• Where do you start when you put together a Jimi Hendrix Tribute Show?
Purple Haze All in My Plane! Shenanigans recorded during a series of tour dates 400 miles from home.
• Why is my toothbrush in the gutter?


text:
WILL MARSHALL
SHARON BELLOWS
NIKKI DELL'ARA
JASON GARCIA
JEFFREY KOHN
What is the General Data Protection Regulation?
Published by Will Marshall at June 26, 2018
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the European Union's new data protection law. It came into force on May 25, 2018, replacing the Data Protection Directive passed in 1995. The Directive had resulted in a patchwork of national laws and compliance challenges. The purpose of the GDPR was to provide a single uniform law governing the protection of personal data across the EU.
The GDPR was also intended to clarify, strengthen, and modernize data protection, particularly given the profound changes since 1995 in the use of personal information on the Internet. The GDPR permits fines of up to 4% of annual revenue and expands its application outside the EU, which is why it is receiving so much attention here in the U.S.
How do I know if the GDPR applies to our company?
The GDPR applies to your company if:
You are "established" in the EU. There is no precise definition of being "established" in the EU. Recital 22 of the GDPR explains that establishment "implies the effective and real exercise of activity through stable arrangements" in the EU. So it could be, for example, maintaining offices there or something less.
You offer goods or services (whether free or paid) to or you monitor the behavior of EU residents. Mere ability of someone in the EU to access your website does not count as offering goods and services to EU residents. However, if you have an e-commerce site that has currency conversion to euros or has offerings tailored to the European market, then you are likely subject to the law. If you do not intentionally target the EU market, but you have a significant percentage of EU customers, you may have a hard time claiming you are not covered by the law. Monitoring of EU residents would include things like tracking an EU person's activity across the Internet through behavioral advertising.
The other way you may face compliance obligations is if you are acting as a processor for a controller (e.g. a customer) that is subject to the GDPR. For example, if you have a customer with an EU division and you process EU personal data for them, then you're subject as a processor under the GDPR and will have contractual exposure for compliance pursuant to the agreements you must have with the customer under the GDPR.
What is Privacy Shield and do I need to be certified?
The GDPR attempts to ensure that when personal information leaves the EU, it is covered by substantially the same protections it enjoys in the EU. A few countries (not the US) have been deemed to have sufficient protections such that transfers to those countries are automatically acceptable.
Privacy Shield is an agreement between the EU and US to allow these data transfers out of the EU to the US. While there are other mechanisms under the GDPR to make this export of personal data compliant, if you are collecting personal information directly from individuals in the EU in a B2C context, then certifying to Privacy Shield is generally the only practical way to handle that export.
Keep in mind, Privacy Shield does not equal compliance with the GDPR. It only addresses the issue of the transfer out of the EU. Also, keep in mind that a small US business may be outside the practical enforcement reach of the EU. However, if you certify to Privacy Shield, you are expressly agreeing to be subject to enforcement in the US by the FTC (or DOT). Certain organizations like non-profits are not governed by the FTC or DOT and therefore cannot use Privacy Shield.
Finally, be aware that Privacy Shield has been under attack by EU privacy activists almost since its enactment so it's possible it may not last forever, at least in its current form.
My customer/vendor is asking me to sign a Data Processing Agreement. Do I need to sign it and what happens if I don't?
The GDPR divides the world up into "controllers" and "processors." Controllers are those choosing the purposes and means of the processing. Processors simply process data on behalf of a controller. Both controllers and processors have direct compliance obligations under the GDPR.
For example, if App Co. operates a consumer mobile app, App Co. is the controller. If App Co. hosts its app on Amazon Web Services, then AWS (since it has access to the data on its servers) is a processor of App Co. AWS may, in turn, have its own processors (referred to as subprocessors) and so on.
Companies are obligated to have agreements with their processors that flow down certain compliance obligations (see Article 28). They are often referred to as Data Processing Agreements (DPAs). If you've received a DPA for signature, it means someone with whom you do business believes you and they are sharing personal information in a way that a DPA is required.
If you sign a DPA as a processor, you're generally agreeing to various GDPR compliance obligations for which you'd have contractual liability for breach of the DPA. If you refuse to sign one, you are likely signaling to the other party that you can't or won't comply with the GDPR and, assuming you are in fact sharing personal data subject to the GDPR with the other party, you'd be violating Article 28 requiring a DPA.
What about all these emails updating privacy policies and asking for my consent? Do we need to do that?
Many companies updated their privacy policies to comply with the GDPR resulting in a flurry of emails notifying people of those updates. However, some emails asked for your consent to receive further marketing emails. Email marketing is governed not just by the GDPR insofar as it uses personal information, but also by the so-called ePrivacy Directive, which has been in effect for years, governs communications (e.g. phone, email, texts) and is responsible for those cookie banners seen mostly in the EU. This area can be very complex, but companies are likely seeking these consent for one of two reasons.
First, the GDPR has heightened the standard of what constitutes valid consent. To the extent a company relied on a true opt-in consent pre-GDPR to send email marketing to someone, they would have to refresh that consent to GDPR standards. However, much email marketing is based on a so-called "soft opt-in" where a customer is given the ability to opt out of email marketing at the time of purchase, which handles ePrivacy compliance, and the company can rely on "legitimate interests" rather than consent for GDPR compliance. See these great articles here and here by Phil Lee of Fieldfisher for further information. Note that B2B email marketing has fewer requirements under ePrivacy and generally just an opt-out is sufficient.
However, others may be asking for your consent because they are uncertain as to how they collected your personal information in the first place and their legal grounds for doing so, so they are trying to remediate their list by asking for your consent. This is dangerous ground and people are more inclined to file a complaint in response to what they feel is improper marketing to them. If you have such an email list, seeking fresh consents won't remediate the list. It will just be another non-compliant marketing email and companies have been fined for trying to remediate their lists by seeking opt-ins. Regardless, if the recipient doesn't respond, you must treat their silence as opting out of your marketing emails and you should not send "do you really mean it?" follow up emails.
What's a GDPR compliance effort look like at a high level?
At a very high level, a compliance program might look like the following:
Assess what personal information (or "personal data") you are handling and how much of it might be EU data. Keep in mind personal data includes encrypted data, public data, simple names and emails and indirect identifiers.
Perform a data mapping and inventory exercise to identify what personal data you handle, where it comes from, who you share it with, what you do with it, and what security measures (or risks) the data is subjected to.
Hire competent EU data privacy counsel to help assess and develop a plan of action. Determine in what respects you are a controller and in what respects a processor. Develop an understanding of the GDPR principles and core requirements.
Enter into DPA's where you share personal data.
Address cross-border transfers of personal data (e.g. Privacy Shield).
Purge stale personal data and minimize future collection of personal data.
Evaluate your data security policies and practices and tighten up gaps.
Implement or update internal policies like disaster recovery, incident response and data retention and train staff to them.
Revise your outward facing privacy policies or notices to meet GDPR transparency requirements and otherwise address your disclosures in collecting the data.
Implement policies and procedures to properly handle requests from individuals invoking their rights under EU data protection law.
Think about your email marketing activity relative to the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive.
Appoint a data protection officer (Arts. 37-39) and an EU representative (Art. 27) as necessary.
Maintain processing records per Article 30.
What's my practical risk if I do nothing or am not fully compliant?
First, it's better to be e.g. 40% compliant than 0% compliant. The EU has a history of going easier on those who are making a good faith effort to comply in light of their size and resources.
Think of your practical risk. If you are processing basic EU names and emails on a relatively minor scale for your own purposes, are not doing anything egregious with the data, are not Privacy Shield certified, and have no assets or operations in the EU that could be targeted, then EU authorities would probably not prioritize you for enforcement and likely wouldn't be able to reach you as a practical matter, although you may suffer reputational harm for violations.
If you're acting as a processor, particularly for a larger company, you have the exposure of losing their business because you are non-compliant. Or, if you simply sign their DPA (or have e.g. privacy compliance obligations in your underlying contract with them), but are not compliant or breach it, you'll have contractual exposure to the company.
To the extent you do have practical exposure, there are a variety of enforcement mechanisms under EU law from investigations to rights to compensatory damages of individuals to fines of up to the greater of 20M euros and 4% of global annual revenue. Needless to say, focus your compliance resources where you determine you have the greatest exposure.
UBM Law Group, LLP
991 Lomas Santa Fe Drive, C236

