Elections cloud the horizon!

Coming up to Super Tuesday, when so many states hold their primary elections, the run for the nominations for President are taking over more and more shelf space in our national supermarket of ideas (wow, what a metaphor!). Here are some interesting sites to follow news and possible scandals:

AP report that the Ohio ACLU is petitioning a federal judge in the Northen District of Ohio to enjoin the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections from using balloting technology that does not give notice to voters of problems with their ballot. (see the ACLU report on this here). You can also access a lot of information at the ACLU site about their Voting Rights Project, dealing with the upcoming expiration of the Voting Rights Act.

Then, there are a lot of sites that will let you track the vote results, if you are inclined:

Election 2008 has a spiffy little map and will track congressional races as well as presidential primary balloting. Lots of interesting toys to play with.

Survey USA tracks how close polling has come to predicting election outcomes. Ought to be fun.

For the conspiracy minded, and paranoid among us, there is Wired's article, "How to Jam an Election...", reviewing How to Rig An Election(buy it), by former GOP operative Allen Raymond and ghostwriter Ian Spiegelman. It's been covered a lot lately, since it came out just in time for the New Hampshire primaries. Read Huffington Post here .

The clouds are Cloud study, horizon of trees 27 September 1821, by John Constable.

Clarification on an earlier post

On January 11, I posted a "head to head comparison" between the Legal Research Engine, and Westlaw's WebPlus. I need to clarify that post -- the Legal Research Engine is a product of Cornell's law school library, not of the Legal Information Institute -- my mistake. It's an amazing piece of work and very impressive as a legally oriented alternative to Google or other general search engines.

ABA Journal on Career Satisfaction for Lawyers

Click the title to this post to read an interview with Michael Melcher, author of The Creative Lawyer: A practical guide to authentic professional satisfaction, in the newest issue of the ABA Journal. He has lots of interesting things to say that readers can easily apply to the way they approach their own professional life. Here is a brief example:

Is satisfaction hard to come by because of the legal profession, or because of the personalities that are drawn to the field?

I think the legal profession is a little bit odd in some ways, but I don’t think it’s pathological. Many of the problems that lawyers think are unique to the legal profession are common to other professional services – for example, billable hour requirements.

I do think that most people who become lawyers have a certain analytical, critical perspective that is further honed in law school. It becomes second nature to see the glass as half-empty, and to conclude that nothing can be done to fill it. This is where they are wrong. There are lots of ways that lawyers can become happier in their existing careers, or make transitions to new ones. To do that, they need to give up some of the drama they are holding onto, reign [sic] in their egos and expectations, and do some real work to make these changes happen.

Melcher has helpful, sensible advice for readers who are unhappy in their career. For instance, he suggests breaking apart the pieces of your job, to consider which pieces, in particular, make you unhappy or unfulfilled. Then, you can consider whether you can change those pieces within the same career, or position.

Remember the suspicious cyber-attack against Estonia?

Last spring, OOTJ reported that Russia was suspected of launching denial of service attacks against Estonia. The post linked to a BBC story about cyber-pirates attacking a variety of Estonian websites and online services, following shortly the removal of a Russian war memorial from Estonia. Though Russia officially denied their involvement, there were deep suspicions about the links.

Now a story comes out on Ars Technica, here stating that a single student was behind the rash of attacks.

As InfoWorld reports, an Estonian youth has been arrested for the attacks, and current evidence suggests he was acting independently—prosecutors in Estonia have stated they have no other suspects. Because the attacks were botnet-driven and launched from servers all over the globe, however, it's impossible to state definitively that only a single individual was involved.

Dmitri Galushkevich, a 20-year-old Estonian student, launched the DoS (denial-of-service) attacks from his own PC last year. Although he's a native Estonian, Galushkevich was angry over his government's plans to move the statue, and launched the attack as a means of protesting the decision. The fact that a single angry student was able to impact international relations between two countries is an startling development. (snip)

The fact that a single student was able to trigger such events is particularly ominous when you consider just how many potential flashpoints exist between various countries all over the world. The DoS attack against Estonia is an excellent example of how a cyberattack carried out by a 20-year-old student in response to real-life events further exacerbated an existing problem between two nations.

