Monkey Self-Portrait
Continues To Raise Issue of Copyright Control
 
If an animal takes a
photo, who owns it?
 
Usually, the issue of
who owns a photograph is fairly straightforward. Barring contracts or
agreements, the person who pressed the shutter gets it. But what happens if
it's not a person who presses the shutter? That's a question that's still proving incredibly
difficult for photographer David Slater, ever since a monkey took his
camera and grabbed a self-portrait back in 2011.
 
A celebes crested
macaque took Slater's camera while he was shooting in Indonesia. According to
Slater,
 
At first there was a lot
of grimacing with their teeth showing because it was probably the first time
they had ever seen a reflection. They were quite mischievous jumping all over
my equipment, and it looked like they were already posing for the camera when
one hit the button. The sound got his attention and he kept pressing it. At
first it scared the rest of them away but they soon came back - it was amazing to
watch.
 
Out of the hundreds of
images, only a couple came out in focus—and rapidly went viral, but it also raised
questions of copyright, questions that exist to this day. Slater didn't press
the shutter button, so some argue that he doesn't have the copyright—and since
monkey's aren't capable of owning copyright, then it must be in the public
domain. It was a debate that first popped up in 2011 when Slater licensed his images
through Caters News, and it's one that's going on today.
 
The most recent arena
for this fight is Wikimedia Commons, a repository of Creative Commons and
Public Domain images, that as of press time has three copies of the images
uploaded. All three of the images are simultaneously marked as "nominated
for deletion" due to it being under Slater's copyright, but at the same
time stating "This file is in the public domain, because as the work of a
non-human animal, it has no human author in whom copyright is
vested." 
 
 
Talking to the Telegraph, Slater has
successfully had the image removed multiple times—but it has always been
re-uploaded by those who think it's in the public domain. And Slater faces a hefty
legal battle if he goes to the courts to get a proper ruling. A number of legal
blogs weighed in in 2011, coming out against Slater.
 
There's an awful lot to
pick apart in trying to figure out who owns the copyright. If we assume the
monkey can't have it (due to not having most legal rights), then that springs
up a whole series of other questions. If I strap a camera to an animal, and
take images from its point of view, do I own the copyright? What if I'm not
triggering the camera directly, but it's on a timer? What if I set up a
wildlife photography trap that's triggered by motion or sound? Technically,
isn't the animal "pressing the button" then? Does intent matter? What
if an animal makes a painting?
 
It's definitely a tricky
issue, and one that doesn't seem like it will be resolved soon.
 
Source | http://www.popphoto.com/
 

Message from

Irina Bokova,

Director-General of UNESCO,

on the occasion of International Day for the Remembrance of the

Slave Trade and its Abolition

UNESCO, 23 August 2014

International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition is

particularly significant in 2014, year of the 210th anniversary of Haiti’s

independence and the 20th anniversary of UNESCO’s educational and cultural

programme the Slave Route Project, a pioneering project that has helped to

accelerate research and raise awareness of the history of slavery and its

consequences.

The history of the slave trade tells not only of the suffering endured but also of the

ultimately victorious struggle for freedom and human rights, symbolized by the

slave uprising in Saint-Domingue on the night of 22 to 23 August 1791. That

struggle has lastingly strengthened awareness of the equality of all men and

women, which we have all inherited directly. That emancipatory vision should guide

us in our efforts to build a culture of tolerance and respect. UNESCO’s educational

and cultural programmes and support for historical research are intended to

highlight the wealth of the traditions that African peoples have forged in the face of

adversity – in art, music, dance and culture in its broader sense, creating

indissoluble ties between peoples and continents and irreversibly transforming the

face of society. This heritage is invaluable for living in peace in our globalized world

on the eve of the International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024).

Transmission of this history is an essential condition for any lasting peace based on

mutual understanding among peoples and full awareness of the dangers of racism

and prejudice. It also helps us to continue mobilizing against modern forms of

slavery and trafficking in human beings that still affect more than 20 million people

worldwide. DG/ME/ID/2014/023 – page 2

True to the words of Aimé Césaire, who said of the Citadel in Haiti: “for these

people brought to their knees, a monument was needed to make them stand”,

UNESCO is contributing actively towards the design of a Permanent Memorial to

and Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, to

be established at the United Nations Headquarters. I call on all Member States and

partners of UNESCO, in schools, universities, the media, museums and places of

memory, to mark this International Day and redouble their efforts to ensure that the

role played by slaves in winning recognition of universal human rights is better

known and taught more widely.

