Technovia

What can we conclude from the new Radiohead release?

murketing » Blog Archive » What can we conclude from the new Radiohead release?:

"I think it’s a big mistake to draw conclusions about the Death of Big Labels based on the successes (or failures) of bands that built massive followings while on a big label. Radiohead isn’t coming out of nowhere: According the RIAA site, Pablo Honey, The Bends, OK Computer, and Kid A are all platinum records. So Yorke can breezily dismiss the need for labels now, but that’s after a decade-plus of benefiting from having the big-label machine work his records at radio, bankroll the early videos and tours when they weren’t megastars, etc. I’m not saying the old model isn’t under serious pressure; I’m saying that you can’t make sweeping conclusions without considering residual effect from the old model."

Of course, none of that will stop the anti-copyright brigade making exactly these kinds of sweeping generalisations, but you could, at least, hope that it would lead some serious economists to look into the effects of lack of copyright on the economy.

Observer retracts Danie Krugel story

Stephen Pritchard, the redoubtable reader's editor at the Observer, has published what amounts to a retraction of last week's story on Danie Krugel's "evidence" in the Maddie McCann case. Kudos to Stephen and to the Observer for this - it's nice to see a paper admitting it got it wrong.
It is, however, still disturbing that a newspaper would assign reporters to a case which is likely to hinge on DNA evidence who clearly have little understanding of the science of DNA. Perhaps that's down to the horrendous state of science teaching in the UK - but I would expect, even under deadline pressure, a journalist to seek a second expert source on any claim like this rather than rush for the story and get it so badly wrong.
However, Stephen's claim that the internet had "appeared to led credibility to his claims" doesn't hold all that much water. Top search result on Google for "Danie Krugel", both last week and this, is a blog post from Moonflake entitled "Midweek Cuckoo: Danie Krugel" - hardly a post to inspire confidence in Mr Krugel's credibility.
In fact, there's almost nothing on Google's first couple of pages which lends any credibility to Krugel, except for straightforward reports of the programme "Fingerprint of Fate" which was made about him (and comprehensively debunked afterwards).
The big exception is a web site, Danie Krugel Facts, which provides only positive spin on Danie's involvement in the McCann case and his other involvement in missing persons cases. The domain, incidentally, is registered to a PO Box in South Africa and judging by the page source design appears to have been done by CenterWeb, a company based in Bloemfontein - the city where Danie Krugel works, as head of security at Central University. I'd certainly love to know who's paid for that site.

Technorati Tags: Danie Krugel

And The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Madonna Dumps Record Industry

And the prize of hyperbolic headline of the week goes to TechCrunch, for "And The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Madonna Dumps Record Industry"

Another way of putting it would be "Has-been who's record sales have been slumping for ages doesn't attract the advance she thinks she's worth, and spurns regular record deals". But that might not have the self-congratulatory, "huh huh we know media" tone which TechCrunch requires.

Is the Observer now staffed by lunatics?

Yet another great post from Bad Science today about stories appearing in the Observer based on cranky anti-science. In this case, it's about a story on Madeleine McCann which claims that "forensic tests 'reveal traces of Madeleine's body on resort beach'".

In fact, the "forensic evidence" comes from Danie Krugel, a South African ex-policeman who claims to be able to pinpoint the location of anyone in the world using "'quantum physics', a secret energy source which nobody is allowed to know, and a strand of the missing person’s hair".

In other words, Krugel is a charlatan. That a reputable British newspaper should be taken in by this nonsense is bad enough. That it should splash a story like this in a sensitive case where, it should be remembered, a small child's life is the central theme is nothing short of a disgrace.

I haven't bought the Observer since its awful MMR story, the effect of which will be to encourage parents to adopt practices which will cause children to die. I haven't bought the Independent - in either its Sunday or weekly guises - since joined the tinfoil hat brigade with its stories on the "dangers" of WiFi. Is there a single paper left in Britain which actually has anyone with even the vaguest clue about science left on its staff, or are we doomed to have to read this kind of drivel for the rest of time?

The Durham fish oil "trial"

This time last year, if you read any of the newspapers, you'd have undoubtedly read something about the Durham Fish Oil Trial, a purported experiment which meant that thousands of children in Durham were being given fish oil supplements every day, in an effort to show that they improved brain performance. As people pointed out, though, this was anything but a scientific trial: there was no control group, and the data was very tightly held.

So what were the results of the completely unscientific "fish oil trial" in Durham last year? The answer is simple: nothing:

"This was an area of failing schools, remember, receiving a huge amount of extra effort and input of all forms. The preceding year, with no fish oil, the results – the number of kids getting 5 GCSE grades A* to C – had improved by 5.5%. And now? After the fish oil intervention? Well. This rate of improvement seems to have deteriorated spectacularly. I chased the results myself through Durham press office: this year there was only a 3.5% improvement. And this is against a backdrop of a 2% increase in GCSE scores nationally anyway. 1.5% over, in an area which was rapidly improving before, and which was receiving huge amounts of extra resourcesand input. You live by anecdata, you die by anecdata: you could argue this ‘trial’ had a negative result."

Of course, if read the current reports about the trial, you wouldn't actually know any of this. You'd think it was a massive success. But then, bad non-science backed by an effective PR company trumps real, slow but valuable research every time.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: A very silly report on "fair use"

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: A very silly report on "fair use":

"There's a little problem, though. Even by the woeful standards of the bespoke research industry, this study is a crock. It's not just bad; it's absurd.