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Xenotaenia resolanae, the leopard splitfin, is a species of splitfin endemic to west–central Mexico where it is found in the Purificación and Marabasco River basins in Jalisco and Colima.  This species grows to a length of  TL.  It is found in the aquarium trade and is the only known species in its genus.

References

Goodeinae
Fish described in 1946
Freshwater fish of Mexico
Endemic fish of Mexico

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Supersymmetric world from a conservative viewpoint ( )
Friday, August 28, 2009 ... / /
Klaus: buy lots of light bulbs on Monday
The light bulb wars are back.
In 2005, Fidel Castro easily switched his Freedom Island from incandescent light bulbs to the postmodern fluorescent ones. Castro was 4 years ahead of the camp of peace. In 2009, his European comrades followed the example of their great role model. Well, they're not quite the second ones in the world: the second pioneer after Fidel Castro was Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. ;-)
Starting from Tuesday, September 1st, 2009, the EU companies won't be allowed to produce and the shops won't be allowed to sell any conventional light bulbs with a milky or otherwise obscured surface as well as the transparent classic 100-Watt incandescent light bulbs - or any light bulbs above 80 Watts: see e.g. UPI. In one or two years, the cutoff will be lowered and new light bulbs will be banned, and so on. In 2012, only "efficient" light bulbs will be allowed and by 2016, they want to ban even the halogen lamps.
While Fidel Castro had some rational economic justifications for his decision (well, he simply wanted to reduce recurring blackouts), the reason behind the same policy in Europe is that the Eurocratic wise men think that American imperialist Thomas Alva Edison is causing a catastrophic global warming. ;-) Well, there are cases in which Fidel Castro looks relatively sensible, moderate, friendly to America, and pragmatic.
It's pretty clear that the total "warming" that classic light bulbs may have contributed since the birth of Edison was less than 0.01 °C, i.e. also less than a one-day fluctuation. Only a relatively small portion of the "man-made" CO2 comes from electricity production; only a very small portion of electricity is used for light (most are electric motors): this reduces the figure by more than an order of magnitude; only a part of light came from these light bulbs; only a part of the electricity is produced in coal-burning plants.
» Don't Stop Reading »
Vystavil Luboš Motl v 9:13 PM | slow feedback (3) | |
Other texts on similar topics: climate, Europe, markets, politics
Thursday, August 27, 2009 ... / /
The arrow of time: understood for 100 years
Some early history
It's been 206 years since Lazare Carnot published the first paper sketching the law of an increasing entropy (Carnot, 1803), an insight that was later elaborated upon by his son Sadi Carnot (Carnot, 1824).
At the macroscopic, i.e. thermodynamic level, the notion was discussed by Rudolph Clausius and others in the 1850s and 1860s.
Finally, 113 years ago, the entropy was derived from the statistical properties of the atoms and it was proved that it can never macroscopically decrease (Ludwig Boltzmann, 1896).
Vystavil Luboš Motl v 11:17 AM | slow feedback (1) | |
Other texts on similar topics: philosophy of science, science and society
Tuesday, August 25, 2009 ... / /
SUSY masses near 120 GeV favored
First, congratulations to the 400th birthday of Galileo Galilei's astronomical telescope!
In July 2009, Buchmueller et al., a team of 10 theorists and experimenters including John Ellis, published an interesting frequentist analysis of the likely masses of new particles in supersymmetric models of particle physics:
Likelihood functions for supersymmetric observables in frequentist analyses of the CMSSM and NUHM1 (click)
They focus on two models, constrained MSSM (CMSSM) and a non-universal Higgs mass model (NUHM1). Roughly speaking, they're two lower-dimensional slices in the MSSM parameter space, assuming that the spin-0 and lightest spin-1/2 superpartners have masses easily calculated from two parameters. Such artificially more specific submodels are useful to get an idea what's predicted by the MSSM.
The authors have used a frequentist analysis to estimate the probability distribution. It means that they calculate a "score" as a function of the parameter spaces. The lower score, the better (more likely) for a point in the parameter space. The "score" is schematically
chi-square = sum [(experiment-theory)/error]^2
Note that in general, "theory" is a complicated function of the parameters predicted for the quantity by the theory. The quantity is measured in an "experiment", with an "error" margin. Additional terms from other considerations may be added to this "score".
The probabilistic distribution may be obtained as a chi-square distribution from the calculated function chi-square, as a function of the parameters, taking the right number of parameters into account (it affects the power law which multiples exp(-chi^2/2), the basic factor generalizing the normal distribution).
Click to zoom in.
When this process is completed for many high-precision quantities, they may offer some predictions for the masses of the new particles. For example, the universal (by assumption) masses of spin-0 and spin-1/2 are visualized on the graph above. The left chart refers to CMSSM while the right chart depicts NUHM1. You see that the masses are likely to be below 600 GeV or so, and the spin-0 masses in CMSSM are likely to be below 150 GeV.
Both the Higgs boson and a neutralino is favored near 120 GeV (and one of the models prefers such values even if you ignore the LEP constraints). The best stau mass estimates are close to 130 GeV. Tan(beta) is preferred around 10. The branching ratio of B_s to a muon pair is strongly favored near 4 parts per billion. However, gluinos are between 500 and 1,500 GeV, about 0-150 GeV heavier than the five light squark flavors.
Many other figures - and correlations between various pairs of unknown masses - are discussed in the paper, too. The announced numbers generally imply that if low-energy SUSY is there, it is more likely than not that the LHC will discover it pretty soon - literally within weeks after the collider is re-activated in November 2009.
Hat tip: Tommaso Dorigo, a supersymmetry foe who is gradually turning his coat, too ;-)
Vystavil Luboš Motl v 9:51 AM | slow feedback (0) | |
Other texts on similar topics: experiments, LHC, string vacua and phenomenology
The Chamber of Commerce wants a trial with AGW
The United States Chamber of Commerce, the world's largest not-for-profit business federation (or "lobby") representing 3 million businesses, is afraid of the intent of some politicians to hurt the business by carbon limits and they want to put the science of global warming on trial:
Los Angeles Times (click)
What they imagine is a Scopes Monkey Trial of the 21st century. Well, in my humble opinion, it is not the most flattering analogy. The Scopes Trial (Tennessee, 1926) led to the temporary verdict that it was illegal to teach Darwin's evolution at state-funded schools. ;-)
I don't know whether most of the officials of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce believe in creationism. But if the analogy is supposed to go too far, it surely hurts their case. After all, the analogy is upside down. The key mechanisms of climate change are natural, not man-made, much like the key mechanisms behind the origin of species.
Other texts on similar topics: climate, politics
Sunday, August 23, 2009 ... / /
Why Lee Smolin is deceiving you
Every competent high-energy physicist who knows Lee Smolin may confirm that Smolin is the ultimate symbol of the complete absence of the scientific integrity and, indeed, the very basic human ethical values.
David Gross discusses some experience with a double-faced Lee Smolin - concerning AdS/CFT and background independence - in their discussion with journalist George Johnson. It was the very first public video from which the laymen could learn that the top physicists consider Lee Smolin to be a (now I quote George Johnson) "crackpot" - a fact that would be completely hidden if the information only depended on the journalists.
More worrisome and persistent stories are often told by A.S., A.V., R.B., and many other big shots.
But what he's doing and saying after the Fermi collaborations have proved that all the "theories" he has ever invented about quantum gravity were rubbish simply exceeds all the limits that could be tolerable for a person who should be allowed to freely walk on the street.
After many years when he was boasting about his "falsifiable predictions" of loop quantum gravity (Lee has even become a template for Leslie Winkle in an award-winning sitcom) that were moreover completely "generic", and when he was using these "predictions" to sling mud on the top research in high-energy physics, namely string theory, he has turned his coat.
Vystavil Luboš Motl v 3:26 PM | slow feedback (13) | |
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Slovakia vs Hungary: Sólyom banned
The president of Hungary was just banned from Slovakia and I understand the extraordinary decision.
Ms Jana Kirschner, "Pokoj v duši" (Peace in the Soul).
Fourty-one years ago, the armies of five Warsaw Pact countries - Soviet, Hungarian, East German, Polish, and Bulgarian troops - invaded Czechoslovakia in order to suppress the Prague Spring, a short period of relative democracy and freedom led by Slovak reform communist politician Alexander Dubček [Doob-Czech]. Romania rejected to participate and so did Albania that left the pact because of the invasion.
In this act of "brotherly assistance", our comrades sent us 500,000 troops or so. We may guess that about 400,000 were Soviet troops, less than 0.2% of the Soviet population. Hungary sent approximately 30,000 troops, or 0.3% of the Hungarian population.
