Farewell to Summer

Click on the title above to visit NPR for an audio tour of musical farewells to summer. The survey spans Beachboy pop to classical music to modern ballads from Sinatra to Stevie Wonder.

As we enjoy the last weekend of summer, consider the turning of the year. Summer seems to stand for freedom, youth, fun, while the autumn often implies aging, the end of youth and imposition of responsibilities of adulthood.

I have actually always loved the autumn. And working in a law school, the fall is New Years! Have a happy weekend.

The illustration is the cover of Ray Bradbury's new book, Farewell to Summer.

How sophisticated the phishers have become!

Click on the title above to read an excellent article by Hiawatha Bray in the Boston Globe about the theft of e-mail addresses from Monster.com for "spear phishing." This is targeted e-mails, to the users of Monster.com, which will look as though they came from Monster. The recipients will be more likely to follow directions in these scam mails, since they used Monster in employment searches. Watch out!

Bar Glitch in New York

Apparently there was a glitch during the July New York bar exam--what a nightmare for the candidates! The story follows.

"Son of a Glitch!: Hundreds of NY Bar Exam Takers May Have Had Essay Answers Fouled Up by Software


New York Lawyer
August 30, 2007
Reprints & Permissions

By Joel Stashenko
New York Law Journal

The state Board of Law Examiners and Software Secure Inc., the company the board hired to provide software to take the bar exam, appear to have incomplete essays from about 400 people who sat for July's exam.

The company and the board are both notifying the test takers this week via e-mail that they should e-mail backup data to Software Secure, board Executive Director John J. McAlary said yesterday. Six essay questions were part of the New York phase of the two-day exam.

Mr. McAlary said in an interview that one or more of the essays might be missing for the 400 exam takers. In some cases, it is not clear whether the answers Software Secure has are complete, he said.

"They may have an essay that appears incomplete, and that may be because someone just ran out of time on that part of the exam," he said.

Backup data saved through the software will provide a minute-by-minute accounting of students' work on the timed exam and a clearer picture if essays are complete, according to Mr. McAlary. The backup data would also provide answers that may have appeared to have been overwritten on the software, he said.

Test takers began complaining of problems with the Cambridge, Mass.-based Software Secure program starting on July 24, the first day of the exam. Software Secure later determined that the software malfunctioned on some laptops when students toggled between answer tabs on their screens. The Board of Law Examiners said backups in the software should have saved all the work students did on their laptop, but they will not know for sure until all students' answers are printed out and studied by the board.

It is too early to tell if the software problems will cause a delay in grading the July test, which is scheduled to be completed in mid-November, the board said.

Just under 5,000 - or about half of - July's test takers used a laptop."

Blog for Justice Day -- Jena Six

A group of bloggers have agreed that today is Blog for Justice Day. This is focusing on the Jena Six (see blog post here at OOTJ). The incredible miscarriage of justice, the inequitable sentences given black teenagers in that small town are outrageous, and must be condemned and (we hope!) changed. But I see a larger and very troubling trend. While on the surface, we have all got that equality race relations song down pat, there are definitely troubling harmonics going on down deep.

Racism is a cancer that was written into our country's legal foundations -- through an agreement between the founding fathers to reconcile slavery in order to gain the slave states' acceptance of the union. Slavery was a fact of life in many parts of the world through history. But the Greeks and Romans were upfront about the fact that they took a human being otherwise like themselves and pressed that person into involuntary servitude. They might have been captured in battles, sold for debts. But there was never a comment that the slave was less human than the master -- in fact Romans valued literate Greek slaves as tutors for their children and secretaries for themselves. But in the Christian world, where our Bible proclaims that Christ is the same for slave or freeman, owners felt the need to rationalize their slaveholding by building a fiction that Indians and black African were somehow less human than white Europeans and Americans. How bitterly ironic that the roots of racism against people of color are in their ancestors' slavery.

