The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
http://rt.com/politics/panarin-usa-collapse-economy-905/
This is an interesting thought experiment on what could happen if things go WAY downhill.
The US might collapse into six pieces, according to a theory proposed by Russian political scientist Igor Panarin. And the current economic crisis in the country, amplified by mass protests, might be the beginning.
Sen. Tom Udall (D., N.M.) has proposed a constitutional amendment that would wipe out the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 ruling in Citizens United.
The ruling last year unleashed a flood of campaign contributions from corporations and super PACs, which can spend as much money as they want and do so nearly anonymously.
The proposal put forth by Udall would add language to the Constitution that says Congress and the states can regulate campaign contributions and expenditures. Click here for more on the proposal in The New Mexican.
This proposal is seen as part of broader movement to rethink and reform the notion of corporate personhood in the US.
They spotted the first student texting 17 minutes into her law school career. Of the upper-year students, the observers could see using laptops, 58 percent used them for non-class purposes at least half the time. Altogether, 87 percent of the upper-year students used laptops for non-class purposes more than five minutes per class. Announcing that students should not surf the Web seemingly made no difference; even as a professor proclaimed such a prohibition, students continued visiting the Internet.
via Laptops in class: How distracting are they? – CSMonitor.com.
This CSM op/ed piece is drawn from a draft paper by Prof. Jeff Sovern at St. John’s University School of Law. Based on back of room observations of students’ use of laptops, Prof. Sovern speculates that student react to a tension between incentives to pay attention and the temptation to be distracted when not engaged. The result is that upper level students are more likely to be doing something else with the technology available to them during class rather than paying full attention to the lecture.
While the op/ed piece comes down firmly on the side of banning laptops in the classroom, a move Prof. Sovern notes is paternalistic yet shows a “responsibility to their students’ future clients”, the fuller draft leaves conclusions more open and encourages others to conduct similar studies.
The “banning laptops” debate has been ongoing in legal academia for over a decade and it looks like there is no end in sight. The problem is that law schools have spent a large part of that decade encouraging students to purchase laptops, providing them with ubiquitous wireless access, and increasing student reliance on electronic resources. The message at some schools is that law students should use laptops everywhere but in the classroom, a place where many students actually find technology most useful.
I suspect that this problem will continue until law faculty and law students can sort out what it is they are trying to achieve in the classroom.
So, I decided to take a look at state court websites to see what opinions are available and in what format. I’m as far as Kentucky and the only real surprise so far is that Alabama wants me to buy a $200 subscription to search what appears to be a home-brewed legal info system. I have no idea what’s up with that. Beyond that everything else is all about the PDFs. The older sections of archives, if they exist, may include HTML and word processor files, but any sort of FTP or other bulk download mechanism is not to be found.
I’ll be pushing forward with this over the next couple of evenings. If you want to follow along, follow this delicious tag: http://www.delicious.com/emasters/courts.
The changes are part of a movement by the Supreme Court under the tenure of Chief Justice Kilbride and his predecessors to integrate electronic technology with a goal of achieving greater court transparency and efficiency. The Illinois Supreme Court was one of the first to incorporate Twitter in publicizing announcements and was also among the early few to make available video and audio recordings of its oral arguments the same day they occur before the Court. The audio of all Appellate Court arguments is also available on the Court’s website at www.state.il.us/court.
The changes in citation will be overseen by the Supreme Court Reporter of Decisions, Brian Ervin. The new method of citation goes into effect July 1, 2011. The current contract for printing the advance sheets and bound volumes of Illinois court opinions expires July 31, 2011 and will not be renewed.
This is great, but like most courts the opinions are available only as PDFs. While PDFs do provide an easy way to access and read the opinions, the PDF format is of very limited use to anyone looking to do things like the Free Law Reporter or otherwise make programatic use of the files. It doesn’t need to be this way. From 1996 through 2005 the Illinois Supreme Court made its opinions available for download as HTML and WordPerfect documents before switching to PDF only in 2006. Surely, at the very least, the court could continue to provide additional formats for download along with the PDF?
The old “open vs. proprietary” debate is over and open won. As IT infrastructure moves to the cloud, openness is not just a priority for source code but for standards and APIs as well. Almost every vendor in the IT market now wants to position its products as “open.” Vendors that don’t have an open source product instead emphasize having a product that uses “open standards” or has an “open API.”
“Openwashing” is a term derived from “greenwashing” to refer to dubious vendor claims about openness. Openwashing brings the old “open vs. proprietary” debate back into play – not as “which one is better” but as “which one is which?”
What does it mean to be open? And how can you tell if a product is really “open”?
The article goes on to recommend paying close attention to licensing, the community, and a vendors proprietary products to see if their software and APIs are truly open source or just wrapped in a open blanket to take advantage of the latest buzz words.
Over the years I’ve seen a number of instances of openwashing, most notably with companies who built commercial products around a core of open source projects. The companies would make big noise about being open source and such, but community releases would just be a mash-up of other open source projects with the glue and features that comprised the real product they wanted to sell held back as proprietary.
So, buyer/developer beware. That open source based product that looks so cool may really just be a mirage.
But it turns out that you can’t easily do such searches in Google any more. Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search.
Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google.
Article highlights the failings of Google when it comes to finding plain old information. If your just looking for information Google may not be your best bet. I mean how many times is a random ad going to ask me if I want to buy “Drupal API load_node()”?
