Kermit's revenge

Here's a nice demonstration of the power of releasing your photos under a Creative Commons license... a photograph of Bill Clinton that I once took is now featured in this month's Science magazine!

The fellow who wrote the paper was nice enough to let me know about my picture appearing in Science, writing me to say "Hello - I am writing because you kindly granted permission for your photography to be used in a paper submitted to the journal Science." Yesss! He understood that permission had already been granted :) Too frequently people e-mail me asking permission to use my photographs and such, when the whole point of the CC license was so they could use it without wasting my time, so long as they follow my license terms. Of course in this case he probably didn't need to use Creative Commons-licensed photos, I'd say he has a pretty good case for fair use here, publishing part of a picture in an academic journal. But hey, whatever.

Check out this nice summary of the article and see how we can teach a computer to recognize Bill Clinton's face!

P.S. Thanks to Elsa for mentioning the article to me too... it's always good to know that even if the author had neglected to inform me, my friends would have kept me up to date :)

Thanks to everyone who wished me happy birthday on IM and Facebook: I love you all! I was considering throwing a full-fledged birthday party today, but I was worn out from last week at school, so I just got together with a few friends from my hometown and played Scrabble and Risk. Gosh, I'm 22... my age is a palindrome.

Anyway, I will be in California in the LA - Claremont area this week, doing free culture stuff and visiting friends. I arrive on Sunday afternoon (today!) and depart for NJ on Saturday morning, so if you're in the area and you want to see me, now's the time to do it! I'm considering going to check the urban farm that is in danger of being paved over to build a warehouse, and also going to see the Electric 6, so there should be plenty of fun to go around ^_^

I will be speaking on Thursday, March 9 at 8:30pm at Scripps College in Humanities 101. (See the flyer.) I went out and bought a wireless presentation mousy-clicker thing for this talk, so it'll be a little extra smooth and sexy. Do come!

Also, if you're in the Boston area, I'll be speaking at Northeastern University on Thursday, March 23rd, with Danny O'Brien and Lawrence Lessig, 11:30-2:30pm in 450 Dodge Hall. See the pretty yet bizarre poster:

UPDATE: The event is indeed free and open to the public. Also, Danny has been replaced by Derek Slater, and while I will miss Danny's British accent I'll be glad to see Derek again ^_^ Here's an updated poster:

I'm not sure why I downloaded this PDF, but I am looking at Antongiulio Fornasiero's thesis about "Integration on Surreal Numbers" (the first Google hit for "surreal numbers thesis intellectual property"). I have little to no interest in the topic, but when I skimmed through it in an attempt to find out what it was doing on my desktop, the "Notice" caught my eye:

==Notice==
The notions of intellectual property and originality are self-contradictory. Ideas
cannot be the private property of anybody; nihil sub sole novi was already in the
Bible.(1) Nobody cares about who first uttered a theorem, only whether it is true or
false.(2)
You can freely distribute, copy, quote, edit or modify the present work, either
as a whole, or in part, without any further obligation on you.

(1)The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after. Ecclesiastes I, 9–11.

(2) Unfortunately, this work, being a (almost) verbatim copy of a Ph.D. thesis, does not follow the principles stated here. . .

You tell 'em, Antongiulio!

UPDATE: Mystery solved, I found the link in my del.icio.us inbox... I have friends who are math geeks ;-)

I went to a live taping of the show Justice Talking today, where the topic of debate was filesharing, the Grokster case, sampling, and many other free culture issues. Kembrew McLeod, a free culture-y communications professor from UIowa, was debating Dean Garfield, a lawyer who currently works for the MPAA and formerly represented the RIAA in suits against Audiogalaxy and Kazaa. I managed to get in a question early on in the program, so you should be able to hear me if you listen to the show (called "Peer-to-Peer File Sharing") in late April when it airs.

( my breakdown of the event )

Read Bill's "transcript" of a conversation he had with Dean Garfield after the show:( Bill's encounter with Dean Garfield )