Anybody with eyes to see and ears to hear knows that racism is a continuing problem in the US. For a number of years, it was "out of style" to say racist things or make jokes based on race or ethnicity. But there seems to be a backlash going on against "political correctness." This framing of the issue seems to be code speak for let's share blatantly all the secret biases and racism we all know we share. I know it does not go away if we stop people being blatant about it -- but it does create a real pressure that it's not acceptable behavior. A large plurality of people will be swayed and changed by either hearing racist statements allowed as acceptable behavior or condemned as rude, out-of-bounds bad behavior. It's hard for white people to full understand the damage caused by allowing racism to go unchallenged. Here is a nice quote from the (white) columnist:

At its core, racism is a judgment imposed on people based not on their merits as individuals but on their membership in a racial group. That's why many black people cringe when another black person is cast in a bad light. They understand that for some, one person's failure will become evidence of the group's failings.

I think it's hard for white people to place ourselves in that position. You can draw analogies — a postal worker might cringe when a story breaks about some mail sorter out in California "going postal" on co-workers with a shotgun — but racial identity cuts deeper than mere occupation.

Link to editorial in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution today. Author Jay Bookman muses on the secretive nature of continuing racism.

Link to Dinesh D'Souza's analysis of types of racism and bigotry.

Link to Human Rights Watch notes on racism in the U.S.

Follow the link in the title to the central organizer for Blog for Justice Day. And follow the links I give here in the text. But consider this: until you can truly walk in the shoes of another, it may be impossible to imagine the effects of racism and bigotry in the world. If you have friends of color, ask them about their experiences of racism. Ask them what Jena means to them.

On the Anniversary of Katrina: Voices from New Orleans

From Amy Hale-Janeke, at the %th Circuit in New Orleans:

Thanks to all of you who have sent encouraging words to us here on Katrina's anniversary. There are a lot of memorials going on around the city despite pouring rain. Throughout the area there is bell-ringing, wreath-laying, secular and religious services.

It is raining heavily outside right now. During lunch, I dashed across the street to a local eatery. As I stood in line, I heard one lady say, "See? Even the sky is crying today." I thought about that statement as I ate my sandwich. There is cause for crying- the very-preventable breaking of the levies, the tragedy and suffering at the Superdome, the loss of lives, houses, businesses and even whole neighborhoods. Some things can come back (and are) and some things aren't. Some people are coming back and some never will.

But there is also cause for hope! The hope comes from individuals who make up our nation. Individuals who donate time, money, and sometimes just give someone a hug when despair overwhelms them. In fact, as I drove into work this morning, I listened to an NPR story about who is really doing the rebuilding. Mainly, it's Habitat for Humanity. In fact, the story said Habitat has built more homes than anyone else, including the gov't. They are building something like 57 a month. The story is here:
http://www.npr.org

There was also a long story in last Sunday's paper about the New Orleans Public Library and its determination to rebuild and how individuals and non-profits are helping out. Check it out at:
http://www.nola.com/timespic

For those of you who wrote to ask what you can do to continue to help, consider making a donation today to either:
the Friends of the New Orleans Public Library
(http://nutrias.org/info/friends/friends.htm)
or
Habitat for Humanity New Orleans Area Chapter
(http://www.habitat-nola.org/)

And now....back to your regularly scheduled programming....

Amy Hale-Janeke, JD MLS
Head of Reference Services
5th Circuit Court of Appeals Library
New Orleans Headquarters
600 Camp Street, Room 106
New Orleans, LA 70130

The Jena Six: Race Relations in Louisiana

Click on the title to this post. You will link to the online student newspaper at Howard University. The story is about racially motivated attacks involving high school students in Jena, Louisiana. What is even more troubling is the involvement of the local DA, judge and all-white jury in unjust treatment of the involved teens, according to their race. From the May, 2007 BBC World report:

It all began at Jena High School last summer when a black student, Kenneth Purvis, asked the school's principal whether he was permitted to sit under the shade of the school courtyard tree, a place traditionally reserved for white students only. He was told he could sit where he liked.

The following morning, when the students arrived at school, they found three nooses dangling from the tree.

Most whites in Jena dismissed it as a tasteless prank, but the minority black community identified the gesture as something far more vicious.

"It meant the KKK, it meant 'niggers we're going to kill you, we're gonna hang you 'til you die'," said Caseptla Bailey, one of the black community leaders.

Old racial fault lines in Jena began to fracture the town. It was made worse when - despite the school head recommending the noose-hangers be expelled - the board overruled him and the three white student perpetrators merely received a slap on the wrist. (snip)

The Washington Post reported on Aug. 3, 2007:

A few weeks after the nooses were discovered in September, an arsonist torched a wing of Jena High School. Race fights roiled the town for days, culminating in a schoolyard brawl that led the LaSalle Parish district attorney to charge six black teenagers with attempted murder for beating up a white teenager who suffered no life-threatening injuries.

