jonathan.rawle.org

The City Council in Birmingham, England, recently sent out leaflets to all households congratulating them for meeting targets by recycling their rubbish. The leaflets cost £15,000 to produce. Under the headline “Thank You Birmingham!”, the leaflet showed a picture of the Birmingham skyline. Unfortunately for the council, the photo was of Birmingham in Alabama, and not of the West Midlands city.

Very similar views of Birmingham in the US are the first images that are found by a Google search for “Birmingham skyline”. However, the image that was used apparently was bought from the iStockphoto image library. It would appear the image in question is 1478222. When searching for Birmingham on that site, it does default to Birmingham (Alabama), but this is clearly indicated, and it asks underneath if you meant Birmingham (West Midlands). There are actually some nice skyline images of the “right” Birmingham on there.

The worst part of this episode is that when the mistake was pointed out, the council initially claimed there was no mistake, and that it was a “generic skyline intended to symbolise an urban area”. Naturally, it was therefore an amazing coincidence that the city used to represent a generic skyline happened to be the American city that bore the same name.

This is not the first time that a similar mistake has been made. A few months ago, a group of Conservative MEPs also used a picture of the Alabama city on their website by mistake. Perhaps as MEPs for the West Midlands, and Tory ones at that, they had never actually visited Birmingham to know what it looked like.

It isn’t just the British that are prone to mixing the cities up, either. An American company used a picture of Birmingham, UK to advertise the renovation of the Thomas Jefferson Hotel in Birmingham, Alabama.

Spot the difference: the English Birmingham (top) actually has a distinctive skyline, with the Holloway Circus Tower, Hyatt hotel, Alpha Tower, famous round Rotunda and BT Tower, as well as Selfridges visible in the foreground. By contrast, the Alabama city (bottom) does not have a very exciting skyline by American standards. (The aforementioned hotel is the small building on the far left.) Aside from the fact the leaflet was simply wrong, it would have looked far more inspiring had it depicted the correct city!

Birmingham UK skyline (top) by Ian T Edwards; Birmingham AL skyline (bottom) by Andre Natta. Both images used under the terms of their Creative Commons licences. The above derived image is released under a CC Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike licence.

With the 2008 Olympics under way, it is becoming increasingly irritating to hear presenters on TV and radio pronouncing the name of the Chinese capital with a French-sounding “j”. It is as if they think, “Beijing is a foreign word, so it must be pronounced in a foreign way”, and as French is the most widely-taught language in British schools, they use a pseudo-French pronunciation.

In fact, English speakers would do much better just to stick with an English “j”. Although this is not quite the same sound as in Mandarin, it is much closer than the French sound. It also means they wouldn’t appear to be trying to hard to sound foreign. The irony is, the French don’t normally even call the city Beijing, preferring Pékin.

I’m not the only person who is annoyed by this. Two Americans have even posted a YouTube video on how to pronounce Beijing correctly – this still doesn’t attempt to teach the correct Chinese pronunciation, and doesn’t address tones (i.e. whether the voice rises or falls) which are an integral part of Mandarin pronunciation. However, it’s a good guide for English speakers, and also explains how the name of the city is made up of two characters meaning “northern capital”. I’m actually surprised that Americans tend towards a French pronunciation like the British, as I had thought French was not as widely taught in the US, where Spanish is more popular.

Wikipedia has a more accurate example of the correct Mandarin pronunciation.

The video linked above also makes an interesting point about the Beijing 2008 Olympic Emblem, suggesting that the running figure is actually a stylised version of the Chinese character jīng (京), as in Beijing. Others have suggested that it imitates the character wén (文), meaning culture or humanity. Whatever it means, it certainly looks much better than the logo for the 2012 London Olympics, which looks like nothing at all, except a nice earner for the designers who duped the games’ organisers into accepting it. Some people are already suggesting that the success of London Olympics themselves will follow the same trend as the logos.

This week has seen the disgraceful case of a woman, Linda Buchanan, being pushed onto a railway line by two young men, apparently after she had reminded them that smoking isn’t allowed on stations. Interviews the following day give a slightly different version of events, suggesting that Mrs Buchanan had spoken to them about smoking on a previous day, and that on Wednesday, the same two men had made obscene gestures at her as she walked past. She suggested they should grow up, at which point they pushed her.

