Author Archive for deven-desai
MOOCs, Meet Turing or Is It Socrates?
posted by Deven Desai
It dawns on me that Turing tests may have a role for the future of education and MOOCs. In short, can one create a Socratic style system that automates probing what a student knows? A combination of gamification (not a great word) and machine learning might allow a system to press a student to express more than “I memorized X” and move to explaining why in a discussion. If I understand the simple idea of Turing tests, one should not know that the other side is a machine in a conversation. It should be a discussion. That is what a professor does in Socratic method. There would likely be a wall of sorts where the student has no more questions or perhaps the machine determines that some level of mastery is in place. To me, a key reason to press questions is to see whether the student can answer why their claim or understanding is correct. When they can do that they may at last “own” the idea and then do something with it. Insofar as the key is to keep questioning, this approach will hit a different wall where a person may need to engage with the student. In addition, when a student asks something the teacher has not considered, a “does not compute” response will likely be a let down. Assuming one solves that personal dimension, that moment would be a signal to shift to other resources including instructors to go deeper into the issue. Otherwise we are left with test passing equals knowledge. As Erika Christakis put it, we have:
a broken system built on the dangerous misconception that testing is a proxy for actual teaching and learning. Somehow, along the path of good intentions, testing stopped being seen as a diagnostic tool to guide good instruction and became, instead, the instruction itself. It’s as if a patient were given a biopsy, learned she had cancer and was then told that no further medical treatment was necessary. If that didn’t sound quite right, we could just fire the doctor who ordered the test or scratch out the patient’s results and mark “cured” in the file.
Although I am leery of easy solutions, I think that a system that may prod a student to see what they know and then come to a teacher to gain further insight and evaluate what they grasp would be great. It might be a step away from a system that asks students to jump through a hoop and receive a star or treat for performing a trick without knowing why the words or ideas coming from them matter or how to apply the words and ideas to new contexts, which I think would be knowledge rather than inert data.
April 12, 2013 at 8:10 pm
Posted in: Education, Teaching, Technology, Web 2.0
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MOOCs, costs, and Dan Ariely
posted by Deven Desai
MOOCs will solve our education problems. No one wants to pay for education. Everyone wants education to be free. MOOCs will at least bring down the costs and bring the best lecturers to all the world. I own some land in Florida, the Glengary project. Perhaps you’d like to buy a tract? I am fascinated by MOOCs but reject the claims being made about them as demonstrating some sort of magical new education system.
Yet, when I think about taking a great class with a master teacher, I get excited. Heck, I already listen to lectures from iTunes U and MIT’s Open Course Ware when I work out. MOOCs seem like a step up. And the reality of the cost problem means that they will likely play a role. Then I saw that Dan Ariely is offering a MOOC. And he wrote about the experience. His thoughts track much of what I think. On costs he says, “I have learned that some students feel that it is their basic human right to get free education (they call it free but of course free in this case is a shorthand for “someone else should pay for it,”) while the majority feels privileged to live in a time when such adventures are possible.” But more important are his ideas about where MOOCs may fit and why live learning has a place. I think he is correct, but he may miss a deeper problem.
On MOOCs’ place in the future, Ariely offers:
I don’t think that the future of the university is doomed for a few reasons. First, having a scheduled class with obligations, deadlines, exams, real consequences and real rewards is incredibly important for human motivation and getting people to spend the necessary time and effort to really understand the material. The second reason is that the model of many universities, in which students study and live together, is a particularly helpful model for creating the environment that people need to take their education seriously. It is not just about the particular classes, but about being immersed in an academic environment for a substantial period of time.
The latent problems of MOOCs flow from the benefits of physical place-based teaching; they are expensive and will be for the few; not the many. Assume Ariely is correct. The advantages of the scheduled classes etc. matters. That can be mimicked online. That kills the claim that schedules will require the university. Studying and living together is important. Think of The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. Drawing on Xerox PARC, (and the California “Virtual University”) they show that social context is vital for technology and information to help society going forward. But again that physical structure costs money. My concern then is how do we leverage MOOCs and other technology to improve the way education is delivered while not offering only the virtual world, one that may lack social context, to the poorer parts of society.
If we run to replace classrooms at state schools, only the rich will have the benefits I had. That is a mistake. I was lucky. I went to private schools, UC Berkeley, and Yale Law. I have gained social capital. I know some of the language, manners, styles, and more that are part of getting into the game and playing it. That aspect of life is possibly undercut unless everyone in the future works only on social networks and online culture. To date, it still matters to be in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood, etc. so that one can have the day-to-day chance to leverage connections and be part of the so-called conversation. Put differently, back room deals are about who you know. Interviews, for now, may be on videochat, but they still reveal diction, ideas, and manners that influence hiring. Plus, I prefer to read, explore, and solve things on my own. Those who may not be so motivated are precisely those for whom a more disconnected teaching system will not work. So far the drop-out rate for online courses is high. Now, I think there are ways to address these issues. I have believed and continue to believe that technology coupled with social reality can be powerful and beneficial. I stand by that belief.
