The Missing 20th Century: How Copyright Protection Makes Books Vanish - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-missing-20th-century-how-copyright-protection-makes-books-vanish/255282
Because of the strange distortions of copyright protection, there are twice as many newly published books available on Amazon from 1850 as there are from 1950.
What the World Would Look Like If Countries Were As Big As Their Online Populations - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/what-the-world-would-look-like-if-countries-were-as-big-as-their-online-populations/280358
there are also macro forces at work: The Internet largely exists for and is created by the people who are on it. The map above gives a rough idea of who those people are—or, at least, where they are.
The map, created as part of the Information Geographies project at the Oxford Internet Institute, has two layers of information: the absolute size of the online population by country (rendered in geographical space) and the percent of the overall population that represents (rendered by color).
How #Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-hole-in-our-collective-memory-how-copyright-made-mid-century-books-vanish/278209
By this calculation, the effect of copyright appears extreme. Heald says that the WorldCat research showed, for example, that there were eight times as many books published in the 1980s as in the 1880s, but there are roughly as many titles available on Amazon for the two decades. (...)
Copyright advocates have long (and successfully) argued that keeping books copyrighted assures that owners can make a profit off their intellectual property, and that that profit incentive will “assure [the books’] availability and adequate distribution.” The evidence, it appears, says otherwise. 
Étude intéressante à plus d’un titre. L’original est là ▻http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2290181 librement téléchargeable.
Sa dernière partie aborde aussi la disponibilité des chansons et le rôle de YouTube.
Il utilise la base d’Amazon comme source de ses données (#étagère_métaphorique metaphorical bookshelf ) et fait des recherches sur YouTube. Avec des remarques du genre
Perhaps the most striking statistic to emerge from the data is that at least 95% of the videos appear to have been uploaded by non-owners/infringers.
The Climate Is Set to Change ’Orders of Magnitude’ Faster Than at Any Other Time in the Past 65 Million Years - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/the-climate-is-set-to-change-orders-of-magnitude-faster-than-at-any-other-time-in-the-past-65-million-years/278290
A new paper in the journal Science finds that climate change is now set to occur at a pace “orders of magnitude more rapid” than at any other time in the last 65 million years. That breakneck speed may mean extinction for species that cannot keep up.
For example, the paper’s authors Noah S. Diffenbaugh and Christopher B. Field of Stanford write, consider the global cooling that took place beginning some 52 million years ago. That change was of a greater magnitude than even the worst-case global-warming projections for the 21st century. But that transition occurred over a period lasting 18 million years, not a matter of decades. Similarly, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, thought one of the more rapid climatic shifts, was 100-fold slower than the most dramatic 21st century scenarios, and 10-fold slower than the best-case ones. “Further,” the authors add, “the rates of global change during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), Little Ice Age (LIA), and early Holocene were all smaller than the observed rates from 1880 to 2005 and than for the committed warming calculated to occur over the 21st century if atmospheric concentrations were capped at year-2000 levels” (emphasis added because haha).
The specifics of how this “unprecedented rate of global warming” will affect terrestrial species are uncertain, and will likely vary region to region, habitat to habitat. For some species, hospitable environments may emerge just kilometers away. For others, the authors put it in words that conceal the turmoil, “the constraint may be no-analog climates.” Meaning, simply, that they’ll have nowhere to go.
#Einstein Letter on #Religion and God to Be Auctioned on eBay - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic
►http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/einstein-letter-calling-biblical-stories-pretty-childish-to-be-auctioned-on-ebay/263334
The clearest of those here is Einstein’s critique of religion as not sophisticated enough to render the universe as Einstein understood it. This is something he said, or at least hinted at, many times, such as when he wrote to a U.S. Navy ensign that he considered a father-figure-like understanding of God to be a consequence of “childish analogies.” Religion, Einstein believed, made a caricature of God.
That’s not, however, because Einstein rejected the notion of God, but because he took the idea of God very seriously, elevating it above a religious conception to a mathematical one. To Einstein, the elegance of the physics guiding the universe were God’s handiwork, the mark not of a humanlike being that maintains control over the world, but of a divine beauty in nature’s laws.
Cartographie Visualisation Données Information
Ceci, sans vouloir bien sur complètement désespérer les cartographes de France et de Navarre...
The Future of the Map Isn’t a Map at All—It’s Information
Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic
►http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/the-future-of-the-map-isnt-a-map-at-all-its-information/259252
Jun 30 2012, 2:38 PM ET 15
Google’s vision for geospatial information: “We don’t want a monoculture where there is just one map of the world. There never has been; there never will be.”
Maps can be beautiful, interesting, and, of course, useful, but there are a lot of questions we address to maps — and these days, Google Maps specifically — that maybe a map isn’t the best tool for answering.
Think of it this way. In the days before online trip planners and GPS, if you wanted to know how to get from point A to point B, you would look at a map and trace out a route. But these days few people would use a map that way (I still do just because I enjoy the process but I think I’m in the minority). Instead, they would plug in their request and an algorithm would spit out a route for them. The route would appear on the map, but the map is no longer the tool for finding that answer.