I think that the opinion that only Russia was responsible for the invasion is completely dishonest. Relatively speaking, the other four countries were equally responsible. The Soviet Army was bigger, but the guilt is also divided among many more citizens. In the case of Hungary, the invasion had a special dimension because Hungary used to control Slovakia in the past.
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Wednesday, August 19, 2009 ... / /
Yacht Fiona hopelessly trapped in ice
On this blog, we've had a lot of fun with Arnesen+Bancroft, Lewis Pugh, as well as Pen Hadow and company. All these teams were trapped in the brutal conditions of the Arctic while they were trying to prove that the Arctic has become balmy because of global warming.
Ladies and Gentlemen, they have a new friend. Yacht Fiona is participating in the Green Ocean Race, teaching a generation or two how to live without fossil fuels.
They report that they got "hopelessly trapped by the ice" two days ago. Despite a "favorable" ice report, they encountered 8/10ths of ice, with many old i.e. large bergs. They are not in immediate danger because the Canadian Coast Guard is sending them an icebreaker. Well, they're surely not the first carbon-neutral yacht gratefully saved at least by an oil tanker. ;-) Here is the small appendix of the energy-efficient yacht - a true chickabiddy:
Why don't they ask the U.S. government to break the ice by exploding an H-bomb? That would surely be a small price for the chance to save a few liters of gasoline! ;-)
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Renovation of concrete blocks
This is how our apartment building looked from the 1970s through May 2009 (picture taken in 2002):
And this is how it looks today, after a three-month renovation and heat insulation (it is packed in a 10-cm polystyrene layer, too):
I think it is prettier, more friendly, more human, happier, and the neighborhoods are more diverse now. The other inhabitants - including many pensioners - were more conservative concerning the colors: I would prefer much wilder colors and pictures but it's OK with me. The modest advertisement made the contract cheaper by USD 10,000+ and it's pretty cool, too.
Concrete blocks were the main contribution of socialism to the field of architecture. Literally hundreds of millions of people were placed in these panelák's or "rabbit hutches", as ex-president Václav Havel called these boxes composed out of a few gigantic "bricks" ("panels" in Czech). ;-)
It used to be speculated that they would collapse within a decade or two. But you can see that with some creative and transformative forces of capitalism, things are not that bad and the fear may be forgotten.
Much of the three-month work was done by the Ukrainian construction workers. The most active one told me that he had to pay some money to his Ukrainian "mafia boss" - who is responsible for some paperwork - but the things are probably not that bad because he earns CZK 32,000 (USD 1,700) per month after this subtraction - 50% above the average Czech salary. He surely deserves it.
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Precautionary principle destroys EU innovation
EurActiv.COM published a sensible yet pessimistic interview with David Zaruk, an environmental health risk consultant in Brussels.
He explains that Europe is not really becoming a knowledge-based society as people used to say but an influence-based society. And the influence is moving towards the eco-religious fundamentalists, cowards who are gradually replacing the presumption of innocence by the precautionary principle, i.e. the principle that researchers are held "guilty until proven innocent".
The scientific method as used in the EU policymaking.
The beauty of the precautionary principle is that "you can never be wrong" which is attractive for many people. But it's only true as long as you define "being wrong" as something else than "not being right". ;-) Indeed, the precautionary principle distinguishes these two situations while science (and logic) does not.
NGOs' lobbyists are becoming the most powerful force that shapes EU policies related to science and innovation is getting impossible. At the same moment, it is getting hard to hire good scientific experts for the EU's risk assessment process because they are increasingly fed up with the EU's being driven by ever strengthening non-scientific elements. Risk assessment is sadly being separated from risk management.
Other texts on similar topics: Europe, science and society
Fermi kills all Lorentz-violating theories
Future article: Nature and NYT report the demise of Lorentz-breaking theories
String theory is the only beyond-QFT survivor of a today's earth-shaking astro-ph paper (see also Nature)
The following clip comes from the first episode of The Big Bang Theory that your humble correspondent has ever seen:
As of today, I've watched all the episodes that have been released in English and Czech, usually several times. ;-)
It's virtually certain that this exchange was inspired by your humble correspondent's debates with various advocates of loop quantum gravity whose irrational attacks on string theory and the very Lorentz invariance of the laws of physics, as established in 1905, have been persistent and bloody, and so had to be my rational responses.
See, for example, discussions about a subset of someone's incorrect papers (at a blog post titled "Deformed Special Relativity") or
Objections to loop quantum gravity
Lorentz violation and deformed special relativity
MAGIC: dispersion of gamma rays?
MAGIC: rational arguments vs propaganda
Aether compactification
Relativistic phobia
Testing E=mc2 for centuries
Lorentz violation makes perpetuum mobile possible
and dozens of other blog posts debunking loop quantum gravity, Hořava-Lifshitz gravity, doubly special relativity, and several other Lorentz-breaking theories.
Vystavil Luboš Motl v 12:01 PM | slow feedback (9) | |
Other texts on similar topics: astronomy, experiments, string vacua and phenomenology, stringy quantum gravity, TBBT, TV
Czechia, France, Germany out of recession
Despite the chatter about a very great depression - an event that some people dream about in their quest to deconstruct capitalism - the numbers speak a very different language.
The quarter-on-quarter GDP growth has been just reported to be positive in Q2 of 2009 by three Central and Western Europe countries. Czechia, France, and Germany saw a 0.3% growth each. Unfortunately, the same figure in Italy, the U.K., and Spain were negative: -0.5%, -0.8%, and -1.0%, respectively.
The current year-on-year figures remain negative but it's likely that the "very great depression" is actually turning out to be the shortest possible recession that deserves this modest name, namely two quarters. I am sorry but these events don't look like a justification for any further distortion of the markets.
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Hans Christian Ørsted: a birthday
Hans Christian Ørsted was born in Rudkøbing, Denmark on August 14th, 1777. He died in Copenhagen in 1851.
Just like his brother, he received most of his education at home by self-study. And he was an achieved poet and writer. But we primarily remember him as a physicist. Ørsted believed in the unity of Nature which is why he instantly accepted Johann Wilhelm Ritter's speculations about the links between electricity and magnetism, despite the lack of evidence.
The most important story of his life occurred on April 21st, 1820 when he was preparing a lecture. An electrical circuit managed to move the needle in a nearby compass. Ørsted became the first famous person who produced a magnetic field by a time-dependent electric field: the first guy who actually managed to observe this effect was Gian Domenico Romagnosi who saw it 2 decades earlier but Romagnosi remained virtually unknown.
Ørsted's qualitative discovery was later upgraded into a mathematical, quantitative law by Andre-Marie Ampere. This effect shouldn't be confused with the electromagnetic induction which is the creation of an electric field (or voltage) by a time-dependent magnetic field and which was found much later. Note that the influence goes in the opposite direction.
Ørsted's beliefs about the unity of Nature surely turned out to be correct in the case of electromagnetism: the unity of electromagnetism with nuclear forces or even gravity turned out to be much more difficult.
There's one more cute meme that Ørsted should be credited with: he was the first physicist who began to produce gedanken (thought) experiments en masse and who gave them the name. Theoretical physics would advance at a much slower pace, if the progress were not completely impossible, without this technique.
This Danish physicist was also the first man who isolated aluminium as an element.
Other texts on similar topics: Denmark, science and society
Impact (miniseries)
I just watched the second part of Impact, a German-American catastrophic TV miniseries (in the Czech dubbing) about our Moon that became 12 heavier by swallowing a "brown dwarf" and was otherwise determined to collide with the Earth before a team of unusually attractive astronauts and astrophysicists removed the 12-lunar-mass seed from the lunar core.
Like many other catastrophic movies, it was very emotional. And be sure that I am very sensitive about such matters that paint the sentiments of the people who see their beloved ones dying, deciding about the lives of others, or going to dangerous expeditions: yes, my reaction often includes tears. However, the underlying physics was just way too bad.
