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September 29, 2006
Before I moved away from the Bay Area, I worked briefly at the downtown Oakland technology startup iParadigms, writing and editing various web pages and marketing materials. This is the company that runs Turnitin, a web-based plagiarism-checking service that allows subscriber educational institutions to check student work against a vast database of web and print sources, as well as against all other student papers that have ever been run through the system. The company contracts with thousands of public and private institutions, and makes a pretty penny for its efforts.
Turnitin has been criticized on numerous counts, mostly by students who feel like the system is part of a Big Brother climate of mistrust. In particular, though, the feature of checking student papers against other papers that have already been run through the system has led to a popular criticism that the system violates student copyrights. I was given the task of writing some replies to student newspapers that had editorialized against the system. With the new school year, the number of students protesting the system has again increased, and some of them even got the Washington Post to write about it. For all the puffery, though, it's an entirely new question of copyright law as to whether this system would constitute a copyright violation, and so I don't think anyone can really say. It's very interesting to me from a legal perspective. While I worked there, I did a lot of research into cheating and realized that it actually is a huge, huge problem in the Internet age. Also, I noted that the people who created the system and ran the company were not KBR surveillance experts; they were free-thinking academics who were pissed about cheating when they were grad students teaching undergrad classes. They felt like the level of digital plagiarism going on actually impacted the quality of university education all over the country. It seems to me that the best argument on Turnitin's side is that students give teachers a license to read and evaluate their work in numerous ways when they turn it in for grading. Some of these ways would technically be considered copyright violations. For instance, a teacher could make a copy of a paper to give to a grad student grader, or the teacher could make a copy of a paper to place in a file to check against other student work in the future. None of these things would seem to be actionable. So is a private company maintaining a database of these papers, performing checks that teachers would do if they could, and getting paid for it, actionable? In a private school context, definitely not, because students agree to be bound by numerous private school rules as soon as they matriculate. In a public school context, I think it's a much closer question, because the public school is an instrumentality of the government. Could there be an eminent domain claim, that the student had been deprived of property without compensation? September 26, 2006
Wilkes-Barre man arrested after bizarre tirade at local GOP headquarters: "He started to put down Rick Santorum ... and he demanded that Rick Santorum come to his home for two straight days ..." You don't get more Pennsylvania than this one; note reference to Boscov's department store and key role of apple cider in the crime. (Speaking of which, note the embarrassing error in this graphic on the Boscov's site.)
September 23, 2006  Thanks to the premiere of the new CBS series Smith (Tuesdays at 10 p.m.), I've renewed my obsession with a string of pulp movies, none of them hits, that Ray Liotta made in the 90s. Liotta, with his pockmarked face and trademark steely glare, was something of an unlikely star thanks to Goodfellas. He never really caught on as a leading man, but that wasn't for lack of trying. At the very least, his choices in roles were about 100 times more interesting than those of other budding stars of the era, and I'd like to think that I was blazing new territory by creating the Cult of Liotta. When he's not cast as an outright villain, Liotta is almost always an unbalanced man with a terrible secret in his past, or a career criminal struggling with inner demons. He's one of the only actors with what seems to be enough natural intensity to pull off these roles. And when he smiles, it generally looks like he's about to kill you. The string of movies in question began with Article 99 and Unlawful Entry in 1992, then continued with an amazing run: No Escape, Turbulence, Cop Land, Unforgettable, and Phoenix. The string arguably was capped with an out-of-control Liotta performance as crazed Detective Henry Oak in Narc, in 2002. Of these, I'm particularly obsessed with Turbulence, in which Liotta chews scenery as "Lonely Hearts Killer" Ryan Weaver, and the Dahl Brothers' underrated sci-fi tinged thriller Unforgettable, in which he plays a doctor with a terrible past who is falsely accused of murdering his wife, then uses experimental treatments to try to revive her memories. In Cop Land, he plays downtrodden police chief Freddy Heflin's only friend, burnt-out cop Gary "Figgsy" Figgis, who sets an insurance fire at his own house and accidentally kills his girlfriend. His role is mostly memorable for the slow-motion shoot-out at the end, where Liotta appears out of nowhere, guns blazing, with a cigarette hanging from his lips. I didn't think Smith really showcased Ray's talents very well, but it had a few quality Liotta moments, including some funny Ray-with-kids hijinks that were not particularly believable and a scene where he screams frighteningly at one of his partners, which was indeed more believable. In the show, Liotta plays a career criminal who runs major heists, but maintains a quiet suburban life with wife Virginia Madsen. It's a promising premise that owes more than a little to Michael Mann's Thief, one of the ten best films of all time, but the first episode was a little too scattered to really judge. Another problem with the concept is that Liotta can't get caught, or the show will sort of be over. September 15, 2006
When I wrote my article a few years ago about SACD and DVD-Audio, the music industry's then-competing high-resolution formats, there was a good deal of buzz around the release of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon in surround-sound SACD format. There was also a bit of controversy, because the surround-sound mix on the SACD was a new 5.1 mix done by engineer James Guthrie, not the old quadraphonic (4.0) mix done by original engineer Alan Parsons in the 70s. At the time, I regularly talked to Parsons as part of my job, and he was really not too thrilled about the new mix, which he correctly criticized for playing it a bit safe.