The danger is to think that because certain facets of universities cannot be duplicated, universities will survive and all is well. Only certain versions of the university will survive. Duke and other elite schools will survive. At those schools students will be part of all the benefits, on and offline, education can offer. For others, access to the benefits Ariely sets out will be even less than today.
Education is a public good with many dimensions beyond the obvious mastery of a subject. It is better thought of as liberal, as in freeing, one to address the myriad problems and changes one encounters in work and life. MOOCs and other advances in technology can and should help that process. Relying on them alone may increase the problems of an education system that delivers a meal, proves that person ate the meal, but the customer has no idea how to fish for herself when on her own.
April 8, 2013 at 5:09 pm
Posted in: Education
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STEM education and some more on 3D printing as general purpose tech
posted by Deven Desai
3D printing and its related technology is general purpose technology that can train kids for the future. I saw an example of that yesterday when I was able to visit La Jolla Country Day School where sixth to eighth grade kids on spring break were learning basic 3D Modeling and Design. Last week they worked on How to Make Musical Electronics. In the 3D modeling program, Ann Worth, an MIT School of Architecture graduate, guided the youngsters as they manipulated files of their heads so that at the end of the program they could print them. I also watched a video of two girls who had been shown how to make an amplifier and oscillator for their iPhones. Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney, UCSD was their instructor. The kids talked about trial and error, vectors and faces, and circuit boards with energy and joy. How often does that happen? If Katie Rast and her co-visionaries at FabLab San Diego have their way, much more often.
Despite some nerds are cool ideas, we still hear that kids are turned off by math and science and that there is a lack of good Science Technology Engineering Math (STEM) education. New programs may change all that. By taking an old idea like shop and updating it, a FabLab (short for Fabrication Lab) offers the chance to make learning about programing, engineering, geometry, and the jot of creation. Kids are willing to engage with formulas; start, fail, and restart projects; and work rather hard at their projects, because there is fun and an outcome for them. The spring break program I visited is called Science Technology Engineering Arts and Math, or STEAM. The University of California, San Diego and FabLab SD worked together to offer the classes (which to me is a tech transfer moment that is quite important).
In the 3D modeling program, the kids started with a series of photos, which were uploaded to 123D (a suite of 3D modeling apps by Autodesk). That service knits the images together into a file that the kids then download. In many cases there are holes in the images. As they made models of their heads, they laughed at the holes in their heads. They then used a program called Blender to learn about filling the gaps. That meant some kids were telling me about vectors, others about textures, and all showed off as they pulled, stretched, and edited files to create the proper rendering of their heads. After that, they grabbed files for the bodies. A range of animal bodies will be virtually sliced up to make the new creature upon which the heads will attach. When asked what they might do next, these folks talked about how metals, glass, and other materials would be awesome so they could make really functional items. Some talked about being able to have a home printer that could make solar cells to power other printers. When told that these ideas were already being pursued, eyes popped out of their heads, and then grins covered their faces at thoughts of what’s next (and I think a little pride at predicting where the technology could go).
The skills learned in these programs will persist even as the machines and software are superseded. Who knows? If I had access to this sort of tech training combined with math and science education, I might have stuck with that path. Even if I didn’t, I’d have a greater ability to play with and understand the technology that surrounds us. In short, congratulations to La Jolla Country Day School, UCSD, FabLab SD, Ann Worth, Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney, and Katie Rast for pursuing ways to make STEM fun and for kids. The ideas here remind me of Julie Cohen’s work about play and its importance in her book, Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice. As Rast said on a panel at SxSW, computer labs were often seen as saviors for education especially in low income areas, but they often gathered dust. The key is to have maker spaces that work for the group’s context. A lab need not have the latest technology. If the technology is connected to people in meaningful ways, then the magic can happen. I agree. The magic of playing with technology, understanding what you can do with it, and seeing new possibilities will fire the desire to learn and create. As Neil Gershenfeld (a leader in the Maker and Fab movement) put it, this is a liberal, as in liberating, art. But don’t take my word for it. As one kid told me at lunch, adults’ brains are not as good at learning as kids’ brains, and kids like showing what they can do. Now that is education.
