DNA evidence & criminal law

LLRX has a new article with links and descriptions of web-based materials about developments in DNA technology and criminal law. Included in the article:

• Information on DNA access and testing laws and related post-conviction legislation nationwide.


• Standards and guidelines for collection and retention of genetic material in criminal cases as well as testing protocols.


• Reports with policy recommendations from various perspectives based on research into exonerations and DNA testing.


• Law review articles addressing DNA access and testing laws


• Other articles and annotations provide background on DNA access and testing legislation, requirements for filing post-conviction motions, and case law developments.

UN group looks at curbing net anonymity

Reports from CNet and PC World that the UN's International Telecommunication Union is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous. The agency is hosting a telecommunications standards meeting in Geneva next week, and one item for discussion is how to find ways to limit virus attacks and spam by making it harder to "spoof" the origin of electronic communications - but civil rights advocates worry it could put an end to anonymity on the Internet. Steven Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia University blogs about his concern that a political agenda will shape the internet.

Microsoft & GenY

There's a good article in TechCrunch today that talks about Microsoft's problems, as seen in their annual report. The article says that GenY users are just bypassing all the overblown MS products in favor of powerful, easy, user-friendly apps. "in Excel 2008, some users might need pivot tables, but vast majority of those that use spreadsheets will never ever need to use them, nor will they ever write a macro, or script in Visual Basic." Hear hear. And btw it's not just GenY that never needs all that stuff.

WMD Report Card

Greta Marlatt at the Homeland Security Digital Library reports that the WMD Report Card(s) that has been in the news lately is now available. The report - "WMD Report Care: Evaluating U.S. Policies toPrevent Nuclear, Chemical & Biological Terrorism Since 2005" was done by the Partnership for a Secure America, a bipartisan group. She provided links to the main page , the full report card (pdf); the nuclear report (pdf) "Nuclear Terrorism: US Policies to Reduce theThreat of Nuclear Terror"; The biological report (pdf) "Biological Terrorism: US Policies to ReduceGlobal Biothreats" ; and the chemical report (pdf)"Chemical Terrorism: US Policies to Reduce theChemical Terror Threat".

Copyright fight over NIH & PubMed

The Chronicle reports on the Sturm und Drang going on in the Congressional hearing over HR 6845, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act: to amend title 17, United States Code, with respect to works connected to certain funding agreements ( TEXT , pdf.) The bill, introduced by John Conyers of Michigan, would curtail the National Institutes of Health's public-access policy that requires all NIH-funded researchers to submit electronic copies of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed, a free online archive of biomedical and life-sciences journal articles, and that the material be made publicly available within 12 months of publication. The hearing is being held by the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property.

Advances in electronic book technology: the Plastic Logic Reader

I want one!

Friday fun - 2d Microsoft ad with "Jerry and Bill"

5 signs of email addiction....

Computer World has an article about the problem of "email addiction". The 5 signs that you - or someone you know - might have a problem:

• You check your e-mail more than once an hour, even when you aren't on the clock.
• You look at every message that comes in, as it comes in, either at or away from the office.
• You feel the need to respond to messages instantly or within minutes of when they arrive.
• You interrupt real, in-person activities on a regular basis to deal with e-mail.
• E-mail has, in some way, interfered with your regular life -- in the form of sleep loss, relationship troubles, stress or any other noticeable effect.

Read the article to see how you can "curb your electronic enslavement".

Free court information and records

Great article in the ResourceShelf this morning, pointing to a number of free online resources where you can find various state court records and information about the court system in state jurisdictions.
The "Resource of the Week" is Court Records Free Reference and Directory offering links to states' courts. Click on the state you are interested in and you will be taken to an excellent web guide to that state’s court system. They also blog about state courts.
A more general public records site is a Free Public Records Directory, with information about many types of public records. All links indicate whether online public records searches are available for free, as paid services, or not available online. If it isn't online, they provide contact information for the appropriate agency. It also has a blog & discussion forum organized by state.
And A Journalist’s Guide to the Federal Courts has great information geared towards finding the best information sources. There are descriptions of court procedure and "key players", and a glossary of terms.

