The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
Fayetteville, Ga.-based Southern Community Bank was seized late Friday by state and federal banking regulators, in the 12th Georgia bank failure in the last 11 months.
via Southern Community Bank shuttered – Atlanta Business Chronicle:
This comes in the same week that GA posted record unemployment and the construction market continued to collapse. Doesn’t seem like a recovery is in the cards this year.
The system, which took two and a half years to install, has been quietly up and operating for about six weeks.
Unlike free wi-fi access that has been available for years at restaurants and public buildings around Atlanta, Clear isn’t free. To hook up a lap top requires a special USB modem, for $59.99. There’s a $35 activation fee, and service subscription rates that start at $10 a day and go to $50 a month.
But the WiMax technology is three or four times as fast as computer Internet access from air cards through companies such as AT&T and Verizon, says the company, and every bit as fast as home DSL lines.
via WiMax turns metro Atlanta into giant wireless hotspot | ajc.com.
May have to give this a try.
Many state court systems now permit live streaming video of court proceedings via the Internet to interested parties. The equipment used by Westlaw and its partner Courtroom Connect does not interfere with court proceedings; it typically consists of one compact, stationary video camera on a tripod, a video encoder that enables the video signal to be sent over the Internet, an audio mixer, and a device that transmits the signal. With the exception of the camera, all of the equipment can fit on a small table. It usually takes about four hours to install and test the equipment. To webcast proceedings live, a separate Internet connection can be installed in order to prevent any disturbance to the court’s Internet connection.
via Westlaw Wants Your Video Records.
Interesting development. This press release is from March 2009, but Carl Malamud just twittered about it. I’ll look into this a bit more, but it looks like this partnership is making video record of trials, which are generally public, and then selling the footage. Some portions are available for free, but full coverage is only for paying customers. Sounds like a 21st century update of the way West gained a virtual monopoly on the print opinions of courts in the late 19th and early 20th century, a monopoly that is only now being broken.
I’ve taken a quick look at the stuff on the Courtroom Connect site and this is not rocket science. They are placing a web cam in the courtroom and streaming the video back to a Microsoft server. Pretty straight forward and something that could be handled in house or by an organization that would provide the content for free.
As of August 1, 2009, Pace Environmental Law Review (PELR) will use a new Peer Review process to select articles for publication. Submissions will be reviewed internally and then forwarded to a select group of Peer Reviewers – academics, practitioners, and experts in the field, including members of Pace Law School’s world-renowned environmental law faculty. The Peer Review process will offer new and distinctive opportunities to foster continued debate and reflection upon some of the most pressing topics within the field of environmental law.
via Pace Environmental Law Review Announces Shift to Peer Review « Feminist Law Professors.
A step in the right direction for law reviews. Their peer review FAQ is here. Now if PELR would publish on the web in an open format, that would really put them in the forefront. The “archive” link on the PELR website redirects to HeinOnline and requires a login for access. Maybe sign the Durham Statement and get those web publications going.
ALL-SIS has agreed to co-sponsor the Legal Information and Technology eJournal (http://www.ssrn.com/update/lsn/lsn_legal-info-tech.html) on SSRN for the next three years. The eJournal was launched in January of 2009 and is co-edited by ALL-SIS members Randy Diamond, (diamondrj@missouri.edu) Director of Library and Technology Resources and Associate Legal Research Professor of Law at the University of Missouri Columbia and Lee Peoples, (lpeoples@okcu.edu) Associate Professor of Law Library Science and Associate Director of the Law Library at Oklahoma City University.
via ALL-SIS | ALL-SIS to Co-sponsor SSRN’s Legal Information and Technology eJournal.
The journal will present work on many aspects of legal information and technology. The full Legal Information & Technology library is browsable here.
“The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Thomson Reuters’s lawsuit against George Mason University has been dismissed. Last fall the news organization had sued GMU’s Center for History and New Media over supposed violations of the EndNote licensing agreement by the Zotero project, hosted at the university. Zotero, a Firefox plug-in designed to help scholars store and organize their online research, has seen millions of downloads. Zotero project co-director Sean Takats’s announcement is pretty heartwarming. No comment as yet from Thomson Reuters.”
via Slashdot News Story | Zotero Lawsuit Dismissed.
TR had alleged that the Zotero team at GMU reverse engineered EndNote in violation of the EULA.
The starting list of schools for this report was taken from data provided by the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar. This is their “2008 Official Guide to ABA-approved Law Schools”. Selective data is reproduced to present demographic data about schools to provide context for the content displayed. Factors such as student body size, program type, number of faculty, library collection or tuition could directly or indirectly influence website content needs. However, no inference is made regarding the relationship of this data to the homepage content.
In addition to capturing information about schools in the ABA spreadsheet, the report includes several non-ABA schools and online legal education organizations. For good measure, the homepages for Oxford and Cambridge are also included.
via Law School Website Design Study 2009.
Not something you see everyday. Roger Skalbeck of Georgetown Law Library put this report together and will present it at the CALI’s 2009 Conference for law School Computing. Something like this is a good thing for law schools, giving folks something to compare their site to.
“[The Arkansas Supreme Court] and the Court of Appeals will soon step into the future: effective July 1, 2009 the electronic version of appellate decisions posted on the Arkansas Judiciary website [link] will the official reports of those decisions. Arkansas will be the first state in the nation to publish and distribute the official report of its appellate decisions electronically.” In re: Arkansas Supreme Court and Court of Appeals Rule 5-2 (May 28, 2009).
Publication of the Arkansas Reports and Arkansas Appellate Reports will end with volume 375 Ark./104 Ark. App. Hat tip to Coleen Barger (UALR Bowen School of Law), Legal Writing Prof Blog.
A most welcome development. While the linked announcement is a PDF of a scanned fax (yuk!), the opinions currently on the site are nice clean text-based PDF files and site boasts a page of RSS feeds that let you keep track of what is going on. Let’s hope this is fast moving trend.
In a burst of reinvention, though, the high court is asking Congressional appropriators for about $800,000 to take the site in-house (in chamber?) and give it a good overhaul. The Government Printing Office established the site in 2000, and has been running it ever since.
The court has increasingly been doing its own Web production, and in its request to Congress, it noted a rather astonishing mark of success: a “100 percent increase” in hits, to almost 19 million in January 2009, compared with January 2008.
via Supreme Court Plans a Web Overhaul – The Lede Blog – NYTimes.com.
Sounds like an excellent idea, so long as the money is well spent. May be worth the Court’s time to take a look at some of the other sites that are serving their opinions to get ideas and ask for help.
During week 20 (May 17 – 23, 2009), influenza activity decreased in the United States, however there are still higher levels of influenza-like illness than is normal for this time of year.
CDC – Influenza (Flu) | Weekly Report: Influenza Summary Update Week 20, 2008-2009 Season
Fascinating. Still a lot of flu around, including H1N1, more than normal for this time of year in fact. Looking at the graphs would seem to indicate that despite the appearance of H1N1 and a late season, last year (07–08) was worse.