April 4, 2013 at 1:29 pm
Posted in: Education, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Technology
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Sunday Night Monday Morning music
posted by Deven Desai
I’m re-reading Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon now on Kindle by the way). Finished V. Finished Crying of Lot 49. Tried to pick up Vineland which I loved. Wanted the difficult, mad, beautiful language. Back to Gravity’s Angel. For fans I post a song I knew before I read the book. It is Laurie Anderson’s Gravity’s Angel. Honestly, she’s not for everyone. Maybe not for most. But if you dig experimental music and complex lyrics give it a shot. The album Mister Heartbreak from which the track comes is fun too. Again fun for some. It has William Burroughs on Sharkey’s Night. I quoted it at my Cal graduation. That is below too. Shorter.
Where’s the law? Not sure. As Burroughs intones, “And sharkey says: hey, kemosabe! long time no see. he says: hey sport. you connect the dots. you pick up the pieces.” OK for a bit more, as I have said here before, life beyond the law matters. And it turns out that knowing life beyond the law might make you a better lawyer. That, by the way, is why empathy for a judge is important and a good thing. If you can’t walk in someone else’s shoes, at least read more, listen to more, watch more. Great writing, great communication opens the door to the world beyond yours and mine. At least those are the dots I connect. The pieces I pick up.
March 25, 2013 at 12:11 am
Posted in: Culture, Just for Fun, Law School, Weird
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Innovate or Innovation, Your Assurance of Meaningless Assertions
posted by Deven Desai
In the words of Portlandia, innovation is over. Or as another era of hipsters might say, innovation is dead anyway (Swingers). Take a look at the posturing of European Publishers Council and Google over the recent German bill to force search to pay for material longer than a snippet.
“As a result of today’s vote, ancillary copyright in its most damaging form has been stopped,” Google said in a statement. “However, the best outcome for Germany would be no new legislation because it threatens innovation, particularly for start-ups. It’s also not necessary because publishers and Internet companies can innovate together, just as Google has done in many other countries.”
Translation: Insert resistance is futile jokes as needed, but you will work with us and win! We all will win, because we innovate and belong to the Church of Innovation (located somewhere south of San Francisco and north of San Jose).
“With the right legal conditions and the technical tools provided by the Linked Content Coalition, it will be easy to access and use content legally,” the European Publishers Council said in a statement (PDF) on Friday. “This will mean that publishers will have the incentive to continue to populate the internet with high-quality, authoritative, diverse content and to support new, innovative business models for online content.”
Translation: We have no idea what is next. But please give us more time, protection, and money. We promise we will come up with something new.
Confession: Have I invoked innovation. Of course. It is seductive. It is too seductive. Pam Samuelson is a fan of Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, as is Neil Richards, and as am I. I must confess that I have sinned. I slipped away from Orwell’s mandate and went with the easy, meaningless word. I hate when that happens. I will try and stop.
Of course, what other word or words would say more is the next struggle. The German law says only a snippet is allowed. Right. What’s a snippet? Someone says innovate. I say, “Right. What’s innovate?” I hope to find out. If I am lucky, I may be like Bill Cosby’s Noah and come up with an answer no one else thought of. Hmm is that innovat… Khannn!!!!
Enjoy the clip
March 22, 2013 at 2:22 pm
Posted in: Humor, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Technology
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42 minutes 59 seconds + copper wire (and a little more) = bliss
posted by Deven Desai
Question: Why 42 minutes 59 seconds? Not 43 minutes. Not 42 minutes, 58 seconds. 42 minutes 59 seconds. Solution: Step One. New receiver. Step Two. Unpack old B&W speakers. Step Three. Strip casing, twist copper. Step Four. Connect all. Step Five. Insert album designed for stereo. Step Six. Hit Play. Step Seven. Bliss.
Answer: Dark Side of the Moon. Forty years old as of March 1, 2013.
I unpacked my speakers and set them up a few weeks back. Headphones are nice. They are portable. They are personal. They may even allow sound to envelop you. But not like speakers. Dark Side of the Moon was the first CD I bought. It is a great way to appreciate music engineered for stereo. I put the disc in years ago. Hit play. The next 42:59 was great. The same was true a few Sundays ago. I had a cup of tea (loose leaf, my mix of lapsong, Assam, and Kenyan). I hit play. 42 minutes and 59 minutes slipped away. That was a good, damn good day.
I recommend getting to a stereo and trying it.
(Even on your computer, check out Money, below, for the stereo fun.)
March 21, 2013 at 1:37 am
Posted in: Culture, Just for Fun
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Vintner, lawyer, pioneer, James Barrett has died
posted by Deven Desai
I know that Silicon Valley gets all the hoopla for the way knowledge and industry can thrive, but look a bit north and you will find that similar things happened in the wine industry. That industry just lost a leader. James Barrett was the head of Chateau Montelena when its Chardonnay beat French wines in a taste test that changed the wine industry. He died yesterday. (Stag’s Leap’s Cabernet Sauvignon won the red category). The story (embellished but fun) was told in the film Bottle Shock.
