This is sort of "duh!" territory, but folks may want to read the Boston Globe article linked in the title to this post, about how student debt is starting to affect alumni giving. When they still owe tens of thousands on their tuition, our graduates don't feel they are able to make donations to their schools. Unless we can reduce the debt burden, all their money is going to the private lenders, not their own welfare or the school's giving coffers.
Check out the article from the NY Times Sunday article on librarians. Although they speak of younger librarians being less typical of the stereotype, we hope OOTJ readers will also agree that librarians have NEVER been like the stereotype. There are some interesting links in the article and references to social groups, comix and mags by, about and for librarians. They also drop the awful term "guybrarian" -- sheesh! Still, it's nice for the librarian image to be tagged as Hip by the NY Times style section (I think, maybe -- let me think about that).
... in your deliberations, when seeking to determine the military conditions, let them be made the basis of a comparison, in this wise:--Sun Tzu earlier explains that "The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger." I contemplate the current U.S. adventures in war and I fear for my country.
(1) Which of the two sovereigns is imbued
with the Moral law?
(2) Which of the two generals has most ability?
(3) With whom lie the advantages derived from Heaven
and Earth?
(4) On which side is discipline most rigorously enforced?
(5) Which army is stronger?
(6) On which side are officers and men more highly trained?
(7) In which army is there the greater constancy
both in reward and punishment?
By means of these seven considerations I can
forecast victory or defeat.
Law.com (the National Law Journal online) also reported recently that
A Massachusetts bar examination applicant who claims he failed the test because he didn't answer a question about homosexual marriage and parenting is suing the test administration agency, the state Supreme Judicial Court and four individual justices for constitutional violations.No, I think it just required the applicants to state the current law in Massachusetts.
In his pro se complaint, plaintiff Stephen Dunne seeks preliminary and permanent injunctions barring the defendants from considering the question in regard to his application to practice law and from enforcing the question in the current or future bar examinations. Dunne is also seeking a jury trial and unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. Stephen Dunne v. The Massachusetts Board of Bar Examiners, No. 07-11166 (D. Mass.)
Dunne claims his score of 268.866 on the November 2006 bar exam just missed the passing score of 270 points because he didn't follow the proscribed format for an unlawful question about gay marriage. Dunne said the question required applicants to "affirmatively accept, support and promote homosexual marriage and homosexual parenting."
Link to the article at law.com in the title above to read a story about the ABA tightening bar passage standards under pressure from the Dept. of Education. Many law deans oppose to the new standards. Schools being accredited must...
meet one of two criteria. Under the first, they would need to show that in at least three of the most recent five years, first-time test takers passed at no more than 10 points below the first-time bar passage rates for graduates of other accredited law schools taking the bar in the same jurisdiction.The ABA House of Delegates will vote on the new standards at the ABA annual meeting this August.
Also under the first criterion, schools in which more than 20% of their graduates take the bar exam for the first time in other jurisdictions would need to demonstrate that at least 70% of their first-time test takers passed during the two most recent bar-exam periods.
As an alternative to the first criterion, schools would need to demonstrate that 80% of their graduates who took the exam anywhere in the country passed within three attempts, within three years of graduation. ...
The ABA's attempt to revise the standard is part of its bid to the Department of Education to remain as the accrediting body for law schools. Last month, the Department of Education extended the ABA's power to continue accrediting for only 18 months, instead of a five-year term that it received in the past.
The two organizations have butted heads, in part, because of the disagreement over the ABA's diversity rule — Standard 212 — which the ABA revised at its annual conference last summer. The standard requires law schools to demonstrate by "concrete action" that they are admitting minority students. Opponents assert that the requirement is unlawful.
It has taken me awhile, but I finally read last Sunday's New York Times Magazine section yesterday. One interesting article concerned Wikipedia, the open-access encyclopedia. According to the article, Wikipedia is rapidly becoming a "leading source of daily journalism." It has even "all but strangled one of its sister projects, the three-year-old Wikinews." One of the examples author Jonathan Dee used was the article about the Fort Dix Terror Plot. After the plot was disclosed on May 8, a stub of an article was created on Wikipedia at about 7:00 A.M. Over the next few hours, a Wikipedia contributor "expanded and corrected this stub 59 times, ultimately shaping it into a respectable, balanced and even footnoted 50-line account of that day's major development in the war on terror." This contributor is only sixteen years old!
The aspect of the Times article that I found most interesting was how Wikipedia is changing our idea of what an encyclopedia is. Traditionally, an "encyclopedia was synonymous with a fixed, archival idea about the retrievability of information from the past. But Wikipedia's notion of the past has enlarged to include things that haven't even stopped happening yet. Increasingly, it has become a go-to source not just for reference material but for real-time breaking news--to the point where, following the mass murder at Virginia Tech, one newspaper in Virginia praised Wikipedia as a crucial source of detailed information." It was also interesting to read mini-profiles of some of the individuals who dedicate hours of their own time to creating and editing articles on Wikipedia. One is going to be starting law school at American University in the fall.
The moon is so big/Won't you come watch it with me -- John Doe, Big Moon
Law Librarians should read two free articles available from SSRN.
