Author: Ed Felten
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Sloppy Science
New Scientist reports on how scientists prepare their papers for publication: A cunning statistical study has exposed scientists as sloppy reporters. When they write up their work and cite other people’s papers, most do not bother to read the original. The discovery was made by Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury of the University of California,…
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We're #22!
Seventeen Magazine has released its long-awaited “100 Coolest Colleges” list. Princeton ranks 22nd. Yale ranks second, probably due to the influence of the ultracool LawMeme crowd. You have to wonder, though, about anybody who ranks my alma mater, Caltech, as the fifteenth-coolest school in the country. Caltech has many virtues, but coolness is definitely not…
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Privacy Technology vs. Privacy Laws
Politech reprints an anonymous, somewhat overheated essay arguing for a technology-only approach to privacy, as opposed to one based on laws. It’s easy to dismiss an essay like this just because of its obnoxious tone. But we should be skeptical of its ideas too. Certainly, we ought to use privacy-enhancing technology when it is available,…
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TIA Discussion at Politech
Lots of postings recently over at Politech about DARPA’s Total Information Awareness program. Check it out, if you’re interested.
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AP: Parents Complain Too Much to Professors
AP reports on a supposed trend of parents complaining to professors about their kids’ education, grades, course scheduling, and so on. In eight years of teaching at Princeton, I have never been contacted by a complaining parent. Come to think of it, I have never been contacted at all by a parent during the academic…
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"Fair Use" in the Media
Siva Vaidhyanathan offers data on the prevalence of the term “fair use” in the media. He counted the number of times that “copyright” and “fair use” were used in the same article in any newspaper (worldwide) listed in Lexis/Nexis. Here’s the data, labeled with some possibly relevant events: 118 in 2001 113 in 2000 20…
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Publish in New Jersey, Get Sued in Australia
The highest court in Australia has ruled that Dow Jones can be sued in Australia for libel, even though the article in question was published on a web site in the U.S. The Economist has a good article on the decision and its implications.
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Business Week: Hollywood's Love/Hate Relationship with Technology
Jane Black at Business Week describes how digital technology is changing the movie business. She reports that while one part of the movie industry is fighting tooth and nail against new technology, other parts are eagerly adopting it.
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Fair Use as Black Hole (Cont.)
In response to my earlier posting on fair use, Siva Vaidhyanathan points out one reason for the messiness of the fair use debate – different people mean different things by “fair use”. Some people (mostly lawyers) use “Fair Use” in a narrow, legalistic sense, to refer to a specific set of exceptions to the enumerated…
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Wilkins on Technology Policy
In 1641, John Wilkins published the very first book in English about cryptography. (It discussed many other topics as well.) The book’s title was “Mercury; or, the Secret and Swift messenger, shewing how a man may with privacy and speed Communicate his thoughts to a Friend at any distance.” Wilkins ended the discussion with two…