Google gets patents for advanced Glass and a driverless delivery truck; ComputerWorld, 2/18/16

Sharon Gaudin, ComputerWorld; Google gets patents for advanced Glass and a driverless delivery truck:

"Google is working on advancing its Google Glass technology, while also working on the concept of a driverless delivery truck.

Google, which holds a myriad of patents, was recently granted two U.S. patents, one for a more rugged and flexible version of its computerized eyewear, and another for an autonomous delivery truck."

Librarians Find Themselves Caught Between Journal Pirates and Publishers; Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/18/16

Corinne Ruff, Chronicle of Higher Education; Librarians Find Themselves Caught Between Journal Pirates and Publishers:

"The rise, fall, and resurfacing of a popular piracy website for scholarly-journal articles, Sci-Hub, has highlighted tensions between academic librarians and scholarly publishers.

Academics are increasingly turning to websites like Sci-Hub to view subscriber-only articles that they cannot obtain at their college or that they need more quickly than interlibrary loan can provide.

That trend puts librarians in an awkward position. While many are proponents of open access and understand the challenges scholars face in gaining access to information, they are also bound by their contracts with publishers, which obligate them to crack down on pirates. And while few, if any, librarians openly endorse piracy, many believe that the scholarly-publishing system is broken."

Marvell Technology to Pay Carnegie Mellon $750 Million Over Patents; Reuters via New York Times, 2/17/16

Reuters via New York Times; Marvell Technology to Pay Carnegie Mellon $750 Million Over Patents:

"Marvell Technology Group Ltd on Wednesday said it will pay Carnegie Mellon University $750 million to settle a nearly seven-year-old lawsuit accusing it of infringing two hard disk drive patents held by the Pittsburgh school.

The accord was announced six months after a federal appeals court said an earlier $1.54 billion damages award against the chipmaker should be reduced significantly and that a new trial be held, but that Marvell must pay at least $278.4 million...

Carnegie Mellon had sued Marvell in March 2009 over patents issued that related to how accurately hard disk drive circuits read data from high-speed magnetic disks.

The university said at least nine Marvell circuit devices incorporated the patents, which were issued in 2001 and 2002, letting the company sell billions of chips without permission."

Balancing Benefits and Risks of Immortal Data Participants’ Views of Open Consent in the Personal Genome Project; Hastings Center Report, 12/17/15

Oscar A. Zarate, Julia Green Brody, Phil Brown, Monica D. Ramirez-Andreotta, Laura Perovich andJacob Matz, Hastings Center Report; Balancing Benefits and Risks of Immortal Data: Participants’ Views of Open Consent in the Personal Genome Project:

"Abstract

An individual's health, genetic, or environmental-exposure data, placed in an online repository, creates a valuable shared resource that can accelerate biomedical research and even open opportunities for crowd-sourcing discoveries by members of the public. But these data become “immortalized” in ways that may create lasting risk as well as benefit. Once shared on the Internet, the data are difficult or impossible to redact, and identities may be revealed by a process called data linkage, in which online data sets are matched to each other. Reidentification (re-ID), the process of associating an individual's name with data that were considered deidentified, poses risks such as insurance or employment discrimination, social stigma, and breach of the promises often made in informed-consent documents. At the same time, re-ID poses risks to researchers and indeed to the future of science, should re-ID end up undermining the trust and participation of potential research participants.

The ethical challenges of online data sharing are heightened as so-called big data becomes an increasingly important research tool and driver of new research structures. Big data is shifting research to include large numbers of researchers and institutions as well as large numbers of participants providing diverse types of data, so the participants’ consent relationship is no longer with a person or even a research institution. In addition, consent is further transformed because big data analysis often begins with descriptive inquiry and generation of a hypothesis, and the research questions cannot be clearly defined at the outset and may be unforeseeable over the long term. In this article, we consider how expanded data sharing poses new challenges, illustrated by genomics and the transition to new models of consent. We draw on the experiences of participants in an open data platform—the Personal Genome Project—to allow study participants to contribute their voices to inform ethical consent practices and protocol reviews for big-data research."

Without Copyright Infringement, Deadpool Doesn't Get Made; TechDirt.com, 2/16/16

Tim Cushing, TechDirt.com; Without Copyright Infringement, Deadpool Doesn't Get Made:

"Sure, leaking test footage isn't like leaking an entire film, but without that happening, nothing else does. The movie is never made and Fox doesn't have almost three times the budget grossed within the first four days of ticket sales. But because this leak happened, the studio is likely in control of a promising franchise, provided it can keep the lightning bottled and push forward without discarding everything that makes Deadpool Deadpool. And everyone involved can thank the unnamed person they won't rat out for shrugging off the insular "power" of copyright and mobilizing a fan base that is now making good on its promise to support the movie."

Gearing Up for the Cloud, AT&T Tells Its Workers: Adapt, or Else; New York Times, 2/13/16

Quentin Hardy, New York Times; Gearing Up for the Cloud, AT&T Tells Its Workers: Adapt, or Else:

"To Mr. Stephenson, it should be an easy choice for most workers: Learn new skills or find your career choices are very limited.

“There is a need to retool yourself, and you should not expect to stop,” he said in a recent interview at AT&T’s Dallas headquarters. People who do not spend five to 10 hours a week in online learning, he added, “will obsolete themselves with the technology.”...

By 2020, Mr. Stephenson hopes AT&T will be well into its transformation into a computing company that manages all sorts of digital things: phones, satellite television and huge volumes of data, all sorted through software managed in the cloud.

That can’t happen unless at least some of his work force is retrained to deal with the technology. It’s not a young group: The average tenure at AT&T is 12 years, or 22 years if you don’t count the people working in call centers. And many employees don’t have experience writing open-source software or casually analyzing terabytes of customer data."

Leading Scientific Institutions Agree to Share Zika Research Data; Gizmodo, 2/10/16

George Dvorsky, Gizmodo; Leading Scientific Institutions Agree to Share Zika Research Data:

"Scientists are typically tight-lipped when it comes to their research, but desperate times call for desperate measures. In an effort to battle the ongoing Zika epidemic, a number of global health bodies—including academic journals, charities, and institutes—have committed to sharing data on the virus.

The statement, signed by over 30 organizations, is meant to ensure that any information relevant to combating Zika is made freely and openly available to the international community as “soon as is feasibly possible.” Signatories include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Doctors Without Borders, PLOS, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (along with the Chinese equivalent), the JAMA Network, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Researchers who signed the agreement were assured that their work would still be eligible for publication in science journals.

“Research is an essential part of the response to any global health emergency,” said Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust and a signatory of the statement. “This is particularly true for Zika, where so much is still unknown about the virus, how it is spread and the possible link with microcephaly.” It’s critical, he said, that results are shared rapidly and in a way that’s “equitable, ethical and transparent.”

This move follows a recent WHO consultation held in early September 2015 in which leading international stakeholders agreed that the “timely and transparent pre-publication” of scientific data and results “must become the global norm.”"