Faced with a shrinking audience of journalists for their press releases, a consortium of universities has launched Futurity, a site that will aggregate edited versions of the best materials produced by university press offices.
Never ones to let a good deed go unpunished, scammers quickly learned to take advantage of a user-friendly policy that allowed a misregistered domain name–perhaps due to a typo–to be withdrawn at no cost.
File-sharing, to the (very large) extent that it involves copyright infringement, has affected the music business.
As revenues from sales of traditional media have plunged, the music business has been looking for alternate ways of making money from its products, including a variety of subscription services, ad-supported streams, and blanket licenses.
Over the past several years, Wikileaks has made a name for itself by poking its electronic fingers in the eyes of the powers that be while shining a light on the confidential documents of said powers. Now, it appears that the spotlight has been turned inward. Due to a bit of careless email etiquette, a list of past Wikileaks donors has fallen into the hands of an individual that, in turn, posted the list to Wikileaks.
It seems like it’s rare for a month to go by without a story appearing in the popular press in which the frequent enjoyment of violent games by today’s youth is linked to a specific violent act by members of said youth. Behind the press reports, the academic community has been engaged in a hot debate over whether the evidence supports a connection between the violent content of games and any behavioral effects.
Up until recently, economies around the globe were on a fairly steady upward trajectory, a growth that put pricing pressure on some of the raw materials needed for both production and infrastructure. That pricing pressure has, in some cases, led to a bit of a black market where the materials are forcibly recycled through various forms of theft.
As more of the student population gets access to broadband connections, faculty at major universities are exploring how rich media and online interactivity can enhance, supplement, and even replace the classroom experience. In the latest development, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas is going to experiment with replicating a graduate seminar online [...]
YouTube may make a lousy place to hold a class, but that doesn’t mean that the YouTube experience isn’t shaping the expectations of students, especially those engaged in online learning.
Last week, Human Rights Watch released a report describing human-rights abuses in a remote area of Ethiopia. With that region closed to foreigners by the Ethiopian government, the report relies on a combination of eyewitness reports and commercial satellite imagery performed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) Science and Human Rights Program.
The Telecommunications and Internet subcommittee of the the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing today on H.R. 5353, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008. The bill would establish an official national broadband policy, one that prevents service providers from subjecting lawful content to “unreasonable interference” or “discrimination.” It also calls on the Federal Communications Commission to assess competition in and consumer access to broadband Internet access in light of this policy. The testimony at the hearing, however, suggested that these provisions, and net neutrality in general, mean very different things to different groups. And, as far as the RIAA is concerned, Net neutrality legislation could hamstring the fight against piracy.
Last week, the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would bar employers and insurance providers from considering the results of a person’s genetic tests when making hiring or coverage decisions. The House has passed a similar bill and the Bush administration has indicated it would sign legislation of this sort. In the wake of the bill’s passage, however, a number of people have questioned why it shouldn’t be an employer’s or insurer’s right to make decisions based on genetics. As a matter of policy, these questions were answered a decade ago, and the intervening progress in human genetics has only reinforced some of the reasoning of the initial decision.
As the role of the Internet has grown, there have been persistent fears that the less wealthy in society would be left out, due to lack of access to hardware, the Internet or broadband. Although these concerns have lessened as dropping prices and public access programs have increased Internet use across the socioeconomic spectrum, a study in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology suggests that a new divide is becoming apparent: The wealthier and better-educated are better equipped to find and evaluate material on the Internet.
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