Their basic scientific story was that a bizarre heavy astrophysical object was absorbed by the Moon, our favorite natural satellite. People had some fun with cool meteor showers before they began to witness irregular anomalies - such as new kinds of thunderstorms, collapsing telecommunication networks, as well as trains and people floating above the ground. The elliptic orbit of the Moon was heavily distorted and only a few weeks of life were predicted before the eccentricity would have increased sufficiently dramatically for the Moon to hit the Earth. The mankind was getting ready for a judgement day.
Other texts on similar topics: alternative physics, arts, astronomy, TV
Australian Senate rejects carbon regulation
What a nice opportunity for a glass of beer.
Today, Australia's Senate rejected Kevin Rudd's plans to copy the European fraudulent carbon indulgences industry to his continent.
NYT, Bloomberg (click for more information)
The plan only wanted to reduce the CO2 production by 5-15 percent within a decade but it has failed, anyway: the senators voted 42 to 30 against the bill. Rudd has to revise the bill or trigger early elections in a few months.
Antarctica and Australia, two driest continents (in this order), are unlikely to revive this dead horse in any foreseeable future. It is probable that Asia, Africa, and South America will adopt a similar position. We're working hard for Europe and North America to behave sensibly, too.
The Labor Party has been so serious about this crap that they have even created a minister of climate change. In order to show their arrogance of power - and their ability to place an arbitrarily incompetent bureaucrat to control the citizens - they have made the new ministry really dumb and politicized, according to their best standards.
Global CO2 production up 2% in 2008
Reuters reported that the global carbon dioxide output in 2008 was 1.94 percent higher than in 2007. You can see that in 2008, the CO2 growth probably exceeded the GDP growth. Under normal circumstances, the CO2 growth may be equal to the GDP growth minus 1 percentage point or so (because of the gradually increasing "carbon efficiency" of the economy).
At any rate, such numbers make it very clear that the ideas about 20% or 80% reductions within a decade are completely unrealistic (and both 20% and 80% are qualitatively equally silly) unless a new revolutionary technology takes over the world: but the events of this unusual kind cannot be ordered by bureaucrats.
I find it likely that sometime in 30-100 years, such a breakthrough will indeed take place. But no one knows when and where this development will occur. It makes no sense to speculate about such events or include them in the short-term and medium-term planning.
Other texts on similar topics: climate, Kyoto, politics
Saturday, August 08, 2009 ... / /
Paul Dirac: a birthday
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born in Bristol, England, on August 8th, 1902, i.e. 107 years ago. He died in 1984 in Tallahassee, Florida.
His mother was English while his father was an immigrant from Switzerland and an obnoxious family Hitler who taught French and who forced his family to speak French at their English home. Paul's elder brother committed suicide in 1925. In Bristol, Paul gratefully avoided the classics which was the dominant subject taught to his contemporaries, and studied electrical engineering instead.
By the way, at his elementary school, he was asked to solve a famous problem with the three fishermen which may have helped him with the antiparticles 15 years later. I will discuss the episode later in my essay.
After some time spent with electrical engineering, he managed to move to Cambridge to meet his true love, mathematical physics. His PhD in 1926 was based on the work that described the analogy between the commutators on the quantum side (more precisely, in Heisenberg's matrix mechanics) and the Poisson brackets on the classical side. Note that Dirac was 24.
Later, he would study this map in detail. So he was also predestined to figure out how to quantize systems with second-class constraints (using Dirac brackets). Also, Dirac was convinced that the action from classical physics should be relevant for a formulation of quantum mechanics, and he sketched some very rough arguments that Richard Feynman was able to streamline when he invented the path integrals.
Dirac equation and Fermi-Dirac statistics
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U.S. healthcare: brownshirts and informers introduced
After some time, I spent several hours studying what's happening in the U.S. politics. And the controversy surrounding the healthcare program looks pretty scary.
In their efforts to defend an indefensible proposal for a communist healthcare system, the Left has introduced two basic and historically not-quite-new tools:
HCAN (Health Care for America Now), the new Sturmabteilung
Flag@whitehouse.gov, an internet-based system to organize informers and create a list of enemies of the currently governing party in the U.S.
Concerning the first link, they're very open about their desire to make it impossible for the U.S. citizens to express their deep dissatisfaction with the planned government takeover of the healthcare industry at town hall meetings and during similar events, through the activity of their new paramilitary units.
Organized screaming is just one thing that HCAN is supposed to plan.
Other texts on similar topics: politics
LHC in November: 7 TeV of center-of-mass energy
A CERN press release has revealed that the LHC will be restarted in November with 3.5 TeV per beam. A few weeks later, two beams should begin to collide. The people will learn how to deal with the machine at the reduced energy.
Sometime in 2010, the energy should be upgraded to 5 TeV per beam. Lead ions will replace the protons at the end of 2010. A break should prepare the machine for its prescribed 7 TeV per beam - 14 TeV of center-of-mass energy - sometime in 2011 or so.
The restart was recently delayed due to a problem with a faulty hose in the helium transport circuit and with loud sex in the tunnel. ;-) In Dennis Overbye's piece in The New York Times, Lisa Randall says that it may take time before the LHC picks the data she wants. Indeed, unless we're (and she's) extremely lucky, it may take millenia if not millions of years to detect the warped extra dimensions. :-)
Other texts on similar topics: experiments, LHC
First superstring revolution: 25 years
Twenty-five years ago, John Schwarz and Michael Green were spending their summer in Aspen, Colorado and they were working hard. The physicists were realizing that superstring theory was so intellectually sexy that it simply couldn't have suffered from anomalies.
Type I string theory whose low-energy limit is the d=10 type I supergravity coupled to d=10 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory was widely believed to have anomalies. It is a chiral, left-right asymmetric theory with a lot of charged chiral fermions and similar stuff. Vague arguments indicate that the anomalies have to be there and they have no good chance to cancel.
Other texts on similar topics: science and society, string vacua and phenomenology, stringy quantum gravity
XVI International Congress on Mathematical Physics
Yesterday, I spent a day in Prague, on a congress of mathematical physics, thanks to the hospitality of Miloš Zahradník, my (former) diploma advisor from Prague who was a co-organizer and who showed me a new concise version of a Taylor series problem we used to solve in different ways (why exp and ln are inverse to each other: permutation edition) and invited me for a lunch.
I've seen about seven talks, starting from Steven Weinberg's talk on asymptotic safety (and the history of QFT) that we have already discussed (Lenny Susskind asked most of the questions), continuing with various talks related to statistical physics, and ending with three talks about "science and society".
They were delivered by Joel Lebowitz, an ex-teacher of mine from Rutgers (who survived holocaust but that couldn't prevent him from doing a lot of great stuff for the human rights of scientists intellectuals across the world).
Šimon Pánek, a top student leader of the Velvet Revolution, gave a meaningful talk about the activities of their "People in Need" NGO, as well as memories about the fall of communism. It didn't hurt that he thought that physics was studied by physicians :-) and that the November 17th, 1989 demonstration he led was remembering a 1942 rally (rather than the correct answer: 1939).
And an African scientist whose name is somewhat difficult for me to reproduce told us everything about mathematical physics in Africa: it didn't exist before 1980 and since that time, the number of people on the black continent who are interested in such things and who attend various summer schools etc. increased from 30 to 50 or so. There were many names of the institutions from the (white) "North" who help them - but otherwise the talk wasn't bad. ;-)
I may add a lot of details later but I am busy right now. The picture of Lenny Susskind and Steven Weinberg on the left side (click to zoom in) appears because they haven't managed to disagree with its emergence yet, and I hope they won't. ;-) In fact, here you can see
of the Clarion Congress Hotel where the event took place and other things related to the event (press the right arrow button to browse). For Vysočany, a colorless industrial neighborhood of Prague, the building looked impressive to me.
Other texts on similar topics: mathematics, science and society
Silence of the hurricanes
This map looks like the New York Subway but it is actually a map of the tropical storms.
What do Arlene, Bret, Cindy, Dennis, Emily, Franklin, Gert, Harvey, and Irene have in common? Well, they're named tropical storms that occurred by August 4th. Nine of them.
Except that it wasn't in 2009. It was back in 2005. The map above is from 2005, too. The journalists would tell you that the hurricanes would always be like in 2005 - maybe because of global warming.
