“Just because every generation feels that we’re going to hell in a handbasket doesn’t mean it isn’t true- it’s just that it takes fucking ages to get anywhere in a handbasket.” — Andy Armstrong
September, 2006
13
Sep 06
Split-personality blogging- ‘First Movers’
For a few months now I’ve been reading and occasionally commenting on Prof. Jim Chen’s ‘Jurisdynamics‘ blog, which focuses on issues of change and complexity in the law- something I’m really interested in (per the comparison between the code for an operating system and the code for a legal system.) Prof. Chen is aggressively expanding his Jurisdynamics Network, and as part of that, he has invited me to blog with a couple other law students at ‘First Movers‘, a group blog for law students.
In the future, most of my legal posts will start over there, but I’ll cross post them here. I expect that this will let me reach a different audience (one that isn’t so curious about my adventures in tablet computing, for example), perhaps spare my normal readers my most egregiously law-related posts, and hopefully help me meet and work with other law students from outside Columbia, so… should be fun. We’ll see, I guess- wish me luck :)
12
Sep 06
ACLU prez at the Law School
While we don’t quite get the personal touch that I often experienced at the Berkman, we still get a lot of great speakers and such passing through Columbia and the other New York area law schools. Today the president of the ACLU, Nadine Strossen, swung through for a brief lunch talk. I took sort of lousy notes, but a couple things jumped out at me. Note that there is liberal paraphrasing below, so please don’t take anything here as having come straight from her mouth.
- She complimented the Federalist Society, an activist conservative constitutional group, for raising the profile of constitutional law issues, even though she disagrees with many of their positions. She argues that they should be an inspiration to anyone entering law school, and posits that they are an example of the system at work- that anyone can take a legal issue, make it their own, and if it has substance, make it relevant. I think a cynic could easily spin this as ‘the system is great! single-issue lobbyists can make an impact!’, but it was refreshing to hear someone who has been so often stifled still express great optimism that individual effort can make an impact.
- She mentioned that we’re in a time of great interest for constitutional law scholars- Laurence Tribe, Harvard’s leading constitutional law scholar, actually stopped writing a treatise on constitutional law because he felt that the field had become so unsettled and so constantly changing that to write it now would be a waste of time.
- They’ve nearly doubled staff and membership since 9/11/2001, which is bittersweet- obviously good that people care, but obviously bad that civil liberties are in such bad shape that they draw this much attention. Says that ideally the ACLU would fade away.
- Finally, she went into great detail about how the ACLU is working with both sides of the political spectrum right now. She says that this has always been the case, but particularly at this time, given the dominance of the right in Congress, and the growing sympathy of libertarian-leaning Republicans to confront the Big Brother faction of their party, that they have worked often with both sides of the aisle. She had several good examples of this, including their defense of the reprehensible Fred Phelps of godhatesfags.com, and work with both parties on the Patriot Act. I unfortunately wasn’t able to get in a question before I had to leave, but what I really wanted to know what ‘If you’re so effectively bipartisan, why does one party still use ‘card carrying ACLU member’ as an epithet? Is it a failure of PR and of effective communication with one wing of the electorate? Or is the failure somewhere else?’ This seems like a critical problem for the ACLU’s effectiveness- if they weren’t so immediately and effectively demonized by so many people, often without factual basis, it seems like they might be likely to get a lot more done.
Anyway, interesting talk. I don’t always agree with their decisions of who to defend, but I’m glad they are there.
12
Sep 06
Death and rebirth of the science journal, journalism, and what the hell, maybe the law journal too
Interesting melange of articles, not quite sure what they point to for me in the future:
- Two bioinformatics guys write about ‘the death of the paper‘. Their thesis is that scientific journal articles are going to need to be reinvented, as massive data sets become more common, and more important than the actual paper/writing themselves. In specific, they want to publish the actual searchable databases, not just a handful of graphs, and they want to get academic ‘credit’ for something other than the actual article itself; primarily, the db.
- Jurisdynamics* extrapolates the previous link into the legal realm. As I mention in the comments, legal articles don’t typically have databases, so I think if the legal article matures technologically, it’ll look more like the next two links…
- … in which Stephen O’Grady writes about microformats replacing boxscores and the future of journalism, and Adrian Holovaty writes similarly and in more depth (brilliant minds thinking alike, yadda, yadda.) This is in some ways the exact opposite of the ‘death of the paper’ article, since microformats are data in micro-sized chunks, and bioinformatics databases are anything but micro. But obviously the core is the same- traditional reporting and traditional scientific papers could potentially become vastly more valuable if they contained machine-parseable data.
- Of course, microformats.org has given some thought to some of these things. Of particular interest to me right now is that they have given some thought to legal citations. So a microformat-driven journal- and the tools to consume that data- is perhaps not far off. (Of course, the utility of all this in the legal journal is constrained by the two proprietary databases that drive all legal research, but that is a rant for another time.)
