Reuters sues academic for making a Firefox plugin that lets you annotate and reference articles

By Cory Doctorow on Copyfight

Espen sez, "In a move leading me to suspect they have hired laid-off lawyers from RIAA, Endnote (owned by Reuters) has sued GMU and Dan Cohen for the latest version of Zotero (a Firefox plugin that lets you save, annotate and academically reference articles you find online). This is an amazingly stupid market move: Suing an academic for making software for other academics because the software allows you to convert styles (which in turn were freely contributed by other academics) – when your main market is academics."

Remembering Edward Said

By USAK

By Selen Tonkuş

Today is the 5th anniversary of Edwards Said’s death. In 25 September 2003, he died from leukemia after 12 years struggle. I believe it is very appropriate and even necessary to remember Said, who was an academician that lived a life of struggle, an outspoken advocate of Palestinian rights.

To put more formally, Edward Said was a Palestinian American literary theorist, cultural critic, political activist and was a University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and is a founding figure in postcolonial theory.

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk gave an impassioned political speech yesterday at Georgetown University — but it wasn’t the overt kind Washington audiences are used to hearing.

Dingli Shen: China and a New Balance of Power

SHANGHAI – The last rival superpower to the United States, the Soviet Union, collapsed in 1991. But, apart from its military strength, the USSR was never really powerful enough to counterbalance US influence. In the late 1980’s, Japan seemed capable of challenging America’s industrial leadership, but by the 1990’s it lost its competitive edge. China might itself wish to be a major force in a multi-polar world, but has been plagued by its lack of overall strength. Given these realities, China sees the expanding European Union as a likely counterweight to unchecked US power.

The new new deal by Saskia Sassen

The current moment would be a remarkable and revealing one for any United States government, and is even more so when the current administration has been so firm in proclaiming its desire to keep out of the economy. The fact that the White House, the treasury and the Federal Reserve want to inject at least $700 billion of taxpayers’ money into the economy in order to stabilise a fragile and exposed financial system is a stunning departure from long-held neo-liberal mantras.

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S Lynd professor of sociology and member, Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University. Her books include Losing Control? Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization (Columbia University Press, 1996) and The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton University Press, 2001). Her latest book is Territory, Authority, and Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press, 2006), based on a five-year project on governance and accountability in a global economy

Book Review of Mobile Communication and Society

With mobile phone usage now reaching almost fifty per cent of the world’s population, there continues to be an urgent need to understand the impact and influence of mobile communication practices across the globe. Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective examines contemporary mobile communication and the transformations which the incorporation of mobile phones in society. Co-authored by Manuel Castells, Mireira Fernández-Ardèvol, Jack Linchuan Qiu and Araba Sey as a project by the Annenberg School Research Network, the book synthesizes a range of qualitative and quantitative research on mobile phones in an effort to “construct an empirically grounded argument on the social logic embedded in wireless communication, and on the shaping of this logic by users and uses in various cultural and institutional contexts” (4).

Stanford Teaching MBAs How To Fight Open Source

The ruse of “secular humanism”

by Michael Warner

Discussions of the secular can often be peculiarly remote.  Whenever secularism is imagined as unbelief, or political neutrality, or an empty social space to be filled up with religious pluralism, it can be difficult to remember how it can also serve as a framework of corporeal experience and struggle.  We are used to associating corporeal discipline and affect with religion, but not with the secular.  So it might be excusable to begin with some personal reflection, not for the sake of autobiography but in order to tether analysis in some awareness of how the problem comes to have stakes.

Encyclopaedist of the international

By Antonin J. Liehm, Roman Schmidt

Antonin J. Liehm, editor of Litérarní noviny from 1960-1968 and founder of Lettre Internationale, has been at the forefront of numerous attacks on the "provincialism of the great cultures". One theme has remained throughout: the idea of an international magazine.