“For every book you send to 1DollarScan, you’ll also have to send along a signed waiver stating that you understand you’re having a copy of your books made under the company’s Fair Use Policy. The waiver also frees the company from any liability that they might have incurred for making a copy of a book that you don’t own. Once the contracts are signed, just pop them into the box with your books and ship them off to the company’s offices in California. When the books are received by 1DollarScan, the workers cut the spines off of them. This ensures that the pages of the book lay flat on the scanner, and makes it impossible to resell the hard copy of the book after it’s been scanned. When the scanning’s complete, the pages are shredded and recycled, ensuring that the owner only has access to one copy of their book: the freshly minted digital version, which can be downloaded as a PDF from the company’s website via the user’s password-protected account.”
“David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said: “Since 2008, we have used ‘hashing’ technology to tag known child sexual abuse images, allowing us to identify duplicate images which may exist elsewhere. “Each offending image in effect gets a unique fingerprint that our computers can recognize without humans having to view them again. “Recently, we have started working to incorporate these fingerprints into a cross-industry database. This will enable companies, law enforcement, and charities to better collaborate on detecting and removing child abuse images.”
“Some 74 percent of professors aged 49-67 plan to delay retirement past age 65 or never retire at all, according to a new Fidelity Investments study of higher education faculty. While 69 percent of those surveyed cited financial concerns, an even higher percentage of professors said love of their careers factored into their decision.”
U.S. Opens Antitrust Investigation Into Colleges' Talk of Student-Aid Reform
The U.S. Department of Justice has begun an investigation into “a possible agreement” among colleges to reform their financial-aid policies, according to a letter sent last month to at least two college presidents.
The investigation, several sources said, was prompted by recent discussions among a handful of college officials about how—or whether—they could collaborate to limit their use of merit-based financial aid and reduce bidding wars for applicants.
In the May 21 letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Chronicle, a lawyer in the department wrote that an agreement “to restrict tuition discounting and prevent colleges from changing or improving financial-aid awards to individual students” may restrain competition in violation of antitrust laws.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
“I just wish that we could talk about books as if they are for use, not as symbols of enduring knowledge that must be preserved against the ravages of digital barbarians or as emblems of obdurate and blinkered resistance to inevitable change.”
“As hybrids, they defy easy categorization and threaten to upset the tidy categories we have for judging who is and is not college-educated. Like monsters, MOOCs threaten to disrupt our social world and bring chaos in their wake.”
“Nowadays in the digital world you can hardly own anything anymore. If you put things in the cloud, someone, somewhere might disappear it and it’s gone forever. When we grew up, ownership was what made America different than Russia.”
(via arlpolicynotes)
“The work of the Chinese Communists within academic circles in the United States is far greater than what people imagine, and some scholars have no option but to hold themselves back. Academic independence and academic freedom in the United States are being greatly threatened by a totalitarian regime.”
(via shortformblog)
Archivists in France Fight a Privacy Initiative
As a European proposal to bolster digital privacy safeguards faces intense lobbying from Silicon Valley and other powerful groups in Brussels, an obscure but committed group has joined in the campaign to keep personal data flourishing online.
One of the European Union’s measures would grant Internet users a “right to be forgotten,” letting them delete damaging references to themselves in search engines, or drunken party photos from social networks. But a group of French archivists, the people whose job it is to keep society’s records, is asking: What about our collective right to keep a record even of some things that others might prefer to forget?
The archivists and their counteroffensive might seem out of step, as concern grows about American surveillance of Internet traffic around the world. But the archivists say the right to be forgotten, as it has become known, could complicate the collection and digitization of mundane public documents — birth reports, death notices, real estate transactions and the like — that form a first draft of history.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
“The researchers now know why ancient Roman concrete is so superior. They extracted from the floor of Italy’s Pozzuoili Bay, in the northern tip of the Bay of Naples, a sample of concrete headwater that dates back to 37 B.C. and analyzed its mineral components at research labs in Europe and the U.S., including at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source. The analysis, the scientists believe, reveals the lost recipe of Roman concrete, and it also points to how much more stable and less environmentally damaging it is than today’s blend.”
