Tuesday News: Fair Use in the news, how the brain spells, 2015 Pulitzer Prizes announced, and chemistry comic book

JanetPublishing Newsbrain chemistry / chemistry / Comic books / copyright / Fair Use / literary prizes / spelling3 Comments

The News Media’s Use of the Walter Scott Video Is – Surprise! – A Newsworthy Use – So the video of the Walter Scott shooting is being “licensed” by a publicist for $10K a pop to news outlets. Because apparently the fact that actual news publishers want to use the video isn’t “newsworthy” enough for the publicist. This case smacks of the same kind of copyright over-reach as the Conan Doyle estate has become famous for, and, as Sarah Jeong points out, that more news sites don’t seem to be questioning this view is pretty scary. News is precisely the kind of venue in which fair use is a legitimate exception to copyright.

“The Times has gotten its wires crossed here,” said Christopher Sprigman, a professor at NYU Law who teaches copyright. “The video is newsworthy. The video was newsworthy the day it was shot, and it continues to be newsworthy. That’s why TV stations want to use it. This is a paradigm case for fair use.”

James Grimmelmann, a professor at University of Maryland Law School who teaches classes on intellectual property, also criticized Haber’s statement. “The distinction between ‘newsworthy’ and ‘commercial’ is like the distinction between ‘red’ and ‘round.’ Of course news agencies make money reporting the news; that’s what we pay them for.” –Forbes

Stop shaming people on the Internet for grammar mistakes. Its not there fault. – Just ignore the ridiculous title to this article, because the content is pretty interesting. We know that auto-correct can override actual correctness, but so do our own brains, which use certain habits to guide the way we spell, especially when we’re writing quickly.

“Usually we pay a lot of attention to pronunciation while we’re typing because it’s usually a really good cue how to spell things,” MacDonald said. But homophones can trip this process up. “When someone types ‘Are dog is really cute’, it’s not that they don’t know the difference between ‘are’ and ‘our’; it’s that the pronunciation of ‘our’ in the mind activated the spelling ‘our’ but also ‘are.’” Even nearby “hour” might come out, she said.

The brain doesn’t always consult a word’s sound, but studies have shown that it frequently falls back on it, and sound tells us nothing about the difference between “you’re” and “your.” Research on typing errors reveals that sound creates even odder mistakes, such as people writing “28” when they mean to type “20A.” It’s no wonder that people who know better will routinely confound closer pairings such as “it’s” and “its” or “know” and “no.” –Washington Post

2015 Pulitzer Winners: South Carolina Paper Wins Public Service Prize; New York Times Wins 3 – The Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday, with the New York Times and the LA Times winning several prizes each. Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See won for fiction, Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History won for general non-fiction, and in a nice surprise, the Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C won the public service prize for their series on domestic violence. Full list of winners, as well as the video announcement can be found here. 

There were roughly 1,200 journalism entries, Mike Pride, the Pulitzer administrator, said in announcing the awards, which are now in their 99th year. There were also 1,400 books, 200 music compositions and 100 plays considered.

Two categories, investigative reporting and feature writing, were opened to magazines this year, which prompted 60 additional entries. Jennifer Gonnerman was a finalist in the feature category for an article she wrote for The New Yorker on the imprisonment of a young man at the Rikers Island jail complex. –The New York Times

Chemistry Ph.D. student illustrates her thesis in comic book – This is pretty cool. A chemistry graduate student has created a comic book out of her dissertation, in an effort to make the complicated compounds more accessible to non-scientists. Of course, now the resulting comic book, Atomic Size Matters, has a Kickstarter campaign for professional publication.

Veronica Berns, 28, was working on her Ph. D. in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin -Madison. Berns said she long struggled to explain her work to her parents and friends. The self-described comic book fan said she began drafting her thesis on quasicrystals — a subset of crystals that diverge from the usual structural characteristics of crystals. Berns quickly concluded that she would be best able to describe the oddball compounds with illustrations.

“They’re not very well-polished illustrations. That’s on purpose,” Berns said. “I wanted it to be like I’m explaining on the back of an envelope.” –Yahoo News

Janet

isn't sure if she's an average Romance reader, or even an average reader, but a reader she is, enjoying everything from literary fiction to philosophy to history to poetry. Historical Romance was her first love within the genre, but she's fickle and easily seduced by the promise of a good read. She approaches every book with the same hope: that she will be filled from the inside out with something awesome that she didnʼt know, didnʼt think about, or didnʼt feel until that moment. And she's always looking for the next mind-blowing read, so feel free to share any suggestions!

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