Unhappy BOTH ways?

German publishers criticize new Google Books deal

  Frankfurt – German book publishers – angered at being included in the Google Books Settlement without being consulted – voiced concern Sunday that they had now been excluded.
   The US search giant and US publishers announced Friday that the revolutionary plan to put every out-of-print book in the world on the internet was now being limited to books from only four nations: the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia.
   Gottfried Honnefelder, chairman of the Boersenverein, the German booksellers’ and publishers association, predicted this would reinforce the global dominance of the English language.
   Speaking to German radio channel Deutschlandradio Kultur, he said, ‘Progress is now passing us by.’ …

(Via MonstersandCritics.com.)

Oh dear.

Pun competition: Dubai’s financial woes

The puns are coming thick and fast in news reports and discussion about Dubai’s financial woes:

“Dubai’s economic miracle built on foundations of sand.”
“It was all a mirage.”
“When the sh*t hits the sand”

Any more?

Oh, this is funny…

emptypromises graphic by Peter Aranyi www.thepaepae.com

Poor Simon Edhouse. If this isn’t viral yet, it will be. IMO.

“If deal goes ahead there will be some good money in it for you.”

— How many times have publishing and design professionals heard this line?

“The project I am working on will be more successful than twitter within a year. When I sell the project for 40 million dollars I will ignore any emails from you begging to be a part of it and will send you a postcard from my yaght. Ciao.”

{{{snort}}}  This reminds me of some of the ‘instant wealth’ experts I see hawking their snake oil around the place.

Read the full ‘interchange’ Continue reading →

Blinding flash of the obvious

Well, who’da thunk it? Doh!

A classic case of Chicago School of Economics ‘public choice theory’ or ‘provider capture’. Read the full story for tales of (shock, horror) crooked lawyers playing the system. (Never!)

Next week's expose: "Dog pisses on lamp post!" (image: NZ Herald)

Next week's expose: "Dog pisses on lamp post!" (image: NZ Herald)

Breathless reportage from the NZ Herald:

A damning review of legal aid says a sea change is needed to fix a system Continue reading →

Why journalists shouldn’t be defending Fox News

(Fox screenshot: HuffPo)

News? or Mutual admiration society?
(screenshot: HuffPo)

I didn’t see this article at the time, but Dan Froomkin makes a good case.

I dislike the hypocrisy of this ‘channel’ — the apparent willingness to distort, their naked manipulation of the ‘issues’ (far beyond a ‘slant’, Fox misleads … in short, like some people I know: a total lack of self-awareness

Sure, Fox ‘News’ has a right to express its (Master’s) opinions, but NOT — in my view — the right to brazenly mislead as it does … and still expect to be taken seriously as a journalistic organ. Oh no you don’t. Continue reading →

The overblown role of religion in conflict

(image: psychologytoday.com)

(image: psychologytoday.com)

I heard a good radio interview today: Radio NZ’s Kathryn Ryan interviewing Rabbi David Rosen — a conversation which opened with the question whether the long running Israel/Palestine conflict is in any way a religious issue.

In essence certainly not. It’s a territorial conflict … a conflict between two national liberation movements: The Jewish national liberation movement which is known as Zionism and the Palestinian liberation movement.

Rosen points to the 1967 war where the main protagonists were professed atheists, so “obviously weren’t going to war over theology but over territory”… Religion, he says, forms part of national identity but isn’t the driving issue.

The territorial conflict, he said, had been “religion-ized” — reaching dangerous proportions in the last decade. Now, he says, the perception in the Arab and Muslim world is that it is at base a religious conflict and that the holy sites are under siege by ‘malevolent and hostile Jewish intent’. Continue reading →

Microsoft helping ‘de-list’ news sites from Google?

CNN reports on 'discussions'

CNN reports on 'discussions'

Wow. Can this be the future?

Microsoft paying News sites to BLOCK their content from Google? (… while, presumably, allowing it to show up on MS Bing)?

OK, it’s still just a rumour.
Here’s the CNN story and this quote from Lance Ulanoff in PC Mag‘s “online news ice age” what-are-they-thinking?’ reaction — which resonates with me.