Penn, Wharton offer JD/MBA program

The University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Wharton School have announced the launch of a three-year joint J.D./M.B.A. degree. The new program differs from other programs in that it calls for students to spend their first year at the law school and the following summer in four so-called "Law and Wharton" courses. Students in their second and third years will take a combination of Law and Wharton courses and a "capstone course" that ties the two disciplines together. During the summer between the second and third year, students can get work experience in law, business, finance or the public sector. The University of Pennsylvania is touting the program as the country's first fully integrated three-year program offered by elite law and business schools.

Harnessing the power of internet users to digitize books

Luis von Ahn, the CMU professor who developed CAPTCHA (the authenticating method that has you type the letters that you see) has also developed reCAPTCHA, a new form of CAPTCHA that also helps digitize books, according to a press release from CMU. In reCAPTCHA, the words displayed to the user come directly from old books that are being digitized; they are words that OCR could not identify and are sent to people throughout the Web to be identified. Von Ahn said reCAPTCHAs are being used to digitize books for the Internet Archive and to digitize newspapers for The New York Times. Digitization allows older works to be indexed, searched, reformatted and stored in the same way as today's online texts.

Wecht decision online

The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals has handed down its opinion in the Wecht case. The Court removed U.S. District Judge Arthur J. Schwab from the case and ordered that a different judge be assigned to hear any potential retrial. Wecht's lawyers had accused Judge Schwab of being biased in favor of the prosecution. However, the court refused Wecht's request to dismiss the charges.

Hat tip: Joel Fishman

Online Terms-of-Service agreements

Well, there's at least one person who scrolls & reads the fine print before clicking that "I agree" button. Valleywag has blogged about the "most laughable" terms of service agreements online. Google's gmail agreement, for example, has this language: "Google reserves the right (but shall have no obligation) to pre-screen, review, flag, filter, modify, refuse or remove any or all Content from any Service." Watchout!

Copyright and the California Code

Carl Malamud, champion of open-access government, is taking on the state of California, reports the San Jose Press Democrat. California claims copyright to California's laws - meaning the state controls access and price. Malamud has begun publishing copies of federal, state and county codes online in direct violation of claimed copyright. On Labor Day, he posted the entire 38-volume California Code of Regulations, which includes all of the state's regulations from health care and insurance to motor vehicles and investment, on his Public Resource website. He says "A system of selling codes for hundreds of dollars and then making public access inconvenient by requiring you to drive long distances to an official depository library hurts us all. "

CRS reports on the Russia-Georgia conflict

The Thurgood Marshall Law Library (Univ. of MD) has added 2 recent publications (dated 8/13/08) on events in Russia and Georgia to their Congressional Research Service Reports project . The reports provide important background on the developing Russia-Georgia conflict. The reports are titled Russia-Georgia Conflict in South Ossetia: Context and Implications for U.S. Interests and Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia: Political Developments and Implications for U.S.
The Congressional Research Service is a department of the Library of Congress that provides members of Congress with authoritative research and analysis on policy issues. CRS produces or updates more than 3,000 studies and other publications each year, none of which are distributed to the public.

New study of affirmative action in law schools

Inside Higher Education has a story today about a new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research that analyzes statistics about black law students. Using simulations of law school admissions without affirmative action, the researchers find that affimative action is pivotal in achieving racial diversity in law schools.

Encouraging the use of minority- and women-owned law firms

E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co. , Royal Dutch Shell PLC and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. have published for the first time a list of minority- and women-owned law firms that the companies have used in the past. They have sent the list to major corporations to encourage corporations to use these firms. They have also launched a Web site that lists the firms by state with contact information. Judges, juries and public officials are becoming more diverse, so companies benefit from using firms that offer a diverse set of lawyers who can identify with these decision-makers, said Tom Sager, DuPont's general counsel. DuPont also sent the directories to its 50 primary law firms, encouraging them to consider working with the minority- and women-owned firms and to share the information with colleagues.

