Free CALI webinar, Topics in Digital Law Practice

CALI is offering a free nine-week, online web-based course on Topics in Digital Law Practice to help address these issues beginning on Friday, Feb. 10, 2012 at 2pm ET. The course is designed to provide an overview of the changes that are occurring in the practice of law today, especially with respect to technology. It will introduce law students for real-world situations that they will encounter in the job market and point law professors to new avenues to cover in their courses. The course will run for one hour a week for nine weeks and will feature a different guest speaker each week. Each class will be delivered via webcast and will have a 30 minute lecture presentation followed by a question & answer period and an online, interactive homework assignment for all course students to complete. There will be no formal assessment like a final exam. The detailed schedule, with topics and speakers,  is available on the CALI website  Attendees need to register for the course . This offer is open to faculty, students, and librarians.

Email providers work together to stop phishing

Information Week reports that the big free Email-service providers Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and AOL Inc., along with financial service companies Bank of America and Paypal, are backing a new effort intended to dramatically reduce "phishing" emails which attempt to trick recipients into thinking they come from a legitimate source. To achieve that, the firms have created DMARC.org, a working group of 15 companies that plans to promote a standard set of technologies that they say will lead to more secure email, making email more trustworthy and phishing more difficult.
Besides email providers and financial-service firms, initial participants include social-networking companies such as Facebook Inc. and LinkedIn Corp. and messaging-security providers such as Agari Data Inc. DMARC chairman Brett McDowell says it won't cost a lot for companies to start using the standards, but it will require them to identify every server that sends email and ensure that the technologies are in use. The same holds true for third-party firms such as marketing agencies that send email on behalf of a company.

law school lunch theft "epidemic"

Above the Law reports that there has been a rash of student lunch thefts at the UCLA School of Law. The law school's administration sent an email to all the students reminding them that "there is no locking mechanism on the student refrigerator. As such, you always assume the risk of using the student refrigerator". Shortly after this report, another lunch theft email, this time at Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, KS, was reported.

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries

The Association of Research Libraries has just published the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries, which was developed in partnership with American University's Center for Social Media and Washington College of Law. The Code identifies eight situations where there is consensus about acceptable practices in the fair use of copyrighted materials. Librarians affirm that fair use is appropriate in each of these contexts, providing helpful guidance about the scope of best practice in each. The Code states that “This is a code of best practices in fair use devised specifically by and for the academic and research library community. It enhances the ability of librarians to rely on fair use by documenting the considered views of the library community about best practices in fair use, drawn from the actual practices and experience of the library community itself." Pitt Law professor Mike Madison was a member of the legal advisory board that helped develop the Code.

First US county gets Super wi-fi

Wilmington, North Carolina and New Hanover County have deployed the first "Super Wi-Fi" network in the US. The innovation will let the public have wireless internet access outside in county parks.  According to an article in the Wilmington StarNews Online, a new type of "white spaces" technology allows the wireless service to go through trees and thick foliage outside, something nearly impossible with the type of Wi-Fi service familiar to most. White spaces will help eliminate bandwidth constraint and will allow wireless services to reach rural areas and other places that the standard wireless signal can't access, said Alan Stillwell, deputy chief of the Federal Communications Commission's Office of Engineering and Technology. For more information, the Gizmodo Blog has a nice clear explanation of how Super Wi-Fi works. 

Wikipedia anti-SOPA protest

Wikipedia has announced that tomorrow, Wednesday, January 18, 2012, it will black out the English language Wikipedia for 24 hours as a protest against proposed legislation in the United States—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate—that Wikipedia says would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia.  The blackout will begin at  05:00 UTC (midnight in the Eastern time zone).  Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, says:

"This is an extraordinary action for our community to take - and while we regret having to prevent the world from having access to Wikipedia for even a second, we simply cannot ignore the fact that SOPA and PIPA endanger free speech both in the United States and abroad, and set a frightening precedent of Internet censorship for the world." 

Guggenheim eBooks

The Guggenheim Museum has digitized a number of out-of-print publications and is offering them free on their website - a treasury of art books. Selections from key museum titles dating back to the founding of the Guggenheim in 1937 are now freely accessible. Over 60 catalogues of Guggenheim shows were scanned in their entirety with the help of the Internet Archive project. Included in the collection are classic titles such as Alexander Calder: A Retrospective Exhibition, or the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-Objective Paintings (1937), one of the museum’s first publications. The website also offers the Syllabus as a finding aid, which highlights key themes, topics, and trends found in the Guggenheim archives. The Syllabus also offers suggestions for additional readings as well as links for further exploration. This is a fine example of  how creative digitization by thoughtful educators can make knowledge and learning more widely accessible to the public. 

