Yesterday Wired magazine had an interesting article titled “Web Has Unexpected Effect on Journalism,” about the effect that the web has had on journalism, and it’s not what I would have initially thought. The article explains that, rather than making journalism more democratic, the web instead serves as a medium for recycling many of the same stories over and over. Some of the examples given include how “international news” has been boiled down almost exclusively to Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan, leaving the rest of the world uncovered.

On the flip side, the article does mention that many journalists are adaptation to new environments and using the web to their advantage. Apparently many journalists have taken to writing blogs and many appreciate readers input on their stories. Still there seems to be a difference between how large “mainstream media” and “private, personal” blog treat participation; curiously the “mainstream” blog seem to allow more participation from readers, while owners of personal blogs tend to limit comments to those deemed more palatable.

You can read the complete article by David Bauder here.

This morning the New York Times had an article about two parallel art exhibits displaying art looted during WWII. The exhibit is a collaboration between France and Israel in aims at reconnecting these pieces with their original owners. Most of the art on display was either outright looted or forcefully “bought” by the Nazi, and so far has gone unclaimed, presumably because the original owners were likely killed in the Holocaust. The collections contain a number of “common” pieces, but also works from renown artist such as Cézanne, Manet, Degas, Chagall, Delacroix, and Monet among others.

Art and other cultural pieces are often looted during times of war and much has been written and discussed on the subject. Actually a couple semesters ago I attended a lecture by Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, a Harvard professor who has written extensively on collections held in Russian archives which previously belong to other nations. Her book, “Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II and the International Politics of Restitution” discusses the complexities of restitution and why countries loot other nations’ cultural treasures.

Fortunately there are efforts around the globe to stop this practice. The Lost Art Internet Database is a project from the Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste which is working to reconnect lost cultural property to its original owners. Looted Art is another such initiative, and while many of these efforts circle the Holocaust this is not a phenomenon seen exclusively around WWII, Chile recently returned a number of book taken from the Peruvian National Library about 100 years ago. And it’s not just armies who walk away with cultural property that belongs to others. Some of the largest and best endowed universities and museums around the world have gotten some of their material in such a matter. Egypt has been demanding the return of the Rosetta Stone for years, to name just one example (You can read about this from an article in the BBC). Unfortunately we are still seeing this practice in current times; the National Museum of Iraq was gravely looted during the USA invasion. (You can read about the Iraqi National Museum from an article in the Guardian.)

As the year comes to an end the Million Book Project has reached its goal of scanning and making freely available a million books! This project is spearheaded by the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Sciences and University Libraries, with a number of partnerships including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the United States National Agricultural Library, the National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Education in China, and the University of California at Merced who negotiated to acquire copyright permission for the books which are not currently in the public domain.

So far the project has scanned 1.5 million books in 20 languages, including Chinese, English, Arabic and Telugo. The books have also been scanned using OCR to enable full text searching. The project also collaborates with the OCA, acknowledging that both are working towards the same goal of making content easily available to everyone.

You can learn more about the project here, and can access their catalog here.

In April, Ireland came up with a very creative way of helping author collect royalties for their world, while simultaneously making their work available to the largest group of people. The Department of Trade and Employment set up a system by which authors gather royalties each time their works are checked out at the library, better yet, this set up doesn’t cost the patron a cent. Some countries have extended this system to include CDs, audio-visual material and works of art.

This set up is formally know as the Public Lending Right (PLR), and its intent is to compensate authors for potential sale losses when their work is made available through public libraries. Currently about 30 countries have Public Lending Rights, including Canada, the UK, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, Israel, Australia, New Zealand and all the Scandinavian countries. There is some discussion of expending Public Lending Rights to cover all of the EU. PLR was first implemented in Denmark in 1946, and was followed shortly after by Norway in 1947, then the UK in 1979.

