Sunday, December 4, 2016

Dr. Elaraby the President of the ordinary arbitration division of CAS steps down

According to the press release issued today by the International Council of Arbitration for Sport (ICAS), the governing body of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), Dr. Nabil Elaraby steps down from the position of president of the ordinary arbitration division of CAS.

Sunday, 4 December 2016

Thursday, June 16, 2016

"Walking and Texting" shall it be banned?!

Photo: Barcroft Media via The Telegraph


FastCompany: "Texting While Walking? In China, There’s A Lane For That!"
By Beth Brainard, special to the Daily News: " In London, the problem has grown to such proportions that padded bumpers have been installed around the lampposts in certain parts of the city. In the U.S., cities are taking various approaches. New York City has chosen to lower the speed limits on some streets while Fort Lee, New Jersey, has passed a law banning texting while walking.
A 2012 study from Stony Brook University in New York states that those who text while walking are 60 percent more likely to veer off their course than non-texters. Being engrossed in conversation on the phone while walking has a similar effect.
Scientists studying mobile device use call the phenomenon "inattentive blindness." They have found that the human brain has evolved to only be able to adequately focus attention on one task at a time. In other words, when you text or talk on the phone while walking, you cannot pay full attention to both tasks.
Florida legislators are — finally — recognizing that distracted driving is a problem, but they would be wise to broaden their debate to include the increasingly dangerous problem of distracted walking."
 
"The US state of New Jersey may keep the inattentive among us from walking into brick walls or plunging into manholes, daggnabit, even if it has to throw us in jail or fine us to get the point across.
The Associated Press reports that it’s going to do this – in theory, at least – by banning walking while texting.
A new measure recently introduced by New Jersey Assemblywoman Pamela Lampitt would ban distracted walking, forbidding pedestrians on public roads from using electronic communication devices unless those devices are hands-free.
The potential penalties for violating the ban: fines of up to $50, 15 days imprisonment, or both – the same penalties handed out to jaywalkers.
As one of the majority of people (53%, according to the Pew Research Center) who’s walked into something (I admit: it was a pole) while texting, my mind turns all cartoony at the notion of distracted walking.
Imagine putting a phone into the paws of Wile E. Coyote: he’d be texting the Road Runner about dinner plans all the way down to the inevitable “Splat!” at the bottom of the mesa.
Reality is a lot nastier than that, of course."

Friday, April 8, 2016

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Facebook makes a U-turn on nude art after Paris ruling

 Gustav Courbet's L'Origine du Monde, 1866. Photo: Musée d'Orsay, Paris

As per the Art Newspapers, a judge at the Supreme Court in Paris has ruled that Facebook is accountable to French law after a teacher sued the website for banning an image that he had posted of Courbet’s The Origin of the World, 1886, which contravened its rules on nudity. The court ruled that the case comes under its jurisdiction and it is now due to be heard by a civil court in France on 21 May. Facebook’s lawyers had argued that all users agreed to use the courts in California for litigation when they joined the site. Our sister paper Le Journal des Arts said that the judge called this clause “abusive”, while the teacher’s lawyer noted that if it were enforced, none of France’s 22 million Facebook users would “have recourse to French legal jurisdiction in the event of a dispute”. In a seemingly related move, Facebook has issued new guidelines on nudity. “Photographs of paintings, sculptures and other art that depicts nude figures” will now be permitted. Facebook declined to say whether the move was prompted by the legal case.