Mychal Bell, the first of the six to be tried, is scheduled to be sentenced in September. He was convicted in July by an all-white jury on reduced charges of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit it. Like his co-defendants -- Robert Bailey, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, Theodore Shaw and Jesse Beard -- Bell had no prior criminal record.

He faces up to 22 years in prison, and civil rights advocates say the reduced charges were still excessive and did not fit the crime. "Can they really do this to me?" Bell asked recently, sitting in his jail cell looking frightened and numb.

The white teenager who was beaten, Justin Barker, 17, was knocked out but walked out of a hospital after two hours of treatment for a concussion and an eye that was swollen shut. He attended a ring ceremony later that night.

District Attorney Reed Walters said in December that his decision to prosecute the black teenagers to the full extent of the law had nothing to do with race. He would not comment further on the case while it is pending

The Jena Six are six black high school students facing "prosecution to the full extent of the law." Read the full Post article, linked below for a troubling list of over-zealous prosecution of black youths across the country. Are we developing a separate system of justice for blacks and another for whites? There is a petition to the Department of Justice here

and a fund to support the defense of the Jena Six


You can read more at other sites, in case you'd like verification of the story:

Democracy Now, a daily radio and TV news show with video clips.

Whileseated, a blog with excellent links and photos, video segments here, too.

Editorial from the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

BBC

Washington Post

To illustrate why the nooses that began this mess were seen differently by blacks and whites in Jena, I include a photo of a lynching from 1930, Marion, Indiana, at www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0309/lm18.html - 100 photos that changed the world.

Steven Pinker on Dangerous Ideas

Click on the title to this post to read an essay by Steven Pinker in the Chicago Sun Times, "In Defense of Dangerous Ideas." While Steven Pinker lists a bunch of heretical statements that can certainly raise your blood pressure, his central thesis is that we should not be afraid to contemplate dangerous ideas, and that parameters of dangerous ideas change over time. Here is a snippet:

What makes an idea "dangerous"? One factor is an imaginable train of events in which acceptance of the idea could lead to an outcome recognized as harmful. In religious societies, the fear is that if people ever stopped believing in the literal truth of the Bible they would also stop
believing in the authority of its moral commandments. That is, if today people dismiss the part about God creating the Earth in six days, tomorrow they'll dismiss the part about "Thou shalt not kill." In progressive circles, the fear is that if people ever were to acknowledge any differences between races, sexes or individuals, they would feel justified in discrimination or oppression. Other dangerous ideas set off fears that people will neglect or abuse their children, become indifferent to the environment, devalue human life, accept violence and prematurely resign themselves to social problems that could be solved with sufficient commitment and optimism.

All these outcomes, needless to say, would be deplorable. But none of them actually follows from the supposedly dangerous idea. Even if it turns out, for instance, that groups of people are different in their averages, the overlap is certainly so great that it would be irrational and unfair to discriminate against individuals on that basis. Likewise, even if it turns out that parents don't have the power to shape their children's personalities, it would be wrong on grounds of simple human decency to abuse or neglect one's children. And if currently popular ideas about how to improve the environment are shown to be ineffective, it only highlights the need to know what would be effective. Another contributor to the perception of dangerousness is the intellectual blinkers that humans tend to don when they split into factions. people have a nasty habit of clustering in coalitions, professing certain beliefs as badges of their commitment to the coalition and treating rival coalitions as intellectually unfit and morally depraved. (snip)