How Public Lending Rights are implemented tends to vary from country to country. The main division seems to be between countries that consider PLR part of copyright law, and those nations which wish to support culture, with a particular emphasis on local authors. Other differences include, whether foreign residing authors are excluded or not, payments often varies, with some countries making payment for each time a book is loaned, while others base the decision solely on whether the library owns the book.

The initiative is not without detractors. Some of the discontent in the EU circles around the issue of whether or not a country is conforming with EU Directives of Lending and Rental Rights while implementing PLR. These directives establish a framework that gives author and other right holders exclusive rights to license or prohibit lending. Along these lines, the PLR International has set up a website with advice for countries with existing PLR, and to council others considering the change.

Here is a paper presented at IFLA in 2002 about the issue, mainly as it concerns the EU.

This morning the BBC has an article about the first all-female UN peacekeeping troop. The group is comprised of 105 Indian women, who have been based in Liberia for the last 6 months. The group was initially set up as an experiment, and it was gone so well that their mission has been extended to a full year.

The women who make up this troop were selected from all over India and have been trained in drug raids, law enforcement, and crowd control among other things. It is also hoped that their presence will encourage local women to join local law enforcement groups. There is a push to bring more women into law enforcement in hopes to curb down sexual assault and exploitation, as well as helping local women feel safer.

Women in UN peacekeeping troops have been woefully underrepresented. In 2006 women made up only 4% of all peacekeeping troops. The UN currently encourages women to become involved in peacekeeping; here are a few highlighted stories.

Women have been making their mark as soldieries elsewhere around the world. Spain’s arms forces are currently 15% women, the Chinese island of Xisha also host an all women trope. Still it’s really too bad that so many of these articles focus not on the merit and ability of these women, but on their ability to add to the beautiful scenery (Israel recently had the “lovely idea” of having women soldiers pose in their underwear for Maxim magazine in order to boost the country’s image abroad!), or focus on how much these women miss their families (as if any soldier station abroad won’t miss their family).

The Christian Science Monitor has another article on the matter.

Image from Grewal, Shabnam. “All girl UN squad a success”, BBC, June 21, 2007.

A recent file for copyright of Birkam yoga has attracted new attention to the Indian government’s efforts to safeguard their traditional knowledge. The Indian government has put a group together which is working on protecting material such as ancient texts written in Sanscrit, Urdu and Persian, yoga positions, and traditional healing practices. The Indian government has already set up a database for this knowledge called the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (you need a member to use it), which will eventually function in English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish. This project started back in 2001 with collaboration from National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR), the Department of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy, the and Department of Industrial Policy and Promotio. The project is expected to be completed in December 2008.

Such a massive project might initially seem unrealistic and daunting to tackle, specially since patents are usually given to “new” inventions, but given this increasingly growing practice by private companies to patent and restrict use to plants and practices that have been used for millennia, maybe this isn’t such a crazy idea after all.

India’s push to protect its traditional knowledge actually began a while back. In 2003 India proposed a law to fight “protect traditional knowledge and Western piracy [...] knowledge“. This proposal sought to encourage disclosure of traditional knowledge and reward those who help out. Once the information was gathered, it could be patented and thus protected from encroachment.

Earlier this month Suketu Mehta wrote an opinion piece in the International Herald Tribune where she points out the contradictions and complications with this process. She points out that knowledge in India has been protected through caste lines, not legal or economic ones, and that while piracy is common in India, often Indians get upset when Westerners make money of their traditional knowledge. In the end she comments that this new practice of wanting to claim ownership of everything is hurting those in the developing world. In 2005, under pressure from the WTO, the Indian Parliament passed a law making it illegal to make generic versions of patented medications. This in a national with over a billion people, many of which live in absolute poverty.

We’ll see where all this rush to put everything in private hands ends up…

You can see and read more on the subject from PBS; USA Today; BBC.