Barrett was an attorney (Loyola L.A., ’51) who became a winemaker. Reports say he fell in love with wine. He followed a dream. I would bet that his legal training helped with the business. Regardless, he and others in Napa changed the wine industry. Part of that success came from using science and research from U.C. Davis to guide the wine making process. The vineyard also employed Mike Grgich who went on to run a rather good vineyard on his own. As Barrett said about the success, “Not bad for some kids from the sticks.”
Technology, lawyers, and new approaches to a business that has made a huge amount of money and that happens to bring joy to those who imbibe wine. What’s not to love? I, for one, will raise a glass to Barrett and hope that other kids from the sticks are inspired to try and do likewise in whatever field they love.
March 20, 2013 at 6:26 pm
Tags: Chateau Montelena, James Barrett, technology transfer, wine
Posted in: Culture, Intellectual Property, Technology
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Bright Ideas: Mark Weiner on his new book Rule of the Clan
posted by Deven Desai
Sometimes fortune smiles upon you. I met Mark Weiner when we started law school. My life and my work is much better for it. Mark is a scholar and more. He obtained his B.A. in American Studies from Stanford, his J.D. from Yale, and his PhD in American Studies from Yale.
His most recent project is his excellent book, The Rule of the Clan. Ambassadors, professors from all around the world, members of the 9/11 commission, and publishers have embraced the book. Mark argues, and I think rather well, that the state has a quite important role to play, and we ignore that to our peril. Publishers Weekly has said:
A nuanced view of clan-based societies … Weiner’s argument is a full-throated defense of the modern centralized state, which he sees as necessary to protect human rights: “In the face of well-intended but misguided criticism that the state is inimical to freedom, we must choose whether to maintain the state as our most basic political institution or to let it degrade.” An entertaining mix of anecdote and ethnography.
The New York Journal of Books has called the book “accessible, mesmerizing, and compelling.”
I wanted to get into how Mark came up with the project, why it matters, and, for the writers out there, the process of writing about such a complex subject but in a way that is accessible to a general audience. So I asked Mark whether we could do a Bright Ideas interview. He graciously agreed.
Mark, the book is great. I want to jump in and ask, What do you mean by “clan”?
Thanks, Deven. In my book, I consider clans both in their traditional form, as a subset of tribes, but also as a synecdoche for a pattern by which humans structure their social and legal lives: “the rule of the clan.” Clans are a natural form of social and legal organization. They certainly are more explicable in human terms than the modern liberal state and the liberal rule of law. Because of the natural fact of blood relationships, people tend to organize their communities on the basis of extended kinship in the absence of strong alternatives.
So why clans now?
Two reasons. First, the United States is involved militarily in parts of the world in which traditional tribal and clan relationships are critical, and if we don’t understand how those relationships work, including in legal terms, we have a major problem.
Let me give you an example from Guantanamo. In the book, I tell a story of a college friend who was in charge of the team there interrogating detainees from Saudi Arabia. (I should note that my friend finds torture morally repugnant and against the national interest, as do I, and that she has advocated for this view in meaningful ways.) Over the course of her work, my friend realized that because of the first-name/last-name structure of the detainee tracking system, basic information about detainee tribal affiliations hadn’t been gathered or had been lost. This meant, among other things, that we couldn’t fully appreciate the reason why some of these men had taken up arms against us in the first place—for instance, because the United States had become embroiled in their centuries-long, domestic tribal war with the House of Saud.
Our ignorance about these issues is what I call the contemporary “Fulda Gap.” Our lack of knowledge about more traditional societies hinders our ability to understand the motivations of those who oppose us and leaves us vulnerable—and, even more important, it diminishes our ability to cooperate with our friends and to assist liberal legal reformers abroad in ways that are both effective and ethical.
The second reason to study clans, and ultimately for me even more important than the first reason, has to do with our own political discourse here at home. You could say that I became interested in clans because of widespread ideological attacks against the state within liberal societies—that is, attacks on government. By this I mean not simply efforts to reduce the size of government or to make it more efficient. Instead, I mean broadside criticisms of the state itself, or efforts to starve government and render it anemic.
I think you are saying there is something about clans that helps us organize and understand our world. What is it?
It’s often said that individual freedom exists most powerfully in the absence of government. But I believe that studying the rule of the clan shows us that the reverse is true. Liberal personal freedom is inconceivable without the existence of a robust state dedicated to vindicating the public interest. That’s because the liberal state, at least in theory, treats persons as individuals rather than as members of ineluctable status or clan groups. So studying clans can help us imagine what our social and legal life would become if we allow the state to deteriorate through a lack of political will.
