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Sunday, February 13, 2005 |
Copyright and the model airplane.
Jim Dunnigan draws our attention to the latest twist in the copyright madness: defense contractors pushing up prices on aircraft model kits.
Even World War II aircraft kits are being hit with royalty demands...
These royalty demands grew out of the idea that corporations should maximize "intellectual property" income. Models of a company's products are considered the intellectual property of the owner of a vehicle design. Some intellectual property lawyers have pointed out that many of these demands are on weak legal ground, but the kit manufacturers are often small companies that cannot afford years of litigation to settle this contention. (thanks to Mobile Weblog)
[Smart Mobs]
4:55:33 PM 
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Quick Access Quality Blogs.
DeepBlog.com is an Easy Guide & Portal to Quality Blogs.
Sites at are selected by more than popularity. DeepBlogger Michael investigates every site for content, insight, fascination, uniqueness, and usability in order to highlight quality sites for your quality time.
[Smart Mobs]
10:59:46 AM
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No Mullah Left Behind. By adamantly refusing to do anything to improve energy conservation in America, the Bush team is financing both sides of the war on terrorism. By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN. [NYT > Opinion]
 he Wall Street Journal ran a very, very alarming article from Iran on its front page last Tuesday. The article explained how the mullahs in Tehran - who are now swimming in cash thanks to soaring oil prices - rather than begging foreign investors to come into Iran, are now shunning some of them. The article related how a Turkish mobile-phone operator, which had signed a deal with the Iranian government to launch Iran's first privately owned cellphone network, had the contract frozen by the mullahs in the Iranian Parliament because they were worried it might help the Turks and their foreign partners spy on Iran.
The Journal quoted Ali Ansari, an Iran specialist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, as saying that for 10 years analysts had been writing about Iran's need for economic reform. "In actual fact, the scenario is worse now," said Mr. Ansari. "They have all this money with the high oil price, and they don't need to do anything about reforming the economy." Indeed, The Journal added, the conservative mullahs are feeling even more emboldened to argue that with high oil prices, Iran doesn't need Western investment capital and should feel "free to pursue its nuclear power program without interference."
10:59:30 AM
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Hello, I love you.
From Falling in Love in Three Minutes or Less, the data show that, when people meet face-to-face, things like smoking preferences and bank accounts don seem to loom large in intricate complexities of attraction.
From Science Blog, which I got pointed to this morning.
[The Doc Searls Weblog]
From over there:
The researchers studied dating data from 10,526 anonymous participants of HurryDate, a company that organizes "speed dating" sessions, and found rare behavioral data on how people genuinely act in dating situations.
"Some people say they're looking for one kind of person, then choose another. Other people say that they don't even know what they're looking for. But our data suggest that, however it happens, people know it quickly when they see it," said Robert Kurzban, an assistant professor in Penn Department of Psychology. "People generally understand their own worth on the dating market, so they are able to judge each otherspotential compatibility within moments of meeting."
At each HurryDate party, roughly 25 men and 25 women interact with each other for three minutes at a time. At the end of the session, each participant indicates which of the people he or she met would be of interest for the future. HurryDate also collects survey data from participants, including age, height, education, income, drinking behavior, smoking behavior, race and religion. For this study, HurryDate also collected answers to optional questions about such things as how participants rate their own attractiveness and sexuality.
"Although they had three minutes, most participants made their decision based on the information that they probably got in the first three seconds," Kurzban said. "Somewhat surprisingly, factors that you might think would be really important to people, like religion, education and income, played very little role in their choices."
Psychology has often viewed relationships as transactions where people select mates based on substantial qualities a mate has to offer, such as power and money. According to Kurzban, the data show that, when people meet face-to-face, things like smoking preferences and bank accounts don seem to loom large in intricate complexities of attraction.
"The speed dating offered us, as psychologists, something that we rarely get in conducting research: a systematic look at the genuine behavior of people selecting mates," Kurzban said. "The actual behavior of people is worth more to us than their stated beliefs. In this case, because participants might suffer the consequences of a bad date with someone who might look compatible on paper, they had more incentive to follow their hearts and desires. Behavior, more than self-reports, give us an important window into the underlying psychology of mating."
10:56:19 AM
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Colleges' Land Lines Nearing Silent End.
The Washington Post reports that across the country, wired phones are becoming obsolete in colleges. Although not many colleges have eliminated them, "almost every major school is evaluating it," said Jeri Semer, executive director of the Association for Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education.
This transformation of campus culture -- cell phones keeping students closely tied to friends and family, making social life fluid, even intruding on professors' lectures -- also poses a financial challenge for administrators. Land-line phones used to bring in money for many schools. Now some find themselves paying to maintain systems that students rarely use.
[...] Five years ago, the school made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on long-distance service, said Carl Whitman, executive director of the Office of Information Technology. Last semester, the school made $1,109."
Related:
-- Hotels lose money to cell phones - Cellphones have taken a huge bite out of their earnings. Thanks largely to the preponderance of portables, the profits from in-room phones dropped 76 percent. [Smart Mobs]
10:51:41 AM
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A&L Daily:
Russian philosophy over the last 200 years is a tale of real humanist insights. It is also a painful story of intellectual self-defeat... more»
10:51:40 AM
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