Dewey B Strategic Asks: Is Lexis the Next Acquisition for Bloomberg?

Dewey B Strategic: Is Lexis the Next Acquisition for Bloomberg? is a thought-provoking blog post by law librarian Jean O'Grady about a report that discusses problems with Reed Elsevier's management of  LexisNexis and implies that Bloomberg Law might be in the wings waiting to possibly buy LN or some of the LN content.  

And then again, maybe Google's new search isn't so great?

Slate Magazine has an opinion piece by technology columnist Farhad Najoo that is pretty much all negative about the new Google+ search. The piece is subtitled "Google’s disastrous decision to muck up its search results with stuff from your social network", and begins "Google just broke its search engine.

Google Search + Your World

Google has just launched an update to their search engine called 'Search plus Your World,' intended to incorporate users' social network with Google search. Searches on Google will automatically provide personalized search results based on Google+ friends, sharing, pictures and likes. These personalized matches will appear along your normal search results. For example, if you are searching for images of babies, Google will now personalize your search results and give high preference to baby photos from your Google+ circles

New CALI lesson feature

Just in time for the new semester, CALI (Computer Assisted Legal Instruction) has announced a new lesson feature called CALI Lesson Resume. Many students have requested this feature; until now, when a student left a lesson before completion the score wasn't saved. With this new feature, when a student leaves a CALI lesson, the student can now return to the spot they left off with the scoring details saved. It's automatic: it doesn't matter if the student left the lesson by closing the browser, shutting down the computer, or losing internet connectivity. The only time resume is not available is when the student opts to "finalize" the lesson.

AALL on the Stop Online Piracy Act

The American Association of Law Libraries Government Relations Program has published an advocacy information statement on SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.  The statement was authored by Barco Law Library Director George Pike, who chairs the AALL Copyright Committee.  From the statement:

"AALL urges members of the House of Representatives to vote “No” on SOPA because:
- SOPA is overly broad. If used as intended, SOPA provides mechanisms for attacking websites that engagein infringing activities. However, the broad language opens too many websites to liability. For example, a library website that streams or posts content that is knowingly or unknowingly protected by copyright -- even if the post is arguably covered by fair use, or is reposted from another site -- could be subject to the sanctions by SOPA. Many websites that are neither rogue nor trying to enable infringement could be sanctioned.
- SOPA threatens free speech and fair use rights. The expansion of content-owner notice and take-down powers could be used to target fair uses and chill willingness of users to fairly utilize copyrighted works.
- SOPA inhibits free expression. SOPA discourages the use of copyrighted or potentially copyrighted works (e.g. orphan works) for any purpose, even legitimate, non-harmful ones. For example, the criminal penalties raise the specter of YouTube videos of individuals “covering” copyrighted songs being subject to criminal sanction even if their use of material is non-harmful and non-commercial."

Bibliophilia

This lovely video, the Joy of Books, comes to us from Type, a bookstore in Toronto.

hat tip: Pat Roncevich

Duncan School of Law files suit against ABA for non-accreditation

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Duncan School of Law of Lincoln Memorial University, located in Knoxville TN, has filed suit against the ABA in federal court after learning that the ABA's accrediting arm had denied Duncan's bid for provisional accreditation. Instead of appealing the decision by the ABA, the law school  filed a  complaint on Dec. 22, 2011, in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. The school claims that an appeal would be futile because of the “complete and utter disregard” by the Council of the ABA of all the facts presented by the law school. This week the ABA filed an opposing brief with the court this week, detailing why Duncan had not fulfilled the requirements for provisional accreditation.
The school  claims that the ABA colluded with other law schools to restrain competition amongst other schools by denying accreditation for the school.  The Duncan School of Law was featured in a recent New York Times article about how the ABA's accreditation standards contribute to the high cost of a legal education.

LexisNexis Academic free online seminars

LexisNexis is hosting a series of free webinars on the LN Academic database in January and February. There is a webinar specifically addressing legal research on LN Academic offered on three different days:
Thursday, Janaury 26, 2012 2:00p.m.-3:00 p.m. (Eastern Time)
Thursday, February 16, 2012 1:00p.m.-2:00 p.m. (Eastern Time)
Thursday, March 1, 2012 1:00p.m.-2:00 p.m. (Eastern Time)
You can read more about the webinars and register for individual webinars on their Online Seminar Registration page.