Irina Bokova

Aug 14 2014 : The Economic Times (Delhi)

Researchers Grapple with Ethics of Studying Users

@The New York Times





Scientists can now analyse personal data on millions of people online without their knowledge, and some want to bring ethical guidelines to such studies, writes Vindu Goel

Scholars are exhilarated by the prospect of tap ping into the vast troves of personal data collected by Facebook, Google, Amazon and a host of startups, which they say could transform social science research.Once forced to conduct painstaking personal interviews with subjects, scientists can now sit at a screen and instantly play with the digital experiences of millions of internet users.
It's the frontier of social science -experiments on people who may never even know they are subjects of study , let alone explicitly consent.
Scholars are exhilarated by the prospect of tapping into the vast troves of personal data collected by Facebook, Google, Amazon and a host of startups, which they say could transform social science research.
Once forced to conduct painstaking personal interviews with subjects, scientists can now sit at a screen and instantly play with the digital experiences of millions of internet users.
It's the frontier of social science -experiments on people who may never even know they are subjects of study , let alone explicitly consent.
“This is a new era,“ said Jeffrey T Hancock, a Cornell University professor. “I liken it a little bit to when chemistry got the microscope.“
But the new era has brought some controversy with it. Hancock was a co-author of the Facebook study in which the social network quietly manipulated the news feeds of nearly 700,000 people to learn how the changes affected their emotions. When the research was published in June, the outrage was immediate.
Now Hancock and other university and corporate researchers are grappling with how to create ethical guidelines for this kind of research.
In his first interview since the Facebook study was made public, Hancock said he would help develop such guidelines by leading a series of discussions among academics, corporate researchers and government agencies.
Scholars from the MIT and Stanford are planning panels and conferences on the topic, and several academic journals are working on special issues devoted to ethics.
Microsoft Research, a quasi-independent arm of the software company, hosted a panel last month on the Facebook research with Hancock and is offering a software tool to scholars to help them quickly survey consumers about the ethics of a project in its early stages.
Much of the research done by the internet companies is in-house and aimed at product adjustments, like whether people prefer news articles or cat videos in their Facebook feeds or how to make Google's search results more accurate.
But bigger social questions are studied as well, often in partnership with academic institutions, and scientists are eager to conduct even more ambitious research.
The Facebook emotion experiment was in that vein. The brainchild of a company data scientist, Adam DI Kramer, but shaped and analysed with help from Hancock and another academic researcher, Jamie E Guillory , it was intended to shed light on how emotions spread through large populations.
Such testing raises fundamental questions. What types of experiments are so intrusive that they need prior consent or prompt disclosure after the fact? How do companies make sure that customers have a clear understanding of how their personal information might be used? Who even decides what the rules should be?
Existing US federal rules governing research on human subjects, intended for medical research, generally require consent from those studied unless the potential for harm is minimal.
Mary L Gray , a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and associate professor at Indiana University , said that too often, researchers conducting digital experiments work in isolation with little outside guidance.
Gray advocates a simple litmus test for researchers: If you're afraid to ask your subjects for their permission to conduct the research, there's probably a deeper ethical issue that must be considered.

Aug 14 2014 : The Economic Times (Delhi)

Right Hands, Know What Left Hands Do





On the morrow of International Left-Handers Day, an assessment

As the Indian Parliament was agog yesterday with noise and fury about the treatment of minorities in the country , the world celebrated the presence of a global minority group: left-handers. International Left-Handers Day reminds the 90-93% of us that people who are naturally left-handed not only exist but face inconveniences in this “right-handed world“. In essence, this is one day when the right hand is made to know what the left hand does.Sinistrality has its fair share of bigots, the very term “sinister“ -meaning both “left“ and “unlucky“ in its original Latin -giving the game away . Children are often forced to use their right hand even when they are naturally left-handed. But being a southpaw has its advantages: apparently , lefthanded people access both hemispheres of their brain more readily than the right-handed, resulting in more creativity -and better recovery rates from strokes. On the flip side, lefties are more susceptible to mental disorders like schizophrenia. But here's the thing. Sourav Ganguly , a natural right-hander, batted left-handed, while Jimi Hendrix, a natural leftie, played guitar made for the right-handed “upside down“. Which confirms what we have always suspected: being a minority doesn't have to be about being at a disadvantage. It can be an opportunity to stand out.

