Leettaschmidt

This post is co-authored by Dave Hansen and Kyle K. Courtney

We’re very pleased to announce the release of two documents that we believe have the potential to help greatly expand digital access to print library collections by helping libraries do online what we have always done in print: lend books.

Both documents are aimed at addressing the legal and policy rationales for what we term “controlled digital lending” — a method by which libraries loan digitized print books to digital patrons in a “lend like print” fashion similar to how non-digital patrons check out books in-person. Through CDL, libraries use technical controls to ensure a consistent “owned-to-loaned” ratio, meaning the library circulates the exact number of copies of a specific title it owns, regardless of format, putting controls in place to prevent users from redistributing or copying the digitized version.

CDL isn’t itself a silver bullet for mass digital access to books. It’s not meant to be a competitor to Overdrive, nor a replacement for licensing e-books of best-sellers or other currently licensable e-book content. But we think CDL does deserve significant attention as a legal strategy, particularly to help address access to the large number of books published in the “20^th Century black hole” that have little hope of otherwise bring made available to readers online.

The first document is a Position Statement on Controlled Digital Lending, which is meant to help people understand the concept at a glance, give an opportunity for libraries and legal experts to communicate their support for CDL, and provide a centralizing statement around which libraries can build a community of practice. The Statement is signed by a number of leading libraries (some of which are currently employing CDL or actively exploring how to do so) and copyright experts.

 The second document is A White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books, which we co-authored. The White Paper delves much deeper into the legal and policy rationales for controlled digital lending, reviewing relevant law, the fair use rationale for CDL, and practical risk and policy considerations for libraries that might consider implementing CDL for some parts of their collections. Our aim with the White Paper is to help libraries and their lawyers become more comfortable with the concept by more fully explaining the legal rationale as well as the situations in which the rationale is the strongest.

We, along with several colleagues, have posted more information at www.controlleddigitallending.org, which includes the statement text.

The white paper can be found at:

David R. Hansen & Kyle K. Courtney, A White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books (2018), https://doi.org/10.31228/osf.io/7fdyr.

The post Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books appeared first on Scholarly Communications @ Duke.

CC licenses and public domain tools help individuals, organisations, and public institutions better disseminate digital resources and data, breaking down the typical barriers associated with traditional “all rights reserved” copyright. At the same time, CC licenses can’t do everything for everyone. First, the licenses operate in the sphere of copyright and similar rights. They do not attempt to license, say, personality rights, trademark, or patent rights. Also, the CC community recognizes that voluntary licensing schemes will never be a comprehensive solution for access to and reuse of knowledge and creativity around the world. This is one reason why CC works on international copyright reform issues, including the protection and expansion of user rights.

Another dimension of openness that could be better understood from the perspective of the “open” community is the sharing of cultural works related to indigenous communities. This has been talked about with terms such as “traditional knowledge”. Traditional knowledge consists of a wide range of skills, cultural works, and practices that have been sustained and developed over generations by indigenous communities around the world. These communities hold entitlement over this knowledge as well as responsibility for the preservation of their knowledge, but haven’t always had the autonomy to decide what can be done with their knowledge. International and national instruments have attempted to codify the value of traditional knowledge and rights of indigenous peoples, but the place of such knowledge within conventional intellectual property structures remains  deeply contested and uncertain.

These issues and more were brought up at the 2018 Creative Commons Global Summit as well, and has since started an important conversation within the CC community. I’m an attorney and doctoral candidate at UC-Berkeley Law, and over the summer I worked as a research fellow for Creative Commons to conduct an investigation into the current issues regarding traditional knowledge and its intersection with the open movement. A draft of the paper is complete, and we welcome your thoughts and suggestions to it.

In addition, we’ll be hosting a session on the topic on Thursday, September 27 at 3:00p at the 5th Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest in Washington, D.C.

The tension between traditional knowledge protection and IP frameworks is exacerbated by digital technologies that have made the creation, dissemination, appropriation and remixing of knowledge and cultural artifacts easier than ever before. Indigenous communities’ preservation efforts and control over traditional knowledge sometimes also seem to conflict with the ‘open’ ecosystem, which consists of organizations, communities, and individuals supporting open and free culture, open licensing and access to knowledge. This is because traditional knowledge is often perceived as being part of the public domain by default, when it is not. 

There is a colonial history of this perception. The doctrine of discovery, which was used to legitimize and expand colonization, held the assumption that indigenous peoples were “uncivilized,” and hence could not own property like European settlers. Therefore, the land and knowledge of indigenous peoples were seen as part of the commons, open for ‘discovery’ and appropriation. Another oft repeated concern that traditional community representatives have voiced at global venues like WIPO is the misuse and appropriation of their knowledge. Appropriation refers not just to taking something of value to a community, but also reaping economic benefit from it. For these reasons, the public domain may be perceived as detrimental to the interests of indigenous communities. It’s important to recognize this because it affects how these communities might perceive open and free culture movements.

Copyright law in particular is based on a number of assumptions that are sometimes at odds with the protection of indigenous knowledge. For instance, sometimes it can be difficult to identify an author of a cultural work because “ownership” might vest in a community, is sometimes continually being invented, or might be passed from generation to generation. The categories of copyright law may not encompass the kinds of expressions found in traditional knowledge. For example, a dance could be manifested in several ways and may have a sequential unique style over several performances. One sequence might be removed and placed in a western song or performance. Not only would there be no protection for this disparate piece, any social or spiritual meaning that might be attached to that dance would also be lost. Furthermore, some traditions are conveyed and preserved orally, and this might not be ‘fixed’ in a tangible form to receive conventional copyright protection.

This perceived disconnect with copyright law in particular puts Creative Commons in a challenging position with regards to indigenous knowledge. On the one hand, Creative Commons strives to make knowledge and information as widely and freely accessible as possible. It seeks to empower individuals who want to define the terms of access to their works. On the other hand, Creative Commons must grapple with ownership structures of traditional knowledge, its position within copyright law, and the terms of access of different kinds of traditional knowledge online. The CC licenses were never meant to be applied to content that is not meant to be shared broadly — so to the extent such content is not intended to be shared broadly or if open licenses do not adequately meet the needs of these communities for reasons described above, then it makes sense not to expect acceptance or use of open licenses as currently available.

Despite these challenges, digital technologies also represent an opportunity to help resolve some of the tensions between IP structures and traditional knowledge and have been used by indigenous communities. Projects like Mukurtu and Local Contexts help preserve and label traditional works while giving indigenous communities autonomy to set the terms for sharing. Local Contexts also provides guidance to indigenous communities about controlling access and preservation of their knowledge. There are flexibilities within CC licenses that could be used in empowering ways by communities that want to make their works open. The conversation needs to involve more communities, policymakers and scholars and the Creative Commons team is exploring the possibilities of working with other projects and involving indigenous communities more closely to understand the role CC licenses could play in the protection and dissemination of traditional knowledge.

The post Traditional Knowledge and the Commons: The Open Movement, Listening, and Learning appeared first on Creative Commons.

