The problem with using unemployed people to patch up the shortfall in NHS service provision in austerity Britain is that it hurts the service and exploits the jobseekers. If a job is worth doing it should be valued and if it is needed it should be valued even more. Isn't that what free-marketeers tell us?

The Sandwell and West Birmingham hospitals trust is running a scheme using jobseekers to perform tasks such as, "general tidying, welcoming visitors, serving drinks to patients, running errands, reading to patients and assisting with feeding patients". The justification is that the jobseekers get real job experience and the trust gets free labour.

At a time when many in the NHS are facing loosing their jobs is this a glimpse of how the coalition plans to paper over the cracks?

This could be an important observation. What if there is a paralel distinction between discrete imagery and real/continuous imagery in rap?

Is 99 Problems actually a workbook for this? I think we need answers.

There have been calls to reform copyright law in order to clarify and explicitly allow transformative sampling as a tribute to MCA (AKA Adam Yauch). The Beastie Boys were one of the bands who used sampling to brilliant effect in the 1980s to create music that sounded fresh and vibrant. The music they made at that time is part of the emotional fabric of New York City and gave hip hop a huge foot to the fundament.

In a case of extremely poor timing the label Tuf America filed a lawsuit against the Beastie Boys and Capitol Records for samples used on Licensed To Ill and Paul’s Boutique the day before MCA's death from cancer. Perhaps that was poor luck for them. It doesn't look good to sue a dying man.

There are some particularly troubling aspects of the case. A great deal of the legal argument used by Tuf America is based on case law that has come into effect in the 25 years since Licensed To Ill was released. If the act was legal when committed how can the Beasties be held to account now?

The samples in question may have been used to create some great music, but has their use really hurt the artists who made the original records?

A second troubling issue is Tuf America say they did a thorough sound analysis of the tracks they allege are infringing their rights. If this is required surely the works in question are transformative.

Building on past work has been part of musical culture since there has been a musical culture. Now we find ourselves in a situation where litigation is (potentially) strangling culture and creativity. Copyright should be encouraging and rewarding creativity and innovation not holding it back.

There should be a simple solution moving forward. Perhaps a system of explicit attribution for samples would fortify and strengthen musical culture. Building a clear sharing culture would be a great tribute to Mr Yauch and allow future generations of musicians to make some great music unencumbered by fear and worry that they will be set upon by corporate vultures.

via Leigh Beadon at Techdirt

Numberphile is now my favourite YouTube channel ever. Created by the people behind the repositories of wonder that are Periodic Videos and Sixty Symbols this channel simply (or maybe not simply) tries to catalogue interesting and important numbers in a way that non-mathematicians can understand.

This video begins with a wonderful statement about Graham's Number, the highest number to be utilised in an equation, "If you tried to picture Graham's Number in your head. Then your head would collapse to form a black hole." This is not an analogy at all. It's all about the size of your brain, the size of Graham's Number and entropy.

I don't know if I like these videos more for the information about the numbers or the joy of watching clever people (who are normally under-appreciated) explaining why these numbers interest and excite them. There are lots of great videos in the channel about all sorts of numbers and topics, Pi, primes and so forth.

I wish I had paid more attention to this stuff when my mind was more limber.

Under the threat of losing their benefits, which amount to a paltry £53/week, young people in the UK are being bullied into working for no pay for supermarkets and budget stores. The stupidity of this boggles my mind.

Not only are these young people being given a deeply negative working experience but the roles they are filling could (and should) be paid positions. The UK has instituted a low-wage top-up scheme called Working Tax Credit largely to make these marginal jobs viable and now they are forcing people to work there for nothing.

The advertised carrot, with the threat of penury being the unadvertised one, is the chance of an interview at the end of eight weeks unpaid work, and several stores have multiple unemployed young folks competing to be the best floor sweeper in order to win the job at the end of this farrago.

The young woman in the picture above has recently received a BSc in geology and the best we can offer her is unpaid work in a Poundland store. What message are we sending out to our young people with this kind of treatment?

Stefanie Gordon took a striking picture of Space Shuttle Endeavour's recent launch from an aeroplane window. When the plane landed she uploaded the image to Twitpic, tweeted it and (as far as she was concerned) that was that. It's a great image and several news organisations started to use the image to illustrate their coverage of Endeavour's last outing.

This has lead to a secondary issue, Gordon owns the copyright in the image and many of the organisations using didn't license it they just downloaded it and published anyway. Gordon could have made a decent pile of coin for the image and there's some tub-thumping going on about how it's disgusting that she didn't.

The key point is evidently Gordon doesn't care about the money. She took the image, shared it and then went on with living her life. If she were a professional photographer no doubt she would have contacted an agency immediately and started trying to wring as much commercial advantage as possible from this, but she's not and it seems she doesn't want to be.

This is where folks like Bob Sullivan of MSNBC get a bit uncomfortable. Not everyone wants to be a professional photographer. Not everyone wants to go through the hassle of licensing everything they snap. That said it would not be hard to contact Gordon and offer her payment should they wish to.

Not everything that is created is about money and nor should it have to be.

The people being assaulted by the armed and armoured police are protesting about the financial crisis in Spain and elsewhere and what it will mean for Catalan society to deal with the consequences of the Euro collapse. Evidently a tent city had just been forcibly dismantled and the people were sitting to prevent municipal cleaning trucks leaving Plaza de Cataluna.

The police behaviour shown here is disgusting to me. It is not just the fact that peaceful people are being attacked. The most disturbing thing to me is that the malice is being doled out by the police in such a calculated manner. This looks to me like incitement to riot and I wonder to what extent this is a conscious tactic?

Young people in Europe are often derided for not being interested in politics. Solutions like allowing voting by SMS are the kind of thing that gets touted as potential solutions. You know 'cause kids are down with their phones like.

These young people are very engaged with politics though, but not in the manner of previous generations who just sat back and took the crap they were fed. These people are angry enough to sleep on the street to try to find a voice in a crucial time for their country and they are being confronted with a stark metaphor for what their country thinks of their opinions.