Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Reading in Cyberspace ?!?
Reading in cyberspace is definitely my mother's dream. She always asks me if there is a way to read real books over the Internet for free. You see people these days are lazy and they don't even want to walk to their local library to borrow a few books. Google recently started the Google Book Search project which scanned 50,000,000 books and posted them on the Internet for everyone. Like many other Google services, it's totally FREE!
When my mother heard this, she was very excited. She got the website and explored the service before she found out she could only view "snippets" of her favourite copyrighted books. Of course, a week after Google started scanning copyright material without "permission", the Author's Guild and the American Association of Publishers sued them. Their argument was that Google used their copyrighted material as a mean of "profit" and didn't ask "permission" for that.
The case is still unresolved because the "fair use" argument questions the whole existence of search engines. Like Google Book Search, Yahoo, MSN, and Google itself offers an indexing of all the web pages on the Internet. They give the surfer a "snippet" of the web page without the web master's "permission" and therefore can be a violation to the copyright law. The webmaster has the ability to opt out of the indexing just like authors who have the right to opt out of the Google Book Search project. So if Google Book Search is somehow not "fair use", then does that mean search engines have to close down as well? Eventually, the court favoured Google and their "it's fair use" argument.
As for the overall effect of the "fair use" argument, I think the publishers just felt that Google should give them a part of its profit. The publishers left feeling empty because they didn't get "a piece of the pie" from Google Book Search. Google can after all give publishers a part of their profit and the whole argument wouldn't exist in the first place, but why do so when they can avoid it? I don't think the publishers are much of a threat to Google. Google is the world's number one search engine after all. It has wealth, power and many people respect its indexing service.
Google Book Search is not really a threat to public libraries because they offer full view of copyrighted materials. Unlike Google Book Search, they have the physical books themselves. Google Book Search only gave "snippets" of copyrighted books. The books in which its copyright is out of date is actually out of date itself. There is a reason why those copyrighted materials were not renewed - mostly because no one reads them now. So Google is actually helping the library by giving the user a chance to preview the book before they borrow it from the library.
Of course, if the library doesn't have it, the user will be forced to buy the book. Google Book Search can be seen as a way of previewing books.
When my mother heard this, she was very excited. She got the website and explored the service before she found out she could only view "snippets" of her favourite copyrighted books. Of course, a week after Google started scanning copyright material without "permission", the Author's Guild and the American Association of Publishers sued them. Their argument was that Google used their copyrighted material as a mean of "profit" and didn't ask "permission" for that.
The case is still unresolved because the "fair use" argument questions the whole existence of search engines. Like Google Book Search, Yahoo, MSN, and Google itself offers an indexing of all the web pages on the Internet. They give the surfer a "snippet" of the web page without the web master's "permission" and therefore can be a violation to the copyright law. The webmaster has the ability to opt out of the indexing just like authors who have the right to opt out of the Google Book Search project. So if Google Book Search is somehow not "fair use", then does that mean search engines have to close down as well? Eventually, the court favoured Google and their "it's fair use" argument.
As for the overall effect of the "fair use" argument, I think the publishers just felt that Google should give them a part of its profit. The publishers left feeling empty because they didn't get "a piece of the pie" from Google Book Search. Google can after all give publishers a part of their profit and the whole argument wouldn't exist in the first place, but why do so when they can avoid it? I don't think the publishers are much of a threat to Google. Google is the world's number one search engine after all. It has wealth, power and many people respect its indexing service.
Google Book Search is not really a threat to public libraries because they offer full view of copyrighted materials. Unlike Google Book Search, they have the physical books themselves. Google Book Search only gave "snippets" of copyrighted books. The books in which its copyright is out of date is actually out of date itself. There is a reason why those copyrighted materials were not renewed - mostly because no one reads them now. So Google is actually helping the library by giving the user a chance to preview the book before they borrow it from the library.
Of course, if the library doesn't have it, the user will be forced to buy the book. Google Book Search can be seen as a way of previewing books.
