GIS: Online Tutorials and More

The Harvard Design School (GSD) has an online manual for GIS which, while customized for a GSD audience, has much useful information for anyone learning or using GIS. Topics included here: "Beginning a GIS Database," "Digital Elevation Models," "Clipping an Ocean Polygon," "Reclassifying Data with Lookup Tables," "Converting GIS Layers to DXF," "ArcMap Data Management Tips," "Designing for Visibility," "Geocoding," "Mapping with Quantitative Data," and "Elements of Cartographic Style." There are also tutorials, some of which are publicly available: ArcMap Data Management, ArcMap Projections, Mapping Census Data, Georeferencing Scanned Maps and Aerial Photos, Raster GIS in ArcMap, Vector Procedures in ArcMap, Modeling Terrain with Contours and Surfaces, Modeling Surfaces with Mapped Images, and more.

Contextualized Learning

This article, written primarily for a corporate audience, describes three characteristics of contextualized learning: organizational learning; empowered learners; and embedded learning. The latter is the more radical and more interesting of the three: "The nature of work-embedded learning provides content in context — turning the whole learning paradigm on its head. Work-embedded learning considers the individual’s job role and experience level and is accessed as the individual performs work. It does not ask, 'What am I going to teach you?' but 'What work do you do?' and 'What do you need?' When an enterprise looks at a work process and the individual’s role, it can come up with ways to deliver learning embedded into the job, and actually increase the consumption of learning in the organization."

Congressional Budget Office Report: Copyright Issues in Digital Media

The Congressional Budget Office has just released a report, Copyright Issues in Digital Media. According to the report's summary, Congress has three options with regard to the current situation regarding copyright:

• Congress would do nothing and allow market forces to work ("forebearance"). This option would depend on the effective development and implementation of DRM technologies.
• Congress would be to use compulsory licensing to set a price for certain types of creative works. E.g., imposing a tax on computers and using that revenue to may royalties to copyright holders.
• Congress would be to revise copyright law in favor of one of the groups whose interests are at stake in the copyright debate: the copyright owners or the users of copyrighted material. 'Allowing copyright owners to have too much control could exacerbate the compromised efficiency that some differential pricing schemes can create in the presence of weak competitive pressures......Revising copyright law in favor of consumers, in contrast, could lead to inefficiency by making differential pricing less feasible."

How Blogs and Wikis Can Help Knowledge Management

Interesting article on how blogs and wikis can help capture tacit knowledge and transform it to explicit knowledge.

Interview with Linus Torvalds

Interview in last week's Business Week with Linus Torvalds. "Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in knowledge."

Geo-Targeting: BBC Multicasting 5 Broadband Streams of Olympics Coverage

The BBC is multicasting five broadband streams of Olympics coverage, a total of 1,200 hours, using the Real 10 player as well as H.264 video and AAC audio standards. To ensure that the streams can only be viewed in the UK, the BBC is also using Geo-IP, a geo-targeting software from Quova. I confess I wasn't familiar with geo-targeting services, but a quick google turned up this backgrounder and a list of vendors. [I had originally thought of geo-targeting as a "feature" — shows how fusty I am! — but apparently others (Slashdot and Wired) think it's an unreasonable restriction. Censorship seems a bit strong to me, though.]

Acacia

The University of Tennessee received its letter from Acacia two weeks ago, and since then I've been gathering background information for our IT and Legal Counsel folks. Today I stumbled on this list of resources, prepared by WCET and posted to the DEOS-L list:

"The following resources have been selected to help collaboratively construct an understanding of the history, basis, and extent of Acacia's process patents on streaming audio and video."

I. Claims
Licensing request letter (typical) from Acacia to RadioIO
Publication: Letter from Acacia
Link: http://www.radioio.com/acacia.pdf
Legal battle between Acacia and Adult Entertainment industry
Publication: Clickz.com Website
Link: http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3309511
Information on the "Markman" (claim construction) Hearing
Publication: FightThePatent.com
Link: http://www.fightthepatent.com/v2/PreMarkman.html
Legal battle between Acacia and Hotel On-Demand Video
Publication: Yahoo!Finance
Link: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/040607/75767_1.html
Legal battle between Acacia and Cable and Satellite TV
Publication: MSNBC News
Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5218894/
II. History
History of Acacia: patent-buying behavior, bankrupt ventures
Publication: StreamingMedia.com Website
Link: http://www.streamingmedia.com/patent/about.asp
Acacia patent-gathering history, financing history and claims
Publication: CNET News.com Website
Link: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-983552.html
History of, value of, and issues with internet patents
Publication: Information Week
Link: http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20021212S0010
III. Invalidity
All about Claim Construction/Markman Hearings
Publication: National Law Journal
Link: http://www.howrey.com/practices/ip/index.cfm?contentID=288
Bar code industry wins case against Lemelson: A great parallel to the Acacia Saga with a happy ending
Publication: Frontline Solutions
Link: http://www.frontlinetoday.com/frontline/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=83111
Reference to a bibliography of sources that clearly document the prior existence of technologies claimed to be patented by Acacia; describes the technical invalidity of a patent that claims ownership of "prior art"
Publication: Network World Fusion
Link: http://napps.nwfusion.com/weblogs/multimedia/archives/002088.html
Searchable database of invalid patents + explanation of why bad patents get through the patent office
Publication: Bad Patents Website
Link: http://www.bustpatents.com/
IV. Other Resources
Negotiation of license agreement with eCollege customers
Publication: eCollege Press Release
Link: http://www.ecollege.com/stories/press_05_21_04.learn?page=2200
Acacia Technologies Group company profile
Publication: Yahoo! Finance
Link: http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/107/107151.html
A daily weblog detailing the progress of the Acacia issue
Publication: FightThePatent.com Website
Link: http://www.fightthepatent.com/
A list of resources on the Acacia patent issue
Publication: IMPAI (adult entertainment industry association) Website
Link: http://impai.org/onlineindustry.html

Four Reasons to be Happy about Internet Plagiarism

Just got around to this year-old article, Four Reasons to be Happy about Internet Plagiarism. They are:

1. The institutional rhetorical writing environment (the "research paper," the "literary essay," the "term paper") is challenged by this, and that's a good thing.
2. The institutional structures around grades and certification are challenged by this, and that's a good thing.
3. The model of knowledge held by almost all students, and by many faculty -- the tacit assumption that knowledge is stored information and that skills are isolated, asocial faculties -- is challenged by this, and that's a good thing.
4. But there's a reason to welcome this challenge that's far more important than any of these -- more important, even, than the way the revolutionary volatility of text mediated by photocopying and electronic files have assaulted traditional assumptions of intellectual property and copyright by distributing the power to copy beyond those who have the right to copy. It's this: by facing this challenge we will be forced to help our students learn what I believe to be the most important thing they can learn at university: just how the intellectual enterprise of scholarship and research really works.

Lessig Video

A video of Lawrence's Lessig's presentation, The Future of Copyright, Culture and Creativity, delivered on 21 May 2004 in Helsinki.