Except that we have moved on. It's 2009 and we don't hear that the current hurricane score symbolizes the future trends. The reason is simple. The number 9 in 2005 dropped to 0 (in words: zero) in 2009. See the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season. The total damage, fatalities, and ACE have been uniformly zero as of today.
It's obvious that a big hurricane is able to create a higher number of newspaper articles than the absence of hurricanes. Nevertheless, if a journalist only reports the events of the first kind and expects the readers to generalize them, he is being either stupid or dishonest.
Andrew Feustel in Pilsen
Some pure astronautic entertainment. What would you expect from the 3000th posting on this blog? ;-)
Andrew Feustel, the last man who touched the Hubble Space Telescope during the recent service mission in May 2009, brought Jan Neruda's astro-emotional (Czech) poems, Cosmic Songs (1878), to outer space and back to Czechia.
He wants to fly to the Moon and Mars or beyond. Aden, his 13-year-old son, prefers to stay on the Earth unless a flight to the "scary outer space" becomes necessary. And let me tell him: it probably won't. ;-) The 15-year-old Ari is less hostile towards our broader cosmic environment.
Andrew Feustel revealed his goals today, during his fifth trip to my hometown of Pilsen where the uncle of his wife, Indira, surprisingly lives.
"Pilsen is a beautiful place, we like to stop here whenever we go to Germany. During our recent mission, we didn't have good enough position to see the Czech Republic, so at least I have tried to spot the Pilsner brewery."
OK, I improved the answer a bit.
While Feustel could say "chata" [khuh-tuh] (cottage), a place they visit here, his wife (who has Czech roots after her mother and Indian after her father) remembers Ferda the Ant as well as Spejbl and Hurvínek, two famous series of Czech books and/or theater comedies for the kids. Because she also spoke to her friend by phone, she can create Czech sentences and listen to us.
Other texts on similar topics: astronomy
NYT: a hit piece on Václav Klaus
Two days after I was defending The New York Times in a discussion with Noel Shepperd, the paper decided to prove me wrong. The article
Czech Leader Questions Path for Europe (click)
resembles the texts about Václav Havel and other dissidents we used to read in Rudé Právo, the official Czechoslovak communist daily.
Dan Bilefsky and Stephen Castle make it very clear that they have no clue what democracy or fair journalism mean. They expect all their readers to think that Václav Klaus is a villain while the typical Eurocrats are great guys. For NYT readers, it is apparently politically incorrect to realize that the truth is the opposite one.
Other texts on similar topics: Czechoslovakia, Europe, politics
Monday, August 03, 2009 ... / /
Is there too much communication in science?
OpenScience (Dan Gezelter), "How Open Would You Want...", and CommunistSocialistSwine (?) have discussed the question whether science should be "open" and whether partial results should be shared. They have many right ideas but I find most of their attitudes one-sided and misidentifying the real problems and tradeoffs.
When we advocate "open science", our goals are:
Transparency in experimental methodology, observation, and collection of data.
Public availability and reusability of scientific data.
Public accessibility and transparency of scientific communication.
Using web-based tools to facilitate scientific collaboration.
These results are apparently desirable because it seems that they speed up the progress, by giving many people the access to the information, the data, the theories, and their known flaws. Such policies are also likely to make cheating harder. However, there are good arguments in favor of "closed science", too:
Credit is more likely to go to the actual authors which motivates people to work harder and find some new results.
Good new ideas are not being attacked just because they disagree with the average opinions (the "consensus") of the contemporary people: people don't get discouraged by premature criticism.
Complete, final results of a "hidden" scientific process are likely to be of a higher quality than "shared" partial results.
Because of similar reasons, communication is classified as a "bad thing" by some of the bloggers above. But is it the real culprit? Well, I don't really think so. At least a "proper" kind of communication is not a bad thing.
The list of reasons why science should be transparent looks pretty much obvious. Especially when it comes to some "routine" scientific work, the advantages look indisputable. For example, if the taxpayers pay some teams for their measurements of the temperatures, it seems crystal clear to me that the measurements - and all the calculations - should be as transparent as possible.
Arkani-Hamed et al.: all leading S-matrix singularities of N=4 SYM
Let me start with a sentence that occurs quite often on this blog, and it is no coincidence: The most interesting hep-th paper today is arguably the first one. Nima Arkani-Hamed, Freddy Cachazo, Clifford Cheung, and Jared Kaplan wrote about
a duality for the S-matrix (click).
They present a concise formula for scattering amplitudes in N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills up to all orders in perturbation theory and they market it as a new "weak-weak dual description" for this S-matrix. The most informative formulae are equations (9) and (10), analyzed in the rest of the paper:
This is a formula for the scattering amplitude of "n" gluons with "k" of them having the opposite chirality than others. The amplitude is written as an integral over a "kn"-dimensional space of rectangular matrices "C" (with no twistorial indices!). These matrices may be interpreted as parameters of "k"-dimensional planes embedded in an "n"-dimensional space: the space of matrices is therefore an "(n choose k)-1"-dimensional projective space (plus an irrelevant scaling variable).
Other texts on similar topics: computers, mathematics, string vacua and phenomenology
Why perturbation theory remains paramount
Breaking news: Jim Parsons wins the Television Critics Association's 2009 award in the category of highest individual achievements in comedy. Congratulations to my imitator!
What is the method
Perturbation theory is an approximate method that describes a physical system in terms of a similar, simple enough, solvable, and often non-interacting physical system, "H_0", and a small perturbation of this system, "lambda V".
If you assume the letters to represent the Hamiltonians, or the formulae for the total energy (and evolution) of the systems, the total Hamiltonian is
H = H0 + lambda V.
Here, the perturbation, "V", is normalized in such a way that it is comparable to "H_0". On the other hand, "lambda" must be smaller than one. Ideally, it should be much smaller than one.
While "H_0" may be solved exactly, the full "H_0 + V" cannot. But there exist sophisticated mathematical techniques that allow us to quantitatively answer any question about "H" by calculating appropriate Taylor expansion in "lambda". We are continuously moving from "lambda=0", which corresponds to "H_0", to the actual value of "lambda", which corresponds to "H".
Vystavil Luboš Motl v 8:29 AM | slow feedback (13) | |
Other texts on similar topics: mathematics, philosophy of science, string vacua and phenomenology, stringy quantum gravity
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1056 seconds of Chinese fusion
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One attraction of hybrid marine engines is that they can be fuelled by diesel, LNG, hydrogen, and use a fuel cell, batteries or an electric motor. This capability makes hybrids particularly suitable for ferries in coastal or enclosed waters. The future of hybrid propulsion systems in shipping looks promising, although it remains to be seen which energy sources and combinations of power modes will prove popular.
This chapter provided an overview of DSM and especially, DR. In the past years, a wide range of DR programs have been developed in different power systems across the world. These programs aim at engaging all the types of consumers: from large industrial customers to residential end-users with relatively small electricity consumption, considering also special types of consumers such as the EV and data centers. The primary motive for developing DR programs is that by enabling the participation of the demand side in electricity markets significant benefits are anticipated: more efficient and sustainable system planning, enhancement of the operation of the distribution system, lower and more stable electricity prices in the long run, mitigation of the market power of several participants and promotion of competition, economic benefits for the consumers, and increased operational flexibility. Increased operational flexibility is directly linked to accommodating the handicaps of the trend that indicates that significant amount of variable RES generation will be introduced in power systems in the future.
With the integration of wind energy into electricity grids, it is becoming increasingly important to obtain accurate wind speed forecasts, and accurate wind speed forecasts are necessary to schedule power system. In this study, an artificial neural networks (NNs) model with a variational mode decomposition (VMD) for a short-term wind speed forecasting was presented. To reduce the non-stationary of wind speed time series, the historical wind speed was decomposed into different intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) by a VMD. The back-propagation NN with Levenberg–Marquardt was adopted to build sub-models according to the different characteristic of each IMF. The sub-models corresponding to different IMFs were superposed to obtain wind speed-forecasting models. In the experiment, the proposed forecasting model was compared with an NN with wavelet decomposition and empirical mode decomposition. The performance was evaluated based on three metrics, namely maximum absolute error, root mean square error and the correlation coefficient. The comparison results indicate that significant improvements in forecasting accuracy were obtained with the proposed forecasting models compared with other forecasting methods.
