Conspiracy Theories While You Wait

Posted on 2018-03-05 by arjaybe

Lorie Shaull (Flickr) / Creative Commons

The website FactCheck.org has a look at the conspiracy theories that have arisen, and have been promulgated deliberately, after the mass murder and terrorization of school children in the United States on Valentine’s Day 2018. Initially the murderer was the focus of the rumors, but after the surviving children began calling for better gun controls, the conspiracy theories became about them. The gun proliferation advocates began to attack the credibility of the survivors who were speaking out.

The internet has been rife with rumors about the school shooting that left 17 dead in Florida on Feb. 14. We’ve debunked several of them.

Initially, the rumors focused on the alleged shooter himself, Nikolas Cruz. But, as students who survived the shooting started advocating stricter gun controls, new rumors focused on the most vocal among them. Those falsehoods grew into full-fledged conspiracy theories, one of which briefly topped the list of trending videos on YouTube.

Go to FactCheck.org for the rest of the story, and go to WNPR to hear an interview with with people covering this story. Here is a direct link to the interview. Total time: 49:23. This story starts at about the nineteen minute mark.

via School Shooting Spawns Conspiracy Theories – FactCheck.org

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Dunyazad Digital Library

Posted on 2018-02-23 by arjaybe

Robert Schaechter, the creator and curator of the Dunyazad Digital Library, has added the Green Comet trilogy to his stacks. Robert has created an omnibus containing all three novels in one PDF file. This isn’t just any ordinary PDF file, though. Robert is meticulous. All of the books in his collection have been polished to perfection, and Green Comet is no exception. Working together, we eliminated about two dozen errors that I had missed during my previous proofing. He also expanded the front matter and improved the formatting. The Dunyazad Library doesn’t have a lot of books, but the ones there have benefited from Robert’s attentions.

Here is a link to my author page at the library. I encourage you to go there and download Robert’s PDF of the Green Comet trilogy, to encourage him and reward him for his dedicated work. While there, you can browse the rest of the library, too. You never know. One of those polished jewels just might catch your eye.

The Green Comet universe keeps expanding, but I have another novel I’m working on. I hope to have it ready for publication this year, hopefully well before year end. So, you go to the Dunyazad Digital Library, and I’ll get back to The Plainsrunner.

rjb

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The Grateful Dead and Creative Commons

Posted on 2018-02-19 by arjaybe

Image by: Lisa Padilla – CC BY-SA

Could the Grateful Dead have been using Creative Commons principles decades ahead of time? This Matthew Helmke article from opensource.com makes the connection.

Although many bands at the time allowed fans to record shows, the Grateful Dead took the idea a step further. Fans who purchased “tapers’ tickets” were given access to a special area located near the soundboard. The band even encouraged tapers to share their recordings, as long as no profits were made on the sale of their tapes.

Creative Commons took inspiration from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and its GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). Their goal is to find ways to use private rights for public good and to set creative works free, but only for certain uses.

Creative Commons has come up with a set of licenses that keep the power over creative works in the hands of creators while also freeing the content to be used in ways that modern copyright law forbids, much like the Grateful Dead did with their creative ticketing and taping permissions.

In the end, we get a legal means of fulfilling the freedom that the Grateful Dead allowed its fans, without gray areas that could lead to problems such as those that the Internet Archive had with the soundboard recordings of Grateful Dead concerts. This legal murkiness blocked access to those recordings for some time, although they are now available.

So the Grateful Dead has maintained a long and successful career using principles of openness and freedom that didn’t get formalized until much later in the Creative Commons licenses. I think it’s safe to say that the band would have used a CC license if they had been available at the time.

via What the Grateful Dead have in common with the Creative Commons | Opensource.com

rjb

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