Can Monkeys do Business?

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One of the self-portraits taken by the Macaque

One of the self-portraits taken by the Macaque

Some time ago, a wild Macaque monkey snapped a few self-portraits after snatching a human’s camera. The name of the human in question is David Slater who, probably assuming the monkey would have no interest in licensing his work, took it upon himself to sell the rights to a news agency.

The episode sparked an online debate on whether monkeys can actually own copyrights. The debate was also fuelled by a take down request by the news agency claiming ownership of the photos. Clearly though, as anonymous coward’s post explains, monkeys cannot hold copyrights, so there really is no debate and we can all get on with our lives, right?

Well… there is something else really intriguing about this story: As I read through the various posts, comments and arguments, it seemed evident that many people not only think giving copyrights to monkeys is silly, but they go as far as stating that event if they had them, they would not be interested in, or would not know how, to exploit them. Monkeys just can’t do business… right? Hmm, not so sure about that. See, many of us think of doing business as a complex activity which only humans, with our highly developed mental capacity, can understand, let alone perform, but in its simplest form, doing business is nothing more than a basic exercise in cause and effect. Something that any economist understands as well as my 1 year old: “some behaviours cause me gains, while others cause me pains”. The trick, is to learn which are the ‘good’ behaviours and which are the ‘bad’ ones.

This is what we call incentives, powerful learning tools that determine the way we act throughout our lives. Most other business concepts beyond that (e.g., currency, ownership, derivatives, etc…) are just sophisticated tools that we use to manage incentives. The interesting thing about this is that the entire natural world works on the basis of incentives and we are definitely not the only species who experience them consciously, in fact, as the video below shows, we are not even the only species who can use sophisticated instruments like currency for the management of incentives. Just ask yourself: is there really a difference between using printed paper, pieces of metal, seeds or silver tokens to do business?

TEDx Montréal Quartier Latin: Lending an (un)helping hand

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Check out my TEDx talk done in October 2010 in Montréal, QC! I am always closing my eyes in photographs and this could not be the exception.

Jorge Silva argues that when designing assistive devices biomedical engineers should seek to “scratch where it itches.” By adopting alternative business models such as open source systems, users of assistive devices are revolutionizing design and production processes, creating technologies that fit the needs of a larger population.

Installing a Canon Pixma iP2600 on Ubuntu Lucid (10.04)

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According to this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=5337771: the drivers are available from the Canon Asia support site: http://support-asia.canon-asia.com/. Trouble is, those drivers are a bit outdated and require a dependency (libcupsys2) that has been renamed in Lucid. Luckily, a workaround is available here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1305248.

However, after modifying, repackaging and installing the drivers, the printer still wouldn’t work and returned an error that said something like “filter not owned by root” every time I attempted to print a test page. This is because the driver files were owned by me as user instead of root. I have no idea why this happened (makes no sense), but I found the solution here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1313291.

Basically, you just need to change the ownership of the drivers in:

  • /usr/lib/cups/filter/

    , and

  • /usr/lib/cups/backend/

in my case, these files where:

  • /usr/lib/cups/filter/pstocanonij

    , and

  • /usr/lib/cups/backend/cnij_usb

Looting? Seriously?

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What better way to confirm our suspicions of “the poor”, “the underdeveloped”, “the savage”? What better opportunity to reaffirm our condition of “civilized” than to look at Haiti after the earthquake? Make no mistake, because according to the Associated Press, “looting” is what Haitians are doing. We, “the developed”, obviously know better, because when our houses are destroyed, food and water are scarce, and our families lie dead on the roads, we wait for someone to come, rebuild, and officially re-open the stores so we can go in and buy toothpaste to cover the smell of death.

There is looting in Haiti alright, and there has been for longer than history cares to remember. Looting is what France did to Haiti for over a century, looting is what the USA has done to Haiti since the early 1900s, looting is what the Inter-American Development Bank continues to do to Haiti.

So the lesson here is clear: the audacity of freedom, the gift of Haiti to the world, is the greatest offence a nation can ever commit, and those who dare to take their own path, will be despised, abused and ignored, as will be their children, and their children’s children.

State-sponsored racism, Canadian style

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Six or seven years ago, when I arrived for the first time in Canada, I was appalled by the shameless and abusive way in which other Mexicans would try to bend the Canadian refugee system in their favour. Most of the people I knew that were claiming refugee status weren’t actually facing persecution back in Mexico; their lives were not in danger either. Furthermore, many were working illegally in construction, as movers, as banquet hall waiters and other similar jobs while at the same time cashing their refugee status check. I particularly remember a pair of twins claiming their lives were in danger back in Mexico because they were homosexual, but every Wednesday night, like clockwork, they would meet their girlfriends to spend the night with them partying and drinking through their refugee compensation.

“Sooner or later” -I thought- “the Canadian government will have to do something about this”, and so they did… I just never imagined they would make me and my family and the families of all other thousands of hard-working Mexican immigrants, pay for the failure of the refugee system.

The decision by Citizenship and Immigration Canada to require a Visa from Mexican visitors does not even come close to justify referring to the Canadian government as racist. As many Canadians would shamefully admit, this mere annoyance pales in comparison to the county’s treatment of aboriginals, the gold-standard for racism in the country. But when the CIC minister Mr. Jason Kenney decides to skip bilateral talks already underway to solve this problem, announcing the decision overnight and giving a 48-hour ultimatum to ALL Mexicans travelling into Canada, well… that is not exactly what I would call respectful, so I am forced to acknowledge Mr. Kenney’s efforts to drag the CIC into my top racist Canadian policy makers list.

In the meanwhile, my family, who have happily spent their earnings in Canada for the past 5 summers and a couple of winters, will be coming at least $450 short and a lot more annoyed than ever before. But we are some of “those people” who can pay their way in, so congratulations Mr. Kenney! you have achieved your goal of keeping “the poor ones” out. After all, we wouldn’t want the Leamington workers to get distracted with family visits; that would probably add a few cents to the cost of our tomatoes and nobody would want to pay for that, right?

I hope my government in Mexico reacts at least as strongly as the Czech Republic’s, if anything, just to show some self respect. In the meanwhile, I encourage any Canadian reading this to share it with their MPs and MPPs (can’t wait to become a citizen). Who knows… maybe we can get the Queen to start paying my family five dollars a year in reparations.