randform

This post is a follow-up to the last post. There is also a copy of this essay at the Azimuth project.
If you read the essay you will in particular understand that I profoundly disagree with most of the key concepts as formulated in the video by Kirby Ferguson, who also investigated intellectual property in the context of evolution.

Feb22: some additions to the essay in orange more additions eventually on Azimuth
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randform reader Sheila asked:

Nad wrote: “In addition I proposed to the people at arxiv to introduce a closed pre-preprint section for the arxive for timestamping works (something I am going to talk about later in more detail)”

Why did you write to the arxiv people? You should have made that public!
The recent protests against journals could have started much earlier if all people would have published their ideas earlier!

With “protests” Sheila is probably referring to the current protests against the publisher Elsevier and the increasing discussions (see e.g. the forum math2.0) about different models for scientific publishing and mathematical software.

My answer to this: I actually “made this public” in a comment on the math blog n-category cafe. The search button at the n-category cafe doesnt work to good, so I currently can’t find the comment. It must have been something like in 2009. In this n-category cafe comment I explained that it would be good to establish a “lockable section” at the archive (see below) with review function, so this kind of discussion has been prevalent for a while within the math/physics community. As a major application for such a “lockable section” I had actually the review and guidance of Ph.D. thesis’ in mind (a “pre-preprint section”), rather then, whats currently more discussed, the review of finalized articles. Apart from the n-category cafe comment I explained the concept also in this randform post. It may sometimes take a while for a discussion to grow and gain importance.

The underlying concept for these kind of software solutions and in some sense also for the discussion itself is what I would like to call “the traceability of intellectual properties”. On the Azimuth project wiki I recently tried to explain this concept a bit more. Moreover I transferred the concept also to other intellectual property issues, in particular to patents. This resulted in a proposal for a lockable patent archive.

After the click you may find a copy of the current Azimuth project wiki entry.

Short comment: In the above mentioned randform post the revocation of Germany’s former minister of defense Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg’s doctoral degree following accusations of plagiarism was mentioned. Despite the revocation of his degree it seems he may still be a rather good law expert (at least thats what I understood from the comments of his coworkers). In addition he seems to be an expert on some internet software related issues . I could imagine that the legal subtleties of such online legal facilities could be an interesting subject for a new Ph.D. thesis, but of course I am not his advisor :)

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The past 6 months I was involved in a student software project at the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft (University of the applied sciences). The project is called MIMIRIX. It is going to be presented today at the school in building G Room 007 around 1.30 pm. As you may know there is currently the filmfestival Berlinale in Berlin, hence there are many wellknown actors in Berlin. So actually the latest gossip here was that Angelina Jolie comes together with Shah Rukh Khan to the MIMIRIX presentation. But these are of course blatant lies. More about MIMIRIX later.

supplement 11.2.12:
Short comment to the above logo:
The term MIMIRIX was coined by Martin Bilsing,
the logo was designed by Igne Degutyte
using the font Petita by Manfred Klein.

The discussion about certain nuclear waste problems which was indirectly adressed in my previous post about mini nuclear reactors went a little further on the blog Azimuth (here, here and here). Connected with the Azimuth blog is the socalled Azimuth project and the Azimuth forum, where amongst others people voluntarily discuss scientific studies on climate and environmental issues and even do some related software projects (like for example this here). So in the comment I suggested that someone could eventually do the necessary calculations to check wether there is a higher cancer rate in the San Francisco Bay area which may be due to a nuclear waste site in the waters close to San Francisco. Likewise one could eventually do similar calculations for the 25000 undersea radioactive waste sites in Russia mentioned in the post about the mini nuclear reactors or to other known sites in the world (see also this post and this comment about sites in India). It would of course also be interesting to hear about related studies.

related randform posts:
->on a recent study of increased risk of cancer in the vicinity of german nuclear power plants
->On the socalled Greiser-study
-> and the general overview on nuclear science posts on randform

As some randform readers may have noticed the randform blog webpage, as well as Tims lateron.de were put offline yesterday Jan. 18 on the occasion of the protests against SOPA and PIPA and ACTA.

“verticalized overhead power line with book lover using excessive light”, fotography of the Sony Center court yard on Potsdamer Platz by Loretta (see also the randform post chains)

I was recently looking a bit into the issue of smart grids and ran over an interesting european strategy analysis.

In 2005 the european smartgrid platform www.smartgrids.eu was set up. On their document page the currently newest document linked to is from 2010, it is a Strategic Deployment Document for Europe’s electricity networks of the future (2010) on page 53 one finds:

Engineering in the energy sector, electricity grids in particular, is seen by many as old- fashioned and “difficult” as it requires a high level of competence in mathematics, physics and other sciences. This discourages the potential new students from studying and pursuing a career in power engineering.

… and

All stakeholders in the electricity sector have a responsibility to improve the image of the sector, e.g. by engaging with educational institutions and explaining in an understandable way the real benefits of being involved with and able to deliver solutions to the energy, climate and environmental challenges of today.

This sounds very much as if the major problem of getting new working force for the electricity high-tech sector is mainly a question of hipness. In part it may be true that science and math is regarded as highly “unhip” in certain circles (and the reasons for this are manifold), however the comment in the document seems to miss somewhat a crucial point. Or maybe lets say it sounds a bit strange in the view that even fields medallists in e.g. Great Britain or France try to politely point out that there is structurally something at odds with the whole european science and math research and education.

Happy holidays to all randform readers!

supplement 1.1.2012: a happy new year to all randform readers!

I decided to translate the part in the last randform comment, which deals with democracy and social media, because it is of a more general nature.

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Tonträgerindustrie auf dem Ladentisch

I left a long comment at the Berlin city blog Spreeblick which discusses the role of commercial social media, their democracy and the Gema (the german perfomance rights organization). The comment is in german and you can read it also after the click.

Addition on 20.08.2012: A part of this comment which deals with social media and democracy can be found translated in the randform post “translation.”

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bad news from my laptop problem: The Macbook which we bought in Spring 2008 had a broken logic board in Summer 2010 and since then rather regular malfunctions of logic boards and hard disks happened. Now the logic board of my laptop was again replaced, but then it turned out that in addition the system structure of my hard disk has now irrepairable malfunctions.

I had posted a question to the thinkspace at openeconomics.net, which is an initiative of the open knowledge foundation. The site had been managed amongst others by Guo Xu who is the coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group. The question hasn’t been moderated yet, but regardless of that I thought I may post the question also here.
The question I ask is which other forms of money flow regulation -aside from national currencies- are seriously discussed among economists. In particular this concerns the question on how to tackle the Euro problem.

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