March 2011 ~ life style and trends

New App for Shelfreading

11:25 AM Internet at Every Where

Shelfreading is like dusting--no one wants to do it, but it has to be done. Now, however, a new Android app may make shelfreading a breeze. The brainchild of the Miami University Augmented Reality Research Group, the app "'reads' a bookshelf, and with an AR overlay, quickly flags those books that are misplaced. It will also point to the correct place on the bookshelf so the book can easily be re-shelved correctly." This description comes from Audrey Watters' post on the ReadWriteWeb blog. The post includes a video of Professor William "Bo" Brinkman demonstrating how shelfreading would work using the app. Professor Brinkman makes the point...

The Criminal Justice System Gone Awry

12:32 PM Internet at Every Where

Professor Brandon L. Garrett's sobering article, "Getting guilty right," published in the Boston Globe on March 28, presents the results of his study of 250 erroneous convictions using court records and archives housed at the Innocence Project. Garrett's book, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong, will be published in April, and expands on the conclusions he reaches in his Globe article. Garrett uses the example of Neil Miller, wrongly convicted of a 1989 rape, to draw attention to the shortcomings of the criminal-justice system. By the time a new DNA test was performed thanks to the work of attorneys from the Innocence...

Bentham Project Revisited

4:13 PM Internet at Every Where

In a blog post last December, I discussed the University College London's Transcribe Bentham Project, an experiment in crowdsourcing whose goal was transcription of the unpublished manuscripts of Jeremy Bentham. All the work was going to be done by volunteers, with their submissions being vetted by paid research associates. Now it looks as if the future of the project is in doubt. According to a post in the Wired Campus blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, lack of funding is going to cause "scholars to scale back [the] groundbreaking project ..." The government grant that paid for computer programmers, photography, and research associates is coming to an end, and private money needs to be found to keep the project going. The research associates were a vital link between the project...

Darnton on Digital Libraries

10:19 AM Internet at Every Where

The New York Times Opinion pages of March 23, 2011 carried an essay from Robert Darnton, the Harvard Librarian, "A Digital Library Better Than Google's." In response to Judge Denny Chin's rejection of the Google Book Settlement, Darnton revisits the dream of Google Books - a vast digital library, which makes available freely to anyone with a computer and internet connection, the literature of the world. Darnton gives a nice precis of the action up til now: The Authors' Guild, representing a mere 8,000 members, proposed to sue Google for infringement of copyright. Google, which could have defended its actions as fair use, elected instead to negotiate a settlement agreement. This was what eventually went before Judge Chin, in a much-amended version, which... divided up the pie. Google would...

Who Owns Sunlight?

7:30 AM Internet at Every Where

I had never thought about who owns sunlight until I read an interview with Professor Stuart Banner of UCLA Law School. Professor Banner has recently published a book, American Property: A History of How, Why, and What We Own, which, according to the publisher's blurb, is the "first comprehensive history of property in the United States." Banner's central thesis is that the nature of property has changed over time, and was once linked to ownership of tangible things. This is not so today, when ownership of intangibles such as ideas, HTML code, genetic material, artistic styles, and methods of making traditional medicinal remedies is accepted....

Alternative to Google Books: Hathi Trust signs Summon as search engine -

6:53 AM Internet at Every Where

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that HathiTrust has made its large library of digital texts searchable by signing an agreement with Summon, a library-specific search engine produced by Serials Solutions. Indeed, if you click on the HathiTrust link, you will see that they now offer catalog and full text searches, as well as browsing on their site. Looking at the Search tips, they offer phrase searches in both the catalog and full text searches. They offer wild card searches, for both single and multiple characters, ONLY in the catalog search. They allow Boolean searching, with AND, OR, and NOT searches in both catalog and full text...

Google Book Settlement decision handed down

2:23 PM Internet at Every Where

The Court has handed down its final order, and here is the short answer:Before the Court is plaintiffs' motion pursuant, to Rule23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure for final approval ofthe proposed settlement of this class action on the terms setforth in the Amended Settlement Agreement (the "ASA"). Thequestion presented is whether the ASA is fair, adequate, andreasonable. I conclude that it is not.While the digitization of books and the creation of auniversal digital library would benefit many, the ASA wouldsimply go too far. It would permit this class action -- whichwas brought against defendant Google Inc. ("Google") to challengeits scanning of books and display of "snippets" for on-linesearching -- to implement a forward-looking business arrangementthat would grant Google significant...

Law School Applications Down

2:35 PM Internet at Every Where

I guess potential law students have gotten the message that going to law school might not be the best career path right now. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that law-school applications have declined 11.5% since last year. In fact, the total number of applicants "is the lowest since 2001 at this stage of the process." Students know that the job market for attorneys continues to be weak, and that they would almost certainly graduate with significant debt that would be difficult to pay back in a reasonable timeframe. It is undoubtedly a good thing for students to be more realistic about the costs and benefits of a legal education, but as someone who works at a law school that is tuition dependent, the drop in applications is also a cause for conce...

The Times Paywall Finally Goes Up

1:50 PM Internet at Every Where

The New York Times announced today that its new paywall has gone up for readers in Canada, and that the paywall for the United States and the rest of the world will go up on March 28. According to the email I got, the rollout in Canada will allow the company "to fine-tune the customer experience before [the] global launch." Does this mean that if our experience is bad, we can blame Canada? Readers will be able to view twenty articles per month, and after that level is reached, will not be able to view anything more unless they are digital subscribers. I was happy to see that "Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit." That seems...

