Will Sony’s Fourth Playstation Lead to a Second Sony v. Universal?

Sony has included a “share” button on the next version of their popular PlayStation video game system. This feature is meant to allow players to record and share videos of their gameplay. This service shares similarities with the controversial “record” button that Sony included with its Betamax players over thirty years ago. The Betamax player was the subject of the landmark case Sony v. Universal, a foundational case for the modern application of copyright law to new technology. This Issue Brief examines how this “share” feature would fare under the framework laid out by Sony v. Universal and other evolutions in copyright law

Sharing Strangers’: Strangers in the Village

The idea of strangers in American culture is not a new one. While they tolerated them for their manpower, early 17th Century Puritans referred to Anglican and non-religious settlers as “strangers”. The later arrival of Baptists, Lutherans, and the “dreaded” Quakers was also grudgingly tolerated. But Puritan tolerance was limited in the same manner of later generations who privileged certain groups of immigrants, mostly Anglo people, while barricading American shores against less “desirable” groups, a policy which resulted in the Emergency Immigration Acts of 1921 & 1924. No matter the need, Catholics, Jews and “infidels” (Native Americans) were never accepted into the larger community. In fact, some historians suggest that the infamous Salem Witch Trials may have been a reaction to the perceived threat from “strangers” outside the Puritan church (Mitchell 2008: 25). The most current manifestation of strangers in American culture are of course undocumented immigrants who, like the homeless, have become part of the wallpaper of the urban environment, creatures we experience merely as part of the urban landscape through which we pass daily on our way to our “legitimate” business. Should these creatures make their way into our consciousness by accident, our experience of them is too often limited by the social filter to actually recognize them as fellow human beings. They retreat rapidly from our awareness, once again obscured by the stereotype created to preserve our identity, one carefully constructed on the concept of “other”. Invisibility among strangers is not limited to immigrants, as the work of contemporary artist and immigrant himself, Kryzsztof Wodiczko demonstrates. In a project he has titled Xenology, his term for “the immigrant’s art of survival” (Deutsche 2002: 27), Wodiczko employs his training as an industrial designer to fabricate equipment for those immigrants and refugees who “seek protection from the threat of violence and injustice (Ibid.). His now iconic homeless vehicle can certainly be counted among this work. My paper is not a sociological treatise on immigration. It is rather an essay on “stranger” as perceived outsider in American (and European) Culture. Opening with a brief power point accompanied by Neil Diamond’s America, the text will consider some commonalities between the role of undocumented immigrants and other variations of stranger in culture. It will close with a brief discussion of an installation by Columbian artist, Doris Salcedo, her Shibboleth, sliced into the floor of the Great Turbine Hall at the new Tate Modern in London

Coping with the disappointingrates of return on development projects that affect the environment

Lending institutions'initial appraisals often ignore the true costs of environmental impacts, and many development projects are launched despite returns that are often below the cost of capital and all too often actually negative. Most environmental impacts are negative, so approving a project with a low true rate of return is not only a financial waste but a gratuitous stress on the ecosystem. Ecosystems typically have a low tolerance for such impacts, so low-yielding projects entail serious ecosystem opportunity costs. The author explores why projects with environmental impacts so often have lower-than-anticipated rates of return, and what can be done to remedy the situation. Many observers are optimistic because there is more environmental awareness than there was in the 1970s and early 1980s and environmental screening is more a part of project evaluation. But, says the author, attention to environmental risk has not yet provoked the structural changes in government institutions that would allow for the development of incentives that give proper weight to environmental risks. The fundamental political economy of early commitment to grandiose projects of uncertain environmental consequences has not been overturned. It is also important to develop better appraisal methodologies and to hold those preparing initial project appraisals accountable for their appraisals. If post-project evaluations do not capture the most significant environmental costs, analysts conducting appraisals early in the project's life are unlikely to worry about being caught out by their unfounded optimism or their disregard for environmental consequences. The good news is that in policy reform and structural adjustment the movement is toward eliminating blatant risk-seeking and making government institutions accountable for the results of their own actions. Although the conditionalities imposed by international funding institutions can be helpful, the primary responsibility for designing and selecting appropriate projects that have an envrironmental impact still lies with the governments of the developing world.Health Economics&Finance,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Development Economics&Aid Effectiveness,ICT Policy and Strategies

Twisted semilocal strings in the MSSM

The standard electroweak model is extended by means of a second Brout-Englert-Higgs-doublet. The symmetry breaking potential is chosen is such a way that (i) the Lagrangian possesses a custodial symmetry, (ii) a stationary, axially symmetric ansatz of the bosonic fields consistently reduces the Euler-Lagrange equations to a set of differential equations. The potential involves, in particular, a direct interaction between the two doublets. Stationary, axially-symmetric solutions of the classical equations are constructed. Some of them can be assimilated to embedded Nielsen-Olesen strings. From these solutions there are bifurcations and new solutions appear which exhibit the characteristics of the recently constructed twisted semilocal strings. A special emphasis is set on "doubly-twisted" solutions for which the two doublets present different time-dependent phase factors. They are regular and have a finite energy which can be lower than the energy of the embedded twisted solution. Electric-type solutions, such that the fields oscillate asymptotically far from the symmetry-axis, are also reported.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, discussion extended, new solutions obtaine

A fibered power theorem for pairs of log general type

Let $f: (X,D) \to B$ be a stably family with log canonical general fiber. We prove that, after a birational modification of the base $\tilde{B} \to B$, there is a morphism from a high fibered power of the family to a pair of log general type. If in addition the general fiber is openly canonical, then there is a morphism from a high fibered power of the original family to a pair openly of log general type.Comment: Exposition has been greatly improved. Version to appear in Algebra & Number Theor

Improved bounds on sample size for implicit matrix trace estimators

This article is concerned with Monte-Carlo methods for the estimation of the trace of an implicitly given matrix $A$ whose information is only available through matrix-vector products. Such a method approximates the trace by an average of $N$ expressions of the form \ww^t (A\ww), with random vectors \ww drawn from an appropriate distribution. We prove, discuss and experiment with bounds on the number of realizations $N$ required in order to guarantee a probabilistic bound on the relative error of the trace estimation upon employing Rademacher (Hutchinson), Gaussian and uniform unit vector (with and without replacement) probability distributions. In total, one necessary bound and six sufficient bounds are proved, improving upon and extending similar estimates obtained in the seminal work of Avron and Toledo (2011) in several dimensions. We first improve their bound on $N$ for the Hutchinson method, dropping a term that relates to $rank(A)$ and making the bound comparable with that for the Gaussian estimator. We further prove new sufficient bounds for the Hutchinson, Gaussian and the unit vector estimators, as well as a necessary bound for the Gaussian estimator, which depend more specifically on properties of the matrix $A$. As such they may suggest for what type of matrices one distribution or another provides a particularly effective or relatively ineffective stochastic estimation method