By the way, the idea that the state is somehow inimical to freedom—that we gain individual freedom outside the state, rather than through it—is hardly limited to the United States. It was a core component of Qaddafi’s revolutionary vision of Libya. Or consider Gandhi, who advocated for a largely stateless society for postcolonial India. Fortunately for India, his vision wasn’t realized. Instead, we owe the prospects for further liberal development there to the constitution drafted by B. R. Ambedkar.
Hold on. From Indian independence to Libyan revolution seems a long jump. Can you help me connect the dots?
March 19, 2013 at 1:47 pm
Tags: clans, Constitutional Law, international law, rule of law, terrorism, War on Terror
Posted in: Articles and Books, Bright Ideas, Constitutional Law, History of Law, International & Comparative Law, Jurisprudence
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Bring on Jurassic Park!: Resurrection of Extinct Animals
posted by Deven Desai
Scientists have come to a “technical, not biological” problem in trying to resurrect a once extinct frog. Popular Science explains the:
gastric-brooding frog, native to tiny portions of Queensland, Australia, gave birth through its mouth, the only frog to do so (in fact, very few other animals in the entire animal kingdom do this–it’s mostly this frog and a few fish). It succumbed to extinction due to mostly non-human-related causes–parasites, loss of habitat, invasive weeds, a particular kind of fungus.
Specimens were frozen in simple deep freezers and reinserted into another frog. The embryos grew. The next step is to get them to full adulthood so they can pop out like before. Yes, these folks are talking to those interested in bringing back other species.
As for this particular animal, the process reminds me a bit too much of Alien, which still scares the heck out of me.
the gastric-brooding frog lays eggs, which are coated in a substance called prostaglandin. This substance causes the frog to stop producing gastric acid in its stomach, thus making the frog’s stomach a very nice place for eggs to be. So the frog swallows the eggs, incubates them in her gut, and when they hatch, the baby frogs crawl out her mouth.
Science. Yummy. Oh here is your law fodder. What are the ethical implications? Send in the clones! (A better title for Attack of the Clones, perhaps).
March 18, 2013 at 10:07 pm
Posted in: Bioethics, Humor, Just for Fun, Science Fiction, Technology
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Netflix, Facebook, and Social Sharing
posted by Deven Desai
Just as Neil Richards’s The Perils of Social Reading (101 Georgetown Law Journal 689 (2013)) is out in final form, Netflix released its new social sharing features in partnership with that privacy protector, Facebook. Not that working with Google, Apple, or Microsoft would be much better. There may be things I am missing. But I don’t see how turning on this feature is wise given that it seems to require you to remember not to share in ways that make sharing a bit leakier than you may want.
Apparently one has to connect your Netflix account to Facebook to get the feature to work. The way it works after that link is made poses problems.
According to SlashGear two rows appear. One is called Friends’ Favorites tells you just that. Now, consider that the algorithm works in part by you rating movies. So if you want to signal that odd documentaries, disturbing art movies, guilty pleasures (this one may range from The Hangover to Twilight), are of interest, you should rate them highly. If you turn this on, are all old ratings shared? And cool! Now everyone knows that you think March of the Penguins and Die Hard are 5 stars. The other button:
is called “Watched By Your Friends,” and it consists of movies and shows that your friends have recently watched. It provides a list of all your Facebook friends who are on Netflix, and you can cycle through individual friends to see what they recently watched. This is an unfiltered list, meaning that it shows all the movies and TV shows that your friends have agreed to share.
Of course, you can control what you share and what you don’t want to share, so if there’s a movie or TV show that you watch, but you don’t want to share it with your friends, you can simply click on the “Don’t Share This” button under each item. Netflix is rolling out the feature over the next couple of days, and the company says that all US members will have access to Netflix social by the end of the week.
Right. So imagine you forget that your viewing habits are broadcast. And what about Roku or other streaming devices? How does one ensure that the “Don’t Share” button is used before the word goes out that you watched one, two, or three movies on drugs, sex, gay culture, how great guns are, etc.?
As Richards puts it, “the ways in which we set up the defaults for sharing matter a great deal. Our reader records implicate
our intellectual privacy—the protection of reading from surveillance and interference so that we can read freely, widely, and without inhibition.” So too for video and really any information consumption.
March 17, 2013 at 6:02 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Technology, Web 2.0
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Autonomous Vehicles: Unintended Upsides and Changes
posted by Deven Desai
Some day we might do away with pretext traffic stops, because some day autonomous vehicles will be common. At ReInventlaw Silicon Valley, David Estrada from GoogleX, made the pitch for laws to allow autonomous vehicles a bright future. He went to the core reasons such fuel sustainability and faster commutes. He also used the tear jerking commercial that showed the true benefits of enabling those who cannot drive to drive. I have heard that before. But I think David also said that the cars are required to obey all traffic laws.
If so, that has some interesting implications.