Holiday gift for bibliophiles..

The CB I Hate Perfume website (from a guy who hates perfume, at least brand name perfumes) offers a scent called "In the Library" capturing "the scent of books and of the libraries where they live." As CB says,    "There are few things more wonderful than the smell of a much-loved book."
Available as perfume, home spray, and "water perfume". 

ebrary E-books Can Now Be Downloaded

The Pitt University Library System has announced that Ebrary has made their e-book collection downloadable for Pitt users. ULS has turned this feature "on" for all titles for which we have multiple user access. This includes all of the titles in our Academic Complete subscription as well as those individual titles that we have purchased with a multiple user license.
There are two download options. You can convert a book chapter (or page range) to pdf format OR you can download the full book using Adobe Digital Editions software (free download).  The books can be read with this software or transferred to compatible devices (Kindles are not compatible.) You then have access to the ebook for 14 days.  Note that there are some titles for which the full download option is not available; note also that you have to create an ebrary account to download material.

Bar Reciprocity dot com provides one-stop shopping for Bar information

There is a new website called www.BarReciprocity.com that was created to help users navigate the convoluted process of attorney bar admission.  The site  collects and organizes  information about bar exams, bar admissions,  and reciprocity  for the entire United States. It has an interactive map to help navigate the information for individual states.  The site  includes information on special licenses for special attorney categories such as Military Attorneys, law professors, and students; it also provides the pro hac vice rules and procedures (allowing attorneys to practice law in a particular proceeding in a jurisdiction where the attorney is not admitted) for all the states.

Dept. of Justice investigates ebook pricing

Business Week reports that the United States Dept. of Justice has confirmed that it is investigating the pricing of electronic books  to look at whether there was improper collusion by Apple and publishers to prevent discounting.  This comes after the EU announced on Tuesday that it is investigating possible anticompetitive practices between Apple and five major publishers, including France's Hachette Livre, German-owned Macmillan, U.K. publisher Penguin, and U.S.-based Harper Collins and Simon & Schuster.

TRAC webinar on "ICE Charging Practices in the Immigration Courts"

TRAC is offering a webinar on Weds. Dec. 7 at 2:00 p.m. on "Monitoring ICE charging practices in the Immigration Court". The webinar will include a short (approximately 15-20 minute) overview and demonstration of TRAC's newly released web monitoring tools for immigration courts, followed by a question and answer session. If you would like to join the webinar, please email TRAC.

TRAC report on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) is a non-partisan research organization associated with Syracuse University. TRAC from has prepared a report on deportation proceedings in US immigration courts, with accompanying data tools which allow tracking by charge, nationality, and specific location. TRAC's findings, based upon very recent case-by-case data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from Immigration Court files, appear to contrast with the White House's announcement that under the President's direction DHS during the past year has prioritized the removal of people who have been convicted of crimes in the United States. The data shows that in ICE-initiated Immigration Court deportation proceedings during July-September 2011, only 7,378 individuals or 13.8 percent of the total were charged with having engaged in criminal activities. The proportion of alleged "criminals" of those targeted is down significantly from the already low level of 16.5 percent during FY 2010, and has been declining steadily throughout the past year.

Want to know what plane is flying overhead?

CNET has a story about a feature that can be used with the iPhone 4S Siri app (Siri is a voice-activated assistant app built into the phone's operating system that allows users to interact with the iPhone 4S by voice). According to the article, if you tell your iPhone "Ask Wolfram what flights are overhead" it will retrieve the information and tell you the overhead airline(s), flight numbers, and altitude.
Wolfram is the database that does dynamic computations on a wide range of web-based objective data.

hat tip Ryan Vandegrift

British Library announces historical newspapers site

The British Library has announced the launch of the British Newspaper Archive, offering access to 4 million pages from 200 18th & 19th Century newspapers from the UK and Ireland. The project is a collaboration between the British Library and Dundee-based IT firm Brightsolid. Over the next 10 years the project will digitize an additional 40 million pages spanning 3 centuries. The archive includes articles reporting on the Great Exhibition of 1851 plus stories on infamous murder trials and men, women and children being transported to the other side of the world for minor crimes. It also includes eyewitness accounts of social transformation – newspaper reports, commentary and letters to the editor on topics ranging from the railway mania of the mid-19th century to the extraordinary expansion of the temperance movement; as well as advertisements and illustrations. According to the press release, "Alongside first-hand accounts of historic events such as the wedding of Victoria and Albert and the Charge of the Light Brigade, these newspapers also provide countless vivid details of how our ancestors lived and died, how they went up and down in the world and how they fed, clothed and entertained themselves."

