95,267 research outputs found

    Legal Fictions: Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law

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    A girl owns a number of Barbie dolls. She makes outfits for them and constructs elaborate scenarios in which they play starring roles. She enacts her dramas in her front yard, where passers-by can easily see. Does she violate the law? What if the girl writes down her stories starring Barbie? What happens when she lets her friends read them? What if she e-mails those stories to a Barbie mailing list? What if she posts those stories and a picture of Barbie in her new outfit on her Web page? Copyright law has long been a concern more for corporations than for ordinary citizens. However, with new technologies that allow individuals to produce and distribute information easily, however, copyright law is becoming increasingly relevant to common activities. Much has been written about the problems created by the easy reproduction of copyrighted documents and by the poor fit between law and technology that makes every person who browses the World Wide Web ( the Web ) a likely lawbreaker. This Article goes beyond the debate over pure copying to analyze the implications of creative work-now widely accessible via the Internet-that draw on copyrighted elements of popular culture

    Twitter: Businesses Increasing Their Revenues 140 Characters at a Time

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    With the consumer market becoming more competitive by the day, businesses must find innovative yet cost effective means of reaching their target markets and steadily increasing their revenues. While businesses compete with one another to remain the best, they must have a strategic market plan that differentiates their products and/or services from their competitors. In an effort to do this, many businesses have begun using social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn as a means of reaching their target markets. Such sites have opened businesses to a new level of advertising where they reach consumers faster, have the ability to be more innovative, and spend less money than they would with conventional means of advertising. In addition to these social networking sites, Twitter has emerged, gaining interest from businesses looking to get their products and/or services out to consumers through a new medium. With the number of users increasing daily and the ease of passing information along from one user to the next, businesses have begun to see their new found means of advertising on Twitter as the way to increase their revenues 140 characters at a time. This project highlights how the understanding of the benefits of social media marketing is essential to businesses venturing into the use of Twitter. This understanding allows businesses to frame the use of Twitter to successfully fit their business strategies, while the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) shows the connection between the use of social networking sites by businesses and how it relates to the manner in which consumers are receptive to the information such sites provide. Various studies conducted on the use of Twitter by companies along with a case study on FM Global, a mutual insurance company, highlight how Twitter can be used by businesses as a marketing tool for branding purposes and increasing revenues

    Substring filtering for low-cost linked data interfaces

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    Recently, Triple Pattern Fragments (TPFS) were introduced as a low-cost server-side interface when high numbers of clients need to evaluate SPARQL queries. Scalability is achieved by moving part of the query execution to the client, at the cost of elevated query times. Since the TPFS interface purposely does not support complex constructs such as SPARQL filters, queries that use them need to be executed mostly on the client, resulting in long execution times. We therefore investigated the impact of adding a literal substring matching feature to the TPFS interface, with the goal of improving query performance while maintaining low server cost. In this paper, we discuss the client/server setup and compare the performance of SPARQL queries on multiple implementations, including Elastic Search and case-insensitive FM-index. Our evaluations indicate that these improvements allow for faster query execution without significantly increasing the load on the server. Offering the substring feature on TPF servers allows users to obtain faster responses for filter-based SPARQL queries. Furthermore, substring matching can be used to support other filters such as complete regular expressions or range queries