I think that once autonomous vehicles are on the road in large numbers, the police will not be able to claim that some minor traffic violation required pulling someone over and then searching the car. If a stop is made, like the Tesla testing arguments, the car will have rich data to verify that the car was obeying laws.
These vehicles should also alter current government income streams. These shifts are not often obvious to start but hit home quickly. For example, when cell phones appeared, colleges lost their income from high rates for a phone in a dorm room. That turned out out to be a decent revenue stream. If autonomous vehicles obey traffic laws, income from traffic violations should go down. Cities, counties, and states will have to find new ways to make up that revenue stream. Insurance companies should have much lower income as well.
I love to drive. I will probably not like giving up that experience. Nonetheless, reduced traffic accidents, fewer drunk drivers, more mobility for the elderly and the young (imagine a car that handled shuttling kids from soccer, ballet, music, etc., picking you up, dropping you home, and then gathering the kids while you cooked a meal (yes, should I have kids, I hope to cook for them). The time efficiency is great. Plus one might subscribe to a car service so that the $10,000-$40,000 car is not spending its time in disuse most of the day. Add to all that a world where law enforcement is better used and insurance is less needed, and I may have to give in to a world where driving myself is a luxury.
March 17, 2013 at 5:31 pm
Posted in: Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Culture, Technology
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The Rule of the Clan – Mark Weiner’s new book
posted by Deven Desai
What is happening with the world? Is it falling apart? Is the state the problem? Is everything to big? Is everyone better off breaking into small groups? Mark Weiner has answers in his book The Rule of the Clan. Understanding clans helps us understand the problems and relationships among individual liberty, the state, domestic policy, and foreign policy.
Mark Weiner is one of the best thinkers I know. I will note that Mark is one of my dearest friends as well. Mark has authored three books. The first two have won awards. The latest, Rule of the Clan, is, to me, yet more impressive. I will be posting more about this book. But for now, here is Mark on the Brian Lehrer Show.
March 15, 2013 at 2:05 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books, Constitutional Law, Culture, History of Law, International & Comparative Law, Law and Humanities
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ReInvent Law! How Technology and New Business Models Are Affecting Legal Practice
posted by Deven Desai
Anyone interested in where legal practice may beheaded should check out ReInvent Law Silicon Valley 2013 on March 8 at teh Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA (disclosure I am a speaker). The conference is devoted to law, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship in the legal services industry. Dan Katz gave and excellent talk at the mid-year AALS conference. He talked about how automated system, machine learning, and more are defeating outsourcing and changing the face of legal practice. I nodded as what he said mapped to what I learned while I was at Google. In 2008 I started writing about problems with the structure of legal education. Those issues are now with us in full force. I think Dan and this project get to issues within the legal industry that may make the what about firm jobs question obsolete (which it may already be for a host of reasons) but present opportunities going forward.
Here is how he sums up the idea:
At all price points, the legal services market is rapidly changing and this disruption represents peril & possibility. This meeting is about the possibility … about the game changers who are already building the future of this industry. This is a 1 day event featuring 40 speakers in a high energy format with specific emphasis on technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. It will inspire you to consider all of the possibilities.
In that Silicon Valley way, it will be a blitz of 40 speakers covering LegalTechStartUp, Lawyer Regulation, Business of Law, Quantitative Legal Prediction, Design, 3D Printing, Driverless Cars, Legal Education, Legal Information Engineering, New Business Models, Lean Lawyering, Legal Supply Chain, Project Management, Technology Aided Access to Justice, Augmented Reality, Legal Process Outsourcing, Big Data, New Markets for Law, Virtual Law Practice, Information Visualization, E-Discovery, Legal Entrepreneurship, Legal Automation … and much more.
Tickets are Free but registration is required.
Please feel free to sign up today.
February 19, 2013 at 2:51 pm
Posted in: Law Practice, Legal Ethics, Technology, Web 2.0
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Dave Brubeck – A great has died
posted by Deven Desai
Dave Brubeck has died at age 91. I grew up on jazz from Miles Davis to John Coltrane to the Marsalis family and more. I was fortunate to have seen Brubeck in concert. In the odd coincidence world, yesterday I was listening to one of my favorite albums, We’re All Together Again for the First Time, as I got into a groove for an article I am writing. I thought I should post one the great tracks to encourage students and professors to dive into the song and their work. Perhaps I felt a tremor in the force. Anyway enjoy.