The amount of solar energy incidence on a photovoltaic (PV) panel depends on the PV tilt angles with respect to the horizon. It is thus crucial to investigate the optimum tilt angles to maximise the efficiency of PV panels and at the same time to increase the performance of solar energy systems. The objective of this study is to estimate the optimum tilt angle for PV panels in order to collect the maximum solar radiation for the city of Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. A newly developed optimisation algorithm called the vortex search algorithm is used to estimate the solar radiation on the tilted surface. Moreover, one year can be divided into different periods in the proposed approach, and the optimum angle can be obtained for each one of these periods separately. The horizontal solar data (i.e. direct, diffuse and global solar radiation) is used to estimate the optimum tilt angle. The results demonstrate that the solar radiation estimated using the optimum tilt angle is maximised compared with the one estimated on a horizontal surface.
This study proposes a comprehensive decision support framework to optimally select the solid medium and heat transfer tubes material composing the thermal energy storage (TES). The proposed decision model aims to maximise the net present value (NPV) associated with the TES investment over a given time horizon. Compared with related works in the literature, the authors' design accounts for various practical investment costs and design parameters that are the number of heat transfer tubes, storage module length, and the storage unit diameter. The decision problem, which maximises the NPV is formulated as an optimisation problem to find out the optimal combination among a set of solid media and heat transfer tube materials considering their thermo-physical characteristics. The proposed design is evaluated through case studies to test its concrete practices and to evaluate the impacts of the design parameters on the TES investment costs.
The increasing demand of energy can meet out through renewable source of energy. Hence it is necessary to focus on sustainable energy source. The solar energy is the prime source of energy, most available, eco-friendly and renewable to sustain the increasing energy demand. The solar energy is collected either through thermal based collectors or solar PV collectors. Moreover, heat pipe based solar collector is the most promising technology for various applications. Heat pipe is an advanced technology which has been proven to show higher thermal performance of solar collectors compared to conventional solar collectors. Due to high thermal performance, heat pipes becoming popular as passive energy transfer technology. This article lays out the comprehensive review of integration of heat pipe with stationary solar collectors. This manuscript comprised of mainly two parts: classification of heat pipes and heat pipes for stationary collectors. First part provides the information of types of heat pipes used for different applications and purpose followed by progress and development of heat pipes used in flat plate solar collector, evacuated tube solar collector and solar PV collector. Also, further studies are recommended for investigating the heat pipe in solar collectors by considering the economic issues. In addition to this major issues in heat pipe stationary collectors such as low heat removal factor (when less than ten heat pipes used in stationary collector), Increase complexity in design and small surface area of condenser are also discussed.
Gasification of dry refinery sludge has gained a lot of interest of late. Fly ash and sludge ash are waste by product of gasification process. Using these ashes as catalyst material can reduce the waste disposal to landfill sites. This study has shown that both fly ash and sludge ash can be used as a catalyst in gasification as it is rich in catalytic material like silica, alumina, ferric oxide, calcium oxide and a host of other catalytic materials. These ashes catalytic material shows improved syngas quality when blended with dry refinery sludge (DRS) in updraft gasification process thereby enhances its economic viability. Furthermore, mixing of these catalysts with sludge fuel cause reduction of the agglomeration of metal oxides inside an up draft gasifier. The presence of fly and sludge ash catalyst are found to convert stable tar into gaseous products, thus enhance the hydrogen production by moving water-gas shift reaction to forward direction. Experiments were performed to determine the catalytic effects of fly and sludge ash using various percentages ranging from 0, 10, 15 and 20% and with equivalent ratio (ER) of 0.195 and 0.24. The study was centered on the product gas, heating value, combustible gases vol%, and cold gas and carbon conversion efficiencies. It was found that both fly and sludge ash has enhanced catalytic properties. An ER of 0.195 is best suited for the gasification of dry refinery sludge. Increase in the catalyst addition improves gas quality, increases high heating value (HHV) and cold gas efficiency.
Identification of coherent generators (CGs) in power systems is one of the key steps in determining controlled islanding strategies. In this study, a wide-area measurement system (WAMS) and agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC) algorithm based coherency identification method is presented for interconnected power systems with aggregated renewable sources. First, the trajectories measured by WAMS are transformed to the centre of inertia based ones for better representing the dynamic behaviour of a given power system, and ten trajectory dissimilarity indexes are presented for determining the similarity of the trajectories of any two generators. Second, a CRITIC (CRiteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation) based method, in which entropy and the Spearman's rank correlation coefficient are integrated for reflecting the differences and correlations among multiple indexes, respectively, is presented to integrate the trajectory dissimilarity indexes. Next, the AHC algorithm is utilised to identify CGs. Finally, a modified New England–New York interconnected power system with a large number of renewables, a simplified actual Western Interconnection power system in North America and the eastern part of Guangdong power system in China with a recorded oscillation event happened are utilised to demonstrate the proposed wide-area coherency identification methodology.
This study presents a review and comparison on the power generation by artificial vortex approach. The basic principles of the artificial vortex theory are presented to comprehend the topic. The main characteristics of the components, working principles and features of the existing Vortex Generator Systems for the production of electricity have been discussed and compared. The literature demonstrates that there are two ways to establish the vortex updraft flow: (i) by constructing a special design of the updraft tower to yield a vertical pressure gradient along the axis of a vortex. These types of system have a high investment cost due to the tall tower, or (ii) by using an external heat source to create large temperature rise in ambient air and enhance the buoyancy forces. This integration between the vortex generation system and the wasted heat source is restricted operation in the industrial areas. Therefore, enhancement and development of the way to use a simple construction design based on the solar energy as a heat source support the technology of electricity production by artificial vortex generation. A solar based vortex power generator could be a potential technology for electric power generation, especially in the desert and rural areas.
Battery storage is usually applied in the renewable energy (RE) plant for improving RE utilisation and integration ability to the power grid. Battery health status detection is essential for plant reliable, safe and efficient operation. This study presents a battery anomaly and degradation diagnosis method based on data mining technology. First, battery cell characteristic vectors are set and classified under charging, discharging and standing states, respectively. Synthetic characteristic vectors are formed for abnormal battery cell identification by K-means algorithm. Second, battery degradation degree is estimated by searching and comparing with ideal performance curve under the same running status in the historical database. Finally, taking an actual renewable energy plant with battery storage, for example, the results verified the correctness and validity of the proposed method.
The wind energy conversion system is a complex dynamic system which contains multi-coupling and multi-time-scales. The commonly used simplified models are unable to uncover all the detailed dynamics. The real-time co-simulation platform based on real-time digital simulator and GH Bladed is built with a controller hardware-in-loop, in which the kinematics equation of generator rotor is used as the interface to decouple the different time scales, and a specific programmable logic controller is used to build the two-way communication. The effect of signal delay between the two simulation platforms is discussed and the stability of the system is analysed. The proposed co-simulation platform is able to show detailed dynamics of the whole turbine as well as the comprehensive effects of the controllers. The correctness and superiorities are verified by number of simulations.


