Cairns Blog

PreCYdent's Web of Law Free Legal Search Engine

Right Coast blogger and author of the article, Web of Law on legal citation networks,  Thomas Smith, launches Precydent.

Here's an interview by Law Librarian Blog with Thomas Smith about the project.

And here's his email, inviting participation:

PreCYdent is a free legal research site that applies new search technology to law, which is much, much more effective at finding authoritative and relevant cases than Westlaw or Lexis.  The idea is that anybody, whether they are a lawyer or not, and whether or not they can afford what the big companies charge, ought to be able to do effective legal research online.

PreCYdent was founded by me and Antonio Tomarchio, a mathematician from the Politecnico di Milano (and my co-author) to remedy the deplorable state of the search technology that lawyers have to use in their online research.  The online legal research industry is dominated by a couple of big players that make billions of dollars a year offering obsolete technology at high prices to lawyers who don't have much choice.  This relative lack of competition is responsible in my view for the backwardness of the technology.

But it also turns out that making search technology that works well in legal databases is really, really hard.  Existing technologies, including Google's PageRank, do not work very well in legal authority networks.  But we created something that does work well.  If you are used to Westlaw or Lexis, I think you will notice the difference right away.  Our tests show we return relevant cases at something like 4 to 5 times the rate of Westlaw and Lexis.  But let us know what your impressions are.

Here's an interesting post about us by a technology blogger in Southern California (as you can tell, it's a candid, non- sock puppet review): http://www.techcoastreview.com/2008/03/precydent-setting-precident.html

We are trying to get the word out about PreCYdent as efficiently as we can.  If you know lawyers or others interested in law, or people interested in web apps and technology, we'd be grateful if you would forward this message to them.  The site is free, and we are not trying to sell anything to anybody, unless you count the ads in the margins.  We are committed to bringing free law to everybody interested in it.

Tidbit of the Week: Apropos of Nothing in Particular - Satsumas

My aunt is an award-winning German translator, whose translations include Hitler’s Bunker: The Final Days of the Third Reich and Europa, Europa.  While we were together, she was working on a book called Lexicon des Unwissens, not unlike a German version of Schott's miscellanies, those perennial bathroom-reading favorites.  Why in this day and age of Wikipedia, I queried, would anyone want or need such a book?  Well, she answered, it's precisely because you don't know what you don't know and until you know to look it up, well......

This is why I thought that someone might find it as useful as I did to know the difference between a Clementine and a Satsuma (also sometimes spelled Tsatsuma).  Mandarins are now in season and they are deliciously sweet, seedless and easy to peel.  I also like the challenge of having to consume the entire wooden crate-full as they are generally sold in bulk.  I've included the links to Wikipedia but there's lots more on the web about both.

The short answer is: Clementines are the variety of mandarins from North Africa.  The varietal is about 100 years old.  Satsumas are the variety of mandarins from Asia and Asia Minor/Turkey and are more than 700 years old.  The largest producer of mandarins in the world is China.

So what's a mandarin?  Well, according to Wikipedia:

The Mandarin orange or mandarin is a small citrus tree (Citrus reticulata) with fruit resembling the orange. The fruit is oblate, rather than spherical, and roughly resembles a pumpkin in shape. Mandarin oranges are usually eaten plain, or in fruit salads. Specifically reddish orange mandarin cultivars can be marketed as tangerines, but this is not a botanical classification. The mandarin has many names, some of which actually refer to crosses between the mandarin and another citrus fruit. Most canned mandarins are of the satsuma variety, of which there are over 200 cultivars. Satsumas are known as mikan in Japan. One of the more well-known satsuma cultivars is the "Owari", which ripens during the late fall season in the Northern Hemisphere. Clementines, however, have displaced satsumas in many markets, and are becoming the most important commercial mandarin variety. The tangor, which is also called the temple orange, is a cross between the mandarin and the common orange. Its thin rind is easy to peel; and its pale orange pulp is spicy, full-flavored, and tart. The rangpur is a cross between the mandarin and the lemon

You don't know you don't know until you know.