Aug 14 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

Maths wizard honed skills with orange pyramid





CanadianAmerican mathematician of Indian-origin who has mastered Sanskrit and plays tabla at concert level has been awarded the Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize equivalent for math.Manjul Bhargava, who became a tenured full professor at Princeton University — the second youngest in its history — within two years of finishing graduate school, was among four winners of the prestigious prize announced at the International Mathematical Union (IMU) Congress in Seoul on Tuesday.
A surprise and welcome co-winner was Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematician who teaches at Stanford University. It is the first time a woman has won the Fields medal; all 52 previous winners have been men in a field traditionally dominated by men. Expectedly, it created a ripple in the rarefied world of maths.
The two other Fields Medal winners for 2014 are Artur Ávila from Brazil and Martin Hairer from Austria.
Avila is also the first Brazilian and Latin American to win the medal.
The IMU also presented Princeton alumnus Subhash Khot, a New York University professor of computer and an IIT-Bombay alumnus, with the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize, which honours “outstanding contributions in mathematical aspects of information sciences“.
Though a CanadianAmerican who was born in Ontario, 40-year-old Bhargava is no stranger to India or to Indian mathematicians; indeed, he has deep connections to India. His mother, Mira, is herself a rare woman mathematician, teaching at Hofstra University , New York. Manjul has also collaborated with many Indian mathematicians. Manjul's work with fellow Princeton scholar Arul Shankar, his PhD student, won them the Fermat Prize in 2011. Manjul's own PhD advisor was Andrew Wiles, famous for proving Fermat's last theorem.
Bhargava is also an accomplished tabla player -he was tutored by Zakir Hussain -and has the number on Sanskrit, which he learned from his grandfather Purushottam Lal Bhargava, who was the head of the Sanskrit department of the University of Rajasthan, during family visits to Jaipur. He sees close links between his three loves -maths, music, and Sanskrit -noting how beats of tabla and rhythms of Sanskrit poetry are highly mathematical.
In several past interviews, he has often recounted how in Grade 3, he became curious about how many oranges it takes to make a pyramid.
Just as well his mathematician mother and chemist father were well-to-do, they indulged him with oranges till he figured out the answer, which was not long coming.
Now he's at the pinnacle of his calling.
Meanwhile, Mirzakhani's success was “hugely symbolic and I hope it will encourage more women to get into mathematics because we need more women. I am very happy that now we can put to rest that particular `it has never happened before',“ Ingrid Daubechies, who is herself the first woman president of the IMU, said while announcing the award.
One to four Fields Medals are awarded once every four years to mathematicians under the age of 40 years at the International Congress of the IMU, which meets every four years. The award presentation will take place in Seoul on Wednesday at the quadrennial IMU Congress.
Though the prize money of $15,000 is chump change -approximately1/100th -compared to the Nobel Prize, the award, long dominated by Americans, Russians, French, and Britons (38 medals between them), is the highest recognition in the world of mathematics.
Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields instituted it at a time mathematicians felt short-changed that they had no Nobel recognition. The Nobel Prize is awarded for literature, peace, economics etc. but not for mathematics.
Legend goes that the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, who instituted the Nobel Prize, disdained mathematics after someone he loved cheated on him with a mathematician.
But there is no historical basis to the story .
For the full report, log on to www.timesofindia.com

