Day archives: January 1st, 2019

For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain

Smithsonian.com: “At midnight on New Year’s Eve, all works first published in the United States in 1923 will enter the public domain. It has been 21 years since the last mass expiration of copyright in the U.S. That deluge of works includes not just “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which appeared first in …

Subjects: Copyright, Education, Intellectual Property, Knowledge Management, Libraries

Top ten developments in international law in 2018

Oxford University Press Blog: “This year was, once again, one of great political turmoil. The international legal order is not immune from the impact of the rise of populism and increasingly strained relations between many of the world’s most powerful states. A positive view is that we are witnessing a period of global re-adjustment. A …

Subjects: Legal Research

Economists calculate the true value of Facebook to its users in new study

Corrigan JR, Alhabash S, Rousu M, Cash SB (2018) How much is social media worth? Estimating the value of Facebook by paying users to stop using it. PLoS ONE 13(12): e0207101. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0207101 “Facebook, the online social network, has more than 2 billion global users. Because those users do not pay for the service, its benefits …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Economy, Privacy, Social Media

Firm Led by Google Veterans Uses A.I. to ‘Nudge’ Workers Toward Happiness

The New York Times: “Technology companies like to promote artificial intelligence’s potential for solving some of the world’s toughest problems, like reducing automobile deaths and helping doctors diagnose diseases. A company started by three former Google employees is pitching A.I. as the answer to a more common problem: being happier at work. The start-up, Humu, …

Subjects: AI, Economy, Education, Intellectual Property, Knowledge Management

Paper – Giving datasets context

Giving datasets context: a comparison study of institutional repositories that apply varying degrees of curation. International Journal Of Digital Curation, Vol 13 No 1 (2018). DOI: 10.2218/ijdc.v13i1.632. “This research study compared four academic libraries’ approaches to curating the metadata of dataset submissions in their institutional repositories and classified them in one of four categories: no …

Subjects: Knowledge Management, Libraries

​In 1983 Isaac Asimov predicted the world of 2019. Here’s what he got right (and wrong)

Big Think: “Isaac Asimov was one the world’s most celebrated and prolific science fiction writers, having written or edited more than 500 books over his four-decade career. The Russian-born writer was famous for penning hard science fiction in his books, such as that in I, Robot, Foundation and Nightfall. Naturally, his work contained many predictions …

Subjects: AI, Education, Food and Nutrition

CNN Poll Reveals Depths of Anti-Semitism in Europe

CNN article – includes a video: “Anti-Semitic stereotypes are alive and well in Europe, while the memory of the Holocaust is starting to fade, a sweeping new survey by CNN reveals. More than a quarter of Europeans polled believe Jews have too much influence in business and finance. Nearly one in four said Jews have too much …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Education, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

How Apps on Android Share Data with Facebook – Report

Privacy International: “Previous research has shown how 42.55 percent of free apps on the Google Play store could share data with Facebook, making Facebook the second most prevalent third-party tracker after Google’s parent company Alphabet. In this report, Privacy International illustrates what this data sharing looks like in practice, particularly for people who do not …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, E-Commerce, Internet, Privacy, Social Media