New Skills, New Learning: Legal Education and the promise of Technology. Gene Koo http:/papers.ssrn.com/abstract=976646
The Two Hemispheres of Legal Education. Randolph Janokit
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=913084
The articles could provide justification for libraries to offer CLE tech programs. Librarians also need to become more familiar with the free legal resources, like public filings and briefs available over the internet. Janokit’s article gives an acerbic perspective to Koo’s premises.
There is a hole in the city since you’ve been gone – John Doe
I have been reading some interesting stuff.
The June/July 2007 issue of Scientific American Mind has some articles that could apply to librarians:
“The Science of Team Success” by Steve W. Jo Kozlowski and Daniel R. Ilgen sums up recent research on work teams. Reading it, I wanted to work in a library organized according to its insights. I have never felt comfortable with the idea that people should be hired because they fit in—fit in to what I always thought. I did have a problem with the idea of strong ties among co-workers. I am nervous about my co-workers being included in my private life (I need a lot of privacy), but that may say more that I have been in many work situations not supportive of my interests and goals. Or maybe I am not a team player.
Something for us to be aware as we librarians promote cyber-services is Kyle Lewis’s discovery: [he] “found that the development of a team’s ability to access distributed knowledge required face-to-face interaction. In groups that communicated exclusively by phone or e-mail, this skill did not emerge—an observation of increasing importance, given the rise of teams that operate remotely and coordinate sometimes only through computer interactions. …”
“Getting Good Advice” by Yvonne Raley is about how to evaluate experts. Since we librarians are supposed to evaluate resources without subject expertise and a lot of legal reasoning requires evaluating, this article is intriguing. It didn’t offer much that was new, but it was fun to see our concerns in a major publication.
Evaluating experts leads into questions of authority. Narration relies on expectations. With all the law reviews of constructing legal narratives, we librarians should be ready to challenge those assertions. “Dog Bites Dog Story” in Steve Mirsky’s Anti Gravity column in the July Scientific American should be read by those of us who like to quote Sergeant Friday, “Just the facts.” Mirsky describes two types of sciences: experimental (chemistry) and then the historical and observational sciences like journalism and crime scene investigation. I thought of legal research because the attorney like “ a reporter gathers facts and then constructs one or more possible narratives to explain those facts. Alternative narratives then fight it out, and the most parsimonious wins. Sometimes.”
Those evidence chains need to be questioned.
Another great article is “Insights: Data Protection: A little Privacy, Please.” Latanya Sweeney is a computer scientist we need to follow. She runs the Data Privacy Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon. Privacy, the sense of a self with rights, is important to our legal system. Because of it, we don’t sacrifice women in cenotes, and we hold wrong-doers accountable.
In my experience with Filipino and Latino in-laws, privacy does not exist in a clan based culture. In such cultures, grievances are mediated, which usually means that the weakest person has to publicly accept the apology of the stronger. There is no real restitution or change, just a public performance that fulfills protocol. This was brought out again in a recent incident reported in the New York Times(Pakistani Papers Are Snatched, And Their Publishers Warned, June 10, 2007.)
The article closed with the publisher Mr. Faroogi saying, “'I am from a tribal society and I don't want to live in a tribal society here, too,'' he said. ''I don't want to hug each other and resolve the problem like that. I want to go to court.”
Mr. Faroogi is a brave man and he points out a strength of the US, its legal system. The Law Library Journal “Legal Information as Social Capital” applies here. It is a wonderful article. Its theme needs to be brought into our daily practice.
The August issue of “Seed” has an article by Jonah Lehree on “The Living City.” Cities run under their own scientific laws! “They are free from the constraints of ordinary living things and are instead subject to an entirely new set of requirements.” “As life grows, it develops enormous economics of scale.” Cities are the reason behind innovation: face time (like the finding that teams don’t work well electronically) the exchange of ideas creates more ideas.
Libraries can be a part of that.
Follow the link in the title above for an excellent and entertaining explanation of how fireworks operate and are made. I have been fortunate enough to see some wonderful fireworks displays, and have long wondered how such marvels are constructed. There's a real art to designing a specialty firework, and to composing displays.
See this link for a history of fireworks. They state that the Liu Yang region of Hunan Province is the world's leading producer of fireworks. While many know that most fireworks are created in China, many assume that they remain the leading source because of cheap labor. This site disputes this, and argues that China's position as leaders in fireworks production stems from its long history with pyrotechnics. The site also notes that originally, all fireworks imported to the U.S. from China came through Hong Kong. After Nixon opened trade between China and the U.S., and then after Deng Xiaoping began supporting entrepreneurialism, the imports began arriving directly from mainland China. Many products were incorrectly labeled and such laxness proved dangerous. At that point, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Council and
..., American Pyrotechnics Association, and Hong Brokers Association spent 10 days in Southern China meeting with representatives from each export corporation and factory managers, on a province by province basis.Now, fireworks are produced in China without government subsidies. This website appears to be sponsored by the Phantom Fireworks chain, which offers not only this history, but also safety information and info on the chemistry behind fireworks.
The meetings involved shooting each item produced in China and determining what the appropriate and correct warning descriptions and print size should be from the point of view of providing safe warning labels for the American consumers. The Americans involved took on the infamous moniker of "The Shekou Six" by most of the shell shocked Chinese industry people, and from that meeting and a few that followed was born the American Fireworks Standards Laboratory (AFSL) which monitors firework production within China to this day.