Here is a link to the full story on Infoworld, which is briefer than the Ars Technica post. Infoworld states that investigations are still under way to establish whether Galushkevich acted alone. Ars Technica, written by Joe Hruska, gives a nice background explaining the meaning of the Russian war memorial to ethnic Russian Estonians and to others Estonians who viewed the statue differently.

Rand report on managing diversity in corporate America

Rand released a report reviewing the rise of a new "cottage industry" -- consultants helping corporations to manage diversity, a newly promoted priority. The report criticizes the current approach used by such consultants as a...

laundry list of best practices that is not well organized, prioritized, or integrated. In contrast to this rule-based approach, the authors attempt to lay the groundwork for a fact-based approach to diversity management. We first establish a framework for evaluating approaches to diversity management on the basis of a synthesis of the best practices literature. We then use our diversity management model to determine whether diversity-friendly corporations really do stand out from other companies by analyzing the strategies pursued by 14 large U.S. companies recognized by Fortune magazine for their diversity or human resource (HR) achievements. Finally, to understand whether best practices alone make a company diversity-friendly, we compare a number of characteristics of best diversity companies, best HR companies, and other companies, using quantitative and qualitative methods.

Our principal findings are that firms recognized for diversity are distinguished by a core set of motives and practices that resemble those presented in the best practices literature, but that best practices per se may not enable a company to achieve a high level of diversity. Contextual factors, such as industry affiliation and company size, may be as significant as strategic factors in influencing the extent of a company’s diversity.

Click on the title to this post to reach the full text of the report.

Get Wise to Google

Librarians have mixed feelings about Google. It is a great search engine. We have to admit it. We use it ourselves, though we try to use other tools, too. What bugs us is that we see too many library users who get so Google-habituated that it’s the only tool they think to use. That’s a problem!

If you are going to use Google, or any search engine or database, use it wisely. Get wise to Google. Find out what makes it work and how to make it work better for you.

The best place to begin finding out about any search engine is the help pages that search engines offer now. Google is very generous that way. They have very good help pages, if you will just take the few minutes to read them, and check them from time to time, to keep up to date. Here are URLs for the two most helpful parts of the Google help pages:

http://www.google.com/apis/reference.html

This is a quick reference with explanations for a very large number of special query forms. It has neat tables laying out in quick outline how the system works. There are lots of aspects of Google that most users never take advantage of. What a shame. It’s like owning a Porsche and driving it 20 miles per hour all the time. This baby has power that you are missing out on – find out how to shift up, and corner, and do all those cool sporty things you’ve been missing out on!

http://www.google.com/support/?ctx=web

his is another section of the Google help pages. These explanations are more in-depth on a smaller number of operators. Very helpful. For instance, you can create a query that requires the words you are searching for to be all in the title or all in the URL. You can pull up a web page and display what other websites link to it. Pretty cool capabilities.

http://ezbuzz.blogspot.com/2006/01/google-hacks_21.html

EZine Buzz is a blog devoted to improving your chops at Google searching. It’s pretty good. We noted only one mistake, where the page still lists a 10 word limit. Now Google allows 30 words in a search. It may be that the entry was put in and just not updated. It is, after all, just one entry on January 21, 2006. Still, it is full of good ideas and pretty helpful .Here is EZine Buzz’s own introduction:

Web Search Basics

Searching in Google doesn't have to be a case of just entering what you're looking for in the search box and hoping for the best. Google offers you many ways—via special syntax and search options—to refine your search criteria and help Google better understand what you're looking for. We'll dig into Google's powerful, all-but-undocumented special syntax and search options, and show how to use them to their fullest. We'll cover the basics of Google searching, wildcards, word limits, syntax for special cases, mixing syntax elements, advanced search techniques, and using specialized vocabularies, including slang and jargon.