There are lots of calls for the platforms to police the bad speech on their platform -- disinformation and fake news; hate speech and harassment, extremist content and so on -- and while that would represent a major shift in how Big Tech relates to the materials generated and shared by its users, it's not without precedent.

For more than 20 years, online platforms have had a legal duty to police their users' copyright enforcements, responding to unproved accusations of copyright infringements by (usually) removing materials, generally without a moment's thought.

Everybody hates this: users, copyright holders, the platforms themselves. Now, maybe it doesn't have to be this way, but if we're going to ask the platforms to expand their policing duties without turning into (more of) a shitshow, it's worth considering the lessons we've learned from decades of copyright enforcement.

EFF's Legal Director Corynne McSherry offers five lessons to keep in mind:

1. (Lots of) mistakes will be made: copyright takedowns result in the removal of tons of legitimate content.

2. Robots won't help: automated filtering tools like Content ID have been a disaster, and policing copyright with algorithms is a lot easier than policing "bad speech."

3. These systems need to be transparent and have due process. A system that allows for automated instant censorship and slow, manual review of censorship gives a huge advantage to people who want to abuse the system.

4. Punish abuse. The ability to censor other peoples' speech is no joke. If you're careless or malicious in your takedown requests, you should pay a consequence: maybe a fine, maybe being barred form using the takedown system.

5. Voluntary moderation quickly becomes mandatory. Every voluntary effort to stem copyright infringement has been followed by calls to make those efforts mandatory (and expand them).

There's no question that the platforms have a problem with bad behavior and bad speech -- the question is what we should do about it. If we're going to put the platforms in charge of deciding what is and isn't acceptable speech, let's at least try to learn from the failures of the recent past.

Notably missing from most of these discussions is a sense of context. Fact is, there’s another arena where intermediaries have been policing online speech for decades: copyright. Since at least 1998, online intermediaries in the US and abroad have taken down or filtered out billions of websites and links, often based on nothing more than mere allegations of infringement. Part of this is due to Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which protects service providers from monetary liability based on the allegedly infringing activities of third parties if they “expeditiously” remove content that a rightsholder has identified as infringing. But the DMCA’s hair-trigger process did not satisfy many rightsholders, so large platforms, particularly Google, also adopted filtering mechanisms and other automated processes to take down content automatically, or prevent it from being uploaded in the first place.

Platform Censorship: Lessons From the Copyright Wars [Corynne McSherry/EFF Deeplinks]

John Frost writes, "Travis, a railroad engineer, recreated iconic buildings from Disneyland's Fantasyland in his spare time. The result is an incredibly detailed and faithful recreation of facades to Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, Snow White's Scary Adventures and more."

“I drew a scale plan of what space I had to work with then laid out walls where I felt would work,” said Travis. “Upon going through photos I took at Disneyland, I noticed that several of my wall plans lined up with the Fantasyland exteriors in my pictures. It must have been a subconscious inspiration.”

Although he started the project in 2006 and worked on it from time to time, he began to get serious about completing it in 2015. He created a lot of the specialty pieces himself to get an accurate recreation of the exteriors.

“I have many thousands of reference pictures collected from the internet, taken my me or by friends at my request for images of certain items or from certain angles,” said Travis. “From those I have tried to, within reason, faithfully reproduce those exteriors.”

Disneyland’s Fantasyland recreated in incredible detail in a basement [John Frost/The Disney Blog]

MIT Comparative Media Studies researcher/instructor Chris Peterson is an adrent supporter of the Math Prize for Girls, and as part of his work with the organization, he's learned about the way that STEM fields were once considered inherently feminine, while the higher-status humanities were dominated by men -- it's the subject of some outstanding feminist scholarship by Professor Maria Charles.

Peterson tweeted a quote from Maria Charles's work on the subject in a discussion of the upcoming Math Prize for Girls, and then found that his Twitter account had been suspended, without any explanation (he was given a chance to appeal the suspension, but has been told he might have to wait for days to find out what Twitter thought he did wrong).

Peterson thinks he tripped over Twitter's new ban on "dehumanizing speech," which is meant to improve the quality of Twitter discourse by prohibiting Tweets that attack whole groups of people (formerly, Twitter banned attacking individuals on the basis of things like race or gender or sexual preferences, but not generalized racism, sexism, homophobia, etc).

Peterson's explanation seems plausible: although his tweet was a condemnation of sexism, it did discuss gender norms through a critical lens, and an overbusy Twitter moderator might well have mistaken its meaning. One of the great ironies of moderation -- etiher human or algorithmic -- is that criticism of bad speech often contains examples of bad speech that can trip up moderators (for example, a complaint about being the subject of a racial slur might repeat the slur).

Peterson is on the board of the nonprofit National Coalition Against Censorship, a charity that fights for free expression (NCAC helped me when one of my books was censored by a high school principal in Florida). He has recently argued for a relaxation of NCAC's "historic hard-line stance against social media intermediaries implementing any kind of steps to make their speech environments less toxic." because he is "deeply sympathetic to the arguments made by people, particularly members of historically subaltern groups, that a space where 'anything goes' reproduces preexisting power dynamics, and prevents members of these groups from participating on equal terms."

But, Peterson writes, he also believes "that the implementation of these policies and processes can’t be this dumb."

However, I also believe that the implementation of these policies and processes can’t be this dumb. I get that this is a really, really hard social and technical problem to solve. But any system that (apparently) flags feminist academic research about the social construction of scientific privilege as being abusive of women as a class is just not ready for production. And any such system, especially one as poorly designed as this, that keeps the reasons for disciplinary actions opaque, and obscures/delays the process of appealing an account to invisible moderators often working rapidly in inhumane conditions, does not meet the standard we must demand for the most powerful speech intermediaries in the world.

Look: I won’t be harmed by a few hours or days without a Twitter account. In fact, in the current political environment, it might be an unexpected benefit, in the same way getting sick before my race forced me to taper more kept me from hurting myself. But I’m posting this because, as someone (again) who is super-sympathetic to what Twitter is trying to do, this is completely bonkers.

And, in the long run, we have to hold our speech intermediaries to a high standard, even (especially) as we try to give them the space to design and cultivate more equitable environments for everyone to tell their stories. If we don’t, then we’re going to face the impossible choice between the free speech nihilism of “anything goes” or the capricious censorship of arbitrary algorithms. We can’t afford to accept either outcome.

Twitter suspended me for tweeting feminist academic research. Here’s why that’s a problem. [Chris Peterson/MIT]

Somewhere in New Zealand, a seven-year-old boy had an idea to celebrate the spirit of the wolf. His mom shared it on Facebook. And over the course of just a few days, thousands of people, many desperate for something happy after a miserable week, joined the call to celebration.

This is Wolfenoot.

A holiday where we get presents and feast on roasted meat and cake for being kind to dogs?

YES, PLEASE.

I first heard of Woolfenoot when a friend shared author Jax Goss's Facebook post, and joined the enthusiastic chorus of people planning their Woolfenoot feasts. I reached out to Jax through Twitter to ask how her son created Wolfenoot.

There's not a huge amount of background really. I have a very imaginative child who is always coming up with stuff like this. I've been posting the crazy awesome and weird things he says for as long as he's been saying things. ;) This one just exploded.