Could Microsoft really be this tone deaf? I have nothing against some hard-nosed competition, but Microsoft could be setting in motion the biggest online information chill in history. If the folks at Microsoft stopped to think—even for a moment—they’d have to realize that they’ve got their own hand too close to the lion’s mouth. Sure, right now they’re feeding it a big, juicy piece of meat (the ability to get off of Google’s index), but how soon before the lion snaps that hand right off? Seriously, how long before News Corp. says, “Yeah, you helped us, but we’ve been thinking about it, and not only do we not want our content on your index, but we don’t want to see you serving any sites that rewrite or offer synopses of our content/reporting.” Where would that leave Microsoft Bing?

There’s no question that the content of news sites is expensive to produce (consider the cost of the various correspondents, for instance) and it is harvested mercilessly in a parasitic way by websites all over the world (including this one, ahem).

Like it or not, Murdoch’s description of Google ‘stealing’ from him bears more than a passing resemblance to the truth, despite the rising howls of say-it-ain’t-so from ‘new media’. Continue reading →

Playing with numbers

I thought perhaps I might sell my home, and so, I decided to do a little research on when historically the best time might be vs. the best historical sales price that might be obtainable.

From the R100 Market Facts page at the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand web site: http://www.reinz.org.nz/reportingapp/default.aspx?RFOPTION=Report&RFCODE=R100

I downloaded all data, from all dwellings, between the dates of January 1992 to October 2009. I selected the medians calculated over a one month period dropdown box.

I took all the data and then loaded it into my own database. Doing this allows me to place the data into a more readable format so I could conduct my research.

First, I decided to base my study on the Actual Number of Homes that are sold each month. This, I felt is a better indicator of market trend because it does in fact provide the actual number of houses sold in a particular time period (in this case per month); and while the REINZ web site does not provide the actual number of houses on the market at any given time (those not sold) I felt that the number of houses actually sold would be more reflective of market mood and market activity than any other indicator.

Because the year 2009 is not yet complete I decided not to use any data from 2009 and instead used all the data from 1992 to 2008 – a seventeen year period.

Looking at the numbers without a database to manipulate their format is a fruitless task. However, database in hand I went to work. Continue reading →

A discredited profession? — Financial advisors.
About time!

(image: City University of New York Journalism School)

(image: City University of New York Journalism School)

The backlash against the alarmingly greedy pigs on Wall St (“Bail Out People, Not Banks”) was long overdue. Self-inflicted wounds.

We’re also familiar with the loathing of the corporate fat cats who showered excess on themselves even as the punctured airship foundered — and, more scandalously, even in receipt of taxpayer-funded bailouts.

But now I detect a whiff of a different opprobrium — this time directed at the financial planners and ‘advisors’. In many cases, these ‘advisors’ were nothing more than commission salesmen who directed old biddies and the naive to ‘invest’ their life savings into dodgy finance companies and other dubious ‘investments’ — clipping the ticket i.e. getting paid a slice of the capital as commission on the way.

Some disappointed and ripped-off ‘investors’ have sought redress from the their advisors, with little success. In NZ the scandal of the collapsed finance companies (e.g. Bridgecorp and Hanover among others) is only intensified by reports of the inflated commission levels paid to the advisors who sucked funds into the ill-fated companies on their way to oblivion.

Often, it turned out, the investments were made with inadequate ‘diversification’ — or, to put it another way: it seemed in some cases the money was directed by the ‘advisor’ to the firms that paid the highest commission.

In return for a larger-than-normal clip of the ticket, it seems, some respectable-looking advisors sold their clients down the river Continue reading →

Nothing ‘new’ under the sun

TelecomNZNew

New Telecom New Zealand logo

toque

Virgin mobile RE-generation promotion (Canada)

Great minds think alike?

Plagiarism stigma …

‘Uni needs to address plagiarism’ | Stuff.co.nz:

University dean of arts, Associate Professor Jan Crosthwaite, said while concerning, Ihimaera’s actions were not deliberate.

Ihimaera said the offending passages amounted to less than half a per cent of the novel, but respected author CK Stead said that was beside the point.