Librarians hope you will expand your searching horizons beyond Google. There are other great web browsers you ought to know about. For instance, there are meta-search engines that are able to do a creditable job searching more than one search engine at once. They have to be able to create a workable query for each search engine from what you keyed in, and then bring back the results. Ideally, they would sort out the duplicate results, though I don’t think I’ve really seen one that oes. Chris Sherman, at Search Engine Watch wrote a wonderful review of the current crop of MetaSearch Engines and Meta Crawlers, so I won’t try to go there. See the review:

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2156241

This is a great website to visit in order to broaden your horizons on web surfing generally. There is also the excellent Search Engine Showdown:

http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/

Law Firm work changing radically!

Click the title to this post to read a New York Times article dated 1/24/2008, by Lisa Belkin, on changes in law firm employment practices, responding to the wave of depressed lawyers leaving the firm world:

Over the last few years and, most strikingly, the last few months, law firms have been forced to rethink longstanding ways of doing business, if they are to remain fully competitive.

As chronicled by my colleague Alex Williams in the Sunday Styles section earlier this month, lawyers are overworked, depressed and leaving.

Less obvious, but potentially more dramatic, are the signs that their firms are finally becoming serious about slowing the stampede for the door. So far the change — which includes taking fresh looks at the billable hour, schedules and partnership tracks — is mostly at the smaller firms. But even some of the larger, more hidebound employers are taking notice.

“There are things happening everywhere, enough to call it a movement,” said Deborah Epstein Henry, who founded Flex-Time Lawyers, a consulting firm that creates initiatives encouraging work-life balance for law firms, with an emphasis on the retention and promotion of women. “The firms don’t think of it as a movement, because it is happening in isolation, one firm at a time. But if you step back and see the whole puzzle, there is definitely real change.”

The real crux of the "movement" is doing away with the billable hour. The ABA Journal ran an article in August, 2007, with front page highlights, on the death of the billable hour here. The article is well worth reading in full, with lots of info on different models at different firms. Standing firmly on the sidelines, where I happily moved in 1986, in order to have time to be a mom, I am cheering!

Repress U.?

The Nation article, Repress U., by Michael Gould-Wartofsky, discusses a number of ways that U.S. college campuses are

fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention"--as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name--have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.

Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:

1. Target dissidents. (snip)

2. Lock and load (campus police) (snip)

3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused on campus (surveillance) (snip)

4. Mine student records. (snip)

5. Track foreign-born students; keep the undocumented out.

6. Take over the curriculum, the classroom and the laboratory. (treating faculty and students as assets for government research) (snip)

7. Privatize, privatize, privatize. (the multi-billion dollar industry of "homeland security") (snip)

click on the title to this post to read the entire, distressing article. I know something about some of the "steps" listed above at my campus, but there is a lot I don't know about! It's 11 o'clock. Do you know where your campus is?

The prison bars decorating this post are actually "Trail Bay Gaol, which is an old 1880's public works prison and WWI German prisoner of war camp." courtesy of http://www.tripsource.com/stories/Andy/Andy/Trip9/Aust3.htm, Andy Nunn in Australia.

Teaching -- What are we doing?

Today, we had a speaker, Prof. Roberto Corrado from University of Denver College of Law. He was speaking about how he re-organized his upper-level labor law course to incorporate simulation throughout the semester. Within the first five or six weeks, his class must vote whether to organize themselves as a union shop -- to negotiate with Prof. Corrado as management. The course changes depending on whether a simple majority of the students vote to join the union. Prof. Corrado initially implemented this change in his more typical substantive law class largely because he realized that very few of his law students had ever worked in a blue collar job or knew from personal or family experience about membership in unions. You can read several articles he has written detailing his experiences at:
A Simulation of Union Organizing in a Labor Law Class, 46 J. Leg. Ed. 445 (Sept., 1996).
On Teaching Goals, Education Theory and the Law School Classroom, (draft from author), and
Technology as a Lever for the Transformatino of a Simulation-Based Labor Law Course, (co-authored with Desiree H. Pointer) at pointer@carnegiefoundation.org.