Canadian government data free

Embassy Magazine reports that all of Statistics Canada’s standard online products, including the census, socioeconomic and geographic data, will be offered to the public for free starting February 2012. While Statistics Canada has been working towards opening up more of its data for several years, it still currently charges for some online data, including some data sets inside its its “key socioeconomic databas”, the Canadian Socioeconomic Information Management System. Researchers, economists and other individuals buy these products, and several firms are also licensed by the agency to act as redistributors. Some of those firms charge for reselling the data, and some roll it into other value-added products they sell. Organizations currently buying the data from Statistics Canada will be “encouraged” to redistribute information under the government’s new open data licence agreement.

Lawschools & Lawyering: front page news in the New York Times

Yesterday's Sunday New York Times had a lengthy  front page story titled "What they don't teach law students: lawyering."  The article discussed a lack of "practical training" in law schools, saying "Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions, like the variety of property law in post-feudal England. Professors are rewarded for chin-stroking scholarship, like law review articles with titles like “A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern Legal Theory.”"  and "nearly half of faculty members (at top tier law schools) had never practiced law for a single day." 

Report on the status of digitizing vital legislative documents

The Sunlight Foundation has posted a review of the progress that's been made in digitizing 3 key legislative documents: the Constitution Annotated, the Congressional Record, and the Statutes at Large. A year ago the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing directed that these three sets of  documents be published online "as quickly as possible." According to the Sunlight Foundation review there's only been progress on one, the Statutes at Large. The review says that "Unlike with the other two publications, there is tangible evidence of progress. GPO has now publishing a digitized version that covers from 1951-2002, which is a significant undertaking. However, the documents have not been integrated into THOMAS, and are still somewhat difficult to use because of their large size. Moreover, GPO published another set of digitized documents, from 2003 to 2007, that are kept in a separate location on GPO's website and stored at a much greater level of granularity. This project is only partially complete, with a sizable gap in the public record from 1874 to 1951. Moreover, the documents haven't been integrated into THOMAS."

Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act

The Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act, introduced in the House (HR 1974) and Senate (S 1411), would require the Public Printer to establish and maintain a website accessible to the public that allows the public to obtain electronic copies of all congressionally mandated reports in one place.

Law faculty criticize SOPA in letter to Congress

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a group of more than 100 law professors have signed an open letter to Congress criticizing HR 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), as well as similar legislation pending in the Senate ( S 968, the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011, or Protect-IP.) The letter explains that the legislation would unfairly expand liability for online copyright infringement, allow the government to block access to Web sites that facilitate infringement, and permit private rights holders to block Web sites to host ads or conduct credit-card sales.

Trial of 2 BNA resources

We have a 30 trial of 2 BNA products that we currently don’t subscribe to: the Money and Politics Report and the Internet Law Resource Center. You can access both from the BNA main page dropdown box. The BNA MONEY AND POLITICS REPORT provides comprehensive behind-the-scenes coverage of campaign finance, lobbying, and government ethics issues at the federal, state, and local levels, including Full-text documents and summaries of Lobbying Disclosure Act filings. The BNA INTERNET LAW RESOURCE CENTER is comprehensive resource for case law, statutes, news, research, and analysis on Internet and e-commerce law all in one place. “Stay informed of the latest cyber law developments, quickly locate key legal primary sources, and benefit from the practical insights of experienced practitioners from a single integrated site.”

"Ten Top Tricks" from HeinOnline

As a part of Hein’s recent Customer Appreciation Week their "Support Guru" Tim Hooge presented his top ten tricks for using HeinOnline in two 15 minute webinars. Both are available on the HeinOnline webinars wiki. The tips are also available in pdf format on the HeinOnline website. The tips include how to use proximity searching in any HeinOnline library, how to find Supreme Court cases on a specific topic, and how to browse contents in the US Federal Legislative History Library.