December 5, 2012 at 12:56 pm
Posted in: Law School, Uncategorized
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Scan Books at Home: Google Releases Open Source Material for Book Scanner
posted by Deven Desai
Book Scanner DIY-style for about $1,500. Wow. Locker Gnome reports that Google has made the specs for the Linear Book Scanner open source. The device is not perfect but even with its flaws (some torn or folded pages, some skipped ones, issues with which books work on the default modes) the price is quite a drop. Locker Gnome sys that the device can scan 1,000 pages in about 90 minutes. Now put on your Google hat. First launch, some flaws, but overall solid iteration. Hmm. Open source it. Ah yes. Let many folks tinker and soon the device will be cheaper, work better, and viola, more analog will be digital data. Mmmm digital data. Yummy. Before folks think only of copyrighted books, remember that the fellow who made some DIY plans for a book scanner that used old cameras and some wood, but needed a human to turn pages, helped developing countries too. Preservation of archives, public records, and many works that are analog but would benefit by being in digital form comes with cheaper, easier tech like these two options. Oh to be capable of non-infringing uses now that fall is here.
November 16, 2012 at 7:48 pm
Posted in: Intellectual Property, Technology
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Calling Klingons and Romulans, Cloaking Now Available (Sort of)
posted by Deven Desai
According to the BBC, “Scientists have succeeded in “cloaking” an object perfectly for the first time, rendering a centimetre-scale cylinder invisible to microwaves.” OK this method works only for microwaves, works only in one direction, and not for visible light. Nonetheless, “The design principles that make the cloak work in microwaves would be difficult to implement at optical wavelengths. But microwaves are important in many applications, principally telecommunications and radar, and improved versions of cloaking could vastly improve microwave performance.”
The advance is cool to me in that the ideas started in 2006 from a paper on “transformation optics.” with an implementation of the idea coming that year as well. So the science fiction world of true cloaking is not here, but the fact that a few folks did some basics science, a test application followed fast, and now a full version of the microwave idea is in place within seven years is rather great. The practical side of the work may mean that funds are coming quickly from industry and the government. I am not sure which. Still I love the idea that one of the oldest fantasy/sci-fi bits of magic, invisibility, is a little closer to reality.
November 16, 2012 at 6:33 pm
Posted in: Innovation, Technology
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Some Tech 101 (maybe 201) about How Google (and others) Go Offline
posted by Deven Desai
A few days ago, Google went offline. You may have missed it. Jennifer Rexford at Princeton pointed folks to this article about the specific event. Better yet, the article goes into the way the Internet works (well the routing part which was the issue) and how to fix it. One thing that jumped out at me is that humans, yes HUMANS!, are still a big part of the system, and that trust or maybe a Social Life of Information play big roles along with the hardware and software. One of the people who identified the source of the issue called (not email, phone, Paul Ohm and Mike Madison who note my preference for phones) someone they knew at the source. I post the details below as I think it shows the way the system works:
The solution was to get Moratel to stop announcing the routes they shouldn’t be. A large part of being a network engineer, especially working at a large network like CloudFlare’s, is having relationships with other network engineers around the world. When I figured out the problem, I contacted a colleague at Moratel to let him know what was going on. He was able to fix the problem at around 2:50 UTC / 6:50pm PST. Around 3 minutes later, routing returned to normal and Google’s services came back online.
Looking at peering maps, I’d estimate the outage impacted around 3–5% of the Internet’s population. The heaviest impact will have been felt in Hong Kong, where PCCW is the incumbent provider. If you were in the area and unable to reach Google’s services around that time, now you know why.Building a Better Internet
This all is a reminder about how the Internet is a system built on trust. Today’s incident shows that, even if you’re as big as Google, factors outside of your direct control can impact the ability of your customers to get to your site so it’s important to have a network engineering team that is watching routes and managing your connectivity around the clock. CloudFlare works every day to ensure our customers get the optimal possible routes. We look out for all the websites on our network to ensure that their traffic is always delivered as fast as possible. Just another day in our ongoing efforts to #savetheweb.
November 16, 2012 at 12:42 pm
Posted in: Technology
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Bye, Bye Big Brands, Twinkie, Ding Dong: Hostess Brands, Inc. Liquidating
posted by Deven Desai
Ghostbusters, Die Hard, my lunch in grade school all had Twinkies (OK my lunch also alternated with Ding Dongs). In Ghostbusters the Twinkie symbolized psychokinetic energy, in Die Hard it substituted for a cop’s doughnuts, in my lunch it was I guess dessert but substituted for real food. The Wall Street Journal reports, however, that the era is over. Hostess Brands, Inc. is seeking permission to liquidate the company. It’s attempt at reorganization has failed. According to WSJ, “A victim of changing consumer tastes, high commodity costs and, most importantly, strained labor relations, Hostess ultimately was brought to its knees by a national strike orchestrated by its second-largest union.”
There are real people, places, and assets behind these brands. 18,000 workers will lose their jobs. 36 plants will close. The facilities and land will be sold. There is product inventory too. “Loaves of bread and plastic packages of icing-filled desserts” need to go. WSJ suggested that big box stores will be where the food stuff ends up. I remember when Coke changed its formula and folks hoarded the original Real Thing. I wonder whether that will happen with Twinkies. (Given the supposed shelf-life of a Twinkie, a strange pastry cellar built for and owned by some fanatic seems plausible to me).