Apparently, some bootleggers with access to the original quad master tapes (read: maybe Parsons or his buddies) have recently rectified the situation by putting out their own DVD-Audio of the Parsons mix, which was/is beloved by fans. (Anybody with a functioning Quad vinyl system should turn in this dangerous equipment to local authorities.) September 13, 2006
A few things:
--While preparing my forthcoming epic post about The Adventures of Pluto Nash, I spotted albino African-American actor Victor Varnado, who plays a villain in the film, on the subway. (He also was the star of the End of Days trailer, which fittingly took place in the subway.) --I just bought the new Basement Jaxx album, which is great, but the Jaxx did something very odd ... They neglected to put the single "Oh My Gosh," which is also great, actually on the album, instead opting to put it on the enhanced portion of the disc as an MP3 and Quicktime video. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense; even though it was an inter-album single, why not put it on the disc? --What is wrong with Apple? The latest products are nearly useless. Wireless media players have been around for a long time, the new Shuffle still doesn't have a screen, and who is going to pay $9.99 to download a movie at lower-than-DVD quality? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense either. --T-Mobile has a brilliant idea, and it looks like they'll be first to market with a hybrid wi-fi/cell service that will operate over the home wi-fi network (sort of) when in range and standard cell network when not. The advantage of this is that when at home you'll pay a flat rate and not use any cell minutes. --Rick Santorum is going to lose, I don't care if the race is "tightening." September 02, 2006
In terms of things I've been watching lately, I rented Starship Troopers 2 and Hollow Man 2. Both are jaw-droppingly bad low-budget sequels to Paul Verhoeven's last two huge-budget American sci-fi movies. The sequels are official releases from Columbia TriStar, who wanted to make a quick buck on direct-to-DVD titles with a guaranteed audience. I figured they would both be bad, because I hadn't heard anything about them at all, but I didn't think they would be quite as bad as they are. Hollow Man 2 is a sub-TV-quality chase picture with almost nothing remarkable about it except for the casting of Christian Slater as the title character. What's remarkable about that is not the fact that Slater is in the film, but that the production was too cheap to afford him for more than two or three scenes, because he is conveniently invisible for the rest of the picture.
Starship Troopers 2 is marginally better, if only because it has some real action sequences and gore effects, and was able to hold my interest for more than the 10 minutes I watched of Hollow Man 2 before I hit the fast-forward button. The problem with Troopers 2 is that Aliens is now 20 years old and everyone has seen it. Does the world really need another paltry, dimly lit imitator with weak acting and low-rent computer effects where a cast of unknowns are preyed upon in dark tunnels? The only bonus points go to the casting of The Last American Virgin's Laurence Monoson and Death Wish 3's Ed Lauter in two of the lead roles. The behind-the-camera talent, including Robocop and original Troopers writer Ed Neumeier and veteran FX supervisor turned director Phil Tippett, must have been out to lunch when they came up with this. I also finally watched The Adventures of Pluto Nash and want to devote an entire post to dissecting its wonders. And as an update: That's My Bush will be released on DVD in October. |
