| New Job in Tokyo |
[Jan. 21st, 2010|01:57 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  ecstatic | ] |
My main blog is currently experiencing technical difficulties, so I'm posting this here.
From 1st April 2010 I will be a Professor in the Graduate School of Business Administration at Meiji University in Tokyo.I hope to move to Tokyo in early March. |
|
|
| New Website |
[Jan. 7th, 2007|06:37 pm] |
I've set up a new website: A-Cubed Info which, amongst other things, contains blog entries about my trip to Japan. Sorry they're not here folks, but I wanted to set something up separate and including things like an image gallery, so it seemed like time that I finally paid for a reasonable web hosting service. See the entries categorised "Japan" in the A-Cubed Info Blog. |
|
|
| Restaurant Review: Ikkyu, London |
[Dec. 1st, 2006|10:45 pm] |
Ikkyu, Tottenham Court Road. Japanese cuisine in the heart of London.
Ikkyu is located a few doors south on Tottenham court road from the Goodge Street tube station. It has a street level single doorway leading to stairs down to a basement restaurant. Sorry, no noticeable wheelchair access and it's quite a few steps down if you're not in a wheelchair but still mobility impaired. The first thing one notices on entry is the smell of fish. Not that unusual in a Japanese restaurant serving sushi, but the airflow make it particularly noticable on entry. At the bottom of the stairs directly ahead is the kitchen on the left hand side with "sushi counter" eating places along it. Around behind you to the left is a long-and-thin seating area comprising the bulk of the dining area. The restaurant probably seats in the region of fifty people.
The first thing you notice after the smell is that the bulk of the staff are actually Japanese. Well, you notice this when they talk to you, if you can spot a Japanese accent. This is a nice change from most Japanese restaurants in the West which seem principally, though not universally, to be run by Chinese proprietors with Chinese and/or Korean waiting staff. These Japanese staff are quite accommodating and understanding to Western diners wishing to try out any Japanese they have.
The menu is reasonably broad, particularly considering the size of the restaurant. I've seen a wider selection of Japanese cuisine on offer, but only at the Honda Hotel restaurant in Swindon and Nami in Toronto. The menu has entries in Japanese and English, and reading through it you get the nice surprise. This place is reasonably priced. No, I mean really! A set meal of Salmon or Chicken Teriyaki (together with Miso Soup, bowl of rice and pickles) for under ten pounds. For the heart of London this really is excellent value for money.
The food is pretty quick to arrive, but obviously freshly prepared. It's nicely arranged in a traditional manner. Not being a sushi eater, I can't comment on the quality of their sushi chef, but the set chicken teriyaki meal I had was a decent size meal and "totemo oishikatta desu" (it was very tasty). Disposable bamboo chopsticks (which seem to be pretty environmentally friendly, according to some estimates I've seen). There were a significant number of Asian faces and voices among the diners and, albeit on a Friday night, the place was well booked up - at 18:30 they could give us a table but only provided we promised to be done by 20:15.
If you like Japanese food and ambience, this is definitely worht a visit. Book first on busy nights. You could easily pay twice the price for less worthwhile Japanese food elsewhere in London. |
|
|
| A Modest Proposal |
[Nov. 15th, 2006|04:38 pm] |
With respect to the claim by Sir Cliff Richard and others that the copyright in their recordings should be extended from 50 years either to the 95 years "enjoyed" in the USA or to "life 70 years" as provided for the composer of the music and lyrics, there follows a modest proposal regarding recognising the contribution of educators to the creative industries.
Many famous people when appearing on shows such as "This is Your Life" or "Desert Island Discs" acknowledge their debt to their teachers earlier in their life. Whether it is the primary school teacher who first aroused their passion in music/science/engineering/history etc, or the University lecturer who gave them a fine understanding of their craft, they recognise the influence all of their teachers had on their lives. Many teachers end up in relative poverty in old age, while those they have taught go on to fame and, usually, fortune. It is a disgusting state of affairs that those who create the minds of our finest talents do not receive any royalties on their work. Since it can be difficult to judge exactly which teacher was the principle author of a creative mind (we might consider an actuarial model based on how long the teacher taught them for, and how close their subject was to the arena of their success, later on) I propose a tax of 5% on the earnings over 50,000 pounds per year to be distributed amongst their teachers and lecturers. This royalty to be retroactively introduced and applied to all high flying businessmen, musicians, politicians, scientists, TV presenters, actors and military officers. This will provide an incentive for good people to enter teaching, and to pay particular attention to nurturing the talents of the brightest students to ensure that they reach the tops of their chosen professions. Eventually this system will produce highly paid teachers who will then be sufficiently wealthy to focus on teaching only these exceptional students, to the benefit of society.