So what does this mean, exactly? I’m honestly not sure, but the obvious conclusion to draw is that everyone on the publishing side of things (CMSs, word processors, and of course authors themselces) needs to be thinking very hard about how to publish all the relevant structured data that they can, and doing it soon, because the demand from content creators is finally in the pipeline. On the consumption side (web browsers, word processors, etc.) people should start thinking about how they can make the coming flood of parseable data useful to their users. That might look like whatever the hell Mark Pilgrim is working on, or it might look like dabbledb, or more likely like something not yet invented, but people should probably start thinking about it now, because time may be running out if you want to get in on the ground floor :)
* conflict of interest note: I might start writing for one of their side projects soon.
11
Sep 06
Not forgotten.
More pictures from my slice of 9/11/2006.
In the next five years, unlike the last five, I hope we use their memory to inspire us to actually make the US and the world safer for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, instead of making us less safe, or settling old scores. I hope we decide do it in a way that actually respects the values we claim to be advancing, instead of making a mockery of them. That may yet mean war or other forms of conflict, as there are people who do not believe in democracy, basic human rights, or self-determination, and they don’t always listen to reason. But if it is to be war, it should be just war, chosen reluctantly and not out of fear or anger, and conducted competently and with honest ends- again, not like the last five years. And we should pair our force, if we need it, with honest attempts and deep commitment to persuade the populations who play host to evil by attempting to resolve the ignorance, corruption, and poverty that tempt otherwise good people to follow theocrats and demagogues. We should not just pay lipservice to their doubts and prey upon their fears, as we have. Doing those things would be the best and most permanent memorial we can build.
9
Sep 06
Four more miscellaneous bits
Morning blogging sprint is over, nearly:
- Tangential to the facebook privacy issues, someone posted on craigslist announcing that they were a female looking for sex. Very predictable results, except that they were a guy, and they posted all the details. Not much substance there, but funny, and maybe a bit scary for our expectations of privacy.
- I really, really enjoyed Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End. He spoke on the subject of virtual reality at the Austin Game Conference; here is a transcript. Interesting read- stimulating, very plausible thinking about what computing UIs might look like in 20-30 years. Sample: “I am convinced that the day we really get high resolution heads up displays, most people who nowadays are carrying a bluetooth earphone and microphone would have no problem with wearing eyeglasses that gave them a heads up display of something like 4,000 by 4,000 if the infrastructure had moved along in concert. Then high resolution HUDs could be exploited. That’s an example of a highly disruptive technology. It essentially destroys all other display technology except as emergency backups.” He is thinking very, very big thoughts- that for the first time, at least that I’ve seen, aren’t completely implausible like most VRs posited by most SF authors.
- New York continues to rock. We ate at Pukk the other night, and it was delicious, and even plausibly reasonably priced- could happily have eaten a very filling meal for $13 if we hadn’t had desert. Met tomorrow, likely. And our local crazy indy film place served up some spectacularly bizarre film for Friday night date night.
- John Fleck, my personal master of all things media, has a fascinating observation on the relationship between blog, scholarship/academia, and media. Mike Madison has a related post here, on how law journals are turning towards the web- but all in an effort to save the law journal, instead of to actually advance scholarship.
9
Sep 06
on careers
At our introductory dinner Thursday night, a professor spoke on the importance of doing what you want to do and avoiding the risk-avoiding*, herd-following behavior that all lawyers fall into when considering careers. It was a nice speech, and I do hope a lot of people listen to her. Unfortunately, we won’t- something like 97% of my classmates (according to a dean who I spoke with the same night) will go through the traditional sheep-like hiring process the school provides. There are a lot of reasons for it- kids too young to understand what will or won’t make them happy in a job; kids with $100K in debt when they graduate; kids getting offers of $145,000 when they walk out the door; law schools that basically admit that you need big-firm training in order to be a useful lawyer. So there is no blame there. Still something I desperately hope I can avoid, ideally by finding the right open source/peer production firm to fall into. We’ll see :)
Relatedly, the next morning Kathy** posted this piece about using Venn diagrams intead of hierarchies to measure success. It strikes me as one of the more blue-sky pieces she’s written, because the Venn diagram needs three circles- what you are doing, what you want to do, and what the company needs you to do, which she basically ignores. But the nugget is there- if you ran a small company, and could afford the time and money to hire the right people from without to fill management roles, the three-circled diagram might be a preferable first metric for thinking about hiring and raises. (The heirarchy isn’t going away in a firm of more than 7-10 people.) Now if only a law firm (*cough*) would figure Kathy’s balancing act out, maybe the first problem would be lessened :)
* you thought QA people were bad about risk avoidance. Lawyers trump this badly.
** you shouldn’t need me to tell you this, because everyone on earth should be reading Kathy’s blog, but just in case…
9
Sep 06
the state of tablet software in linux
I bought a Lenovo X41 tablet two weeks ago. I got it for a number of reasons- ease of note-taking, improved interaction with professors, just needing a new machine anyway, etc. I knew going in that the state of linux tablet software was sort of poor, but after more investigation I’m surprised at how poor, and perhaps more troubling, how fragmented and nearly stagnant it is.