Wadhwa suggests an alternative in Blekko, a search tool that lets you use “slashtags” to refine your own searches. Indeed alternate tools for finding information are beginning to appear and perhaps the threat of competition will move Google to clean up its spam ridden indexes.
Public.Resource.Org will begin providing in 2011 a weekly release of the Report of Current Opinions (RECOP). The Report will initially consist of HTML of all slip and final opinions of the appellate and supreme courts of the 50 states and the federal government. The feed will be available for reuse without restriction under the Creative Commons CC-Zero License and will include full star pagination.This data is being obtained through an agreement with Fastcase, one of the leading legal information publishers. Fastcase will be providing us all opinions in a given week by the end of the following week. We will work with our partners in Law.Gov to perform initial post-processing of the raw HTML data, including such tasks as privacy audits, conversion to XHTML, and tagging for style, content, and metadata.
via The Report of Current Opinions – O\’Reilly Radar.
On Sunday Dec. 19 Carl Malamud made the startling announcement quoted above. And you did read it correctly: “The Report will initially consist of HTML of all slip and final opinions of the appellate and supreme courts of the 50 states and the federal government. ” To say that this is huge would be the understatement of the year.
From personal experience I can tell you that the “slip and final opinions of the appellate and supreme courts of the 50 states and the federal government” have never all been freely available in HTML before. Not even close. At best you could probably wrangle 75% of these opinions in PDF using a mountain of code to scrape sites and parse feeds. To have all this available as a single feed is a game changer.
As a researcher and builder of tools for legal research and education, having access to a single feed that contains all of this data is just the thing I’ve been looking for (and occasionally trying to build) for the past 15 or so years. I have no doubt that the availability of this feed will spark a flurry of development to use the data in new and interesting ways. I will certainly be incorporating it in the CALI tools I’m currently working on.
Of course there are a couple of caveats here. First, we haven’t seen the feed yet. It won’t be available for a few weeks, so right now I’m still just waiting to see what it will look like. Second, there are 2 “timeouts” built into this service, direct government involvement by July 1, 2011 and a general sunset of private sector activity in creating the feed at the end of 2012. The timeouts underscore the belief that providing free and open access to primary legal materials is a duty of the government, plain and simple. As citizens we are bound to follow the law and our government should be obligated to provide us with free and open access to that law.
I know I’m certainly looking forward to a new year that brings greater free and open access to the law. Thanks, Carl.
Two weeks ago the Google eBookstore finally launched, and the world was briefly amazed. Google Editions, as it was known until launch, was the book world’s Duke Nukem Forever: vaporware for seven years, depending on how you count. Its actual emergence was like the birth of a unicorn. A mewling, misshapen, half-baked unicorn.
Google eBooks: Is That All There Is?.
So, yep, Google launched an eBookstore. It really is a direct shot across the bow of Amazon, but Google should have gone for something with a bigger caliber. As this article notes it has taken Google a lllooonnnggg time to get here, but one does wonder if “here” moved in the meantime and Google some how missed it.
There are really good reasons to believe that Google’s only real competition is Amazon, after both sites are just trying to sell you stuff. The thing is, Amazon sells directly while Google sells through search. And the fact that Google wraps everything in search actually puts it at a disadvantage.
When I’m looking for information I go to Google. When I want to buy something I go to Amazon. But that isn’t what Google wants to tell advertisers. Google needs those big spenders to think that people are searching Google to buy stuff. Amazon, OTOH, is a big retail search engine. People really do buy stuff there, not click thorugh ads to somewhere else to buy.
Try this: search Google for Sony Televisions. One of the top sponsored links is right to Amazon. If you see this enough, that direct link to Amazon for stuff you want to buy, sooner or later it will occur to you to just go to Amazon to look for stuff to buy. Just skip Google. And I have to think that is Google’s worst nightmare. If folks go directly to Amazon to buy stuff without searching Google first, then that ad money is lost to Google.
So, back to the bookstore. The Google bookstore is an attempt to try and harness the stuff that Google does real well, crunch lots of data in interesting ways, and turn it into retail dollars spent on the Google site. That would show Amazon! Look we can sell stuff too! It is a gamble though since retailing (even ebooks) is really different than search. But who knows, maybe some day a search for Sony Televisions will return a big “Buy Now” button taht takes you right to Google Checkout.
At this point, Amazon Mechanical Turk has reached the mainstream. Pretty much everyone knows about the concept. Post small tasks online, pay people cents, and get thousands of micro-tasks completed.
Unfortunately, this resulted in some unfortunate trends. Anyone who frequents just a little bit the market will notice the tremendous number of spammy HITs. (HIT = a task posted for completion in the market; stands for Human Intelligence Task.) Test if the ads in my website work”. “Create a Twitter account and follow me”. “Like my YouTube video”. “Download this app”. “Write a positive review on Yelp”. A seemingly endless amount of spam HITs come to the market, mainly with the purpose of spamming “social media” metrics.
via Mechanical Turk: Now with 40.92% spam. – A Computer Scientist in a Business School.
Article points out that spammers tend to pay too much and only assign one HIT per request. Comments reveal that workers on MT can be relatively sophisticated in detecting spam, often wary of requests that seem too good to be true. So, if you’re thinking about using Mechanical Turk to get some work done, keep in mind that the request should offer a reasonable fee and include multiple HITs.