Isn't everything Sir Cliff has done in his career a "derivative work" of his education? Shouldn't his music teacher(s) have been receiving a cut of his royalties (and all other significant income) for all these years? |
|
|
| Petition against closure of Physics at Reading |
[Oct. 27th, 2006|09:43 am] |
The University Senate recently confirmed the Senior Management Board's decision to close Physics (it was apparently disgusting to see some of the other academic staff from currently successful departments baying for Physics to be closed in the hope that they could grab some of any resources released - it's unclear to me whether this does indeed free up ay resources except for a few student numbers which iwll almost certainly go to the health sciences area i the University's push towards a Medical School).
Anyway, the University Council must still also ratify the decision. Their next meeting takes place on 20th November. The University and College Union (formed from the merger of AUT and NATFHE earlier this year) is running a campaign not only to save Physics at Reading but to persuade the government to take a serious look at why the funding situation is leading to the loss of so many vital science departments around the country. Please consider signing the petition against the closure of Physics at Reading on the UCU website here:
http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=1871 |
|
|
| Another Physics Department bites the Dust |
[Sep. 30th, 2006|01:31 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  annoyed | ] |
The University of Reading announced to staff this week that it will no longer accept new students onto Physics single subject or joint degrees from 2007. This is the latest in a long chain of departmental closures at Reading, as well as the latest in a a long chain of closures of University Physics departments.
At Reading, they've closed, amongst others:
Postgraduate Research Institute in Sedimentology.
This department ran one of only two hydro-geology MScs in the UK. At a time of climate change, when flooding is one of the biggest challenges facing the UK environment, we closed down one of the principle sources of qualified scientists. The relevant government department has since directly funded the creation of a similar course elsewhere.
Music
Food and Microbial Sciences Unit
This unit brought in approx 5% of the University's research income and included one of the most highly cited researchers in the world.
Linguistics and Applied Language Studies
Various Modern Languages, reducing our degree-level language studies to German, French and Italian. We dropped such unimportant languages as Japanese.
Now Physics. |
|
|
| Pandora's Box: Social Issues of the Information Age |
[Sep. 29th, 2006|04:47 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Office | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
The draft for review of the book Pandora's Box: Social Issues of the Information Age, went off to the editors at Wiley this afternoon.
The full book will now be sent off to reviewers for comments. That should take 5-6 weeks. After we get those comments back, we'll have until mid-January to do any revisions necessary (we'll decide these in consultation with the editors).The book then goes into the production process with Wiley - type-setting, proof-reading, copy-editing. It's scheduled for publication in November 2007. |
|
|
| Liberal AND Fascist - can you be both. |
[Sep. 22nd, 2006|04:47 pm] |
One of those strange links on google came up today. Looking for something entirely other, I came across the website of the elite liberal fasict association".
Is it possible to be liberal and fascist at the same time. Is it, as they claim, possible to support democracy and be fascist at the same time. Even taking away the links between fascist states of the past and racism and homophobia (by the way, I'm sitll not sure what their stance on homosexuality is - their statement is self-contradictory), is it possible to support the idea of democracy and an authoritarian government? Is it possible to have some for of PR and still have an authoritarian regime? |
|
|
| database strangeness on Amazon |
[Sep. 22nd, 2006|03:22 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Office | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
So, i was looking for a kanji dictionary on amazon. There's a very good one, but it's only in hardcover and is 40 pounds, so I'm looking for one a bit cheaper but as good. Anyway, going through a useful category of japanese language learning and dictionaries, I suddenly find this entry:
Solid-state Physics and Engineering by Craig T.Van Degrift (Paperback - Mar 1995)
Shurely Shome Mishtake! |
|
|
| Silly online "who are you" test |
[Sep. 15th, 2006|11:58 am] |
Thanks to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) autopope for this one.
 | You scored as Poland. Your army is Poland\'s army. Your tenacity will form a concept in the history of your nation and you\'re also ready to continue fighting even if your country is occupied by the enemy. Other nations that are included in this category are Greece, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Poland | | 94% | British and the Commonwealth | | 81% | Italy | | 69% | Finland | | 69% | United States | | 56% | France, Free French and the Resistance | | 44% | Soviet Union | | 31% | Germany | | 31% | Japan | | 31% | </td>
In which World War 2 army you should have fought?
created with QuizFarm.com |
|
|
|
| Trademarks and Domain Names Stupidity |
[Sep. 15th, 2006|11:37 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | irritated | ] |
The newly authorised international pseudo-country-code top-level domain of .eu was approved last year. As with the new gTLDs (.biz, .info, .museum, .aero) the registrars included a "sunrise period" during which only trademark owners can register their mark as a domain (supposedly anyway - some registrars have also been extending this to other issues such as "right of personality" for individual names and similar). One of the first arbitration cases (see Michael Geist on domain name arbitration) was launched recently. This one, I believe, shows the utterly ridiculous nature of the whole trademarks in domain names and sunrise periods issue. There is a company which has a trademark in an EU country (czech at least and maybe others) on the word "sex". So much for trademarks not being allowed on generic words. Another company trademarked sex.eu (and also casino.eu) and launched dispute resolution proceedings when they weren't the trademark owners who were awarded sex.eu.
