The richest repository of cultural material in the country would have to be the ABC — so it is exciting and maybe even alarming to hear that Auntie is experimenting with the idea of opening up its archives so that members of the public can access and even re-use and remix the material. The experiment is taking place under Pool, the social media project developed within Radio National. Pool is a groundbreaking experiment in User Generated Content. Users can upload text, music, photos, videos, documentaries or whatever and the content is made available for others to view and use
I yam what I yam,
declared Popeye. And just what that is is likely to become less clear as the copyright expires on the character who generates about £1.5 billion in annual sales. From 1 January, the iconic sailor falls into the public domain in Britain under an EU law that restricts the rights of authors to 70 years after their death. Elzie Segar, the Illinois artist who created Popeye, his love interest Olive Oyl and nemesis Bluto, died in 1938
It must have been an appalling moment when a Viking realised he had paid two cows for a fake designer sword; a clash of blade on blade in battle would have led to his sword, still sharp enough to slice through bone, shattering like glass. You really didn’t want to have that happen,
said Dr Alan Williams, an archaeometallurgist and consultant to the Wallace Collection, the London museum which has one of the best assemblies of ancient weapons in the world. He and Tony Fry, a senior researcher at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, south-west London, have solved a riddle that the Viking swordsmiths may have sensed but didn’t quite understand
W Mark Felt Sr, 95, associate director of the FBI during the Watergate scandal, better known as Deep Throat, the most famous anonymous source in American history, died at his home in Santa Rosa, California. Felt secretly guided Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to pursue the story of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate office buildings, and later of the Nixon administration’s campaign of spying and sabotage against its perceived political enemies — via Slashdot
Scientists have discovered what they say is a completely unexpected new giant dinosaur that lived 70 million years ago in Argentina. At 5 to 6.5 metres long, depending on its tail size, Austroraptor cabazai is among the largest of the slender, carnivorous, two-legged dinosaurs called raptors, said Fernando Novas, the lead researcher behind the discovery
Back in the 60’s, archive space at the BBC was hard to come by, forcing the broadcaster to delete some of its own material. Now, a TV show that fell victim to this regime has been resurrected, with the BBC using a pirate recording of the show’s audio to bring it back to life
The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; The Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s; and the entire works left to the collection from LIFE photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, and Nina Leen. These are just some of the things you’ll see in Google Image Search today. Google have announced the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This collection of newly-digitised images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s
Obviously, there were no satellites to snap pictures of Rome two millennia ago. But that hasn’t stopped experts from giving Web surfers a bird’s eye view of the ancient city. Google Earth has added to its software a 3-D simulation that painstakingly reconstructs nearly 7,000 buildings of ancient Rome, including the Colosseum, the Forum and the Circus Maximus. The program, which gives users access to maps and global satellite imagery, now hosts a new layer that allows surfers to see how Rome might have looked in AD 320, a bustling city of about 1 million people under Emperor Constantine
The United States abandoned a nuclear weapon beneath the ice in northern Greenland following a crash in 1968, a BBC investigation has found
Many of the world’s deep-sea octopuses evolved from a common ancestor, whose closest relative still exists in the Southern Ocean, a study has shown
Britain’s code-cracking and computing heritage has won a lifeline in the form of a donation from English Heritage. The grant of £330,000 will be used to undertake urgent roof works at Bletchley Park — where Allied codebreakers worked in World War II. Discussions are also in progress on a further three-year, £600,000 funding programme for the historic site
A once-secret 1940s tunnel complex under the centre of London that housed military intelligence and linked the Cold War hotline phone between Washington and Moscow has been put up for sale
Australia and its immediate neighbours are home to a third of the world’s languages, most of which could disappear without trace. A national archive project is capturing what it can, and making the resource available online to researchers and regional cultural centres. The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) project has been recognised with the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) Award in humanities and social sciences. The project team will receive a server worth over $26,000 thanks to the prize’s sponsor, Dell
A bid to save Britain’s computing heritage has been given a $100,000 (£57,000) boost by a joint donation from US hi-tech firms IBM and PGP. The donation will help curate and restore exhibits at the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Pa The two firms said they hoped the money would kick-start further donations from the technology industry to make up an estimated £7m needed to run the museum. Exhibits include Colossus, thought by many to be the world’s first computer
In its never-ending quest to organise the world’s information, Google started to digitise old editions from newspapers like Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, St Petersburg Times, Today’s News-Herald and make them available at Google News Archive
A giant statue of a Buddha has been discovered in central Afghanistan, near to the ruins of the world-famous Bamiyan Buddhas. Archaeologists say the 19m statue is in a sleeping position and dates back to the Third Century. Other relics such as coins and ceramics were also found. The Taleban blew up two giant standing Buddhas carved into the mountainside at Bamiyan — once a thriving centre of Buddhism — in 2001
Apple has admitted that a British man played a part in developing the iconic and extremely profitable iPod, although he has so far received no money for his invention. In 1979 Kane Kramer from Hertfordshire filed a patent for a digital music player that stored just three and a half minutes of music to a solid state chip — limiting media options to just one short song. Nonetheless, a company was set up by Kramer to bring the IXI to a commercial release, but it slipped into the public domain in 1988 when the firm failed to raise the £60,000 needed to renew international patents. Because of this patent lapse, Kramer has received no money from the sale of any of the 163 million iPods Apple has so far sold. However, Apple recently contacted Kramer and hired him as a consultant in a legal case against another company that claimed the iPod infringed on its own patents, Burst
In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a cave, half a dozen specialists embarked this week on an historic undertaking: digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file — among the most sought-after and examined documents on earth — available to all on the Internet
Kevin Kelly has an interesting post about an archive designed with an estimated lifespan of 2,000 -10,000 years to serve future generations as a modern Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta disk contains analog human-readable
scans of scripts, text, and diagrams using nickel deposited on an etched silicon disk and includes 15,000 microetched pages of language documentation in 1,500 different languages, including versions of Genesis 1-3, a universal list of the words common for each language, and pronunciation guides. Produced by the Long Now Foundation, the plan is to replicate the disk promiscuously and distribute them around the world in nondescript locations so at least one will survive their 2,000-year lifespan. This is one of the most fascinating objects on earth,
says Oliver Wilke. If we found one of these things 2,000 years ago, with all the languages of the time, it would be among our most priceless artifacts. I feel a high responsibility for preserving it for future generations
— Slashdot
One of the driest deserts in the world, the Saharan Tenere Desert, hosted at least two flourishing lakeside populations during the Stone Age, a discovery of the largest graveyard from the era reveals. The archaeological site in Niger, called Gobero, was discovered by Paul Sereno at the University of Chicago, during a dinosaur-hunting expedition. It had been used as a burial site by two very different populations during the millennia when the Sahara was lush
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