A Surveillance Net Blankets China’s Cities, Giving Police Vast Powers; The New York Times, December 17, 2019

Paul Mozur and Aaron Krolik, The New York Times; A Surveillance Net Blankets China’s Cities, Giving Police Vast Powers

""China is ramping up its ability to spy on its nearly 1.4 billion people to new and disturbing levels, giving the world a blueprint for how to build a digital totalitarian state.

 Chinese authorities are knitting together old and state-of-the-art technologies — phone scanners, facial-recognition cameras, face and fingerprint databases and many others — into sweeping tools for authoritarian control, according to police and private databases examined by The New York Times."

U.S. lab chimps were dumped on Liberia’s Monkey Island and left to starve. He saved them.; The Washington Post, December 12, 2019

Danielle Paquette, The Washington Post; U.S. lab chimps were dumped on Liberia’s Monkey Island and left to starve. He saved them.

 

"Animal testing has existed since doctors in ancient Greece studied the anatomy of rodents — an estimated 115 million creatures are still used each year in research worldwide — but rarely is the aftermath so visible. Rarely is it so hungry.

 

This colony of 66 chimpanzees, which never learned to survive in the wild, eats roughly 500 pounds of produce each day, plus a weekly batch of hard-boiled eggs for protein. They rely on money from a charity abroad and the devotion of men who’ve known them since they lived in steel cages."

Elsevier signs first open-access deal in the United States; Science, November 25, 2019

Science News Staff, Science; Elsevier signs first open-access deal in the United States

"Publishing giant Elsevier has signed its first open-access deal with a U.S. institution, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Inside Higher Ed reports. The arrangement, which CMU announced on 21 November, will allow CMU scholars to publish articles in any Elsevier journal on an immediately free-to-read basis. CMU researchers will also continue to have access to paywalled Elsevier articles, which previous contracts covered with subscription fees.

CMU did not disclose the cost of the arrangement, which has been a sticking point in Elsevier’s open-access negotiations with other research institutions. After the University of California system insisted on a price cut, Elsevier’s negotiations failed in February; in April, a research consortium in Norway cut a deal with Elsevier similar to CMU’s, while agreeing to a price hike. “All I can say is that we achieved the financial objectives we set out to achieve,” Keith Webster, dean of CMU’s university libraries and director of emerging and integrative media initiatives, tells Inside Higher Ed. 

CMU researchers only publish about 175 papers annually in Elsevier journals. That low volume gives Elsevier an opportunity to test the 4-year arrangement with relatively low financial risk."

SpaceX Just Retroactively Put Copyright Restrictions on Its Photos; Motherboard, December 11, 2019

Karl Bode, Motherboard;

SpaceX Just Retroactively Put Copyright Restrictions on Its Photos

"As SpaceX began supplanting NASA in humanity’s quest to explore outer space, Motherboard pondered in 2015 what would happen to the public’s unfettered access to space imagery data (images taken by NASA are in the public domain and can be used by anyone for almost any purpose.) Thankfully, SpaceX soon after made the important decision to offer mission images under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) License, allowing them to be freely shared and even remixed by anyone. This is the least-restrictive Creative Commons license in existence and allows anyone to use the photos for almost anything (you could, for example, make and sell a photo book or calendar of SpaceX images if you wanted to.)

But a little noticed change to the SpaceX Flickr account this week stripped away the CC0 license affixed to the company’s images, replacing it with an “Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic” license. That, in turn, imposed notable and potentially confusing restrictions on how those images can be shared and re-used."

Why “Move Fast and Break Things” Doesn’t Work Anymore; Harvard Business Review, December 10, 2019

Greg Satell, Harvard Business Review; Why “Move Fast and Break Things” Doesn’t Work Anymore

"Shift 2: From Rapid Iteration to Exploration. Over the past 30 years, we’ve had the luxury of working with technologies we understand extremely well. Every generation of microchips opened vast new possibilities, but worked exactly the same way as the last generation, creating minimal switching costs. The main challenge was to design applications.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that rapid iteration emerged as a key strategy. When you understand the fundamental technology that underlies a product or service, you can move quickly, trying out nearly endless permutations until you arrive at an optimized solution. That’s often far more effective than a more planned, deliberate approach.