What the authors have done is to define the 'fair-use economy' so broadly that it encompasses any business with even the most tangential relationship to the free use of copyrighted materials. Here's an example of the tortured logic by which they force-fit vast, multifaceted industries into the 'fair use' category: Because 'recent advances in processing speed and software functionality are being used to take advantage of the richer multi-media experience now available from the web,' then the entire 'computer and peripheral equipment manufacturing industry' qualifies as a 'fair-use industry.' As does the entire 'audio & video equipment manufacturing' business. And the entire software publishing industry. And the entire telecommunications industry. And - hey, why not? - the entire insurance industry. Stock markets and commodity exchanges? Sure, throw them in, too."

What is it about debates that means that, so often, both sides think it's OK just to talk shit and hope no one notices on the grounds that "he did it first"?

Here's what I believe on copyright

As I tend to oppose the more whacky fringe of anti-copyright partisans, I sometimes get mistaken for one of those rabid pro-MPAA loons. Nothing could be further from the truth, but I thought I'd state, once and for all, what I believe about copyright.

1. Copyright itself is a good for society. It gives artists a time-limited monopoly on their work, thus providing them with an income and an incentive to do more original work.

2. However, the present copyright terms have twisted that benefit largely away, to the point where it's easy to make the mistake that copyright itself is a bane. Because copyright terms are now so long, for some artists it has removed the incentive to continue creating new work in favour of seeing work as a form of "pension plan".

3. Hence, what we need to do is reduce copyright terms to a more reasonable level. My suggestion would be a straight 25 years, with copyright ending when you die. I see no reason why the children of content creators should make one penny from the work of their parents. It's not like anyone else's work carries on making money after their death.

So there you go. That's my view on copyright in a nutshell. I have long essay that I'm working on at the moment, in which I think I'll be able to demonstrate that the only people who would benefit from an end to copyright would be large corporations, but that's for another day.

DNA hope offered to the McCanns

Link: BBC NEWS | UK | DNA hope offered to the McCanns.

The inventor of DNA fingerprinting has offered to act as an expert witness in the Madeleine McCann case.

Sir Alec Jeffreys said DNA matches alone did not establish guilt and all Madeleine's genetic characters would be found in at least one family member.

I hope that Sir Alec will be making the same offer to the hundreds of people in the UK convicted every year because of "infallible" DNA evidence.

When looking at this case, I'm reminded constantly of one simple fact: according to the NSPCC, nearly 80% of child murders are committed by the parents. Given that fact alone, the police would be negligent if they weren't investigating Mr and Mrs McCann very closely indeed, and regard them, in the absence of other evidence, as the main suspects in the case. No matter how painful that might be, it's simply a fact.

The genius of American beauty queens

Just who's data is it anyway?

In Why is Flickr afraid of Zooomr? TechChrunch reports that Flickr has refused the request of competing start-up Zooomr to use their API, which would allow Flickr users to more easily transfer their images and data to the other site. As TechCrunch puts it:

"Flickr says that users own the the images and tags we enter into their system.  Apparently that doesn’t mean they have to make it easy for us to take what we own elsewhere.

When Kristopher Tate, the founder of the feature-rich startup photosharing site Zooomr (see prior coverage), asked Flickr earlier this month for access to their Commercial API, Flickr’s response by email was that “we choose not to support use of the API for sites that are a straight alternative to Flickr.”  Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield posted to a Flickr forum on Wednesday saying that when it comes to direct competitors like Zooomr, “why should we burn bandwidth and CPU cycles sending stuff directly to their servers?”"

What Google Flickr isn't getting is that, in the Web 2.0 era, who owns data isn't just about who owns it in theory - it's about the ability to take the data you own and reuse it wherever you want as easily as possible. This is a point that Tate makes:

"Tate from Zooomr says that the exports are a cost of doing business, that Web 2.0 is where “the roach motel stops” and that Zooomr will always make it easy for their customers to take their data elsewhere.  That’s easy to say when you’re the underdog, but the issue does lead to some questions about data portability and web services.  Day one of the post-Gates era seems like a good time to consider such questions."

If the customer owns the data, then the company has a duty to make it as easy as possible for the customer to take that data and move it elsewhere. This is especially true of situations - like Flickr - where the metadata that the customer has added forms a lot of its value. Flickr's value comes from the tags that the users have added, and that the users own. But if the users have no method of getting their tags - the valuable data - out of the service and directly into another competitor, then Flickr is effectively locking them into the service, something that's very definitely NOT Web 2.0.

I doubt that this story will get as much attention from the online community as the complete non-story that was Tim O'Reilly's problems with IT@Cork over the "ownership" of Web 2.0, but it's far more important. In fact the question of data transportability recently led to Mark Pilgrim abandoning Mac OS X (after countless years as an Apple user) in favour of Linux, something that regrettably caused some Mac users to jump all over him. Mark is right to be concerned: there is too little thought from most computer users about protecting their data not just from viruses and crashes, but from obsolescence in the future, and from being locked in to the whims of a single company.

technorati tags:flickr, zooomr, tagging, web2.0, markpilgrim, stewartbutterfield