PA unconsolidated statutes online

The librarian of the PA Legislative Reference Bureau has announced that Pennsylvania "unconsolidated statutes" are now on the General Assembly's website , joining the "consolidated statutes". They are listed under the category "Law Information".  You can search by "keyword" or "act number" or browse by "act name" or "year." The "chronological history" of each act is included and shows amendments, repeals, and certain decisions and rules of court by section.
 Also new under the "Law Information" category is a link to the Legislative Reference Bureau's  website for the historical Pennsylvania Session laws Preservation Project.  New to the site are the years 1802, 1803 and 1804. As time and manpower permit, the goal is to make all PA session laws available on this website.

Have Women’s Law School Numbers Peaked?

The ABA Journal online has an article this morning about a report (22 page pdf) from the National Assn. of Women Lawyers finding that women make up 47 percent of first- and second-year associates, down from 48 percent in prior years- suggesting that "the pipeline may be shrinking". The report also shows that the highest percentage of law degrees awarded to women occurred in 2004 and has been declining ever since. “The percentage of women entering law schools may have peaked,” the NAWL report says. In 2009-10, women made up about 47 percent of the law school population and 45.9 percent of all law school graduates.

PITTCat+ Summon

Links to the new Summon version of PITTCat+ have been added to the Barco Law Library webpages. Summon, from Serials Solutions,  has replaced Aquabrowser as the online catalog for the University Library System, is more robust and provides a much more user-friendly experience. 

Prof. Bridy on copyright, internet regulation

Visiting Associate Professor Annemarie Bridy has a couple of terrific blog posts that I found via LLRX - LLRX reprinted her post on The Digital Death of Copyright's First Sale Doctrine. This article discusses the implications of the Supreme Court's declining to review Vernor v. Autodesk, a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision involving the applicability of copyright's first sale doctrine to transactions involving software and other digital information goods. Prof. Bridy says that "As the transition from physical to streaming or cloud-based digital distribution continues, further divorcing copyrighted works from their traditional tangible embodiments, it will increasingly be the case that consumers do not own the information goods they buy (or, rather, think they've bought)."
A second blogpost, published yesterday, is titled Don't Regulate the Internet. No, Wait. Regulate the Internet. It talks about the RIAA's seemingly contradictory stances on regulation of the Internet.   Prof. Bridy says that "The RIAA’s political strategy in the war on piracy has been alternately to oppose and support government regulation of the Internet, depending on what’s expedient. I wonder if rights owners and the trade groups that represent them experience any sense of cognitive dissonance when they advocate against something at one moment and for it a little while later—to the same audience, on the same issue." 

GPO Access sundowning

On Friday, November 4, 2011, the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) draws one step closer to shutting down GPO Access.  GPO has now stopped  updating GPO Access in terms of both database content and HTML pages. This marks the start of the "archive only" phase of GPO Access;  new content will only be loaded to FDsys. During this phase, GPO Access will remain publicly accessible as a reference archive.
In order to make the switchover from GPO Access to FDsys as seamless as possible for users, GPO is in the process of creating one-to-one redirects from GPO Access content to the FDsys equivalent. This will ensure that bookmarks, Web links, URLs in print publications, and other GPO Access references point to valid Web resources. Once this has been completed, GPO Access will be taken offline. A date has not yet been established for the final shutdown of GPO Access; however, it is slated for fiscal year 2012.

Report to Congress on mandatory minimum penalties

The United States Sentencing Commission has released a Report to Congress: Mandatory Minimum Penalties in the Federal Criminal Justice System. The 645 page report says that the Commission "generally continues to believe that a strong and effective guideline system best serves the purposes of sentencing established by the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984," and also recommends a number of reforms of mandatory sentencing. "While there is a spectrum of views on the Commission regarding mandatory minimum penalties, the Commission unanimously believes that certain mandatory minimum penalties apply too broadly, are excessively severe, and are applied inconsistently across the country."  
An Executive Summary of the report (49 page pdf) is also available.

Publisher sues Bit Torrent pirates

Publishers Weekly reports that publisher John Wiley and Sons has filed a "willful infringement" copyright suit and a trademark infringement suit in  the Southern District of New York federal court  involving 27 “John Does” it claims are illegally copying and distributing the  "FOR DUMMIES®" books "through the peer-to-peer file sharing software known as BitTorrent". Though Wiley doesn't know the identities of the accused infringers, in its complaint, Wiley lists their IP addresses and ISPs.

National Law Journal's law school blog on legal education

There is an interesting post in the Law School Review blog written by a law professor at Indiana University.  The post discusses the challenges facing law schools, faculty, and curriculum given a number of factors that are changing the way law is practiced.  The post is very thoughtful and there are interesting comments following the post.  

