Author: Adam Clare

Microsoft and Creative Commons

Microsoft has announced that they will release a tool for Microsoft Office applications that allows for people to easily publish things they create using a creative commons license. This is a great step for the CC movement, something that ThingsAreGood is part of.

“The goal of Creative Commons is to provide authors and artists with simple tools to mark their creative work with the freedom they intend it to carry,” said Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of Creative Commons. “We’re incredibly excited to work with Microsoft to make that ability easily available to the hundreds of millions of users of Microsoft Office.”

“It’s thrilling to see big companies like Microsoft working with nonprofits to make it easier for artists and creators to distribute their works,” said Gilberto Gil, cultural minister of Brazil, host nation for the Creative Commons iSummit in Rio de Janeiro June 23 through 25, where the copyright licensing tool will be featured. Gil, who will keynote at the iSummit, has released one of the first documents using the Creative Commons add-in for Microsoft Office.

Biologically Dated Books

For historians it is obviously important to know when events happened and when those events were recorded and this is where biology is important. A biologist at Penn State as figured out that the way biologists track mutations can be applied to the dating of books. Good news not only for historians, but also for book collectors and librarians.

“The so-called “print clock” technique incorporates some complicated statistical formulas. But professor Blair Hedges says much of his analysis on 16th- and 17th-century books and prints was conducted by simply counting the number of discrepancies such as “line breaks” on the same pages in the different editions of a book. An example of a line break would be a faded line in a drawing that may have been bolder in an earlier edition of a book.”

World Refugee Day

Today is World Refugee Day, and the United Nations wants us to become more aware of the needs of refugees.

“From remote camps to big cities, from the steaming lowlands of Liberia to the high plateaux of Afghanistan, from floodlit fountains to fashion shows and soccer matches, the United Nations today celebrated World Refugee Day with a message of “Hope” broadcast around the globe by leaders, film stars and refugees themselves. ”

In Toronto Amnesty International, the Red Cross, and a whole load of local and small NGOs where at a rally at Yonge and Dundas Square. It was great to see so many people out and supporting human refugee rights.

Do You Live in a Polite City?

Readers Digest has conducted a survey of major cities around the world to find which ones are the most polite. I can’t say I’m surprised that New York City won – NYC has an undeserved reputation of rudeness. Playfuls as a short article on the polite cities.

“The survey showed that New York (80 points), Zurich, Toronto, Berlin, Sao Paulo, Zagreb (Croatia), Auckland, Warsaw and Mexico City were the world’s most polite cities.”

World Urban Forum

Vancouver is hosting the UN World Urban Forum this week and it’s a chance to explore how to make cities more livable. This week people from the world will look at how to make cities more environmentally sustainable and how to make cities a friendly environment for people, among many other topics.

This urban forum badly needed since the majority of people now live in cities than in rural settings – a first for humankind.

There is also a website to encourage youth to be involved with the WUF.