New ideas, nuanced ideas, hybrid ideas -- and sometimes dangerous ideas -- often have trouble getting a hearing against these group-bonding convictions. The conviction that honest opinions can be dangerous may even arise from a feature of human nature. Philip Tetlock and Alan Fiske have argued that certain human relationships are constituted on a basis of unshakeable convictions. We love our children and parents, are faithful to our spouses, stand by our friends, contribute to our communities, and are loyal to our coalitions not because we continually question and evaluate the merits of these commitments but because we feel them in our bones. A person who spends too much time pondering whether logic and fact really justify a commitment to one of these relationships is seen as just not "getting it." Decent people don't carefully weigh the advantages and disadvantages of selling their children or selling out their friends or their spouses or their colleagues or their country. They reject these possibilities outright; they "don't go there." So the taboo on questioning sacred values make sense in the context of personal relationships. It makes far less sense in the context of discovering how the world works or running a country.
Explore all relevant ideas
Should we treat some ideas as dangerous? Let's exclude outright lies, deceptive propaganda, incendiary conspiracy theories from malevolent crackpots and technological recipes for wanton destruction. Consider only ideas about the truth of empirical claims or the effectiveness of policies that, if they turned out to be true, would require a significant rethinking of our moral sensibilities. And consider ideas that, if they turn out to be false, could lead to harm if people believed them to be true. In either case, we don't know whether they are true or false a priori , so only by examining and debating them can we find out. Finally, let's assume that we're not talking about burning people at the stake or cutting out their tongues but about discouraging their research and giving their ideas as little publicity as possible.

Wow! Even that last statement is a controversial one in library circles. My first published article (Librarians and the New Censorship, 7 Public Library Quarterly 23, Spring/Summer 1986. Reprinted in Alternative Library Literature, 1988 (feminist theory of pornography as civil rights violation)) considered the possibility that librarians might have a moral obligation to not collect certain types of material that damage disadvantaged groups -- rather than purchase materials on both sides of issues. That was enough to seem incendiary in public library circles, apparently.

It's easy to come up with "dangerous ideas" that have lost their punch with time: slavery, women's inability to work or play sports, the sun at the center of the solar system. I suppose other ideas that seem dangerous now are easy to come up with, too --Pinker's essay lists a bunch. As Pinker indicates, test may be whether the ideas lead to political action or to wrong or unethical action if carried to an extreme. I do like the idea of trying to separate the controversial but testable root from the dangerous fruit. I suppose the foundation of this blog as a debate over the speed and completeness of moving libraries from print to digital is a good example of dangerous ideas that should be explored, but might also lead to dangerous actions if misunderstood or carried to extremes.Pinker's essay also considers the dangerousness of dangerous ideas:

We know that the world is full of malevolent and callous people who will use any pretext to justify their bigotry or destructiveness. We must expect that they will seize on the broaching of a topic that seems in sympathy with their beliefs as a vindication of their agenda. Not only can the imprimatur of scientific debate add legitimacy to toxic ideas, but the mere act of making an idea common knowledge can change its effects. Individuals, for instance, may harbor a private opinion on differences between genders or among ethnic groups but keep it to themselves because of its opprobrium. But once the opinion is aired in public, they may be emboldened to act on their prejudice -- not just because it has been publicly ratified but because they must anticipate that everyone else will act on the information. Some people, for example, might discriminate against the members of an ethnic group despite having no pejorative opinion about them, in the expectation that their customers or colleagues will have such opinions and that defying them would be costly. And then there are the effects of these debates on the confidence of the members of the stigmatized groups themselves.

Of course, academics can warn against these abuses, but the qualifications and nitpicking they do for a living may not catch up with the simpler formulations that run on swifter legs. Even if they did, their qualifications might be lost on the masses.

Pinker ends his excellent and thought-provoking essay with a call to universities to do a better job of encouraging debate on dangerous ideas and to fight against political suppression of inconvenient facts (as with the climate debate). Librarians are at the center of the struggle to test truth and protect it from suppression. We need to think hard about Pinker's dangerous ideas.

Adios, Alberto

Controversial Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has resigned. Click on the title to read on CNN online.

So what party do you throw?

When your lawyer loses his license?





A disbar mitzvah.



Sorry I couldn't resist. Tip of the hat to Cox & Rathvon, Boston Globe Sunday Crossword.

Virtual worlds modeling social theories

Click on the title to this post to read a Boston Globe article about scientists studying two plagues in two separate virtual worlds. Creators of The World of Warcraft intentionally created a virus to infect players who got to a high level to reduce their ability to beat a major character. But the players carried the disease around the World of Warcraft and unintentionally modeled a plague, called Corrupted Blood. In another world, Whyville, players were recruited for an experiment. In both cases, scientists learned from watching the avatars' responses. Now a social scientist at Indiana U. is planning to launch a virtual world with the purpose of modeling social science and political science theories.