‘It’s really like saying `well yes I did steal from 16 people but I only took a dollar from each’,’ he told Radio New Zealand.

‘You haven’t harmed them much, but you’ve harmed yourself enormously.’

Stead, who is a professor emeritus of the same university, said he was disappointed at comments from Associate Prof Crosthwaite minimising the seriousness of the fault.

He said students had it hammered into them that they must acknowledge borrowed work and not pass work off as their own. Continue reading →

Plagiarism looks like…

http://sites.google.com/site/whatplagiarismlookslike/

What plagiarism looks like?
(click for link to larger image)

Link provided by Jolisa Gracewood in her blog post discussing her uncovering of Witi Ihimaera’s plagiarism.

Our lawyers prepared a similarly convincing graphic display for our High Court copyright infringement action, which may have helped the plagiarists in our case decide to settle the case last year. Continue reading →

Building trust — through deceit?

Peter Steiner, New York 1993

"On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog" Peter Steiner, The New Yorker July 1993

There’s a ‘phoniness’ that plagues the internet. (Peter Steiner’s famous 1993 cartoon “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog” has become axiomatic).

Wikipedia suffers a scandal when it’s exposed that some phoney posing as a ‘learned academic’ has been pasting content into the wiki — which, I guess, compared to the fake surgeons that pop up now and then in our health system, ain’t no big deal.

This inauthenticity applies in spades to social media (ghost-written celebrity tweets etc) in particular.

Plagiarism or unattributed use of others’ written or other material has always been rife. As university professor/novelist Witi Ihimaera has recently found, the age of Google book-scan has made it child’s play to find phraseology and passages that have been consciously or unconsciously lifted from another person’s writing.

While I’m no saint, I do try to/aim to acknowledge the source of material I use from others. ‘Always acknowledge the source of power’ was a thought drummed into me at some business/personal development courses I attended years ago. It was a lesson in ethics and integrity. If someone else has expressed ‘it’ so well that I want to pass that ‘map’ on to my readers, my view is that it does me no harm whatsoever to cite the source. It is lazy not to.

Part of this might be my journalism training, which leans so heavily on attributed sources. (I’ve actually come to see that’s one of the downsides of the profession — it encourages a sense of being a ‘neutral’ observer and uninvolved note-taker and not a committed change-agent or actor … a sense which can need shaking off. But that’s a topic for another time.)

But there’s another angle to this idea of the unattributed use of others’ words which intrigues me because I haven’t thought about it this way before — and that’s the use of ghostwriters to build ‘credibility’ or, in the age of twitter and blogs, to build up a ‘personal’ following. Continue reading →

Taylor Swift — self-aware, not self-absorbed megastar

I love the self-awareness this very talented singer/songwriter/megastar Taylor Swift displays with such apparent ease. (Of course she’s wildly talented and works hard.)
She makes me smile.

UPDATE: Watch the video at YouTube here.

(Thanks to AK for the tip.)

And an entertaining behind-the-scenes/making-of clip: Continue reading →

The place of questions

question-mark-green.jpg

(image: psychologytoday.com)

I’ve been up to my ears in the physical universe (in a good way, mostly) and just spent the last few days pulling together the course notes for an annual Market Update event. Really good notes.

What stands out for me is the wisdom that experience teaches. I don’t mean to say that in a self-serving way, not in the slightest. Really. For instance, some of the comments and advice from Olly Newland have really put the whole global financial meltdown thing — and what we should do/how we could react in response — into practical perspective.

I’ve talked earlier about Steven Covey’s injunction to “work within your circle of influence” (i.e. what you can control) — and it’s so true. One of my big lessons.

Really, the shenanigans that go on in the world financial scene or in politics bring effects which can seem to bear on us … but, actually, not all that much. What we have to watch are our own reactions and how those reactions affect the decisions we make. (As well as keeping an eye out for the blood-suckers in the market and other natural hazards.)

It’s apparent that for most of us exposed to the market (whatever market) we are bobbing around like corks on the tide. Fleas on the dog. Decisions we made years ago are still controlling our outcomes, in some cases our destiny. Continue reading →