    Just What You’re Looking For

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    Overview: Death is inevitable. It’s something that we are all going to experience at some point in our lives, and it’s all just a matter of when. Many people find death to be too abstract and frightening to contemplate, so it becomes an idea that is displaced to back of their minds to deal with later. For some people that later time comes before they know it. It comes before they are able to grasp the idea of what death is and therefore cannot understand it. Or it can come unexpectedly and without planning. Feeling alone, sad, angry, and miserable, the person left is without any ways to deal with the incident. That person could be twelve years old. According to the website, Grief Watch, “ …around one in ten adolescents between the ages of ten and eighteen [have] experienced the loss of a close loved one” (n.p.). These children and young adults may have lost a grandparent, parent, aunt, uncle, or a friend. How do children specifically deal with a loss? One tool is young adult literature, also known as YAL. YAL is geared towards adolescents and intended to relate to their young lives. It includes many obstacles that young adults are facing today such as death. One young adult novel that teens can relate to is, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. The main character, Junior, experiences several challenges of living on a reservation while going to a nearby white public school. He overcomes the death of his honorable grandmother, close family friend, and beloved sister. In another novel, Looking for Alaska by John Green, a group of students at a boarding school look for answers for the death of a close friend. Both novels include relatable characters that adolescents can look to for ways to cope with their own loss. By looking at these two novels, we can see that coping with death is a challenge for adolescents, which most people don’t see; this is important because adolescents can use young adult literature to grieve in a positive way. Young adult literature is written for the interest of adolescents by relating to their lives through the characters, their hardships, interests, and culture. Dr. Jonathon Ostenson, a proponent of YAL claims, “Young adult literature is most succinctly defined by Bucher and Hinton (2010) as a work of any genre that, ‘provides a unique adolescent point of view, and reflects the concerns, interests, and challenges of young adults’” (n.p.). Thus, YAL is written to reflect the lives of young adults. Accordingly, when children can relate to what they are reading, then the novel and story becomes of interest to them. This is imperative for teens who dislike reading. Yet, when they read YAL, it becomes a tool that can be used for development. In Lorna Collier’s article, “YA Literature-Where Teens Find Themselves” she writes, “ YA lit is an invaluable resource in today’s English classrooms, engaging students with relevant topics, relatable characters, and accessible language” (6). This is because young adult literature is a relatively new category of literature that reflects the lives of children today more than the classics that are required of many students to read. Specifically, it is more suitable in their lives than reading about challenges that young adults faced in a time that is irrelevant to the 21st century. Thus, adolescents can learn as much, if not more, from YAL than other resources available to them

    Genericness Doctrine Need Not Apply: Employing Generic Domain Names in Cyberspace.

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    Colour Text Segmentation in Web Images Based on Human Perception

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    There is a significant need to extract and analyse the text in images on Web documents, for effective indexing, semantic analysis and even presentation by non-visual means (e.g., audio). This paper argues that the challenging segmentation stage for such images benefits from a human perspective of colour perception in preference to RGB colour space analysis. The proposed approach enables the segmentation of text in complex situations such as in the presence of varying colour and texture (characters and background). More precisely, characters are segmented as distinct regions with separate chromaticity and/or lightness by performing a layer decomposition of the image. The method described here is a result of the authors’ systematic approach to approximate the human colour perception characteristics for the identification of character regions. In this instance, the image is decomposed by performing histogram analysis of Hue and Lightness in the HLS colour space and merging using information on human discrimination of wavelength and luminance

    “Man? Where’s a man? Don’t let him go!”: Molina’s Trans/gender Web in Interpretation and Performance

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    Using perspectives typical of English and theatrical fields of study, this capstone project interprets Molina from Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel Kiss of the Spider Woman as a heterosexual transgender woman and then investigates why such an interpretation does not exist in performance adaptations. Although Molina has been called a transgender woman in recent criticism, there is a conflation of gender and sexuality that has been uninvestigated in this text. It has not been addressed how Molina constructs her identity or how this interpretation might be employed in performance, which this essay seeks to confront. The first half of the project focuses on a close reading of the text that interprets Molina’s subjective construction of gender and sexuality as a heterosexual transgender woman, finding that the presupposed assumption of Molina as a gay man is a result of critics privileging what other characters say about Molina rather than her subjective articulation. The second half of the essay analyzes elements of the performance that prevented performing Molina as a transgender woman in Hector Babenco’s 1985 Kiss of the Spider Woman movie adaptation – such as the intentions for the movie, the writing of the screenplay, and the personal acting choices of William Hurt, who played Molina – through production research and a semiotic reading of the film. This project speaks to the broader context of how individual identity is constructed, how gender is performed, how societal attitudes oppress individual identity, and how transgender characters have been minimized in media

    Elite Tweets: Analysing the Twitter Communication Patterns of Labour Party Peers in the House of Lords

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    The micro-blogging platform Twitter has gained notoriety for its status as both a communication channel between private individuals, and as a public forum monitored by journalists, the public, and the state. Its potential application for political communication has not gone unnoticed; politicians have used Twitter to attract voters, interact with constituencies and advance issue-based campaigns. This article reports on the preliminary results of the research team’s work with 21 peers sitting on the Labour frontbench. It is based on the monitoring and archival of the peers’ activity on Twitter for a period of 100 days from 16th May to 28th September 2012. Using a sample of more than 4,363 tweets and a mixed methodology combining semantic analysis, social network analysis and quantitative analysis, this paper explores the peers’ patterns of usage and communication on Twitter. Key findings are that as a tweeting community their behavior is consistent with others, however there is evidence that a coherent strategy is lacking. Labour peers tend to work in ego networks of self-interest as opposed to working together to promote party polic
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