The fact that smokers become so irritable when they are not allowed to smoke anywhere at any time, or when someone reminds them that they are breaking the law by smoking, is simply an indication of how they are addicted to smoking. They may not realise it, and claim they are simply angry at being “persecuted”, yet addiction lies at the core.

Of course, the “have your say” sections of online news articles have brought out some despicable views, such as people saying it “Serves her right for not minding her own business”. So there are people who think that asking someone not to smoke in an area where it is illegal, or even, as in this case, asking someone to grow up for making rude gestures, is a valid reason for pushing her onto a railway track where she could easily have been electrocuted or run over by a train. It isn’t even as if it was “not her business” – that would only be the case if the men were alone on the platform, and the lady had been driving down the street in her car and had stopped especially to speak to them. As it was, Mrs Buchanan was waiting on the platform, an area where smoking is illegal under the railway by-laws, where she had every right to expect to wait in clean air, unaffected by tobacco smoke. For most of the history of railway stations, people were allowed to smoke where they liked, and anyone who didn’t wish to breathe in the smoke had to move to another part of the platform. That was something non-smokers had to accept, as smoking was permitted. Now times have changed, and it’s no longer legal to smoke on the platform, so it is the smokers’ turns to face a slight inconvenience while waiting at the station.

Another way of looking at it is, if anyone really believes it is OK to push someone (even if not deliberately onto a railway line) for just asking someone not to smoke, why isn’t it equally as valid to take action when someone is smoking, or carrying out some other sort of anti-social behaviour? Equivalent actions could be snatching a cigarette, or throwing water over the person. Of course, none of these actions is acceptable. But how has society become such that so many people believe any sort of behaviour is OK, no matter how unpleasant or antisocial it is, and that the only thing that is taboo is politely asking someone not to do something that’s bothering others?

This doesn’t only apply to smoking, but also dropping litter, using loud, obscene and abusive language, harassing a lone woman, or playing music out loud instead of using headphones. The same people again will complain that the country has too many laws restricting what people can do, with too many on-the-spot fines. The reason is that people are too inconsiderate now, and take no account of how their actions affect anyone else around them. They believe they have a right to do what they want, never mind what that means for other people. Selfish people are the reason for more laws.

If we want to live in a pleasant, clean environment where people feel safe travelling on public transport, we need more people to stand up to yobs and louts. We need more Mrs Buchanans. The first course of action can be to find a member of railway staff, but failing that, I for one shall continue to remind people that smoking isn’t allowed on platforms (naturally explaining that I wouldn’t like them to be fined for their honest mistake); and I shall continue to politely call after people who have dropped something on the pavement, in case it was something they wanted, of course. There’s no need to be confrontational. But at the same time, we can’t allow out society to turn into one where yobs spoil places for everyone else just because no-one will stand up to them.

The EU Commission is proposing an extension to copyright on sound recordings, the same idea having been rejected by the UK government last year. At present, copyright on a recording lasts for 50 years, after which it enters the public domain. The proposal is for the copyright to be extended to 95 years.

Unsurprisingly, the proposal is being backed by big names in the music world such as Sir Cliff Richard, whose first recording will go out of copyright next year, and Sir Paul McCartney, with the Beatles’ first recordings currently set to enter the public domain in 2013.

It’s important to understand that this proposal concerns recordings, and not the copyright on original compositions or lyrics. Copyright on those lasts for life plus 70 years, in recognition of the creativity put into producing an original work. This is quite different from simply performing someone else’s work. A singer who is talented enough to write his own songs should be less concerned about the copyright on the recordings as he (or his estate) will continue to receive royalties from the work itself.

An actor on stage, whether in Stratford or the West End, will be paid for the performance, then that’s it. The same is true of a musician performing live. There is no further income after the performance has finished. When an architect designs a new building, he is paid a fee for the work. Neither he, nor the engineers and building contractors who actually build it, will receive royalties every time someone looks at the building, or from the people who use it.

This is just an attempt by the music industry, and from a few big-name artists, to grab even more money when they have made enough already. If the so-called stars want a pension, they should make sure they put aside some of their income to provide for them in old age, just as everyone else has to, instead of spending it on an extravagant lifestyle. I can’t imagine either Sir Cliff or Sir Paul is living on the poverty line. And as for the argument that they are doing this on behalf of all the small-time artists and backstage staff, the fact is that most of these had to sign away their rights to royalties to the record company in order to receive the modest session fee they were paid at the time.