I'm not sure where he got this from, to be honest. When I asked him, he said "from my brain". Hehe. Very helpful that. ;) But I am a writer, editor and publisher. I am also a folklore nerd, so he has grown up in a house with a lot of books and stories and fairytales. I have a masters in children's literature, so there are stacks of books in our house. He reads avidly - well above his age level. I think maybe just growing up among all that story has kinda seeped into his brain. ;)

Plus he is this sweet little empathetic kid who strongly objects to meanness and injustice and likes people around him to be happy, so that probably fed into it. I work at a zoo, so I am quite conservation minded, and we've had a lot of conversations about, you know, protecting animals and protecting wildlife so that maybe factored in. Mostly though, he just makes stuff up all the time, and this particular thing just... took off I guess. :)

I asked Jax if she told her son about the reaction to Wolfenhoot and if he knew how excited people were about celebrating.

I have yeah. I'm not sure he entirely grasps it to be honest. :) He's just like, "Cool, it'll be cool to see how different people celebrate it". I don't think he really gets the phenomenal effect he has had, you know?

It's that kid thing, where he's like, oh that's cool, now let me tell you about this other interesting thing. Haha.

It has been pretty overwhelming for me though, to be honest. Definitely mostly just excitement and love, but there's a part of me kinda bracing to have to get between my kid and the nasty side of the internet, you know? Hopefully it won't get to that though. Hopefully it'll just stay a wholesome joyous thing. :)

I've been sent HUNDREDS of pics of people's dogs, via twitter, fb, the even on fb. It's been amazing. :)

Wolfenoot is still a work-in-progress and there's an FAQ on the official Woolfenoot website. There isn't any official merchandise (soon!) yet, so don't fall for outrageously-priced imitations. In the meantime, you can follow Woolfenoot on Twitter and start planning your menu of roasted meats.

Top Photo: Shutterstock

Inventor Ivan Cash of Oakland, California was inspired by the 1988 cult classic They Live to create screen-blocking glasses.

In the movie, a drifter (played by Roddy Piper) discovers a box of sunglasses. He puts on a pair and soon learns they reveal hidden messages behind advertising and that many people in charge are actually aliens.

Now, Cash's IRL Glasses don't reveal hidden messages but do mask most TV and some computer screens. When you look through the lenses, the screens just go black. Plus, they double as sunglasses that look like the ones from the movie.

IRL Glasses are in beta. This means they are compatible with most TVs (LCD/LED) and some computers (LCD/LED). IRL glasses do not yet block smartphones or digital billboards (OLED).

If you'd like to CONSUME a pair for yourself, he's got a Kickstarter going for them until the end of the month. The price now is $49 and will be $79 after the campaign is over.

(swissmiss)

The German Cookbook Recently the people at Phaidon Publishing asked me to take a look at The German Cookbook… and wow, I’m impressed. Alfons Schubeck’s collection of over 500 authentic German recipes brings together all the different regional dishes in one (heavy) comprehensive book. You won’t just find the standard Rouladen, Sauerbraten, Schnitzel Recipes that […]

The post The German Cookbook by Alfons Schuhbeck- My Review appeared first on A German Girl in America.

Last Tuesday Bryan Adams entered the copyright debate.

That’s Bryan Adams the singer and songwriter, the composer of “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You”, and “Summer of ’69”.

Authors, artists and composers often have little bargaining power, and are often pressured to sign away their rights to their publisher for life.

Adams appeared before a Canadian House of Commons committee to argue they should be entitled to reclaim ownership of their creations 25 years after they sign them away.

No control until after you are dead

In Canada they get them back 25 years after they are dead, when the rights automatically revert to their estate. In Australia our law used to do the same, but we removed the provision in 1968. In our law, authors are never given back what they give away.

Some publishers voluntarily put such clauses in their contracts, but that is something they choose to do, rather than something the law mandates.

Australia’s copyright term is long. For written works it lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. It was extended from 50 years after death as part of the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement.

What copyright is for

Copyright is a government-granted limited monopoly to control certain uses of an author’s work.

It is meant to achieve three main things: incentivise the creation of works, reward authors, and benefit society through access to knowledge and culture.

Incentive and reward are not the same thing.

The incentive needn’t be big

The copyright term needed to provide an incentive to create something is pretty short.

The Productivity Commission has estimated the average commercial life of a piece of music, for example is two to five years. Most pieces of visual art yield commercial income for just two years, with distribution highly skewed toward the small number with a longer life. The average commercial life of a film is three to six years. For books, it is typically 1.4 to five years; 90% of books are out of print after two years.

It is well accepted by economists that a term of about 25 years is the maximum needed to incentivise the creation of works.

But the rewards, for creators, should be

The second purpose is to provide a reward to authors, beyond the bare minimum incentive needed to create something. Quite reasonably, we want to give them a bit extra as thanks for their work.

But, in practice authors, artists and composers are often obliged to transfer all or most of their rights to corporate investors such as record labels or book publishers in order to receive anything at all.

In the film and television industries it is not unusual for creators to have to sign over their whole copyright, forever – and not just here on Earth but throughout the universe at large.

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Read more: Life plus 70: who really benefits from copyright's long life?

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It means investors don’t just take what is needed to incentivise their work but most of the rewards meant for the author as well.

This isn’t new. Creators have been complaining since at least 1737 that too often they have no choice but to transfer their rights before anyone knows what they are worth.

Other countries do it better

In recognition of these realities, many countries, including the US, have enacted author-protective laws that, for example, let creators reclaim their rights back after a certain amount of time, or after publishers stop exploiting them, or after royalties stop flowing. Other laws guarantee creators “fair” or “reasonable” payment.

Australia stands out for having no author protections at all.

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Read more: Australian copyright laws have questionable benefits

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Canada’s law already protects authors by giving rights back to their heirs 25 years after they die. Bryan Adams’s proposal is to change one word in that law. Instead of copyright reverting to the creator 25 years after “death”, he wants it to revert 25 years after “transfer”.

Copyright is meant to be about ensuring access

Handing rights back to creators after 25 years would not only help them secure more of copyright’s rewards, it would also help achieve copyright’s other major aim: to promote widespread access to knowledge and culture.

Right now our law isn’t doing a very good job of that, particularly for older material.

Copyright lasts for so long, and distributors lose financial interest in works so fast, that they are often neither properly distributed nor available for anyone else to distribute.

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Read more: Australian copyright reform stuck in an infinite loop

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In the book industry my research into almost 100,000 titles has found that publishers license older e-books to libraries on the same terms and for the same prices as newer ones. That includes “exploding” licences which force books to be deleted from collections even if nobody ever borrows them.

Publishers are interested in maximising their share of library collections budgets, not ensuring that a particular author continues to get paid or a particular title continues to get read.

As a result libraries often forgo buying older (but still culturally valuable) books even though they would have bought them if the publisher cared enough to make them available at a reasonable price.

Restricting access to books is not in the interests of authors or readers.

… and directing rewards where they are needed

If rights reverted after 25 years, as I have proposed and as Adams now proposes, authors would be able to do things like license their books directly to libraries in exchange for fair remuneration – say $1 per loan.