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organization trying to address the lack of resources many Third World Countries struggle with and how these affect education and hinder technological development. Keeping in mind that many countries can only afford to spend $20 per child per year on education (compared to about $7,500 that the USA spends), OLPC tries to circumvent traditional approaches to the situation, and instead want to make available the tools that can allow children to explore and learn on their own. OLPC feel that efforts should continue to build school and train teachers in the poorest corners of the world, but simultaneously, want to try a more direct approach. The idea is to transform these children with personal laptops into teachers. Each child can explore the world on their machine, and will later be able to teacher elders and other children about what they have learned; in this way the entire community can benefit.

These laptops are designed for use by the world’s poorest children. They run on open source software, keeping in mind that while all children won’t become programmers, they should have the opportunity to continue growing without constrains by their equipment. The machine itself is designed to run on very low power, and some of the earliest models were powered through cranking, or with a foot-pedal. The display must also be sunlight-readable, since most children will be outdoors when working on their laptops. The machine itself is small, light and has a handle for easy carrying. It also has a monitor which rotates, allowing for others to participate.

This program was first designed to involved governments in buying laptops for children, and initial conversations involved proposals for Brazil, Argentina, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand. Recently Uruguay and Rwanda have also joined in. Currently the program continues to grow through donations by individuals, businesses and foundations.

If you want to learn more about the project visit their site and their wiki. You can find information on donating and participating here.

Above images come from the project’s wiki, and can be found here.

04.03.07 - I just found a webcast by Walter Bender, president of OLPC, discussing this project; you can access it here. There is another webcast by Nicolas P. Negroponte, chairman and co-founder of OLPC,which can be accessed here.

04.17.07 - The OLPC interface runs on a lightweight version of Fedora Linux, called Sugar. You can take a look at it here.

07.15.07 - Intel has just joined forces with OLPC, after creating competition for each other, in trying to offer low cost computers to children in the developing world. Currently there is no talk about changing processing chips, yet the idea is to develop a variety of low cost computers in the future that can function of a variety of platforms. Intel has been producing the Classmate for sale in developing countries at a cost of US $200.00. You can read more about this in an article by the BBC.

07.23.07 - After much anticipation and testing, OLPC is posed to start massive production, explaining that they finally have orders large enough to make the project viable. You can read more about this at an article by the BBC. And here is another article explaining the different components of the laptop and how they work.

Image info here.

06.08.07 - It seems that everyone is in a rush to grab a piece of the computer market in the developing world. Today the BBC has an article about other major computer producers rushing towards this market, although they differ form the OLPC project, in that these other companies are out just to make some money. Beijing based Levono has announced a low cost computer that can be plugged into the TV

10.29.30- Uruguay just became the first country to buy a large number of these computers to make available to children 6 - 12. They hope to make these laptops available to every children in the country by 2009. You can read more about this in an article from the BBC.

11.15.07 - “Give One - Get One” has started for the USA and Canada and will run until November 26, 2007. You can order yours here.

One of the things that I miss the most about living in the Bay Area is the enormous amounts of culture that I could easily access. Case it point, Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib collection, currently on display at UCB’s Doe library, right where I used to work! From what I’ve read about this collection, Botero first learned about the atrocities occurring in this prison from the news, just like the rest of us; he was deeply disturbed and moved to “say” something about the matter. He commented that art has an important role in times of war, giving the example that while many of us do not know the details about the many battles fought during WWII, all of us who have seen Picasso’s Guernica still have that image engraved in our minds. Botero hopes that his work on Abu Ghraib will be remembered in the same way.

It was also interesting to hear that Botero offered this exhibition to a lot of galleries, both public and private, and with the exception of the Marlborough gallery in NYC and now UCB, no one else will display it. Yet Botero is so committed to showing this disturbing reality that he has offered to give away the collection to any gallery that is willing to permanently display at least a few of his drawings. He also commented that it should really stay in either the USA or in Iraq, since these are the two communities most deeply affected by the mater.

UCB Center for Latin America Studies has two webcasts on the event; one of them is “A Conversation with the Artists,” an hour long interview with Botero. The second one is titled “Art and Violence,” and runs close to a 1:45mins. Both can be accessed here.