And, Hostess Brands will sell…its brands. That is where the most money may be made. As I point out in From Trademarks to Brands, brands are not the same thing as trademarks. In the early days of trademarks, one could not sell a brand without the facilities. Today the brand as assest is a given. Selling it as thing is sanctioned by the law even though such practices do not do well within the law economics explanations for trademarks. I argue that a way to understand the move from direct competition to anonymous source, the growth of goodwill, and the expansive view of merchandising and licensing can be explained by brand practices much more than Landes and Posner’s law and economics view. (64 Florida L. Rev. 981, 1009-1019).
I wonder how folks will perceive the sale. If a company buys the name Twinkie or Ding Dong and then makes the cakes with different ingredients or sources for the ingredients, will that matter? What if the taste varies? What if in a year people think Hostess still makes Twinkies and buys the brand based on that error? Is that confusion we care about? Maybe we should not care about any of these. Then again if someone buys Twinkie and uses a new recipe, and then someone makes Twinkies with the original recipe, should that be allowed? Probably not but why is unclear. A healthy market that assumes rational consumers should be able to let information about such variances drive the market, right? Of course we don’t do that in trademark law.
Hmm, perhaps some sugar will help fuel thinking through these points. Better get Twinkies and Ding Dongs before this incarnation is gone.
November 16, 2012 at 12:10 pm
Posted in: Culture, Economic Analysis of Law, Intellectual Property
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Schneier Calls Out Papers on How Terroristist Groups End
posted by Deven Desai
Bruce Schneier noted some research by Rand about How Terrorist Groups End. The abstract
Abstract: How do terrorist groups end? The evidence since 1968 indicates that terrorist groups rarely cease to exist as a result of winning or losing a military campaign. Rather, most groups end because of operations carried out by local police or intelligence agencies or because they join the political process. This suggests that the United States should pursue a counterterrorism strategy against al Qa’ida that emphasizes policing and intelligence gathering rather than a “war on terrorism” approach that relies heavily on military force.
likely rings true to many who question the use of drones etc. (The comments on Bruce’s page get into some of this point).
To me the fact that RAND put the paper out is interesting. I can never tell whether RAND or what RAND is about. It would seem that claims that RAND is only going to support the government’s goals might be challenged here. Also Bruce calls out the work of Max Abrahms who in 2008 and 2011 addressed these ideas as well. I urge you read the 2008 post and here is the 2011 abstract
The basic narrative of bargaining theory predicts that, all else equal, anarchy favors concessions to challengers who demonstrate the will and ability to escalate against defenders. For this reason, post-9/11 political science research explained terrorism as rational strategic behavior for non-state challengers to induce government compliance given their constraints. Over the past decade, however, empirical research has consistently found that neither escalating to terrorism nor with terrorism helps non-state actors to achieve their demands. In fact, escalating to terrorism or with terrorism increases the odds that target countries will dig in their political heels, depriving the nonstate challengers of their given preferences. These empirical findings across disciplines, methodologies, as well as salient global events raise important research questions, with implications for counterterrorism strategy.
Bruce was cool enough to include a link to the paper.
November 15, 2012 at 9:57 pm
Posted in: International & Comparative Law, Military Law, Political Economy, Politics
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Forget Facial Recognition, Try Tattoos
posted by Deven Desai
Imagine that your cool CSI, NCIS, Mentalist, (fill in the procedural (as in cop show, not law), detective sees a tattoo on someone, but no face. She wants to know who that person was. Quick! Check the database! Turns out MSU is developing such a thing. The article admits that a nationwide database is not on the immediate horizon, but the FBI and local agencies want it. The piece has some cultural overtones too. The researcher Anil Jain noted that one could ask
“Is this tattoo connected to a gang? Who were the previous individuals who were arrested with the same tattoo and other such information?” Jain said. “And then right away you have some information about this person. You may not know his name – the tattoo is not a unique identifier – but it can narrow down the list of identities for this particular tattoo.”
One can start to see where a person fits, or used to fit, into a social setting. Then again someone may get the tattoo just for kicks. Hmm, maybe intellectual property law will foil this one? Remember the Hangover II and the tattoo suit? I wonder whether the database will face cease and desist letters from alleged copyright and or trademark holders. Or maybe they will support the database so they can enforce their rights!
Seriously, however, I think that the use of tattoos to identify people has an established history. I am not sure whether that is just a claim in books and film. But this project seems to lend credence to the idea that those marks really do follow you forever.
November 15, 2012 at 9:44 pm
Posted in: Criminal Law, Cyberlaw, Technology
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