Google Streetview fighting crime?

The Google subnet has a story about how Google StreetView & Google Earth is being used to solve crimes. In one case, StreetView was instrumental in returning a kidnapped Massachusetts girl safely to her home (she was kidnapped by her grandmother and taken to a motel in rural Virginia and police were able to track her down using her cellphone and Google StreetView). In another case, GoogleEarth helped a Swiss police team detect a 1.2-acre marijuana field and nab the gang responsible.
These incidents may help make up for the recent story of a Google StreetView camera car killing "Bambi" - a baby deer.

Superbowl closing

The Barco Law Building and Barco Law Library will close at 6 pm on Superbowl Sunday. Pittsburgh police will close the streets of the Oakland neighborhood, home of both Pitt and CMU, at 9 pm. on Superbowl Sunday.
Go Steelers!

Legal Professionals on Twitter

Justia has compiled a list of legal professionals on Twitter, complete with pictures and a map of locations.

Dept. of Defense releases annual review of mission

The Department of Defense has announced the release of the 2009 Quadrennial Roles and Missions Review (QRM) Report to Congress (48 page pdf) in accordance with the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008. Although the department has completed similar reviews in the past, this was the first review conducted with the intention of establishing a framework for performing roles and missions analysis on a recurring basis every four years.
In the review, the DoD defines its core missions and core competencies and reviews recent efforts undertaken across the force to improve its ability to conduct joint operations in several evolving mission areas.
The report concludes with the DoD's vision to support maturation of "whole-of-government" (interagency) approaches to national security problems.

"Browse Topics" looking for volunteers

Browse Topics, a pathway to federal websites by topic, is a service of the Federal Depository Library Program. It is maintained by volunteers from the FDL community from institutions across the United States and sponsored by the U.S. Government Printing Office. The editors are looking for contributors in the area of Agriculture; anyone interested in contributing should see the Contributors page on the Browse Topics website.
The topics in the area of Agriculture include:
Animals and Livestock
Education and Outreach
Food and Nutrition
History, Art, and Biography
Laws and Regulations
Marketing and Trade
Plants and Crops
Research and Technology
Rural and Community Development

Census report on Educational Attainment in the US

The Census Bureau has released a new report, “Educational Attainment in the United States, 2007,” (16 page pdf). The data comes from two separate sources: the estimates of current educational attainment come from the 2007 American Community Survey (ACS), while historical trends in median annual earnings come from the Current Population Survey (CPS). Some of the statistics it contains: Of people age 25 or older who live in the United States but who were born elsewhere, 10.9 percent have an advanced degree, while only 9.9 percent of those born in the United States have one; 10.7 percent of men have an advanced degree v. 9.6 percent of women; among racial and ethnic groups, 19.6 percent of Asian Americans have an advanced degree, followed by 11.3 percent of non-Hispanic white people, 5.8 percent of black people, and 3.9 percent of Hispanics. A map on page 7 showing the "Percent of People Aged 25 and Over Who Have Completed High School or More Education Relative to the National Mean by State: 2007" is remarkably split along north/south lines, with only New York joining southen states in being below the mean and only Florida joining northern states in being above the mean.

PACER news

Yesterday I emailed PACER to ask about the cost and payment system for court documents - over a year ago there was a pilot project offering free access to PACER from a few select libraries with the hope that eventually PACER might be free in other libraries. Here's the answer I got back from PACER today: "The free access from certain libraries has been suspended indefinitely. There is no plan to change our payment system in the future." Sounds pretty final.

NFL oks Superbowl in churches

The NFL says that churches can show the Superbowl coverage big-screen TVs without fear of violating copyright laws, according to a report. In 2007, many churches cancelled Super Bowl parties after the National Football League (NFL) warned an Indiana church that it would be illegal to show the game on anything larger than a 55-inch screen. But members of Congress threatened to change copyright laws, and the NFL dropped the restriction beginning with this year's Super Bowl. Churches may show the game on any monitor, so long as they do not charge admission and hold the party at a location used for other large gatherings.

New lawyer directory launched

The Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell law school recently launched a new, free online directory of lawyers. The directory is the result of a year-long collaboration with Justia, and promises to be a useful and comprehensive source of information about lawyers.

New website about the author of "Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties"

Government Documents and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have announced the launch of a website entitled Charles J. Kappler - A Life Beyond Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. The site provides a portrait Kappler (1868–1946), the person who was the first to compile these important American Indian legal materials. He was a staff member of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs; served as co-counsel in the first case before the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague; brought important tribal issues before the courts just a quarter century after the Battle of the Little Big Horn; and participated in a number of major Indian law cases before the United States Supreme Court, prior to the creation of the Indian Claims Commission.