If authors weren’t interested in reclaiming their rights, they could automatically default to a “cultural steward” that would use the proceeds to directly support new creators via prizes, fellowships and grants – much like Victor Hugo envisaged with his idea of a “paid public domain” back in 1878.

We could do it all without changing the total copyright term imposed on us by the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement and other treaties. We could get creators paid more fairly while keeping Australian culture alive.

Reversion is the key.

Rebecca Giblin is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. She currently leads the Author's Interest fellowship project (authorsinterest.org; FT170100011) and a multidisciplinary linkage project investigating e-lending in public libraries (elendingproject.org; LP160100387). For six years until May 2018 Rebecca volunteered her time and expertise as an independent expert on the Board of the Australian Digital Alliance.

The sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiations have both harmful and beneficial effects for our health. Too much exposure can lead to sunburn, skin ageing, eye damage or even skin cancer. With too little UV we may become vitamin D deficient.

This big challenge of managing our daily UV exposure limits motivated my colleagues and I to develop a low-cost, paper-based sensor people can wear. The colour produced by our sensor indicates when you have achieved 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of your daily recommended UV exposure.

To accommodate our ethnically-diverse population, we developed six such sensors, each personalised for a particular skin tonality.

The key discovery behind our sensor is an invisible ink that develops a colour when exposed to the UV rays.

We published these findings today in Nature Communications.

Problems with the UV index

When you step outside your home do you notice the intensity of the sun?

If it’s cloudy where you live today, perhaps you assumed you didn’t need protection. If the sun felt intense, maybe you put on sunscreen and a hat.

But irrespective of your judgement about this risk, in reality UV rays neither feel hot (it’s the infrared rays that do this), nor are they visible to the human eye.

So, how do you track UV intensity?

Your current option is the UV index. This is a number calculated by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) that tells you whether the UV intensity is low, moderate, high, very high or extreme.

But UV index is a rather blunt tool: it still leaves you wondering about when and for how long you should step out for your vitamin D dose, and when should you go back inside to minimise skin cancer risk.

Our reliance on the UV index is further complicated by the fact that it’s calculated for a fair skin tone. While lighter skinned individuals are more prone to UV damage, darker skin needs much more sunlight to produce enough vitamin D – which is vital for strong bones and other aspects of health.

This means the current UV index may not be suited to our ethnically-diverse population. And substituting sunlight with oral vitamin D supplements may not always be a good solution either, as a number of factors – including certain medications – interfere with oral vitamin D metabolism.

UV sensitive ink

As another way to measure UV exposure, we developed sensor paper made with an ink that changes colour in the presence of UV radiation.

An important component of this ink is a polyoxometalate molecule. It belongs to a family of materials described as “multi-redox photo-electrochromic” – meaning they can produce different intensities and tonalities of colours when excited with different energies.

We know that solar UV irradiation is comprised of different types of UV waves – so our unique ink responds to these different kinds of radiation and produces distinct colours that are visible to the naked eye.

Using this initially-invisible ink, we can draw or print a design on a paper or any other surface. On exposure to UV, the ink starts to become coloured. The colour intensity allows us to track our total UV exposure in real time.

By changing the ink composition and the sensor design, we can make the ink to develop colour either slow or faster. This allows us to produce sensors for people with different skin tonalities and sun exposure needs.

Wearable wrist bands

This low-cost paper-based technology also offers design flexibility to produce UV sensors as stickers, hairbands and wristbands.

Currently, the sensor comes as a wearable wristband with four smiley faces. As the wearer is exposed to more and more UV with increasing time in the sun, the smileys start lighting up one after another. Finally, a sad smiley appears when the wearer approaches their maximum-allowed UV dose – this acts as a warning sign to leave the Sun.

We have successfully tested the performance of these sensors across various environmental conditions, such as changing humidity, temperature and altitude.

The next stage is to distribute UV sensor prototypes to volunteers to collect sensor response data. This feedback will also assist in optimising the sensor design before we progress towards third-party validation, certification and manufacturing.

Applications outside of health

Overall, we are excited that our modular paper-based UV sensor technology will be useful in helping people negotiate the delicate balance between not enough and too much UV exposure.

But UV rays not only directly impact humans – they also have complex effects on the growth of our agricultural crops, and shelf-lives of many consumer, industrial and defence products.

Our UV sensors show large dynamic range – this means that they can detect extremely low as well as extremely high UV doses. This feature may be particularly promising for those industries that wish to assess the long-term impact of UV rays on their outdoor products.

Vipul Bansal receives funding from Australian Research Council (ARC) and is an ARC Future Fellow.

What have the Romans ever done for us? Well, obviously the roads – the roads go without saying. How about guidance for how to live in the 21st century? That seems less likely, but in fact the last few years have seen a flurry of interest in the work of three Roman Stoic philosophers who offered just that. They were Seneca, tutor to the Emperor Nero; Epictetus, a former slave; and Marcus Aurelius, himself emperor.

Modern books drawing on their ideas and repackaged as guidance for how to live well today include A Guide to the Good Life by William Irvine, Stoicism and the Art of Happiness by Donald Robertson, The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, and How to Be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci. What all these books share is the conviction that people can benefit by going back and looking at the ideas of these Roman Stoics. There’s even an annual week dedicated to Stoicism.

Stoicism holds that the key to a good, happy life is the cultivation of an excellent mental state, which the Stoics identified with virtue and being rational. The ideal life is one that is in harmony with Nature, of which we are all part, and an attitude of calm indifference towards external events. It began in Greece, and was founded around 300BC by Zeno, who used teach at the site of the Painted Stoa in Athens, hence the name Stoicism. The works of the early Stoics are for the most part lost, so it is the Roman Stoics who have been most influential over the centuries, and continue to be today.

Control how you think

So, what were the ideas? Two foundational principles can both be found in the Handbook, a short work summarising the ideas of Epictetus. The first is that some things are within our control and some are not, and that much of our unhappiness is caused by thinking that we can control things that, in fact, we can’t.

What can we control? Epictetus argues that we actually control very little. We don’t control what happens to us, we can’t control what the people around us say or do, and we can’t even fully control our own bodies, which get damaged and sick and ultimately die without regard for our preferences. The only thing that we really control is how we think about things, the judgements we make about things.

This leads us to the second foundational principle from Epictetus: it’s not things that upset us, but how we think about things. Stuff happens. We then make judgements about what happens. If we judge that something really bad has happened, then we might get upset, sad, or angry, depending on what it is. If we judge that something bad is likely to happen then we might get scared or fearful. All these emotions are the product of the judgements we make. Things in themselves are value neutral, for what might seem terrible to us might be a matter of indifference to someone else, or even welcomed by others. It’s the judgements we make that introduce value into the picture, and it’s those value judgements that generate our emotional responses.

The good Stoic news is that these value judgements are the one thing over which we have complete control. Things happen, none of which are inherently good or bad, and it’s within our power to decide how we value them. The paradox of Stoicism, as Epictetus formulates it, is that we have almost no control over anything, yet at the same time we have potentially complete control over our happiness.

