Want clients? Be helpful and do good
“Be helpful and do good” is a deceptively simple strategy: just go out and help people, and clients will find you. (Just don’t forget to make it easy to be found!)
Escaping the Kindle lock-box is now easier for authors and publishers
Purchasing books on the Kindle has always struck me as a bit of a Faustian bargain: once you enter the Kindle ecosystem and purchase some books, those books are forever locked to Amazon’s e-reader. Now Amazon has made it easier for small-scale publishers and authors to opt-out.
Applying the Fourth Amendment to data in the cloud
In a Note called Defogging the Cloud: Applying Fourth Amendment Principles to Evolving Privacy Expectations in Cloud Computing, David A. Couillard explores the potential applicability of the Fourth Amendment to data stored in offsite servers: spreadsheets in Google Docs, accounting data hosted on FreshBooks, and pretty much everything synced through DropBox, just to name three example services.
Truth vs. relativism in science
In Science and Social Inequality by Sandra Harding, I found a discussion of claims to “absolute truth” in science (and the fear of relativism) particularly interesting.
Google and the historian
Dan Cohen gave an interesting talk at the American Historical Association meeting recently, where he discussed the benefits Google brings to historical research, as well as some pointed criticisms.
DECE seeks complex DRM that approximates the simple first-sale doctrine that consumers expect
Consumer electronics manufacturers and Hollywood studios have a problem: when customers purchase a movie online, they expect to be able to watch it anywhere — but, thanks to DRM, they can’t easily do it (unless they bought a physical DVD and rip it, or otherwise remove the DRM, which is what Hollywood is desperate to prevent). The DECE wants to change that.
Making a personal site more dynamic
As part of a recent attempt to update my personal information online, I decided to update my personal site to better reflect my current activities and background. As part of my content update, I ideally wanted my site to be more dynamic, so that I did not need to touch it very often, yet to still have it be more up-to-date and fresh. My idea was to rely on updates I would make to other sites anyway, and to leverage those updates to drive my personal site too.
Scientists choose citations for "discriminatory" reasons
Researchers in Spain recently published an examination of scientific citation practices, and discovered the obvious: scientists don’t use citations purely for altruistic reasons.
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