Grocery shopping in the subway (with your smartphone)

This doesn't have anything to do with law, but one of the people on the CALI listserv posted this cool video:
I wonder if library books could work the same way?

Federal Court opinions on FDsys

The office of the United States Courts has announced that more than 12,000 opinions from three federal courts – the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, and the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Florida – have been posted on the Fdsys website and made available to the public. By the end of 2011, 12 ofederal courts will have opinions posted on Fdsys and work is underway to bring the opinions from an additional 22 courts to Fdsys in early 2012.

ACLU on photographers' rights

The American Civil Liberties Union has an online guide for photographers, with information about rights to take pictures and videos in public places. The guide says that "Taking photographs of things that are plainly visible from public spaces is a constitutional right – and that includes federal buildings, transportation facilities, and police and other government officials carrying out their duties."

Organizations oppose proposed new FOIA rule

The ACLU, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and OpenTheGovernment.org announced that they have joined together to file comments opposing a provision of a proposed rule from the Department of Justice, which would amend the DoJ’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Regulations by adding section 16.6(f)(2). The paragraph states: “When a component (federal agency) applies an exclusion to exclude records from the requirements of the FOIA pursuant to 5 U.S.C. 522(c), the component utilizing the exclusion will respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.” In their letter, the opposed organizations say that "Authorizing government agencies to lie to FOIA requesters by affirmatively denying the existence of agency records when they actually exist undermines the purpose of FOIA, obstructs judicial review of agency FOIA decisions, and destroys integrity in government."

Study shows rise in spending on state court races

A report just released by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law school shows an increase of 60% in independent spending on state supreme court elections by state parties and special interest groups in 2009-10 over spending in elections four years earlier. A total of $38.4 million was spent on state high court elections in 2009-10. The most expensive high court elections were in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio, where the courts are closely divided by party or judicial philosophy. According to the report's Introduction, "(t)he story of the 2009-10 elections, and their aftermath in state legislatures in 2011, reveals a coalescing national campaign that seeks to intimidate America’s state judges into becoming accountable to money and ideologies instead of the constitution and the law. In its full context, the most recent election cycle poses some of the gravest threats yet to fair and impartial justice in America."
The report can also be viewed online at Scribd.

Sustainability: ideas for using computer heat

MIT's Technology Review has an interesting article about ideas for using all the heat generated by data center computers and servers. According to the article, about half of the massive amounts of energy used by computing and data centers goes toward cooling down the computer chips. How can all that waste heat be used? There is a lovely photo of a botanical garden at the South Bend Conservatory, which is heated by University of Notre Dame servers sitting at the rear of the conservatory. According to the article, the servers are connected to the university’s main computing cluster and are given more processing tasks if higher temperatures are needed. This is just one example of creative reuse of the waste heat generated by computers.

law review articles: Really ?

The Wall Street Journal law blog has a post about a recent "study" on how the titles of academic papers affect their rate of citation and download. The study showed law review articles containing a question mark in the  title were downloaded more but cited less; and articles containing a colon in the title had fewer downloads and fewer citations.  Hmmm. 

redesigning the eBook

Technology Review has an articlediscussing how some publishers are experimenting with creating new kinds of reading experiences with ebooks, rather than simply digital versions of text on a page. The author talks about Pottermore, a website where JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, has hired a team to create a new way to read her books. "Over time, the site will weave the books together with interactive and social features that allow readers to connect with one another and with the characters in Row­ling's world."
 The article goes on to discuss a second example of redesigning the eBook, Principles of Biology, published by Nature Publishing Group. It is written as a series of more than 200 self-contained modules; the publisher has suggested an order for the modules, but instructors who use the book in their classes can freely drop or shuffle them. Instructors can also choose settings that increase or decrease the difficulty of the material. Principles of Biology links related modules as well as journal articles, summaries of those articles, and other online resources. This is not the sort of e-book familiar to users of the Kindle or iPad but is fundamentally a website designed for interactivity and can be "read" on any device with a Web browser.

University of Cincinnati Law Review

The University of Cincinnati Law Review has launched its online full-text version hosted on Digital Commons. The student editors have put the current issue as well as several earlier issues online, and are working to add older issues.

Wikileaks temporarily suspends publishing

Wikileaks, the whistleblower website,  has announced that it is temporarily suspending publication because of financial constraints. It claims that several large financial institutions have made it difficult to receive donations as the result of "aggressive retaliation" for publishing classified State Dept. documents last fall.