Train your mind

At first glance, this might seem to understate the very real challenges that people face in their daily lives. How can just thinking differently help someone who is struggling to put food on their table, for instance? The Stoics didn’t shy away from this. They fully acknowledged that life can be hard sometimes.

Seneca knew this all too well: he suffered exile, multiple bereavements, and was ultimately forced to commit suicide by Nero. He also knew that it was all too easy to say “I’m not going to let these external things disturb me” but quite another to follow through and not be disturbed oneself.

So the Stoics developed a whole series of practical exercises designed to help train people to incorporate Stoic ideas into their daily lives. Seneca recommended taking stock at the end of each day, noting when you become irritated by something trivial, or act angrily in response to someone who perhaps didn’t deserve it, and so on. By noting his mistakes, he hoped to do better the next day.

Marcus Aurelius had another strategy, reminding himself each morning that he was probably going to encounter a lot of angry, stressed, impatient, ungrateful people during the coming day. By reflecting on this in advance, the hope was that he would be less likely to respond in kind. But he also reflected on the fact that none of these people would be like this intentionally. They were the victims of their own mistaken judgements.

Here we get another paradox: no one chooses to be unhappy, stressed, angry, miserable, and yet these are in fact all the product of our judgements, the one thing within our control.

Accept what happens

Another Stoic strategy is to remind ourselves of our relative unimportance. The world does not revolve around us. Aurelius regularly reflected in his Meditations on the vastness of the universe and the infinity of time stretching into the past and future, in order to put his own short life into wider context.

Our lives are but moments when placed within this cosmic perspective. Given this, why should we expect the universe to deliver whatever it is that we might happen to want? On the contrary, it would be absurd to expect it to conform to our will.

As Epictetus put it, if you expect the universe to deliver what you want, you are going to be disappointed, but if you embrace whatever the universe gives, then life will be a whole lot smoother. Again, this is easier said than done, but more and more people are taking note of this Stoic advice and working hard to incorporate it into their daily lives.

John Sellars is a member of Modern Stoicism, a non-profit organisation that runs Stoic Week and organises Stoicon events.

Gravely misinformed ideas about health, beauty and body image still dominate, as derogatory reactions to plus size model Tess Holliday’s October Cosmopolitan UK magazine cover prove. TV presenter Piers Morgan, for example, posted a photo of the cover on Instagram with a caption that called out this “step forward for body positivity” as “a load of old baloney”. He went on to add: “This cover is just as dangerous and misguided as celebrating size zero models.”

Debates along the same lines run throughout discussion of the magazine cover on social media, with many people arguing that the image promotes obesity and an unhealthy lifestyle. There are plenty of supportive and celebratory comments too but why do many diverse audiences – from newspaper op-eds to online fitness coaches to social media users – react to this cover with immediate disapproval?

It comes after a glut of “summer shredding” diet plans and health programmes addressing the obesity panic and offering “fast fixes” to solve health issues by putting patients under dramatic weight loss regimes. Yes, there are correlations between obesity and other health issues, and it is important for us to think and talk about health. But the ways we have been going about this are often not accurate nor helpful.

Fat stigma, thin privilege

Many of the social media comments responding to Holliday’s magazine cover start by exalting the efforts of body positivity and body acceptance movements. But there is always a “but” – “but this isn’t healthy”, “but she’s going to get diabetes”, “but she’s going to die early”.

Why do we feel entitled to comment on anyone’s health when we most likely know nothing about them, their health, nutritional choices or fitness activity? Fat stigma has led us to draw a direct and exclusive connection between fatness and ill health, often disregarding the many other aspects of a person’s life that also bear on their bodies and health. Research has also shown that the stress experienced by fat people in the face of fat phobia, stigma and shaming often make it far harder for them to address the health issues they need to.

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Read more: Obesity is about much more than an unhealthy lifestyle

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There are plenty of thin people suffering from illness and all manner of health complications too. But the privileges Western culture has accorded to thinness mean that these people will never be subject to the same interrogations, or faux concerns, about their health. Unhealthy diet fads hardly come under the same kind of criticism.

Meanwhile, contemporary Western societies glamorise and laud numerous unhealthy lifestyle practices on a regular basis. People boast about their excessive drinking jaunts, or glorify stress by exalting those who work hard and are constantly under pressure. These practices are not only permissible; they have almost become something to aspire to. But the moment a fat person appears on a public platform, huge concerns about health are suddenly developed.

Multiple body stories

Slurs against fat people almost always draw on two main stereotypes: that they eat copious amounts of unhealthy food and that they are too lazy to exercise. Scrolling through the comments about Holliday’s Cosmo cover alone will pull up a few of these.

Such slurs do not only exclude and deny the material experiences of people suffering from such conditions as hormonal imbalances, genetic issues or other health complications that lead to weight gain. More harmfully, it ignores the many other affective, emotional and mental factors that contribute to an person’s relationship to their body.

Instances of childhood abuse, sexual assault, peer bullying or fractured familial relationships are only a few of many reasons my own interview participants (for my ongoing PhD) have shared of the subsequent damaging practices they took towards their bodies. These include starvation, over-exercising, binge-eating, self-harm or excessive preoccupations with certain beauty practices such as plastic surgery or skin bleaching.

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Read more: Discrimination against fat people is so endemic, most of us don’t even realise it’s happening

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Seeing bodies differently

People never just arrive at looking a certain way overnight. It is harmful and counterproductive to assume that a woman is very fat because she just eats junk food all day and fails to exercise; that a very thin woman is anorexic, or that people with hair on their bodies or acne on their faces are dirty. A complex set of traumas, experiences, relationships and interactions lie beneath the surface and have led them to where they are – and we need to honour these stories too.

Instead of seeing fat bodies simplistically and sanctimoniously as a glorification of bad health, we might instead try to reframe any display of an unconventional body as a means to understand that health can look very different and take varying forms. We should view a publicly visible fat, confident, self-accepting fat body, like Holliday’s, not as a sign that she is promoting unhealthy life choices but as the opposite: that whatever size we are or whatever state of health we are in, we might begin to find some peace with our bodies.

If health is really what we are concerned about, surely this might be a more helpful and kind approach. After all, the current knee-jerk reactions to images like Holliday’s magazine cover (or any number of her social media posts) of horror and disdain, and consequent shaming and bullying, haven’t been working. They only cause more stigma, and the bodies that may need help and healing become more invisible.

Jamie Khoo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

If you’re not an academic or scientist, then you probably have no idea how off kilter research scholarship has become.  (more…)

Zipstitch is a patch that closes wounds without stitches. It's available over the counter, but I suggest if you get a cut big enough to require this nifty gadget, you should probably go to the doctor as soon as you can.

Move aside Fail Whale, now the internet has a Snail Whale (and other strange beasts).

Digital Culture's interactive Hybridizer app allows you to digitally create cryptozoological creatures using the 17th c. art of engraver Matthäus Merian. His work has been digitized, split in half, and animated by the team of Kajetan Obarski, Igor Hardy and Tukasz Kozak.

Give it a whirl.