Panorama of the Inauguration

During the Obama Presidential Inauguration last Tuesday photographer David Bergman attached a robotic arm called the Gigapan Imager onto a railing and snapped 220 images with his Canon G10 to create this amazingly detailed image.
A regular camera fits into the Gigapan Imager. The photographer marks the corners of the panorama and Gigapan calculates how many pictures the camera needs to snap. The robotic device captures hundreds or thousands of photos, and Gigapan software integrates the image afterward. Bergman says that it took his Macbook Pro six and a half hours to finalize the nearly 2 gigabyte image--the highest resolution panorama of the inauguration.
The Gigapan Imager was developed as part of a larger project between Carnegie Mellon University, Google, NASA and National Geographic to create high quality images for maps and disaster relief efforts.

hat tip: MIT Technology Review

PACER recycling

Carl Malamud and his organization Public Resource have a project to "recycle" documents that you buy from PACER, the Federal Judiciary's centralized registration, billing, and technical support center for electronic access to U.S. District, Bankruptcy, and Appellate court records. They have a page of FAQs to answer any questions you may have - and, by the way, provide some interesting stats on PACER usage and fees.
Here are the simple instructions from the site for how to recycle your PACER documents:
"Just upload all your PACER Documents to our recycling bin. Click on the recycle bin and you'll be presented with a dialogue to choose files to upload. Then, just hit the “Start Upload” button and you'll hear the sounds of progress as your documents get reinjected into the public domain.
We'll take the documents, look at them, and then put them onto bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/pacer for future distribution. This is a manual process and you won't see your documents show up right away. But, over time, we hope to accumulate a significant database of PACER Documents. "

HeinOnline blog demos

The HeinOnline blog uses the 36th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision to demonstrate how to use their new social indexing tool, Hein's ScholarCheck. They show how you can look up the case in the Supreme Court library (or just by searching) and once you have the case you see immediately the number of scholarly journal articles that cite to it and how many times these articles are cited by other scholars.

Mednar search engine for health information

Deep Web Technologies’ Mednar has been named the 2008 best health information search engine by AltSearchEngines, a well-respected blog that focuses on specialty search engines.
Mednar (still in beta) is a one-stop federated search engine designed for professional medical researchers. It enables users to quickly access information from a multitude of credible sources, including deep web content not indexed by popular search engines. “Mednar offers access to an array of databases that are simply not mined by other health search engines and features a dependable email alert service that enables users to keep up on the latest publications on the medical topics of their choice,” said AltSearchEngines reviewer Hope Leman. “Mednar is the Secretariat and gold medal winner of medical search at this point.”

Advice on dealing with law school debt

Slate has an article entitled "The Law School Debt Trap: How to escape it and have a career in public service law" prompted by a question from a law student with $100,000 in debt. The article offers several partial solutions ranging from debt forgiveness programs to fellowships to frugal living.

Britannica 2.0

Search Engine Journal reports that Britannica 2.0 is ready for launch, and among its new features it will allow users to edit, enhance, and contribute to the online encylopedia Wikipedia-style. Any changes or additions made to Britannica entries online would have to be vetted by one of the company's staff or freelance editors before the changes were reflected on the live site.
The encyclopedia had set a benchmark of a 20-minute turnaround to update the site with user-submitted edits to existing articles, which are written by the encyclopedia's paid expert contributors. They hope that researches will turn to Britannica 2.0 as a more authoritative source of information which still has the agility of Wikipedia.

New: Who Runs Gov blog

The Washington Post has launched a new blog called "WhoRunsGov". According to the first post, "With a new presidential administration in town for the first time in eight years, there will be hundreds of new faces appearing on the subway, in congressional hearings, on K Street and of course in the White House. And many of us will be asking: Who Are They?". The blog will be an ever-growing database of government power-brokers containing key information on new administration officials, lawmakers, senior Hill aides and ultimately interest group and think tank experts. The WaPo staff are currently adding professional profiles of people in the government - you can browse the list; the blog says that eventually readers will be able to add or edit profiles too.

The Clery Act and campus crime stats

The Chronicle of HIgher Education has a story that discusses the Clery Act and its effectiveness. The Clery Act is a federal law that requires colleges to send the government lengthy reports on campus crime each year, detailing their policies and tallying their total crimes. It was intended to inform families, to change students' behavior, and to keep them safe. But research on the use of the reports shows that very few students look — and even those who seek solid information can't find it. The article concludes that the Clery Act has created more bureaucracy on campus yet the information on campus crimes tends to be deceptive and confusing.

Are law schools exploiting students?

The ABA Journal has a report that the dean of New York Law School, Richard Matasar, said that law schools are exploiting their students who fail to succeed. He made the remarks, available in a podcast, at a program at the recent Association of American Law Schools meeting. He is quoted as saying that “We own our students' outcomes. We took them. We took their money. We live on their money. … And if they don't have a good outcome in life, we're exploiting them. It's our responsibility to own the outcomes of our institutions. If they're not doing well ... it's gotta be fixed. Or we should shut the damn place down. And that's a moral responsibility that we bear in the academy.” In a recent year at 50 law schools, 20 percent of the students either flunked out, can’t find jobs or have unknown outcomes. And many students graduate with a staggering amount of debt: another ABA Journal article tells the story of divorcing law school grads who were unable to cope with their combined $190,000 debt despite both earning six figure salaries. Both articles point to a recent story in Forbes magazine entitled "The Great College Hoax" that questions the idea that higher education is always a good investment.

Google calendar desktop gadget

If you use Google calendar, you will be pleased to hear that Google has just released a gadget that lets you keep your Google calendar on your desktop. You can click on an event to see details, including a map of the location, a list of attendees, and start and end times.