Dog Law

11:03 AM Internet at Every Where

Yale Law School Library has announced a three-day pilot program beginning March 28 which will enable students to check out a "certified library therapy dog." The dog's name is Monty, and he will be available for thirty-minute sessions with stressed-out students. To allay the concerns of those who aren't big fans of dogs, Monty is hypoallergenic and his "visits will be confined to a 'dedicated non-public space in the library.'" According to Therapy Dogs International, an organization quoted in the Yale Daily News feature about the program, "studies have indicated that visit with therapy dogs help decrease blood pressure and stress levels, while...

The New York Times: Too Little, Too Late?

7:18 AM Internet at Every Where

Like many other people, I have been waiting for The New York Times to announce when it would begin charging for access to its website. The silence has been deafening since the initial announcement fourteen months ago. Every so often, I would see news (sometimes no more than informed speculation) about the Times's plans on other news organizations' websites, but there was nothing from the Times itself. On Sunday, the silence was finally broken, but in a mea culpa op-ed piece that acknowledged the paper's failures in implementing the new plan, but neglected to provide any details whatsoever about the plan itself. I understand that the management of the company wants to have everything in place before making the announcement and cutting over to the new website, but they have had months to...

Students and Being There

12:13 PM Internet at Every Where

A challenging article from The Chronicle of Higher Education: Actually Going to Class: How 20th Century, by Jeffrey R. Young, dated February 27, 2011. The first (and so far only) time I had students ask me about whether they actually had to attend class, it was not, thank heavens, in my own class. I was attending a reception for potential law students. Two of the guys interested in the Intellectual Property concentration were the ones who brought this up. They had jobs in the real world, like most of the students in our evening division, so there is, I suppose, some justification. But most of our students are serious about attending class....

Establishing Torture

3:18 PM Internet at Every Where

According to an article in today's New York Times, the human rights program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York is playing a key role in establishing that asylum seekers were tortured in their home countries. Proof that individuals were tortured in the past can help establish that they have a well-founded fear of persecution should they return, which is the legal standard for being granted asylum in the United States. This standard comes from the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951, Article I, which the United States adopted with some modifications in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(42)(a). Dr. Ramin Asgary is the director of the Mount Sinai program. Heand his students have examined about 130 refugees ... sifting...

New Clinic at Yale Law School

10:42 AM Internet at Every Where

Thanks to Pace Law Library colleague Vicky Gannon for sending me this article from the Yale Daily News about a new clinic that has recently opened at the Yale Law School. According to the press release that announced the founding of the clinic, The Ethics Bureau at Yale will be open for business in the spring of 2011. It will provide pro bono ethics counseling and opinions as well as advice on asserting ineffective assistance of counsel claims when counsel engaged in ethical misconduct.“The course is the first of its kind. ... It will provide a valuable service not otherwise available and an opportunity for our students to understand the real-life dimensions to the professional responsibility obligations of lawyers.” The Ethics Bureau is under the direction of Lawrence Fox, former chair of...

Vendor Neutral Citation is getting some traction

10:00 AM Internet at Every Where

Well, besides Judge Posner's poison valentine, The Bluebook Blues, 120 Yale L.J. 850 (2011), there have been a number of blog posts recently reacting to the article. Judge Posner is a long-time Bluebook antagonist (see Posner, Goodbye to the Bluebook, 53 U.Chi.L.Rev. 1343 (1986)), but his solution is not a vendor-neutral citation system. In his recent article, he supplies an example of his own citation system that he teaches to his law clerks. It is not really format or vendor neutral. Many support his reaction against the Bluebook's traditional-style citation requirements, while struggling towards a different ideal. The Bluebook citation styles, which have been bound to print format, favor not only the old print reporters but also Lexis and Westlaw which provide "star numbering." This...

DrawCongress.org - What Non-partisan Congressional Redistricting Looks Like

1:32 PM Internet at Every Where

Tip of the OOTJ hat to colleague Kent McKeever at Columbia. He passes along news of Columbia Law Professor Nathaniel Persily, who teaches a class in "Redistricting and Gerrymandering." His class project just came out with a website, DrawCongress.org. The students are working on an Internet depository of non-partisan maps of possible Congressional redistricting lines for every state in the Union. Prof. Persily says, and asks for feedback: This website and associated project have three goals. First, the project seeks to educate both the students involved and the general public about the redistricting process. We hope that the maps and redistricting...

Sold out! AALL sells us down the river

10:23 AM Internet at Every Where

Well, thanks to Joe Hodnicki at the Law Librarian Blog, Sarah Glassmeyer at SarahGlassmeyerDotCom, and Greg Lambert, of 3 Geeks and a Blog, we know that AALL has requested that nobody blog live during the AALL Vendor Colloquium. So, not only is it not Webcast for us members who are footing the bill, it is not blogged or Tweeted. Wonder why not?Greg says at his blog...I don't think you'll be seeing a lot of #AALLVC tweets today, as many of us were asked to wait and sit through the entire discussion before we start pushing information out. I looked at this the same way that I looked at when I got to look at WestlawNext last year when I went up to Eagan, MN. Many of you may not agree with me on this, but that's what I agreed to, and I will make sure that I keep lots of notes on what is said...

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