(Nag on the Lake)

Facebook usage is falling in the US and Canada, especially among young people, but it's still dominating the internet overseas, especially in countries where Zero Rating is legal.

In those countries, Facebook -- more than any other technology, platform or service -- is leading the rise in authoritarianism and genocide. It's become the go-to tool for manipulating public opinion to support violence, racial cleansing and other horrors.

In his latest piece, John Oliver describes how Facebook's business model, moderation tactics, and history have led to this moment -- and how Facebook has become an irredeemable cesspool, an insult to toilets, because toilets "make shit go away, whereas Facebook retains shit, disseminates shit to your acquaintances, and reminds you of shit from seven years ago while allowing corporations to put their shit in front of you. What I’m saying is there’s a purity and integrity to toilets that Facebook seriously lacks."

An August investigation by Motherboard gets a shout-out in the piece, as Oliver references one of Facebook’s many internal content moderation rules—in this case, one that specifies the very specific instances in which photoshopped anuses are allowed on the site. Facebook has similar rules for hate speech (drawing the line on what’s allowed and what isn’t in often difficult ways to understand), which cut across cultures, countries, political regimes, and geographic borders.

“I am not saying the challenges Facebook is facing are not significant. But for a company that moves fast and breaks things, they have sure moved slowly in trying to fucking fix them,” Oliver said. “Until they do it is painfully obvious that everyone should be treating everything on their site with extreme skepticism and see Facebook for what it is: A fetid swamp of mistruths and outright lies, interspersed with an occasional reminder of a dead pet. That’s it. That’s what it is.”

John Oliver Calls Facebook 'a Fetid Swamp of Mistruths and Outright Lies' [Jason Koebler/Motherboard]

Last year, 8th-grader and cartoonist Sasha Matthews discovered that the Scholastic Awards had a nasty rule buried in the fine print: all the childrens' work submitted for consideration became the property of Scholastic. This year, Scholastic fixed the rules, only taking a license to publish the entries. It's a big victory for the kids and a smart decision by the company.

Nicole Brown reports:

A 14-year-old Manhattan girl has learned firsthand the power of speaking up.

Months after Sasha Matthews, of the Upper West Side, tweeted about the copyright policy of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the organization behind the national teen competition, which gets hundreds of thousands of submissions, announced new participation terms.

Matthews, a cartoonist known for her “Everyday Superheroes” comic book that raises money for the American Civil Liberties Union, questioned why winners of the contest would have to grant the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers Inc. the copyright to their work for two years.

Copyright markets are -- and always have been -- broken. People make art because they have to, and there's always a middle-man ready to take advantage of the oversupply of willing creators to grab our rights and pay us peanuts.

That's why expanding the term or scope of copyright does little to help creators, especially less-well-known artists or those at the beginning of their careers. When you give a person with no bargaining power more rights, the bullies who've been grabbing the lion's share all along simply take the new rights, too. Merely expanding copyright is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money in the hopes that the bullies will leave them with enough to buy something to eat.

But there's a better way!

One of the best features of the US copyright system is "reversion": this allows creators to fill in a few forms and take back their copyrights after 35 years, even if they have entered into a "perpetual assignment of copyright" with a publisher, studio, label or other party.

Creators at the start of their careers have no negotiating leverage, and most creative works have no commercial life after the first couple of years. Reversion allows the small minority of creators who have attained fame to take back the copyrights they were strong-armed into surrendering when they were unknowns, and it allows other, less-successful creators to take back their creations and distribute them in small, independent editions that give them new life.

Canada is contemplating a sweeping set of copyright reforms; as in inevitable on these occasions, the process has been dominated by batshit proposals from giant corporations who've bilked some creators to front for them.

But one proposal stands out for its sensible, pro-creator obviousness: singer Bryan Adams' proposal to create a 25-year reversion system for creators. Such a system would allow creators like Adams (whose own career peaked long enough ago to allow him to claim back his most successful works under this rule) to right the old wrongs in the contracts he signed when he was starting out.

As Australian copyright scholar Rebecca Giblin notes, this system was once in place in Australia, but was abolished in 1968. Importantly, reversion systems are one of the few areas of copyright that are not tightly constrained by impossible-to-alter international copyright treaties like the Berne Convention and the WTO's TRIPS.

If you're an American who wants to revert your 35-year-old rights, check out the Authors Alliance tool for streamlining the process.

In the book industry my research into almost 100,000 titles has found that publishers license older e-books to libraries on the same terms and for the same prices as newer ones. That includes “exploding” licences which force books to be deleted from collections even if nobody ever borrows them.

Publishers are interested in maximising their share of library collections budgets, not ensuring that a particular author continues to get paid or a particular title continues to get read.

As a result libraries often forgo buying older (but still culturally valuable) books even though they would have bought them if the publisher cared enough to make them available at a reasonable price.

Restricting access to books is not in the interests of authors or readers.

Everything he does, he does it for us. Why Bryan Adams is on to something important about copyright [Rebecca Giblin/The Conversation]

(Image: Gerardo Gonzalez, CC-BY)

With nativism and xenophobia on the rise, Americans are increasingly required to "prove" that they are actually Americans: whether it's at a border checkpoint (far from any border), or in a government office. (more…)

Floating in on the wind, yet again, the sound of It's Raining, It's Pouring being sung by a child on the creepiest siren in Britain. The Ipswich Star reports on what one local described as "something from a horror movie." I've embedded a recording made by one alarmed local at the top of this post so you know what they were hearing.

A tormented mother living in Bramford Road with her two young children has been woken on an almost nightly basis by a tinny, distant rendition of ‘It’s Raining, It’s Pouring’. She said the threatening undertone of the song had left her frightened and questioning whether she was imagining things. After months of torment, she finally reported the unusual complaint to Ipswich Borough Council.

The next time it happened, they scrambled workers to her address and she helped them track down the unnerving music to a loudspeaker installed at "an industrial premises on the neighbouring Farthing Road estate [business park]." The council subsequently issued a press statement, which follows.

“This is unique in our experience – it was difficult to believe a nursery rhyme would be playing in the middle of the night. “But we do take all complaints extremely seriously and asked the residents who contacted us to let us know when it was actually playing so we could investigate properly. “We took a call around midnight and immediately went to the Bramford Road area to find out more - we did hear the nursery rhyme playing from an industrial premises and it sounded very eerie at that time of night. We appreciate that people living nearby would find it quite spooky.”

The premises' operators blamed spiders.

“The sound is only supposed to act as a deterrent for opportunistic thieves that come onto our property, and it’s designed only to be heard by people on our private land. We are now aware of the problem - the motion sensors were being triggered by spiders crawling across the lenses of our cameras and it looks like we’ve had it turned up too loudly. We’ve spoken to the resident who brought it to our attention and adjusted it so this shouldn’t happen again.”

The BBC adds that it had gone on for months.

For several months she would hear the rhyme, which would go away only to come again another day. The woman, who did not wish to be named, said: "The first time I heard it it was the most terrifying thing ever, I went cold and felt sick, and thought 'what on earth was that?'"