Every Monday evening from 18:45 till 20:45 a language exchange happens at the BDG club Genève, to have a look at the calendar click here.
This FACEBOOK group has been created as a part of activities and initiatives organized by Geneva Interns Associations' (GIA's) Social Affairs Working Group.
– Members can post their announcements about learning, teaching and exchanging any language in documents or as comments.
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– You are welcome to create and update documents.
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Also find the links to currently held Language classes and find their schedule and location on the GIA newsletter, sent every week.


The Land Access Ombudsman (LAO) officially opened its doors on 14 September 2018 to provide a free land access dispute resolution service for landholders and resource companies in Queensland.
The LAO investigates alleged breaches of conduct and compensation agreements (CCAs) and make good agreements (MGAs), and makes practical recommendations to resolve the dispute.
It aims to resolve disputes quickly and efficiently, with as little formality and technicality as possible.
The LAO operates independently of the Government and is not subject to direction by anyone.
It is a free service for both landholders and resource companies in Queensland that have existing CCAs or MGAs (click here for dispute resolution options during the negotiation of these agreements).
Recommendations made by the LAO are not binding and are provided to parties as information or advice only.


text:
Uma paródia pornográfica é um subgênero dos gênero da indústria de cinema pornográfico onde a base para a produção da história ou enredo é a paródia de um mainstream programa de televisão, filme, figura pública, jogo eletrônico ou obras literárias. Este subgênero também inclui paródia de eventos históricos ou contemporâneos, tais como escândalos políticos. O subgênero ganhou aceitação pela indústria adulta na medida em que os principais prêmios são apresentados nesta categoria por organizações como o AVN e XRCO.

