[de]quarantined by slideshare

A follow-up episode to the SlideShare m’a tuer [sic] saga: After the 20 November closure of my xianblog account and my request for an explanation, I was told by Linkedin that a complaint has been made about one of my talks for violation of copyright. Most surprisingly, at least at first, it was about the slides for the graduate lectures I gave ten years ago at CREST on (re)reading Jaynes’ Probability Theory. While the slides contain a lot of short quotes from the Logic of Science, somewhat necessarily since I discuss the said book, there are also many quotes from Jeffreys’ Theory of Probability and “t’is but a scratch” on the contents of this lengthy book… Plus, the pdf file appears to be accessible on several sites, including one with an INRIA domain. Since I had to fill a “Counter-Notice of Copyright Infringement” to unlock the rest of the depository, I just hope no legal action is going to be taken about this lecture. But I remain puzzled at the reasoning behind the complaint, unwilling to blame radical Jaynesians for it! As an aside, here are the registered 736 views of the slides for the past year:

What the …?!

copyright antiques and antics…

I just cannot understand why publishers persist in requesting from us authors copyright agreements and even less  handwritten copyright forms that have to be sent back to them instead of via a simple email agreement or at least an electronic form. And because I cannot fill most those forms on line, it annoys me no end if only because it involves several physical steps, hence wasting my time. It would be just so easy to set an electronic copyright agreement if the publishers were under any form of pressure to do so. Hence I encourage everyone (sharing this irk!) to return a reply like the following one to each copyright request:

…why should I waste time printing, filling, scanning, and sending back this form in an era when electronic forms and signatures do exist and are accepted for legal matters? Commercial publishers request such paper antiques because they cannot be pressured into creating the proper electronic medium to handle copyright transfers.

Introduction to Monte Carlo methods with R and Bayesian Essentials with R

Here are the  download figures for my e-book with George as sent to me last week by my publisher Springer-Verlag.  With an interesting surge in the past year. Maybe simply due to new selling strategies of the published rather to a wider interest in the book. (My royalties have certainly not increased!) Anyway thanks to all readers. As an aside for wordpress wannabe bloggers, I realised it is now almost impossible to write tables with WordPress, another illustration of the move towards small-device-supported blogs. Along with a new annoying “simpler” (or more accurately dumber) interface and a default font far too small for my eyesight. So I advise alternatives to wordpress that are more sympathetic to maths contents (e.g., using MathJax) and comfortable editing.

And the same for the e-book with Jean-Michel, which only appeared in late 2013. And contains more chapters than Introduction to Monte Carlo methods with R. Incidentally, a reader recently pointed out to me the availability of a pirated version of The Bayesian Choice on a Saudi (religious) university website. And of a pirated version of Introducing Monte Carlo with R on a Saõ Paulo (Brazil) university website. This may be alas inevitable, given the diffusion by publishers of e-chapters that can be copied with no limitations…

brands with a tree logo…

As the cold wave in Varanasi caught me by surprise, I asked the conference organisers for a place to buy a down jacket and they kindly drove me to a nice store called Woodland within the city. I purchased a cheap down-like jacket there (as demonstrated by the newspaper excerpt!) that solved my problem. And I thus discovered a brand that looked surprisingly similar to Timberland, slowly coming to realise this was the whole point: change Timber into Wood, slightly modify the tree in the logo, and you get a local brand that recycles Timberland designs and products to their own profit… (This seems to be a common occurrence in India, judging from this New York Times article.) Anyway, it is rather entertaining to visit the Woodland website, as they mimic major outdoor brand websites like Patagonia or Petzl, but do not offer any material one could seriously consider taking hiking and even less climbing! (Besides the jacket that managed to keep me warm for the rest of the meeting!, I also bought a cheap pair of sneakers and that quickly  proved to be a mistake, as the fit is only approximate and the material of poor quality.)