Right now I'm listening to a mix of coffee shop chatter and tweeting birds. I'm using a website called A Soft Murmur, which lets you create an ambient mix of rain, thunder, waves, wind, fire, birds, crickets, coffee shop, singing bowl, and white noise. You can save your favorite mixes, too, or click a button for a random mix.

[via Nag on the Lake]

The Republican president speaks for the Republican Party.

3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000.... [twitter] ....This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico! [twitter]

Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September 2017. The 2,975 count comes from a George Washington University study, published in July, which included people who died of thist, starvation, disease or neglect as a direct result of the storm. 64 (not "6 to 18") were reportedly killed outright by drowning, falling debris, in collapsing buildings, etc.

On the 170th anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, British graphic novelist Martin Rowson has produced an illustrated adaptation. Apart from a few pages of prose, the whole work is presented in the style of a graphic novel.

The preface describes how the middle-aged Rowson became smitten by Marx and Engels' exciting prose when he was only 16. Aside from expressing his great admiration for Marx’s writing, as well as his own critical stance, he furnishes the reader with some historical backdrop to the completion of The Manifesto. Marx had been commissioned to write it by a socialist group in the summer of 1847, but, under pressure, succeeded in producing it at the beginning of 1848. Significantly, that was before the outbreak of revolutionary movements in Europe later on in 1848. Rowson goes on to explain that the initial publication failed to attract the attention of many people. Only after the events of the Paris Commune in 1871 did the pamphlet receive a wide audience and a publication renewal.

The illustrations create an atmospheric accompaniment to the Marx figures whose speaking balloons relay the text of The Manifesto. The graphics pair nicely with the text with dense images that impart the feeling of the clashes of historical forces (classes) or with the dramatic rendering of the first lines of The Manifesto in which a spectre appears, so Hamlet-like in two dark and foreboding images to haunt the reader’s mind. There is plenty of theatricality too: images of Marx interacting from a stage with a hostile audience (Rowson’s added flourishes added to enhance the exposition in a stimulating theatrical way).

As a literary work, the illustrations do justice to the marvelously compressed, yet sweeping, literary quality of Marx’s verbal imagery and present readers. Though I had read The Manifesto years ago, I found the adaptation to be both a refresher and newly insightful.

The Communist Manifesto: A Graphic Novel [Martin Rowson/SelfMadeHero]

Imagine your grandfather was interviewed about his life, over many hours, some 80 years ago. Everything he says is written down, enough to fill more than 20 notebooks.

You’ve heard that those notebooks hold stories of your grandparents and their grandparents. Stories they would tell as they sat around a fire in the winter, by a river in summer. There are stories about the sports they played, the food they ate, their spirituality, how they celebrated important events. Stories about their songs, dances, artworks. Stories of the events that shaped them, many of which play out even now.

Then you learn that the wife of the person who wrote down your grandfather’s stories has locked the notebooks away. You and your family are not allowed to read them.

This is how it is for a number of Aboriginal people today, among them 81-year-old Vincent (Vince) Copley senior, co-author of this article.

Between 1939 and 1944, Vince Copley’s grandfather, Ngadjuri man Barney Waria, provided information about his people and culture to anthropologist-in-training Ronald Berndt. When Berndt died in 1990, 45 years and an illustrious career later, he’d published only one significant article about Barney Waria and the Ngadjuri people.

Four years after his death, Berndt’s wife and fellow anthropologist Catherine Berndt died. Her will, written in 1993 and following her husband’s wishes, stipulated a 30-year embargo on a subset of their extensive collection of papers. This embargo included the Barney Waria notebooks. As it stands, the embargoed material - stored in the Berndt Museum at the University of Western Australia - will not be accessible until 2024.

Vince Copley hopes to see these notebooks before he dies. He would like to be able to read them with his adult children, to give them a fuller picture of their Ngadjuri ancestry. He hopes they may trigger his own memories of his father’s side of the family.

Barney Waria was born in 1873 at Orroroo, on Ngadjuri Country in the mid-north of South Australia. He died in 1948. As far as is known, he was the last initiated Ngadjuri man. Vince’s father Frederick Warrior - the name was anglicised at some stage - was the eldest son of Barney. He died in an accident in 1938 when he was 30 and Vince was a baby.

Between 1936 and 1944, Barney Waria worked with three anthropologists: Norman Tindale, Charles Mountford, and Ronald Berndt. Berndt was in his early 20s when he met Waria for the first time, around 1939.

Important cultural knowledge

Over his lifetime, Berndt published 35 books and many articles. When he met Waria, however, he was just starting his anthropology studies. They met either at Berndt’s father’s house at Rose Park or at Light Square, in the Adelaide city centre, a gathering place for Aboriginal people from many different language groups.

In either 1942 or 1944, Berndt took the older Aboriginal man to visit the Aboriginal collection at the South Australian Museum. As they walked past the exhibits, Waria pointed out artefacts that were familiar. Berndt writes that at one point, Waria stopped and opened his arms wide as if to embrace the gallery of objects. Waria said:

It’s wonderful that we can look at all these things and know their meanings, wonderful to think of the power and the songs and the ritual associated with them, to think about all that has gone. But what they were lives only in the minds of a few of us!

It’s not clear what to make of Waria’s words, as he would have intended them. Lament? Pragmatic acceptance of a new reality? Something else?

What is clear, however, is that Waria was conscious that important Aboriginal cultural knowledge was disappearing. It is our view that he chose to work with anthropologists as one way of preserving that knowledge for his descendents. Much of Waria’s knowledge was recorded in Ronald Berndt’s field notes.

In the late 1950s, the Berndts moved to Perth, taking up senior roles at the University of Western Australia. In 1976 they founded an anthropology museum to hold their extensive collection of material. In 1992, after Ronald’s death, it was renamed the Berndt Museum.

Why an embargo?

Anthropologist John Stanton is the literary executor of Ronald and Catherine Berndt’s estate. Now retired, he was the couple’s protégé, and worked with them for many years. He became a curator of the Berndt Museum, and then director from 1980 to 2013. He remains on the Committee of the Professor Ronald M. and Dr Catherine Berndt Research Foundation.

Stanton says that neither Catherine nor Ronald Berndt trusted Australian governments to support Aboriginal interests. Thus the embargo on Berndt’s notes - placed during the time of the Mabo case and the eventual 1992 ruling that recognised native title - was a result of their concern that their material could be misused by a government.

In the pre-Mabo era, the embargo on Berndt’s field notes would have been viewed as a purely personal decision. It would not have crossed people’s minds to consult with Aboriginal people. Also, Ngadjuri people had been removed from their lands as a result of colonisation. At that time they were not widely recognised as an identifiable language group.

Today, universities actively pursue decolonised approaches. At the very least, they work in partnership with Indigenous people. Often, their work supports Indigenous self-determination. Within the academy, it is increasingly accepted that field notes should be available to the descendants of the fieldworker’s Indigenous teachers.

Stanton has confirmed that the notebooks containing Barney Waria’s interviews have been read by people outside the Berndt Museum on only two occasions. Both times, access was subject to South Australia Supreme Court writs. The first was during the controversy over the Hindmarsh Island Bridge which concerned the Ngarrindjeri people. The second was by an anthropologist from the South Australian Native Title Service in response to a Ngadjuri native title claim in 2011.