Aug 14 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi) Beti... drive in 100 dists with worst sex ratio Himanshi.Dhawan @timesgroup.com New Delhi:   Maneka Sets 2-Yr Deadline For Implementation Hundred districts with the worst child sex ratio across the country will be the cradle for the ambitious `Beti bachao, beti padhao' scheme that envisages a mix of cash transfers with stringent action against erring medical practitioners and monitoring of health clinics.“We are working on district-specific plans for the 100 worst sex ratio districts. There will be a two-year deadline for its implementation,'' women and child development minister Maneka Gandhi said. The ministry will work in tandem with the ministries of health and education on the scheme. The Modigovernment had allotted Rs 100 crore for the scheme in the Union Budget. India has one of the worst sex ratios, earning the title of the “country with missing girls“. Child sex ratio (0-6 years) in India was 927 girl children per 1,000 boys in 2001 which dipped to 919 girls for 1,000 boys in 2011, the lowest since Independence. A Unicef report in 2012 ranked India 41st among 195 countries. “There is a continued belief that the girl will cost her parents whether it education or dowry , that she is not safe and that she will not earn for the family . But these excuses cannot go on. It is time to deal with this problem,“ Maneka said. Officials said best practices from across the country will be adopted. Some of the examples include West Bengal's system of enabling cash transfers at periodic intervals for the child's education. In Punjab, pregnant women were registered in their first trimester so that authorities could monitor cases of feoticide, WCD secretary V S Oberoi said. The ministry is also considering Tamil Nadu's “amma-baby kit“ to encourage institutional deliveries. For the full report, log on to http://www.timesofindia.com

Aug 14 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

Indian-origin professor wins Maths 'Nobel'

Chidanand.Rajghatta@timesgroup.com

Washington





Also Master Of Sanskrit & The Tabla

CanadianAmerican mathematician of Indian-origin who has mastered Sanskrit and plays tabla at concert level has been awarded the Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize equivalent for math.Manjul Bhargava, who became a tenured full professor at Princeton University — the second youngest in its history — within two years of finishing graduate school, was among four winners of the prestigious prize announced at the International Mathematical Union (IMU) Congress in Seoul on Tuesday.
A surprise and welcome co-winner was Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematician who teaches at Stanford University. It is the first time a woman has won the Fields medal; all 52 previous winners have been men in a field traditionally dominated by men. Expectedly, it created a ripple in the rarefied world of maths.
The two other Fields Medal winners for 2014 are Artur Ávila from Brazil and Martin Hairer from Austria.
Avila is also the first Brazilian and Latin American to win the medal.
The IMU also presented Princeton alumnus Subhash Khot, a New York University professor of computer and an IIT-Bombay alumnus, with the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize, which honours “outstanding contributions in mathematical aspects of information sciences“.
Though a CanadianAmerican who was born in Ontario, 40-year-old Bhargava is no stranger to India or to Indian mathematicians; indeed, he has deep connections to India. His mother, Mira, is herself a rare woman mathematician, teaching at Hofstra University , New York. Manjul has also collaborated with many Indian mathematicians. Manjul's work with fellow Princeton scholar Arul Shankar, his PhD student, won them the Fermat Prize in 2011. Manjul's own PhD advisor was Andrew Wiles, famous for proving Fermat's last theorem.
Bhargava is also an accomplished tabla player -he was tutored by Zakir Hussain -and has the number on Sanskrit, which he learned from his grandfather Purushottam Lal Bhargava, who was the head of the Sanskrit department of the University of Rajasthan, during family visits to Jaipur. He sees close links between his three loves -maths, music, and Sanskrit -noting how beats of tabla and rhythms of Sanskrit poetry are highly mathematical.
In several past interviews, he has often recounted how in Grade 3, he became curious about how many oranges it takes to make a pyramid.
Just as well his mathematician mother and chemist father were well-to-do, they indulged him with oranges till he figured out the answer, which was not long coming.
Now he's at the pinnacle of his calling.
Meanwhile, Mirzakhani's success was “hugely symbolic and I hope it will encourage more women to get into mathematics because we need more women. I am very happy that now we can put to rest that particular `it has never happened before',“ Ingrid Daubechies, who is herself the first woman president of the IMU, said while announcing the award.
One to four Fields Medals are awarded once every four years to mathematicians under the age of 40 years at the International Congress of the IMU, which meets every four years. The award presentation will take place in Seoul on Wednesday at the quadrennial IMU Congress.
Though the prize money of $15,000 is chump change -approximately1/100th -compared to the Nobel Prize, the award, long dominated by Americans, Russians, French, and Britons (38 medals between them), is the highest recognition in the world of mathematics.
Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields instituted it at a time mathematicians felt short-changed that they had no Nobel recognition. The Nobel Prize is awarded for literature, peace, economics etc. but not for mathematics.
Legend goes that the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, who instituted the Nobel Prize, disdained mathematics after someone he loved cheated on him with a mathematician.
But there is no historical basis to the story .
For the full report, log on to www.timesofindia.com