Librarian Ben Tucker's Tumblr

The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera's settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don't output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.

Wow.

This week I was unpleasantly surprised by Harvard Business Review's extremely restrictive license policy, which prohibits linking to their articles, even in the context of a classroom course reserve.

Here's the text of the statement:

Harvard Business Review Notice of Use Restrictions, May 2009 Harvard Business Review and Harvard Business Publishing Newsletter content on EBSCOhost is licensed for the private individual use of authorized EBSCOhost users. It is not intended for use as assigned course material in academic institutions nor as corporate learning or training materials in businesses. Academic licensees may not use this content in electronic reserves, electronic course packs, persistent linking from syllabi or by any other means of incorporating the content into course resources. Business licensees may not host this content on learning management systems or use persistent linking or other means to incorporate the content into learning management systems. Harvard Business Publishing will be pleased to grant permission to make his content available through such means. For rates and permission, contact [email protected].

Fight fiercely, Harvard!

I like this tutorial, because it breaks from the mold of slides and screenshots that too many tutorials fall into.