political feeling in Benefits is unmistakably mid-Seventies.

[. . .]

Equally prescient in Benefits is the way its fictional state believes that ‘poor parenting’ can have a corrosive impact on the individual and society; this has become an unquestioned orthodoxy today.

Many dystopian novels hint at a future in which pornography has become staple entertainment. Benefits does that, too, and this also speaks to the reality of twenty-first-century life, especially to today’s increasing separation of sex from genuine intimacy (it talks about ‘all that sex and no babies’).

In Fairbairns’ nightmare vision, women who want to receive benefits must undergo ‘a programme of education for motherhood’. This sounds suspiciously like parenting classes, which are increasingly common today, especially for poorer families, or what David Cameron calls ‘chaotic families’. Also, in imagining a future in which parenting is redefined as a ‘national service’, Benefits hints at today’s creeping nationalisation of individual families. The novel even features a supra-sovereign state called Europea, where British politicians willingly offload their own parliamentary responsibilities. Sound familiar?

May 15, 2013

Pollsters wrong-footed (again) by BC election results

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:07

It wasn’t supposed to go down like this:

First things first: British Columbians last night witnessed the most incredible comeback in recent political history, and the biggest choke the province has ever seen.

In the days ahead, Christy Clark’s stunning, come-from-behind win will be endlessly compared to Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s surprise win over Wildrose in 2011. But this is so much harder to believe.

For starters, Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives were actually leading Wildrose in polls right up until the election. The B.C. Liberals have essentially been trailing the NDP since 2009 (briefly, after the 2011 leadership race that saw Clark take the Liberal helm, the party moved ahead of the NDP in polls before again plunging far behind).

And in Alberta, Wildrose leader Danielle Smith made serious campaign blunders. Many Albertans scurried back to the PCs, worried Smith wasn’t ready for prime time. But B.C. NDP leader Adrian Dix made no major mistakes. In fact, Dix’s campaign had so impressed the Globe and Mail that yesterday it published a premature ode to his campaign. Dix’s positive style would surely become a model for politicians across the country, it argued.

Just how historic was the Liberal win? Going back 20 years, there are no examples of a government in a parliamentary system trailing by such a wide margin for the 18 months leading up to an election, then coming from behind for the win.

And the Liberals didn’t just win; they increased their seat count, giving Clark a comfortable, 50-seat majority (the NDP won just 32 seats).

Those results almost perfectly reversed predictions of pollsters who, after yet another spectacularly bad call, will certainly face tough questions.

May 14, 2013

Is this week’s Scandalpalooza actually a “big bath” move?

Filed under: Business, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:22

Megan McArdle explains what a “big bath” is and how the current rash of scandals might be a political version of this financial accounting trick:

I confess, when I woke up this morning, I half expected to find that Obama had confessed to being one of our lizard overlords, or made an offhand mention of the time he’d had the CIA price out a drone attack on Mitt Romney’s headquarters. Between Benghazi, the discovery that Kathleen Sebelius has been leaning on insurers to finance their Obamacare PR, uncovery of a freelance political inquisition by the IRS, and last night’s revelation that the Department of Justice had been trolling through the phone records of AP reporters, this has been the most scandalicious week in living memory. I mean, sure, none of it rises to the level of Watergate. But while the gravity may pale in comparison, the volume is breathtaking. So breathtaking that it’s tempting to think that the administration is doing this deliberately.

In finance, there’s an art known as “Big Bath Accounting” which is used to manage earnings expectations. Here’s how it works: if you know you’re going to have a bad quarter, you look around for anything else that might go wrong in the future, and you decide to “recognize” that bad news now. Inventory looking a little stale? Write it down, man! Customers getting a little slow to pay? Now would be a good time to write off their accounts as bad debt. Is there some uncertainty in the projections about depletable assets like oil stores? For heaven’s sake, why not use the low end of the projections rather than the medium or high end? And we should really book some sort of charge to account for the risk that the Yellowstone supervolcano will explode, killing hundreds of thousands and covering the entire western half of the United States in volcanic ash, and in the process severely dampening demand for our premium line of Wyoming-themed memorabilia.

Corporations call this “cleaning up the balance sheet”. Accounting professors call it things I can’t print because this is a family blog.