There are a variety of notepad-type tools. Jarnal came with the tablet, and is pretty damn good, except for the handwriting recognition, which is passable with training, but not great. Unfortunately, it appears that there is no active development, so we get what we get. Gournal is around, and looks pretty solid, though I have not actually used it yet. Xournal looks to be both cool and actively developed, at least for now, though it is not as sophisticated as Jarnal (no handwriting recognition, primarily; I have great faith that gocollab will make the collaboration part trivial soon ;). Maybe Xournal will be my first review for Quim’s new project- I’ve been using it every day for two weeks now and am pretty happy with it. None seem as polished as their Windows counterparts at first glance, but they are decent, and Xournal may be picking up steam. Sadly, Xournal appears not to be part of edgy, so I’ll likely have to break my no-compiling rule for another app (currently only gimmie is cool enough for that.) (If tomboy allowed scribbling into notes as well as typing, I’d wet my pants with joy, by the way.)
Unfortunately, for notepad-like tools to become really, really useful, they need handwriting recognition. More unfortunately, the more interesting-looking handwriting recognition/stroke-based text entry projects all appear to be dead in the water. GPE’s rosetta hasn’t had a significant commit in 16 months; mallum’s cool-looking xstroke replacement hasn’t had one in 11 months; and herzi’s HRE work got very little interest at fundable. This is a shame- I wish I had some clue about the ‘why’ to this problem- I’m guessing some combination of low demand and high skill barrier, but don’t really know. (Is there some project out there I don’t know about?)
There is at least some push in the keyboard area- obviously GOK is powerful, omnipresent, and under development. Frankly, though, I was surprised at how difficult it was to get going, and it apparently disabled my pen at one point! I’m intrigued by Ubuntu’s ‘OnBoard‘ project, and it looks nice and ‘Just Works’, though I’m curious why it isn’t just a GOK mode- just too radically different in aims? The laptop shipped with xvkbd, which works, once you figure out the trick :)
It doesn’t appear possible with any of these tools (either keyboards or stroke-recognizers), at least that I’ve seen, to use them in a maemo-like mode, where tapping on an input field brings up a text entry tool. Maemo’s behavior in this respect is so obvious and intuitive that I’m shocked I haven’t seen it elsewhere. It should certainly be in every linux tablet setup.
Anyway, I do think that tablets are going to become more popular, especially once text entry gets solved. Hopefully I’ll be along for the ride :)
[Coolest non-obvious feature I've seen on the windows side, by the way? Onenote will record audio and tie that to your notes, apparently, so that you can ask 'what was being said when I wrote this?' and get back that audio section, to use to polish/expand on your notes later. Very nice hack.]
[PS. I really hate WP's text editor's handling of white space. Does anyone know if there is a fix for it?]
9
Sep 06
webcite- ubercool!
Lessig’s blog pointed me at WebCite- surely one of those ‘everyone in academia has thought about this at one point, but no one has actually done it’ ideas. (I know I’ve had it in the back of my mind since my last year of college, but never had the motivation to get off my ass and do it.) Basic notion is that they’ll archive any page you point them at, so that in your papers you can link to a permanent archived copy of a site as it was when you cited it, instead of a potentially broken or modifiable URL. Apparently it is already a year old- shocked I haven’t actually seen it used yet. (Interestingly, none of the members of their consortium are law reviews, despite that it is not uncommon for law reviews to cite blogs these days- wonder why that is? Perhaps the Columbia Science and Tech Law Review can become the first. ;)
6
Sep 06
facebook rebellion(?), and potential lessons for other internet communities
So facebook did an update last night, changing it from something that had all the data to enable stalkers, but which made it mildly irritating to do it from their UI, to making it radically easy to find out all sorts of personal information about someone. Lets be utterly, 100% clear- you can’t do anything now that you couldn’t do 48 hours ago. They just made something that had been mildly hidden very, very obvious. In 43 hours, 345,000 people have joined the largest protest group- ‘Students Against Facebook News Feed’. In comparison, the self-titled ‘largest facebook group ever’ has 840,000 members. So that group is huge, growing at an insane rate (over 20K/hour for most of today, has grown by 4,000 while I’ve written this post) and that is only one of many. Clearly putting it in people’s face every time they log in exactly how little privacy they have may have been a mistake for facebook.
There is a pretty straightforward lesson here for anyone building online community- the things you and your power users think are obvious (‘it is already possible to stalk someone, duh!’) may not be obvious to the vast majority of your community members. Surface those issues that are obvious to the core without thinking about the details of how you surface it outside the core and it may well blow up in your face, even if nothing substantive has changed.
NB: there may be another long-term lesson here: people adjust and things blow over sometimes. It will be really interesting to see whether or not that happens in this case, and why. If I had to place a bet, I’d guess that facebook will make some very minor changes (one or two categories might become opt-in instead of opt-out) and the essentially exhibitionist facebook crowd will get used to it. If they do get used to it, that has huge implications for the future of privacy in our society- the majority of an entire generation will have spent very formative years living very, very, very publicly, and that will inevitably influence what they think of privacy as a value in the future.