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
The Genographic Project
Life is a mysterious subject. No one fully understand it. Yet, curiosity created science as a stepping stone to one day mastering it. Many hypothesis have been made on the subject of life. Yet many unknown mysteries are to be discovered. A recent hypothesis suggested that all human beings inhabited in Africa 60,000 years ago. Many of us would say that it's an outrageous claim. But one would say the same thing to a round earth a few centuries ago. The genographic project will determine this theory's possibility.
This project was started in September of 2004 by National Geographic and IBM. Their objective is to collect DNA samples from diverse races across the globe. It is estimated that the whole process will take around five years. This project can also be regarded as a continuation of the failed Human Genome Diversity Project in the 1990s.
According to National Geographic, the project was made possible by hundreds of thousands of computers contributed by ordinary people. I don't think this will happen 100, 50 or even 25 years ago because not many people have computers back then. Technology has advanced so fast in the last few years that the latest gadgets of today are just a thing of the past tomorrow. The CD players that costed around $100 in 2000 only cost around $10 today. Plus, how many scientists knew the existence of DNA 100 years ago. These are all recent scientific discoveries. Even back 50 years it was a challenge. I mean who could trace the Y-DNA in males and Mitochondrial DNA in females back then?
As for participants, anyone is allowed to participate. For a reasonable fee of US$100, anyone (even me) can order a self-testing kit. The kit includes a mouth scraping (saliva swab) where your DNA is obtained. The person who buys the kit has to mail it back so researchers can analyze it. They will eventually reveal your genetic history to you. I think scientists should have no problem retrieving DNA samples from urbanized people because these people tend to be more curious and understand what their DNAs contribute to. On the other hand, the indigenous people wouldn't be so eager to give their DNA to scientists since they have no idea what the scientists will do. Yet, collecting DNA samples from the indigenious population is an important part of this project.
This project was started in September of 2004 by National Geographic and IBM. Their objective is to collect DNA samples from diverse races across the globe. It is estimated that the whole process will take around five years. This project can also be regarded as a continuation of the failed Human Genome Diversity Project in the 1990s.
According to National Geographic, the project was made possible by hundreds of thousands of computers contributed by ordinary people. I don't think this will happen 100, 50 or even 25 years ago because not many people have computers back then. Technology has advanced so fast in the last few years that the latest gadgets of today are just a thing of the past tomorrow. The CD players that costed around $100 in 2000 only cost around $10 today. Plus, how many scientists knew the existence of DNA 100 years ago. These are all recent scientific discoveries. Even back 50 years it was a challenge. I mean who could trace the Y-DNA in males and Mitochondrial DNA in females back then?
As for participants, anyone is allowed to participate. For a reasonable fee of US$100, anyone (even me) can order a self-testing kit. The kit includes a mouth scraping (saliva swab) where your DNA is obtained. The person who buys the kit has to mail it back so researchers can analyze it. They will eventually reveal your genetic history to you. I think scientists should have no problem retrieving DNA samples from urbanized people because these people tend to be more curious and understand what their DNAs contribute to. On the other hand, the indigenous people wouldn't be so eager to give their DNA to scientists since they have no idea what the scientists will do. Yet, collecting DNA samples from the indigenious population is an important part of this project.
National Geographic said themselves that their key purpose in this project is to collect DNAs from "Key Populations". Genographic Project define this term as "stable populations who have lived within their respective geographic regions and maintained their present culture for many generations". They also said that indigenous people has "stability that makes the genetic signatures carried by each member anthropologically informative". This means indigenous people contain the most reliable DNA patterns. You see urbanized people have more variations so it's harder to trace their ancestors.
Shortly after the announcement of the project in April 2005, the Indigenous Peoples Council protested against this project. The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues also recommended the suspension of the project in May of 2006. Yet, National Geographic claims that the project has received a positive response from many different indigenous and traditional peoples around the world.
I am anxious to see the results of this study.