Time to free the CBC

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:04

In Maclean’s, James Cowan makes the case for liberating the CBC from the shackles of government subsidy, as it’s now out-competing private business in several fields:

The online success of the CBC should be laudable. Its website received an average of 6.2-million unique visitors last year, making it the most popular Canadian website. Around 4.3-million people visit the CBC News site each month, besting both The Globe and Mail and Huffington Post. Adding to this success is an ambitious five-year plan that will open digital-only news operations in cities like Hamilton and Kamloops and allocate 5 per cent of the overall programming budget to digital content. Once upon a time, it was only private TV and radio broadcasters who had reason to grumble about competing with the Crown corporation; in building its online empire, the CBC is taking on everyone from newspapers to Netflix.

In doing so, the CBC has strayed a long way from its original purpose: to sustain Canadian culture when and where the market cannot. The problem is, the CBC’s traditional funding model now allows it to build its digital empire unfettered by economic reality. In its last quarter, 60 per cent of the company’s expenses were paid by government subsidies while just 21 per cent of its revenue comes from advertising. All media companies are struggling to adapt to shifting consumer and advertising patterns brought about by the digital age; only the CBC had $1.2 billion in government cash to fund its experiments and ease the transition.

Broadcasters would argue the CBC has always operated from an unfair advantage. But the current scenario is different in several respects. For one, the Corp.’s legislated mandate to be “predominantly and distinctly Canadian” arguably placed it at a commercial disadvantage. Further, capital and regulatory requirements made it implausible for commercial broadcasters to serve many areas of the country. But nobody needs to ask the CRTC’s permission to create a website, and the startup costs for a digital service are far less than those of a television or radio station. If small cities like Kamloops need a local digital news service, that’s a need that could be plausibly served by entrepreneurs. The CBC is increasingly no longer complementing the market, but instead meddling within it.

Peter Worthington’s final column

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

It was suggested that Peter Worthington write his own obituary:

If you are reading this, I am dead.

How’s that for a lead?

Guarantees you read on, at least for a bit.

When the Sun’s George Gross died suddenly in March 2008, at age 85, there were few of his contemporaries left alive to recall the old days, when he was in his prime and his world was young. I was one of the few who knew him then.

After attending his funeral I half-facetiously remarked to the Toronto Sun’s deputy managing editor, Al Parker, that I had been around so long that no one was left who knew me back then, and I had better write my own obituary.

“Good idea!” said Parker with more enthusiasm than I appreciated.

I mentioned it to my wife, Yvonne, who approved.

So here it is, not exactly an obit but a reflection back on a life and a career that I had never planned, but which unfolded in a way that I’ve never regretted.

QotD: Litmus testing political scandals

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:27

Dear friends in the media.

Come on.

I mean, come on.

You and I know what’s going with the Benghazi thing. Let me share something that I first put into play during the “was Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account hacked” debate, but that comes from watching the Lewinsky scandal, the where-did–Mark-Sanford-go scandal, the why-is-David-Wu-dressed-in-a-tiger-suit scandal, and a wide variety of wrongdoing committed by politicians:

When there is evidence of scandalous or bizarre behavior on the part of a political figure, and no reasonable explanation is revealed within 24 to 48 hours, then the truth is probably as bad as everyone suspects.

Nobody withholds exculpatory information. Nobody who’s been accused of something wrong waits for “just the right moment” to unveil information that proves the charge baseless. Political figures never choose to deliberately let themselves twist in the wind. It’s not the instinctive psychological reaction to being falsely accused, it’s not what any public communications professional would recommend, and to use one of our president’s favorite justifications, it’s just common sense.

Jim Geraghty, “The Mask Is Ripped Off of ‘Hope and Change'”, National Review, 2013-05-14

May 13, 2013

Peter Worthington, RIP

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

680News reports on the death of Toronto newspaperman Peter Worthington yesterday:

Well-known journalist Peter Worthington, the founding editor of the Toronto Sun, has died. He was 86.

The Toronto Sun reported Worthington died Sunday night at Toronto General Hospital, where he had been admitted with a staph infection.

Worthington enlisted in the Canadian Navy when he was 17 and served in the Korean War before becoming a journalist.

As a former staff reporter at the Toronto Telegram, he covered the Vietnam War, and was in the Dallas courthouse parking garage in 1963 when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot and killed by Jack Ruby.

He also reported on conflicts in the Gaza Strip, the Portuguese Colonial War, the invasion of Netherlands’ New Guinea by Indonesia and was in the northeast frontier of India when Chinese forces invaded, the Sun reported.

After the Telegram folded in 1971, Worthington, J. Douglas Creighton and Don Hunt founded the Toronto Sun.

I met Peter Worthington in 1982 when he attempted to enter politics as a Progressive Conservative. After he was defeated for the PC nomination, he ran as an independent candidate in a lively but ultimately unsuccessful by-election campaign. In 1984, he secured the PC nomination, but lost at the polls (he joked with supporters after the election that it took real skill to lose in the middle of a PC landslide — Mulroney took 211 of the 282 seats in parliament in that election).

