The Second Law and Rivalrous Digital Information (Or Maxwell's Demon in an Information Age)

Over thirty years ago Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, in an extraordinary book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process opened up a whole new branch of environmental economics, exploring the impact of a fundamental, though not widely known, law of nature, the second law of thermodynamics, on the economic process. The 2nd law of thermodynamics basically says that when energy gets transformed some of it always gets wasted. No matter how efficient we make any machine it will always waste energy to some degree. This has implications for the knowledge society. There is a widespread belief that once information is digitised it can be copied and distributed at zero marginal cost but digital information fundamentally depends on access to a source of energy. And it turns out that large data centres and servers use up a lot of energy. The big technology companies' energy bills can run into hundreds of millions of dollars. In a world facing an energy crisis that means digital information is a little more rivalrous than we originally thought..

Ecology, intellectual property and a five point plan for a sustainable public domain?

At the turn of the century, Harvard evolutionary biologist and all round science polymath Edward O. Wilson wrote that more that 99% of the world's biodiversity was unknown and that we should rectify that state of affairs, since our ignorance was contributing to the destruction of the environment. He outlined a five point plan for doing this. 1. Comprehensively survey the world's flora and fauna. This will need a large but finite team of professionals. 2. Create biological wealth e.g. through pharmaceutical prospecting of indigenous plants. Assigning economic value to biodiversity (e.g. as a source of material wealth as food or medicines or leisure amenities) is a key way to encourage its preservation. 3. Promote sustainable development i.e. 'development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'. 4. Save what remains i.e. being realistic we are not going to halt environmental degradation overnight. 5. Restore the wild lands e.g. through designating large areas of land as natural reserves like Costa Rica's 50,000-hectare Guanacaste National Park. Could we conceive of a parallel five point plan for protecting the global information store that is the public domain, the diversity of which is potentially endangered by what James Boyle so eloquently argues is a second enclosure movement

Colmcille and the Battle of the Book: Technology, Law and Access to Knowledge in 6th Century Ireland

Many hundreds of years before the GPL was even a twinkle in Richard Stallman's eye, an Irish monk proved to be an unlikely champion of the geeky A2K notion of access to knowledge. The short version of the story of Colmcille and the battle of the book goes something like this - One monk copied another monk's manuscript. The second monk objected and they settled things the way they did in those days, with 3000 people getting killed in the resulting battle. The interesting thing from the A2K (access to knowledge) perspective is that there was an attempt, prior to the battle, to settle the dispute in the Irish High Court at the time; and remarkably, the arguments invoked in that hearing could have come straight out of one of the modern digital copyright disputes. Have attitudes to law and technology really changed a whole lot in 1400 years

The economic impact of consumer copyright exceptions: a literature review

Advances in the technology available to consumers have fundamentally altered the relationship between authors, rights-holders and consumers with regard to copyrighted creative works. The copyright system in the UK is undergoing a gradual process of reform to reflect this new reality. In 2006, Andrew Gowers, a former editor of the Financial Times, presented a report into the state of intellectual property in the U.K. Among his policy recommendations were three proposed changes to the copyright exceptions system which alter the way in which consumers can interact with copyrighted works. Gowers proposed introducing copyright exceptions for: - Format shifting, for instance the transfer of a piece of music from a CD to an mp3 player. - Parody, caricature and pastiche. - Creative, transformative or derivative works. In our context, this definition includes user-generated content. Our review examines the existing literature on the possible economic effects of these proposed changes to the copyright exceptions system, specifically whether the introduction of these proposed changes would cause economic damage to rights-holders. Whilst the economic issues surrounding copyright infringement via file-sharing and commercial "mash-ups" are interesting and important, our review is focused solely on copyright

Back to the future: digital decision making

The process of making decisions about the conception, design, development, deployment and regulation of complex information and communications technologies (ICT) systems with the potential to effect significant changes in society could be labelled 'digital decision making' (or DDM for short). DDM is not the rational process that we might assume or wish it to be. It can even be difficult to define the boundaries of the social, political or technical environments to which the process applies. It depends on craft knowledge, power and agenda, politics and situational messiness, personal values, law and environment, and a host of other factors starkly illustrated by cases ranging from the Three Mile Island to the space shuttle Challenger disasters. Too often DDM leads to information systems failures and it is time we started to learn from those past failures

Amyloid precursor protein drives down-regulation of mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation independent of amyloid beta

Amyloid precursor protein (APP) and its extracellular domain, soluble APP alpha (sAPPα) play important physiological and neuroprotective roles. However, rare forms of familial Alzheimer’s disease are associated with mutations in APP that increase toxic amyloidogenic cleavage of APP and produce amyloid beta (Aβ) at the expense of sAPPα and other non-amyloidogenic fragments. Although mitochondrial dysfunction has become an established hallmark of neurotoxicity, the link between Aβ and mitochondrial function is unclear. In this study we investigated the effects of increased levels of neuronal APP or Aβ on mitochondrial metabolism and gene expression, in human SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cells. Increased non-amyloidogenic processing of APP, but not Aβ, profoundly decreased respiration and enhanced glycolysis, while mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) transcripts were decreased, without detrimental effects to cell growth. These effects cannot be ascribed to Aβ toxicity, since higher levels of endogenous Aβ in our models do not cause oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) perturbations. Similarly, chemical inhibition of β-secretase decreased mitochondrial respiration, suggesting that non-amyloidogenic processing of APP may be responsible for mitochondrial changes. Our results have two important implications, the need for caution in the interpretation of mitochondrial perturbations in models where APP is overexpressed, and a potential role of sAPPα or other non-amyloid APP fragments as acute modulators of mitochondrial metabolism

‘Growing your own’: a multi-level modelling approach to understanding personal food growing trends and motivations in Europe

Growing food for personal and family consumption is a significant global activity, but one that has received insufficient academic attention, particularly in developed countries. This paper uses data from the European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) to address three areas of particular concern: the prevalence of growing your own food and how this has changed over time; the individual and household context in which growing takes place; and whether those who grow their own food are happier than those who do not. Results showed that there was a marked increase in growing your own food in Europe, in the period 2003–2007. This increase is largely associated with poorer households and thus, possibly, economic hardship. In the UK however the increase in growing your own food is predominantly associated with older middle class households. Across Europe, whether causal or not, those who grew their own were happier than those who did not. The paper therefore concludes that claims about the gentrification of growing your own may be premature. Despite contrary evidence from the UK, the dominant motive across Europe appears to be primarily economic — to reduce household expenditure whilst ensuring a supply of fresh food