Over the next decade or two, however, the challenge will be to advance technology that we don’t understand well at all. Quantum and neuromorphic computing are still in their nascent stages. Exponential improvements in genomics and materials science are redefining the boundaries of those fields. There are also ethical issues involved with artificial intelligence and genomics that will require us to tread carefully.

So in the future, we will need to put greater emphasis on exploration. We will need to spend time understanding these new technologies and how they relate to our businesses. Most of all, it’s imperative to start exploring early. By the time many of these technologies hit their stride, it may be too late to catch up."

Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure a ‘Pirate Bay of Science’ Never Goes Down; Vice, December 2, 2019

Matthew Gault, Vice;

Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure a ‘Pirate Bay of Science’ Never Goes Down

"...[O]ver the last few years, two sites—Library Genesis and Sci-Hub—have become high-profile, widely used resources for pirating scientific papers.

The problem is that these sites have had a lot of difficulty actually staying online. They have faced both legal challenges and logistical hosting problems that has knocked them offline for long periods of time. But a new project by data hoarders and freedom of information activists hopes to bring some stability to one of the two “Pirate Bays of Science...

“It's the largest free library in the world, servicing tens of thousands of scientists and medical professionals around the world who live in developing countries that can't afford to buy books and scientific journals. There's almost nothing else like this on Earth. They're using torrents to fulfill World Health Organization and U.N. charters. And it's not just one site index—it's a network of mirrored sites, where a new one pops up every time another gets taken down,” user shrine said on Reddit."

Who owns the law in Georgia?; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 29, 2019

Bill Rankin, Atlanta Journal Constitution; Who owns the law in Georgia?

"“If the (appeals court’s) decision is affirmed, publishers will no longer be able to rely on sales of copyrighted works to recoup their costs for preparing annotations,” said Johnson, also a Washington attorney. “Therefore, states will either need to use taxpayer dollars to pay the publishers or stop offering annotated versions of their official codes.”

Thirteen states and the District of Columbia offered similar sentiments in a legal brief filed with the high court...

Malamud’s case has received support in friend-of-the-court briefs filed by a wide variety of groups, including the American Library Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Intellectual Property Association and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which was joined by Gannett Co., the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times.

“If the First Amendment requires public access to criminal trials so that citizens may oversee and participate in government, then citizens must also have access to the laws that organize their society (and that form the basis of those criminal trials),” the media organizations said.""

Should You Be Allowed to Copyright a Law? We're Going to Find Out; Gizmodo, December 4, 2019

Whitney Kimball, Gizmodo; Should You Be Allowed to Copyright a Law? We're Going to Find Out

"Copyright law, boring on its face, has posed various unprecedented threats to intellectual freedoms in recent internet history. It threatens to kill our links, kill our news, kill our memes, kill our precious videos of babies dancing to Prince. And yesterday, the Supreme Court considered the momentously stupid question: should you be able to paywall a law?"

Open Access: SCOTUS will consider whether publishers can copyright annotated state codes; ABA Journal, November 27, 2019

Mark Walsh, ABA Journal; Open Access: SCOTUS will consider whether publishers can copyright annotated state codes

"The question in Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org Inc. is whether a work such as the Official Code of Georgia Annotated may not be copyrighted because it falls under the doctrine of “government edicts.” The doctrine stems from a series of 19th-century Supreme Court cases holding that judicial writings and other official legal works published under state authority are not “the proper subject of private copyright,” as an 1888 decision put it."

China Uses DNA to Map Faces, With Help From the West; The New York Times, December 3, 2019

Sui-Lee Wee and Paul Mozur, The New York Times; China Uses DNA to Map Faces, With Help From the West

Beijing’s pursuit of control over a Muslim ethnic group pushes the rules of science and raises questions about consent. 

"The Chinese government is building “essentially technologies used for hunting people,” said Mark Munsterhjelm, an assistant professor at the University of Windsor in Ontario who tracks Chinese interest in the technology.

In the world of science, Dr. Munsterhjelm said, “there’s a kind of culture of complacency that has now given way to complicity.""