Space Oddity … performed in space

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Space — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:59

International Space Station Commander, Chris Hadfield, performs a revised version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Seen in this video is the Larrivée Parlor guitar that has found it’s home on the ISS for the last decade. Chris has used this Parlor, the first guitar in space, to write and record the first musical recordings in space. Here at Larrivée we refer to Chris as “The Space Cowboy”.

Below is the original description as posted by Chris himself on his YouTube channel… enjoy.

Published on May 12, 2013

A revised version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.

With thanks to Emm Gryner, Joe Corcoran, Andrew Tidby and Evan Hadfield for all their hard work.

Update:

May 12, 2013

Influenza: the trade-off between virulence and contagion

Filed under: Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:34

Matt Ridley explains why the breathless claims that this or that flu outbreak could rival the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 should not be taken too seriously:

Here we go again. A new bird-flu virus in China, the H7N9 strain, is spreading alarm. It has infected about 130 people and killed more than 30. Every time this happens, some journalists compete to foment fear, ably assisted by cautious but worried scientists, and then tell the world to keep calm. We need a new way to talk about the risk of a flu pandemic, because the overwhelming probability is that this virus will kill people, yes, but not in vast numbers.

In recent years flu has always proved vastly less perilous than feared. In 1976 more people may have died from bad reactions to swine-flu vaccine than from swine flu. Since 2005, H5N1 bird flu has killed 374 people, not the two million to 7.4 million deemed possible by the World Health Organization. In 2009, H1N1 Mexican swine flu proved to be a normal flu episode despite apocalyptic forecasts.

No doubt some readers will remind me that, in the story of the boy who cried “Wolf!”, there eventually was a wolf. And that in 1918 maybe 50 million people died of influenza world-wide. So we should always worry a bit. But perhaps it’s not just luck that has made every flu pandemic since then mild; it may be evolutionary logic.

Of course, just about every story about influenza you’ll encounter goes the Chicken Little route:

There’s no mystery as to why we talk up the risk every time: All the incentives point that way. Who among the headline-seeking journalists, reader-seeking editors, fund-seeking scientists, contract-seeking vaccine makers or rear-end-covering politicians has even a modest incentive to say: “It may not be as bad as all that”?

Thomas Szasz was no conservative

Filed under: Health, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

In Reason, Jacob Sullum looks at an essay on the late Thomas Szasz that puzzlingly attempts to portray him as a staunch conservative:

In an interesting but puzzling Aeon essay, Cornell historian Holly Case notes the resemblance between contemporary doubts about the scientific foundation of psychiatry and the critique first laid out by Thomas Szasz half a century ago. “It might be that the world has only recently come around to his way of thinking,” Case suggests. Yet she misconstrues an important aspect of Szasz’s thinking by portraying him as “a staunch Republican” and a “conservative,” apparently unaware of his self-proclaimed libertarianism. Szasz, who died last year at the age of 92, was a Reason contributing editor for decades. He described the main motivation for his intellectual career as “my passion against coercion,” which he opposed (outside of situations involving the defense of rights) no matter who was advocating it, left, right, or center. Hence he opposed forced psychiatric treatment, but he also opposed interference in consensual transactions between psychiatrists and voluntary patients. Here he parted company with some left-wing critics of psychiatry.

[. . .]

But Case focuses mainly on common ground between what she views as right-wing and left-wing critics of psychiatry. Beginning in the 1960s, she writes, “Right and left sought to eliminate insanity in order to lionise dissent, legitimise the marginal and condemn the new normal. Few other issues show a convergence of right and left so far-reaching, while still allowing both sides to adhere to their politics and maintain a sense of total opposition.” At the same time, she says “Szasz was conspicuously alone in mounting the barricades from the right,” so she really needs him to be a right-winger. Bending the facts to fit her thesis, she ascribes to Szasz a “distinctively conservative perspective.” That label does not jibe with his opposition to drug prohibition and his forthright defense of the right to suicide, two major themes of his career that Case tellingly ignores. Szasz’s position on physician-assisted suicide combined both of these themes and demonstrated that his perspective was in fact distinctively libertarian. He opposed Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act (later imitated by Washington) because it medicalized a moral decision and required people to meet government-dictated criteria before they could legally end their lives. If the drug laws did not make it difficult for people to obtain substances useful for suicide (such as barbiturates), he said, there would be no need for physician-assisted suicide.

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