OutLaw story.
Trademarks were developed to prevent unfair business practices, such as building a shoddy car called a Rolls-Royce and then trading on the goodwill of the original brand to sell inferior goods or to penetrate a market. The justification for trademarks is as much about consumer protection (knowing what you're buying without having to go digging through company records) as it is about rewarding the good business of the existing company. ALlowing trademarking of words such as sex, and then allowing sunrise registration of such trademarks in new domain names, brings the law into serious disrepute. It used to be that you had to have actually been trading under a recognisable name before you could get a trademark, and it used to only be valid within a very specific domain, unless you became a sufficiently well-known mark (such as Rolls-Royce again) such that customers would need protection within all domains.
It's time we stopped regarding trademarks as "intellectual property" and started regarding them as consumer protection. |
|
|
| Two Thirds Done |
[Sep. 10th, 2006|06:06 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  exhausted | ] |
Well, I've revised Chapter 10 of Pandora's Box. Only five more chapters to go. It's due at the end of the month, so it's not too bad. Five chapters in two weeks should be eminently possible. |
|
|
| Pharmaceutical Patent Enforcement in the Developing World |
[Sep. 8th, 2006|04:28 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  tired | ] |
Claim by pharmaceutical companies:
Allowing cheap generic production of new drugs for use in the developing world would destroy their ability to do research and development by removing their income stream, because of grey imports back from those countries into the developed world where their patent runs.
Thoughts:
Assuming this is the honest argument, and it isn't just the more politically acceptable argument than "we demand maximum profit, even if this means that lots of people in developing countries suffer and die", then the following thought occurs:
Is the grey import problem principally a factor of the lack of a proper government funded health system in the US? In the UK, for instance, if we agree to honour global pharma patents then the NHS will not be allowed to source prescription drugs from the third world. Since the vast majority of patented drugs in the UK are prescribed by the NHS, this should be sufficient protection of the income stream of pharma companies - anything else would be beyond the point of diminishing returns at the margins. In most other developed countries, so far as I'm aware, there is not a substantial underclass of people without access to necessary drugs.
So, is this a factor in the skewing of the worldwide debate on pharma patent enforcement? |
|
|
| Nic Garnett on DRM et al. |
[Sep. 8th, 2006|12:38 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | aggravated | ] |
At http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrb/complaw/ there were two keynote speakers this morning. The first, Prof Michael Geist (http://michaelgeist.ca/) is well known to copyfighters as a battler in the trenches in his native Canada and on the international scene. The second was Nic Garnett, former IFPI (http://www.ifpi.org/) chief, who negotiated the WIPO Copyright Treaty (http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/wct/) and Performances and Phonograms Treaty (http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/wppt/) on their behalf. I must first congratulate Nic for being willing to step into the lion's den, before proceeding to snack upon him, along with my colleagues at the conference (http://lexferenda.com/ : http://www.lexferenda.com/?p=139, http://nic.suzor.com/ : http://nic.suzor.com/2006-09-garnett-tpm_regulation, http://dooooooom.blogspot.com/ : http://dooooooom.blogspot.com/2006/09/understanding-wipo.html).
Nic no longer works for the copyright middlemen directly. Instead he has switched to working for developers of DRM (see key below) software. He now works for Media Rights Technologies (http://www.mpb.tv/), and previously for a company he founded called Interight (http://www.interight.com/) on whose description page (http://www.interight.com/about.html) he is described as "lawyer and technologist".
Nic was presenting thoughts based upon his work for WIPO in writing a report for their Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights. The title of the report is Automated Rights Management Systems and Copyright Limitations and Exceptions (http://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/sccr/en/sccr_14/sccr_14_5.doc).
As Ian Brown pointed out in the questions/comments section after the presentation, Nic's technical expertise is sadly lacking in someone producing such reports. Nic's claim that he is only a lawyer and doesn't understand the technical details seems rather at odds with the Interight website claim about being a "lawyer and technologist". Various claims in both the report and the presentation simply sit there and beg to be blown apart. In fact, the presentation and report seem almost like a straw man set up to show the naivety and/or FUD of the pro-TPM/pro-DRM/copyright maximalist groups.