I was interested in several aspects of Prof. Corrado's talk. But for this post, I'll focus on just one. Prof. Corrado pointed out that pedagogical theory holds that students learn better and retain better when they actively do and participate in the learning. This actually jibes with my own observations teaching legal research. It is notoriously difficult to teach research without practice in same -- witness all the arguments over pure bibliographic instruction. I long ago believed I could pour my knowledge into my students' minds. I worked hard and diligently to shovel the knowledge in there. But after a while, I became convinced that teaching and learning were joint enterprises that required the active participation of both sides -- teacher and students.

Coincidentally, my daughter, who volunteers at the Museum of Science here in Boston says the pedagogical theory underlying their programs is very similar. That teaching amounts to facilitating the efforts of the learner to construct their own model of reality. When the child drops the ball and sees it fall, again and again, she is testing and exploring the way that gravity works on the ball -- all you can do as a teacher is to help the child observe, test and generalize what they pick up. In the same way, when I teach my Advanced Legal Research class, all I can do is facilitate the students' exploration of ways to do research, and lead discussions of what they observed, and help them build their own models of the legal research universe. I finally gave up trying to pour info into their minds.

Wouldn't it be an exciting class to co-teach with one of the substantive faculty a course on research and practice, that incorporated simulations? I actually co-taught Tax Research and Practice for about five years. We did not incorporate any simulation. But it would be so cool to develop a law firm practice scenario and add research in context!

The decoration for this is actually supposed to be the earth goddess, Gaia, from http://www.earthrainbownetwork.com/medcorner.htm

Martin Luther King Day

Click on the title to this post to read a brief Associated Press article about Martin Luther King. By Deepti Hajela, as printed in the Boston Globe, the article quotes a number of scholars who remind the reader that, in his own day, Reverend King was much hated and feared. This is an important fact to keep in mind on this day in 2008. Today, an air-brushed, safe image of Martin Luther King, Jr is presented as every man’s hero. Those of us who lived during those days can recall that there were many Americans who disagreed with King, for many reasons. Recall that Reverend King was assassinated, not assumed into heaven.

I recall my parents, who, in theory, supported civil rights for black Americans, actually breathed a sigh of relief when they heard King was dead. They feared, as I think many white Americans did, the anger and frustration of black Americans. With a visceral panic, they watched the now-iconic Dream speech (link to American Rhetoric site with an audio-video recording and text of the speech). They focused, not on King’s immortal rhetoric, but on the huge numbers of dark faces on the Washington Mall. And they feared change.

What they overlooked was that King represented a firm stand for non-violence, in contrast to more radical leaders such as Malcolm X or the Black Panthers. And, though sympathetic to civil rights in the abstract, nevertheless, they were blind to the every day injustices and outrages experienced by black folk in pre-civil rights America. What they hoped for, I think, was a very gradual change, as the Supreme Court said in Brown vs. the Board of Education, “with all deliberate speed.” But from the point of view of people of color, those changes were a century overdue.

So, when you think about Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., today, consider the courage it took to stand up and push against both intransigent whites who supported Jim Crow and lynchings, but also the “silent majority” of whites (and some blacks as well) who feared upsetting the status quo. Consider that the principled stands he took cost him supporters on both sides – blacks who thought him too moderate as well as whites who feared his message of change, and mis-understood his message of non-violence.

And consider whether today we are closer to achieving Dr. King’s dream, that one day, his children would live in a country where they would be judged, not by the color of their skins, but by the content of their character. Do listen to his wonderful speech from the Lincoln Memorial. The man was a consummate speaker, who had deep roots in the oral traditions of his culture, and in the preaching traditions of American Baptists. Do not forget that King was a Christian first, and that he found in his faith and Mohandas Ghandi’s non-violence a tool to move the world.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

(snip)

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."²

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day -- this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

We have more work to do.