Copyright has historically been a balance between the rights of those producing the works and the public, allowing artists to have a chance to profit from their work, while ensuring it can still be enjoyed and built upon in the way it historically always has been. The greed of those calling for the change in the law can not be allowed to destroy this principle. The new law would mean people could no longer share or enjoy old recordings that have long since been deleted from record companies’ catalogues, be they of rock and roll, or classical performances by long-dead conductors.

The proposal still has to be agreed by the Council of Ministers and European Parliament, and the latter in particular has been known to listen to the people on similar issues such as software patents. To help defeat the extension of copyright, please sign the petition against it.

In July 2006, another Wikipedia user left a message on my talk page to say that he had begun an article on renowned Leicester space physicist Ken Pounds, and noting that I was a Leicester physicist, invited me to contribute to the article. Although I was reluctant to write about someone I vaguely knew, the article as it stood wasn’t brilliant, so I decided to expand it. As when writing any other article for Wikipedia, I took information from a number of sources on the web and provided links to them at the end of the article.

A couple of weeks ago, the question came up of whether Ken Pounds was the first chief executive of PPARC. I couldn’t remember, but knew the answer would be in his Wikipedia article. I was quite surprised to find the article had been deleted. I checked the log for the article, and found it had been deleted by a Wikipedia administrator called Refdoc with the comment that is was a “blatant copyright violation”, and giving a link to a report by the Irish Higher Education Authority entitled Research Infrastructure in Ireland - Building for Tomorrow.

Initially, I suspected someone might have pasted a load of text into the article from the report, but wondered why Refdoc couldn’t have reverted to an older version of the article. However, when I checked the Irish HEA’s report, I discovered that they had actually copied the Wikipedia article word for word and used it as a biography for Prof Pounds, who is on the steering committee that produced the report. Thus the biography in the report uses my words to explain that it’s a “rare distinction” to be awarded an honorary degree by the institution one works at (or at least I think they’re my words – it seems the University have also been reading Wikipedia, re-worded in their case, for material promoting the Alumni Association Lecture 2008). The report also contains the slightly obscure statement that someone added to Wikipedia, that “one of [Ken's] many discoveries is that Black holes are common in the Universe.”

I know I wrote the article in summer 2006, shortly after I was contacted by the other user. I checked the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and indeed, it had archived the article in September 2006. From this archived version, it is clear that the text is identical to that in the HEA report. Yet the report was only published in December 2006! While I personally already knew the text was originally from Wikipedia, I thought the evidence I’d found would surely convince anyone else. Yet Refdoc refused the re-instate the article, accusing me of being a user with “poor respect for copyrights” and saying he had little reason to believe me. He clearly hadn’t looked at the internet archive version. That comes as no surprise, as a little investigation before he deleted the article in the first place would have revealed that the Wikipedia article existed before the HEA report. The Wikipedia edit history would also have shown that it was written and improved over a number of edits by different people, rather than copied wholesale from anywhere else. Therefore Refdoc is clearly not a particularly thorough administrator on Wikipedia.

I have now initiated Wikipedia’s Deletion review process, and at the time of writing there is a consensus that the article was wrongly deleted. Hopefully the article will be reinstated by next week.

This episode brings up an interesting point about Wikipedia. They have a strict policy when it comes to copyright, where copying directly from another source is not allowed. But as more and more documents copy text from Wikipedia, it’s going to become harder to tell which was the original source. I think the Irish HEA’s report probably violates the GFDL, as they are supposed to credit Wikipedia, and also to license any document that builds upon a GFDL’d document under the same licence. They haven’t done so, and while I’m sure that I and the other contributors don’t object to our work being used, failure to include an acknowledgement has ultimately resulted in it being us who were accused of breaching copyright.

As for Wikipedia administrators, candidates for that role will have to be prepared to put in a lot of work to investigate suspected copyright violations, as more and more will be false alarms. Anyone who isn’t prepared to do that isn’t fit to be an administrator. In the future it’s going to be more important to check the history of an article, and look for any other evidence to determine who has copied whom.

Now, I wonder how many of my other contributions to Wikipedia have been deleted while I wasn’t looking…

Update: the article on Ken Pounds was reinstated the same day.