WIKIPEDIA VS. PORTRAIT GALLERY: THE LINE IS CROSSED
Artnet has a fascinating article about an unusual clash between Wikipedia and the National Portrait Gallery.
Go ahead and look while you still can. A collection of more than 3,000 images of works from London’s National Portrait Gallery(NPG) is still live on Wikipedia Commons as of today, July 21, 2009. Lawyers for the NPG had givenWikimedia — the parent organization of Wikipedia as well as a dozen other nonprofit “wiki” projects — a July 20 ultimatum to remove the images, which were uploaded to the free-wheeling digital repository by a volunteer, Derrick Coetzee, back in March. The London museum claims that it owns the copyright on the digital reproductions, despite the fact that the artworks themselves are in some cases many centuries old and thus in the public domain.
Commons Wikimedia post by the guilty party.
Kevin Bishop to take the rip out of Derren
The first series of The Kevin Bishop Show in August 2008 came second only to Big Brother in terms of the number of complaints made to Channel 4. Not particularly surprising when sketches included musical parodies of Holocaust drama Sophie’s Choice and convicted murderer Fred West.
The second run of Bishop’s show looks likely be no less controversial in its second series, with more impersonations of celebrities including Simon Cowell and Hugh Laurie.
Bishop also impersonates illusionist Derren Brown, but in the guise of his taxi-driving brother. ”The Darren Brown sketch is part of a thing we do called Celebrity Siblings,” he explains.
“There’s Tristan Bale, he works in a call centre, and there’s Andy Sugar – who is Alan Sugar’s brother – and is a car mechanic and keeps firing people even though he’s not the boss.”
Library bans Sunday school’s ‘religious’ poster
Jacalyn Oghan, 46, wanted to advertise the craft, singing and drama day for children at her church. Despite the poster clearly stating that children of all religions could “come along and have fun”, she was told she could not put the poster up at Jubilee Library in Brighton.
Mrs Oghan, who runs the Sunday school at St Mary’s Church in the city centre, said: “Anyone in the community, of whatever faith, should be able to put up a poster in their local library so that people know what is going on.
“But I was told my poster could not be displayed because it had religious content. ”Many Christians in the community are already too frightened to speak up. ”I was made to feel as if my poster was somehow offensive or dangerous.” She described the council ruling as “political correctness gone mad”.
Mrs Oghan added it riled her that the library was also selling sweets that were “clearly poking fun at Christianity”. The ‘Messiah Mints’ have a picture of Jesus on the tin and the flippant message: “Here’s that Jesus fella again – and this time he’s spreading minty freshness into the mouths of the masses.”
7-year-old boy starts car chase to avoid church
A 7-year-old boy in Utah was so desperate to avoid church that he ended up leading police officers on a car chase after driving off in his father’s car.Police dispatchers received reports of a child driving recklessly in a Dodge Intrepid on Sunday morning, with one witness saying the boy had driven through a stop sign.
Anderson says two deputies caught up with the boy and tried unsuccessfully to stop the vehicle, in Plain City, to the north of Salt Lake City. The car reached speeds of 40 mph before the boy stopped in a driveway and ran inside a home.
A police spokesman said that when the boy’s father later confronted him, the kid’s explanation said he didn’t want to go to church. As the child is too young to prosecute no further action was taken – although police did urge the father to make his car keys more inaccessible to children.
Metro (Thanks Fiona)
Do You Have These Core Human Skills?
Scott Adams, creator of the popular comic strip Dilbert, has a simple but useful strategy of personal success: you can either choose to hyper-specialize and become the best in the world (top 1%) at doing one very specific thing, or you can try to become very good (top 25%) in as many different areas as possible, which you then can use in combination.
The latter strategy is far easier, and is often more effective: by improving your skills in a few different but related areas, you increase your versatility and rarity, making your particular combination of skills more uniquely valuable.
Goat’s crowning as king of Ireland in doubt
The annual crowning of a goat as king of Ireland at one of the country’s oldest fairs is in doubt after organizers said the heir to the throne may be stopped from traveling to the festival. Traditionally a male goat is caught in the mountains of Kerry in southern Ireland and paraded through the town of Killorglin where he reigns for the three days of Puck Fair, a centuries-old festival of drinking, music and dancing.
Locals may have to desperately trek the nearby hills after this year’s chosen animal from the Northern Ireland town of Ballycastle could only get a four-day license for the trip south of the border. “It takes at least a day to bring a goat from Ballycastle to Killorglan and the goat is on the stand for three days. It’s not possible to do that within the four days,” Puck Fair chairman Declan Mangan told state radio station RTE. “The people in Ballycastle are looking for another goat who would be able to come for an extended trip to Kerry. In the meantime we have to look around the mountains here just incase.”
Naked girls plow fields for rain
Farmers in an eastern Indian state have asked their unmarried daughters to plow parched fields naked in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain, officials said on Thursday. Witnesses said the naked girls in Bihar state plowed the fields and chanted ancient hymns after sunset to invoke the gods. They said elderly village women helped the girls drag the plows.
“They (villagers) believe their acts would get the weather gods badly embarrassed, who in turn would ensure bumper crops by sending rains,” Upendra Kumar, a village council official, said from Bihar’s remote Banke Bazaar town. “This is the most trusted social custom in the area and the villagers have vowed to continue this practice until it rains very heavily.”
Invite to deface Bible withdrawn
An artist who created an artwork in which visitors were encouraged to deface a copy of the Bible has asked for it to be put in a glass case.
Jane Clarke, herself a Christian, had said she wanted people who felt marginalised to be able to write their stories back into the Bible. But the exhibit, part of an exhibition about sexuality at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art, was the subject of protest.
Christian groups complained visitors were writing obscene messages. The Bible will remain on display in a glass case and the public will be able to write their comments in another book alongside. Sheets from this book will be inserted in the Bible by curatorial staff. Ms Clarke, who devised the exhibit, is a minister with the Metropolitan Community Church, which has a specific outreach to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities.
BBC (Thanks Houdinia)
Why don’t Americans understand science better? Start with the scientists
Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science unveiled the latest embarrassing evidence of our nation’s scientific illiteracy. Only 52 percent of Americans in their survey knew why stem cells differ from other kinds of cells; just 46 percent knew that atoms are larger than electrons. On a highly contentious issue like global warming, meanwhile, the gap between scientists and the public was vast: 84 percent of scientists, but just 49 percent of Americans, think human emissions are causing global warming.
What real piracy looks like: biopirate loses patent over century-old latinamerican staple crop
US Patent Number 5,894,079, belonging Colorado’s Larry Proctor, has been struck down. Proctor brought home some yellow beans from a Mexican market and filed for a patent on them in the 1990s, neglecting to tell the USPTO that the beans had been a dietary staple in latinamerica for over a century.
Proctor called them “Enola beans” and began to receive a toll on every Enola bean imported into the US from latinamerica. He used this money to fund a series of defenses to challenges on his patent. Because the patent system continues to enforce challenged patents while the gears of litigation turn, for every year that went by, Proctor found himself richer and better-able to fund his defense, while the people who had grown and eaten the beans for a century got poorer.