Origem
PornParody.com, um site dedicado a revisar paródias pornográficas, cita a paródia Bat Pussy da série de televisão Batman como possivelmente o primeiro filme de paródia pornográfico conhecido, possivelmente, a mais antiga conhecida paródia pornográfica de um filme, Um título que também é compartilhado com o curta de animação alemão de 1973 Snow White and the Seven Perverts. O subgênero começou a participar da década de 1990, tendo um aumento na popularidade durante a década de 2000 e 2010.

Tipos
Em 2002, Shaving Ryan's Privates, um filme estrelado por ator que virou analista de segurança da informação Jeff Bardin, foi lançado. O filme documentou filmes pornográficos que parodiam filmes clássicos de Hollywood. Houve paródias pornográficas produzidas por sitcoms como Who's The Boss e Parks and Recreation, Filmes de terror e drama, como Edward Scissorhands e Silence of the Lambs, filmes de filmes de ação e ficção científica como Star Wars e The Avengers, e dramas, como Downton Abbey, intitulado Down on Abby. O gênero inclui tanto heterossexuais, como homossexual. As paródias também incluem produções não-históricas ou específicas de eventos, como as várias paródias que apresentam uma personagem semelhante a Sarah Palin.

Produção
Algumas paródias utilizam técnicas como a CGI. Um revisor de filme comentou que a fantasia de um personagem de quadrinhos em uma paródia pornô era uma "versão melhor" da usada no filme principal.

Recepção e revisão
O jornalista e escritor Charlie Jane Anders escreveu, antes de blogs sobre o assunto, "eu não percebi o quão muitas paródias pornô existem — e como terrível a maioria deles realmente são."

Um escritor do New York magazine, comentou que, embora a paródia da série da PBS Downton Abbey intitulado Down on Abby, estrelado por Lexi Lowe é bem-humorado, ele é "cheio de incorrecções históricas" e "não recomendado para aqueles que se distraem por detalhes historicamente incorretos".

Aceitação da indústria
Reconhecendo suas origens e apelo público, várias publicações da indústria e grupos de comércio criaram categorias de prêmio para o gênero. Dois dos principais programas de prêmios da indústria oferecem reconhecimento para esta categoria de filmes para adultos.

O AVN Award adicionou, as categorias de "Melhor Paródia - Comédia" e "Melhor Paródia - Drama", em 2009. Em 2013, a paródia de Star Wars, Star Wars XXX: A Porn Parody foi a produção mais indicada desse ano, vencedora da categoria Comédia. Em 2012, a categoria de "Melhor Diretor" para uma "Paródia e a Melhor Celebridade Fita de Sexo" foi adicionado.

O XRCO Award adicionou a categoria de "Melhor Paródia" em 2003. Coincidentemente, o prêmio foi para a produtora Wicked Pictures e o diretor Jonathan Morgan por Space Nuts, uma paródia do filme de Mel Brooks, Spaceballs - que é uma paródia de Star Wars. Space Nuts também ganhou um AVN award 2004 por Melhor Paródia - Comédia.

Principais meios de comunicação
O gênero ganhou a atenção da grande imprensa. Em 2009, o diretor Jeff Mullen (também conhecido como Will Ryder) foi entrevistado pelo escritor Josué Alston da revista Newsweek sobre o seu papel de liderança no ressurgimento de paródias pornô.

Em 2009, o escritor Tom Hymes da Adult Video News observou, "Cheguei à conclusão de que uma verdadeira expectativa está sendo criada entre a elite das celebridades: meu show será a próxima paródia XXX ... por favor?" "O que é genial sobre o todo é o fato de que esses shows mainstream e os atores sobre eles agora conseguem esfregar os ombros com a indústria pornô sem qualquer fricção real." Em uma entrevista da Entertainment Weekly com Alan Ball, criador da série original da HBO, True Blood, ele declarou, ""Nós acabamos de descobrir que eles estão fazendo uma paródia pornográfica de True Blood. Esse é certamente um momento de 'Uau, chegamos'"

Em 2010, a atriz Anna Paquin, falou sobre a paródia pornô de seu próprio espetáculo, "True Blood", no talk show da TBS Lopez Tonight. Paquin, afirmou, "Você sabe, na verdade, o que é interessante é que [o colega do elenco] Steve [Moyer] e eu estávamos tão entretidos com isso que nós presenteamos todos do nosso elenco e equipe, então eu acho que nós provavelmente compramos todas as cópias existentes". Cópias de Tru: A XXX Parody foram dadas a todos do elenco e a equipe na festa de encerramento da terceira temporada.

Pornografia Ficcional
Pornografia Ficcional é por vezes utilizado para plotar ou humorizar um mainstream de cinema e da TV. Em Friends, A irmã gêmea de Phoebe estrelou em Buffay, the Vampire Layer entre outros. Lyndsey em Two and a Half Men foi o papel-título de Cinnamon's Buns, e Wilson em House, M.D. atuou em Feral Pleasures. o  personagem de Peter Stormare em The Big Lebowski pode ser visto em Logjammin'''.

 Ver também
 Axel Braun, diretor conhecido por produções de paródias
 This Ain't..., Uma lista das séries paródicas produzidas por Hustler''
 Tijuana bible, Quadrinhos pornográficos que freqüentemente apresentavam paródias de quadrinhos e celebridades
 Doujinshi, quadrinhos independentes japoneses, muitas vezes apresentam paródias pornográficas.

Referências

Ligações Externas
 O melhor Guia para a Ficção científica e Fantasia Paródias Pornô (NSFW) io9.com
 Ultimate Guide to Pornô Falsifica Pt. 2: super-Heróis, Star Trek, Star Wars e Horror (NSFW) io9.com
Filmes paródias


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Home Reviews Live Reviews Alina Bzhezhinska & the HipHarp Collective
Alina Bzhezhinska & the HipHarp Collective
Alina Bzhezhinska and the HipHarp Collective at Tin Music & Arts, Coventry, 28 February 2019
Once in a while someone comes along and reminds us of overlooked individuals in the jazz world. Not only has Alina Bzhezhinska done this with regard to Alice Coltrane over the past year, with her justifiably lauded quartet, but also in her group, HipHarp Collective, that focuses on the work of the lesser known harpist Dorothy Ashby.
An interesting figure in the history of the music, Detroit-born Ashby, like Coltrane, began as a pianist before settling on the harp in the early 50s. She succeeded in taking it away from the traditional notion of it being largely a background, orchestral instrument. Ashby is on record as recognising the obstacles and disadvantages in her career – being a black woman musician in a male-dominated industry as well as the difficulties making a connection with audiences who were not interested in the harp, classical or otherwise. She overcame much of this, becoming a respected figure in Detroit, not least for her involvement in contemporary African-American issues and working with her husband in community theatre.
One of the admirable aspects of Alina Bzhezhinska's performances is that she engages the audience and gives then a potted history of the background to the material she uses; in this case, someone who she has seen as an important role model and an influence on her own work.
Some of us recall Hip Harp that Ashby made with Frank Wess for Prestige in 1958, but the inspiration for the session at Tin Music & Arts on 28 February was Ashby's 1968 album, Afro-Harping.
Starting with "Soul Vibrations", the band immediately set the tone for the evening, a 60s-style groove, with Christian Vaughan putting down a solid organ sound on his Yamaha. "Action Line", also from that album, showed Alina's broad command of the harp, this time using it more like a guitar, with fewer sweeps and glissandi. At other times she adopted a more pianistic and sometimes percussive approach, as on Luiz Bonfa's "Black Orpheus", which also featured the rich tones of Gareth Lockrane's bass flute.
Drummer Joel Prime produced some tight snare on "Life Has Its Trials", before the Wood/Mellin standard "My One and Only Love" had moments of real beauty from Alina, tugging at the heartstrings. It's a ballad covered by many, including McCoy Tyner, whose playing was brought to mind on "Gospel Train", an Alice Coltrane number, by Vaughan's highly rhythmic and assertive piano.
The second half had more from Afro-Harping, including the title track, with Lockrane on piccolo and flutes, the sound increased in resonance by simultaneous voicing, and Alina widening the intensity with dramatic sweeps. The 60s feel again arose as Andre Previn's "Valley of the Dolls" theme and Bacharach's "The Look of Love" were covered, Prime's drumming and experienced bassist Julie Walkington expertly underpinning throughout. A brief interlude from the famous Second Movement of Rodrigo's "Concierto de Aranjuez" followed, harp effectively taking the introductory guitar part and flutes playing the melody, before "Comin' Home Baby" had us once more thinking of Herbie Mann at the Village Gate, Mod suits and Hush Puppies.
Well, some us.
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