Nic dismissed the Sony/BGM rootkit fiasco (http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/14/sony_anticustomer_te.html) as a storm in a teacup, ignoring, amongst other issues, the fact that Sony settled a lawsuit brought by the EFF on behalf of customers seriously inconvenienced by the obviously illicit nature of the rootkit (http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/Sony-BMG/settlement_faq.php). He then claimed that Sony's understanding of the nature of TPM/DRM was deeply flawed, promoting his own company's approach which is, he claimed, based on the concept of delivering an encrypted content file, by any suitable distribution method, and then separate delivery of a key which allows the interpretation of that file as sound (and, one assumes video) data, but which allows for time limitations on the file. Now, this in itself is perfectly feasible, although the time-limitation element is technologically simple to circumvent by messing around with system clock time (an always-running DRM program MIGHT include its own timer program which measured the passage of time that the machine was switched on and running...) The weakness of this idea is that once the file is decrypted for use (i.e. interpreting it into some form of sound file that can be sent to the sound card driver) then it is vulnerable to interception. He claimed that Media Rights Technologies' software would prevent "stream rippers" from capturing this digital information and that this would prevent re-encoding. The concept of high quality digital recording from the output of the computer soundcard (in either digital or analogue form) seems to have escaped their attention, as do many other ways around this - rolling one's own sound card driver, running the DRM restricted decryption and playback system in a virtual machine running Windows and using Linux software to intercept the digital signal between the virtual soundcard and the linux hardware driver, or even the old standby of an old-fashioned microphone placed near a speaker in a quiet room.
Nic also claimed that Media Rights Technologies had a patent on the "separate provision of encrypted content file and decryption key". I'm sure this wold come as a surprise to many, not least Diffie, Hellman, Rivest, Shamir and Adelman. Surely a candidate for the EFF's patent busting programme (http://www.eff.org/patent/).
Another interesting element was Nic's worries about Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/). Given his claim that he no longer sees the world as a representative of the recording industry, his worries seemed rather strange. Why would someone claiming to be interested in a balanced view of the world of copyright find CC at all worrying? After all, the goal of CC is to give copyright owners more flexibility in offering their content under variable conditions ("some rights reserved" rather than "all rights reserved"). The explanation for this lies in the report itself, which demonstrates Nic's fundamental misunderstanding of the reasons for, and purpose of, the Creative Commons project. To quote from the report:
"Creative Commons was officially launched in 2001. Lawrence Lessig, the founder and chairman of Creative Commons, started the organization as an additional method of achieving the goals of the case Eldred v. Ashcroft,1 which was adjudicated by the United States of America Supreme Court. The initial set of Creative Commons licences was published on December 16, 2002."
The prosecution rests that not only does Nic not understand technology, but that his background as chief strong-arm for the copyright maximalists have led to an inability to view the world of copyright as anything less than an IP-maximalist apologist at best.
Key:
TPM: Technological Protection Measures, the phrase used in the WIPO CT to describe DRM software and encryption of content-bearing files.
DRM: Digital Rights Management, a broad term including formal languages for expressing licensing terms through to software interfering with the noral operation of a computer in processing digital information to prevent perfect digital copying of that information, or systems restricting interpretation of digital files to "authorised" software and/or hardware. |
|
|
| GikII |
[Sep. 7th, 2006|02:55 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | excited | ] |
I'm currently at the VI Computer Law World Conference in Edinburgh. Lots of fun. However, even more fun was the pre-conference workshop GikII (combination of Geeky, Wiki and ***LII - AustLII, BAILII etc, which are Law information Institutes). This was a wonderful combination of law, computers and SF-related stuff (anything from MMORPGS to Harry Potter to SF literature to Philip K. Dick's interactive AI robot head). It was a great success and looks like there'll be another one next year. I hope it's not before I get back from Japan. |
|
|
| Pandora's Box: Social Issues of the Information Age |
[Aug. 9th, 2006|12:28 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | happy | ] |
Rachel and I have just been offered an acceptable contract by Wiley to publish Pandora's Box: Social Issues of the Information Age. We'll be delivering a draft by the end of September and the final version by mid-January. It is scheduled to appear November 2007. |
|
|
| Bear Name |
[Aug. 8th, 2006|11:47 am] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Office | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | calm | ] |
As some of you know, I used to have two beeble-bears. They got stolen during the final bid party for UK in 2005 (at ConJose in San Jose). One of these two was a present to me from nesacat. Very nicely she sent me a new one recently (I also have another one that I bought in 2003, called Misty, a name suggested by jennadragonfly).
Anyway, I now need a name for the new bear. You can see him at:
http://www.personal.reading.ac.uk/~sis00aaa/bear.jpg |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