Best Government Websites

And speaking of government websites, the online publication Government Computer News recently had an article about the "Top 10 Government Websites".
Here's their list:
Medline Plus:the National Library of Medicine’s site offers an astounding array of medical information on a user-friendly site - and gets over 40 million visitors a month!
CDC.gov: the Centers for Disease Control website focuses on visitor needs. It has a help page, complete with audio assistance, for navigating the site’s many resources, such as health information on everything from workplace conditions to the aging process. Users can adjust the text size or choose to read the pages in one of 10 languages.
DC CapStat: the city of Washington D.C. is undertaking a cross-agency accountability program, called CapStat, to tackle broad multiagency goals such as lowering crime and cleaning up the streets, with an award-nominated website for the public to follow.
SSA's Medicare Prescription Help: Through a series of questions, the site can determine if a senior citizen is eligible for discounts on medications and, if so, provides an online application the person can submit to SSA.
USA.gov: USA.gov is a pre-eminent search service for the federal government. It combines the best of a good spider engine — one that catches all the nooks and crannies of government Web sites — with Yahoo-style, human-built directories that help people find what they need. There’s even a complete version of the site in Spanish.
Massachusetts website: MA makes all state agencies easily accessible on the website, and services such as the ability to search state laws or the state budget also are offered on the home page by name rather than the state agency. It tries to foster a sense of community among state residents, offering pages that address the issues of the day.
Business.gov from the Small Business Agency: Just enter your ZIP code and the type of business you’d want to start, and it returns a page with pointers to the appropriate tax permits, entity filings, insurance requirements and even requirements for hiring workers.
US Geologic Survey: Water Science for Schools: this educational site on water offers almost everything anyone would ever want to know about water. And much of the material available on the site is presented in as many as 60 languages.
Cancer.gov from the National Cancer Institute includes descriptions of what cancer is, how to prevent it, how to treat it, and how to screen for it — all of it in simple, easy-to-understand language.
The Merit Systems Protection Board’s E-Appeal: site for government employees.

2008 End-of-Term Website Crawl to Preserve Gov't. Info.

The Library of Congress, the California Digital Library, the University of North Texas Libraries, the Internet Archive and the U.S. Government Printing Office are joining together for a collaborative project to preserve public U.S. government web sites at the end of the current presidential administration ending Jan. 19, 2009. The project will document federal agencies' presence on the internet during the transition of government and to enhance the existing collections of the five partner institutions.
The project has 2 parts:
1. The Internet Archive will do a "comprehensive crawl" of the .gov domain (all of the URLs identified for this project) beginning in late August 2008, and again in early 2009, after the inauguration.
2. Prioritized Crawls: Selected URLs will be crawled at a greater frequency and depth than the comprehensive crawl, in order to capture websites that are at risk of rapid change during this time, or of disappearing altogether.
The project team is now calling upon government information specialists -- including librarians and law researchers -- to assist in the selection and prioritization of web sites to be included in the prioritized crawl, as well as identifying the frequency and depth of the act of collecting. Those who sign up to participate will be provided a link to a web-based tool to facilitate the collaborative work of this project. Participants will be asked to review URLs to determine if they are in scope or out of scope for the project, and may also add in-scope URLs not appearing in the comprehensive crawl URL list.

Hurricane Gustav: online info

If you would like to keep informed about Hurricane Gustav, the National Hurricane Center has begun an experimental podcasting service, with podcasts issued every few hours during a hurricane landfall along the U.S. Coast or U.S. Territorial Islands. When a current podcast is available, a link to the RSS/Podcast feed and a link to the corresponding directory with the latest audio (mp3) file will be displayed. You can right-click and choose "save" to download the file; or Once the podcasts are older than 4 hours, they are no longer available on the page.
There is also a Gustav information network set up on Ning, with bloggers posting information about major news events and alerts.