At present, native title claims are the only avenue for Aboriginal people to try to access the embargoed material. However, this is a flawed process. Families seek to find as many of the missing pieces of their traditional languages and cultures as they can. These cultural reasons tend to get lost in complicated and often combative legal processes.

Ronald Berndt may have decided it was best to avoid these confrontations by imposing the embargo. However, the descendants of the people whose lives and culture he documented have much more at stake than he did.

Unfairly withheld

Vince Copley contacted Stanton in November 2017 - a colleague emailed on his behalf - because he’d heard a rumour that the embargo had been lifted. Stanton emailed back saying he’d retired and a new associate director, Dr Vanessa Russ, was in charge. He acknowledged the difficulties for families, saying he was sorry that “we have been so hamstrung by Catherine Berndt’s will.”

In recent email correspondence, Russ, an academic, artist and Ngarinyin/Gija woman from the Kimberley, has confirmed that the embargo continues. The university, she says, accepted the donations made by Berndt in their entirety, to secure the material for future generations, and has been working to conserve and share these collections. “Unfortunately this has included an embargo on the field notebooks. We acknowledge that we would therefore be breaking the law if we contravened the terms of the Will by providing access before 2024, but that this has caused some distress to Elders.”

The university, she says, is striving to ensure that future consultation will take into account all individuals and communities who through their heirs and ancestors provided information to the Berndts, “in order to find the best process and procedure for future research and teaching with this material post 2024.”

Our position is that the Berndts were not solely the owners of the intellectual property in the field notes. It was jointed owned by Aboriginal Elders, such as Barney Waria. Consequently, the field notes are being unfairly withheld from their descendants.

Recently, we published an article arguing that Berndt’s field notes are joint intellectual property. They could not have been produced by either Berndt or Waria by himself. Both men contributed to this intellectual soup. One shared his specialist knowledge. The other recorded this knowledge in a notebook. It is likely that Barney Waria’s knowledge was recorded verbatim in Berndt’s field notes.

Moreover, there is a further injustice behind the current situation, of which many Indigenous people are acutely aware. Academics achieve careers and financial security on the basis of Indigenous cultural knowledge. However, the Indigenous teachers who impart that specialist knowledge, and their descendants, receive meagre pickings.

Where to from here?

The question of who owns this sort of material is slowly being resolved in this country. However, for people like Vince Copley senior and his family, a solution to the Berndt embargo seems an impossibly long way off.

What reasonable expectations did Barney Waria have when he decided to talk to Berndt? It is likely that these expectations were based on his previous experiences with Norman Tindale and Charles Mountford. Their notebooks are readily available in libraries and museums.

The current situation undermines trust between Indigenous people and anthropologists. If the knowledge you impart to a researcher is likely to be kept from your descendants, why share it? The Berndt example demonstrates that intellectual property can be appropriated as soon as it is written down.

It is time that the University of Western Australia re-assessed the legal basis for the embargo. For Vince Copley and other descendants of the people who shared their specialist knowledge with Berndt - whose stories and culture are locked away - time is running out.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Serena Williams felt she was trested unfairly in 2018's U.S. Open. A series of calls fines have sparked a debate among fans, players and tennis officials. PHOTO COURTESY OF EDWIN MARTINEZ

The discussion surrounding the potential double standard that female athletes face has prompted a firestorm of a debate among athletes, officials and fans since Saturday’s U.S. Open final match between 20-year-old Naomi Osaka and veteran Serena Williams.

When Williams was penalized during the final for breaking her racket and receiving “illegal hand gestures” in the form of coaching, she firmly disputed the umpire’s call, demanding an apology for being accused of cheating and calling him a “thief” for costing her points.

Williams was fined a total of $17,000 for three code violations by chair umpire Carlos Ramos. She lost the match in straight sets — 6-2 and 6-4 — to Japan’s Osaka. Williams later went on to call out the blatantly unfair treatment that women face in sports, explaining how an umpire has never taken a game from a male tennis player or claimed “verbal abuse” for exhibiting the same emotion.

Williams is right.

When British tennis player Andy Murray kicked a ball at an umpire’s head in 2016, he suffered no consequences and was even jokingly praised for his “football skills” by media outlets.

American tennis player Andy Roddick was called for a foot fault in 2010 and repeatedly harassed the lineswoman during the set. After the set, it was the lineswoman who was replaced even though she made the correct call.

Roddick who was never penalized.

Would Williams be treated the same way by officials if she exhibited that behavior? The answer is no, she would not and she was not treated equally at Saturday’s match.

The juxtaposition of these instances to Williams’ is glaring.

Tennis umpires have expressed their distaste with Williams’ behavior by announcing their potential boycott of her matches. The Guardian reported that umpires are also so outraged over the Women’s Tennis Association and the United States Tennis Association showing support for Williams that they are considering forming a union.

While these umpires do indeed have the right to disagree with Williams’ behavior, they are, again, showing a blatant disregard for the double standard shown on Saturday and throughout tennis’ history.

A political cartoon drawn by Mark Knight portrays Williams pitching a fit on the court and exaggerated her features to make her look overweight and like a child. Why is it that when female athletes show outrage for a call, they are labeled as disrespectful, childlike and hysterical, but when male athletes show outrage for a call, they are simply passionate?

The umpires who are threatening to boycott Williams’ matches should consider the sport’s history with an unfair double standard. Perhaps Williams, one of the greatest tennis players of all time, can then too just be considered passionate.

Farmers are the vanguard of the Right to Repair movement; accustomed as they are to fixing their own equipment (you can't wait for a repair tech when the tractor doesn't work -- as the saying goes, you have to make hay while the sun shines), they were outraged when companies like John Deere started using DRM to pick their pockets, creating tractors whose engines wouldn't recognize a new part until they paid a tech a few hundred dollars to drive out in a day or two and key an unlock code into the tractor's keyboard. (more…)

As the Carolinas prepare for the arrival of Hurricane Florence, currently a Category 4 storm, Senator Jeff Merkley appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show with a document that shows $10,000,000 was diverted from FEMA's budget to pay for ICE detention centers. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8Z8o69edAI&w=560&h=315] It's believed the transfer of funds took place at the beginning of summer. You know, right before the start of hurricane season. And if that's not enough to make your blood boil, this video of Trump calling his administration's handling of Puerto Rico during and after Hurricane Maria "an incredible, unsung success" should do the trick. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlWG9Yz97E8&w=560&h=315] I'm sure Carolinians are relieved the President of the United States considers 3000 dead Americans an incredible, unsung success. No worries, Outer Banks! He'll be there to throw paper towels at you soon. Trump admin took millions from FEMA for ICE detentions [MSNBC]

Lobbyists for "creators" threw their lot in with the giant entertainment companies and the newspaper proprietors and managed to pass the new EU Copyright Directive by a hair's-breadth this morning, in an act of colossal malpractice to harm to working artists will only be exceeded by the harm to everyone who uses the internet for everything else. (more…)