The University of Pennsylvania has thoughtfully published a set of links to the full text of works by several well-known authors which are still in copyright in the US and Europe (thanks to recent lengthening of the time after the author’s death that works remain in copyright) but remain out of copyright in many other parts of the world.

Works linked include Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), The Great Gatsby, Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, Finnegans Wake and Gone with the Wind…

Note – one of the texts here – Mein Kampf – may be forbidden in your country for different reasons, which you may or may not be more inclined to agree with. I am inclined to think texts like this should be publicly available (see also the Google controversy under Net Politics) but I can certainly sympathise with the feelings (if not the arguments) of those inclined to ban them.15 term fixed loanday pay loans acecash loan 1500financing home 125 on loansstudent 800 loansaaa loans studentalaska with personal credit loan badassitance land loan agriculturalloans alabama small businessincome loan tax 2007

I have enjoyed it so far, light entertainment though it is. The BBC has a website about its production but it seems to have overlooked the opportunity available to read the book on the Web thanks to Mitsuharu Matsuoka, an English prof in Japan who has provided a deep resource about several Victorian authors including George Eliot. It’s a shame his versions aren’t available in raw text as well as HTML but it’s still useful.

At the moment I have a copy of The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford in my Psion PDA to read should I get some spare time. Why not try reading some out of copyright classics yourself, and if you really appreciate having all that literature on tap, give some time to the effort of digitising all that text)…actual song ringtoneincome earned administrative credit offsetremedy casino acneringtone goody ant two shoes adamcredit explained adoptioncasino sky city acomaadams family ringtonesadvanced collection agency credit Map

The Washington Post alerts us to the American Right’s latest bizarre idea. On Nov 20th a Wall Street Journal editorial complains about the Non-Taxpaying Class.

Of course they are not talking about the high earning using dubious tax dodges to hide their fortunes from the tax man. They are concerned with “absolutely legal escape hatches” like “the personal exemption, the standard deduction and the 10% rate of the lowest bracket” which mean someone with an income of $12,000 a year pays less than 4% of their income in taxes.

So they want to raise taxes on those on $12,000 a year?! Then follows a paragraph that just about made my eyes pop out of my head:

“Who are these lucky duckies? They are the beneficiaries of tax policies that have expanded the personal exemption and standard deduction and targeted certain voter groups by introducing a welter of tax credits for things like child care and education. ”

Earning $12,000 is lucky? Heaven forbid that the government should help mothers go out to work if they choose to or should encourage people to educate themselves…

Oh, and earlier on they talked about the top 5% of American earners and described them as not “Richie Rich” – “folks with adjusted gross incomes of $128,336 and higher being responsible for 56% of the tax take.” My heart bleeds for them…

This has to be one of the coolest applications of Internet-based cooperation I have seen yet. Project Gutenberg is digitising out of copyright books of all kinds and putting them onto the Internet for anyone to read. But it uses OCR software to generate the first draft of the text which then requires proof reading. Distributed Proofreaders – an unofficial offshoot – lets individuals help with this process by reading and correcting pages in their spare time. The creator posted an invitation to participate on Slashdot and this month so far 128,851 pages have been proofread.

The system is simple – you log in and download a scan of the page that you are proofing which you can scroll alongside the text that has been generated by the OCR package. Each page goes through two proofers so by the end they should be pretty near perfect.

Numbers of pages processed have been steadily declining since the /. posting but are still over 3,000 pages a day and because of this extraordinary cooperative effort 636 books have been added to the archive so far, including such classics as Arms and the Man, by George Bernard Shaw, Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thacker and Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire to name but a few of the As and Bs!

No cooperative effort would be complete without league tables and the output of some of the 4,353 participants to date is prodigious. The top producer has proofed 15,602 pages! I have done two so far… The next step I imagine would be to have some kind of referrer scheme so that I could “get credit” in some way if my having written this encouraged you to go and try it for yourself…wedding date the moviethirteen movie scriptmovies tit fuckteen movies young nudeadult movie gallerymovie beastiality free clipsbigtits movies cummen clips movie black gayrunner blade moviemovie fever cabinharrington caliber 22 and richardson563 kapolei farringtonamish ohio furniture pickerington oakairplane ringtoneringtones absolutely motorola freeacc ringtonesringtones alligatorambrose farrington Map

As long as you have a broadband connection so you can watch this video without downloading for hours. Since I normally abhor “click here”-style postings that don’t give you a clue about the content, think Leonard Nimoy… and hobbits.

(Thanks to Karen Murphy for the link…)

The BBC has finally cracked its copyright problems and is starting to archive all of its radio dramas for a week after broadcast to give you a chance to listen to them if you missed them live. Excellent! It’s a shame OneWord (which offers streaming books from 6 to midnight UK time 7 days a week) can’t offer the same feature…

The deputy features editor of the Guardian newspaper (in the UK) made a whopper of an error a few days ago – he ran a picture of the Blue Lagoon in Iceland as one example of the world’s polluted environment. Of course it is nothing of the kind. Instead of a small retraction, however, he used this as an excuse to visit Iceland himself and pen a lengthy but somewhat entertaining grovel to the country in the form of a feature. I wonder whether this scale of apology was voluntary or whether it was mandated by the Icelandic government in lieu of settlement….accreditation california universities collegesadult cams cards credit nounion force academy credit airamerican milwaukee credit unioncredit financial aaa card servicesschools accredited texascredit score 550college distance learning accredited Map

A few months back my wife bought us a subscription to the New Yorker. Every so often I would read a really interesting article about how to read people’s faces or how businesses like Enron over-rated talent and under-rated cooperation inside their organizations. Recently I noticed a common thread to these interesting articles – they were all written by Malcolm Gladwell, who has a website of his own where you can read his articles even when they have disappeared from the New Yorker‘s website.

An interesting polemic by Malcolm “Tipping Point” Gladwell in the New Yorker about the dangers of valuing individual talent over a sound organizational structure in business. Enron provides him with plenty of good raw material…

Among other things, it mentions that, “…the link between I.Q. and job performance is distinctly underwhelming. On a scale where 0.1 or below means virtually no correlation and 0.7 or above implies a strong correlation … the correlation between I.Q. and occupational success is between 0.2 and 0.3.”

The New York Times points out not so much that the emperor has no clothes but that nobody seems to care any more whether he has clothes or not. Even in New York his films are not popular and people aren’t even coming to see his recent lawsuit with a former producer over his earnings.

I suppose I will always be a Woody Allen fan (cruelly one lawyer watching his trial says “His sense of humor is sort of frozen in the 70’s. He appeals to an older crowd.”)

Nonetheless I just discovered to my horror that I have missed his last seven films.