Democracy Journal Publishes "Wiki Government"

New Issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas

The Winter issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas has arrived - available at the website, www.democracyjournal.org ; via print subscription by clicking here; or at your local bookstore or newsstand.

The Winter 2008 issue of Democracy contains my article, "Wiki Government," which discusses the opportunity presented by new technology to create institutions that are both more expert and more democratic.  Download democracy_journal.pdf

In addition:

• Historian Matthew Dallek looks back at World War II-era Civil Defense as an inspiration for a progressive response to homeland security that is bottom-up, not bureaucracy-based.
• The Council on Foreign Relations' Steven Simon and the Naval War College's Jonathan Stevenson argue that the real lesson from Vietnam is that we need to withdraw from Iraq now to preserve American prestige and power.
• Anne-Marie Slaughter takes apart Norman Podhoretz and neoconservative foreign policy and offers a liberal internationalist alternative.
• Aziz Huq from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU traces the imperial presidency of George W. Bush and how we must recalibrate the balance of power between Congress and the president.
• And political scientist Thomas Schaller explores the new world of regulating "public bads" - from carbon emissions to cigarette smoke.

This issue also features Jim Sleeper's assessment of labor leader Al Shanker's "tough liberalism"; Peniel Joseph's exploration of how the civil rights movement weaves into the fabric of American democracy; Mary Jo Bane's look at the Bush Administration's faith-based initiative; Rick Perlstein's revisiting of the 1972 McGovern campaign; and Sierra Club president Carl Pope's response to Gregg Easterbrook on the future of the environmental movement. Finally, in our "Recounting" essay, Andrei Cherny looks at the battle over the phrase "War on Terror."

About Democracy: A Journal of Ideas

Democracy: A Journal of Ideas is a quarterly journal of progressive thought founded by Kenneth Baer and Andrei Cherny that serves as a place where ideas can be developed and important debates can be spurred. Democracy is the progressive analogue of conservative journals such as Commentary, the Public Interest, and the National Interest, and it showcases breakthrough thinking on the major domestic and foreign policy issues of our time. Democracy is sold in bookstores in 49 states, and its readers - in print and at www.democracyjournal.org - can be found in 90 countries around the world.

Published to Public -- Project Update and Request for Comments

Hi All,

We wanted to post an update on our project to see if anyone had comments.  Below is the paper outline we're developing.  (See here for our original project proposal.)

Does Wikipedia's value depend on derivative publication?

In his recent Washington Post article "A Brave New Wikiworld," Cass Sunstein (of republic.com and "The Daily We" fame) extols the virtues and possibilities of collaborative knowledge systems but does this optimism rest on the assumption of continued wiki-dependent publication?

Have you ever done a Google search on yourself? I search for myself regularly, just to see what other people are able to pull up on me, and I am usually disturbed at the amount of information that people can get just by punching my name in a little box. Especially if I type in my maiden name, years of my life are laid out for public consumption with a simple click of a button. I know the day will probably come when I will have a conversation with someone and they will let slip some information that they got from some random internet search. Yet, even though I am bothered by the ease with which anyone can access my past, I accept it as the trade-off of a vibrant online community. Quite simply, if I demand that almost all information be readily available online about almost any topic, then I must deal with information about myself being accessible as well.

Losing Bureacuracy and Developing an Open Source Career

In reading the material on open source movements I was struck by: 1) the construction of networks for code-sharing; 2) the emphasis on the open source movement as a set of practices and processes; 3) and the remuneration of open source activities in both reputational and financial currencies; 4) the way in which legal concepts (e.g., copyright and licensing) both construct and are constructed by the practices of self-organizing open source community members.  Open Source can thus be seen as an *institution* with regulatory, normative and cognitive-cultural elements (cf. Scott's [1995] model of institutional pillars).

P2P: Distinguishing between Public and Published ...

Hi All,

Below is a description of our project -- comments appreciated!

   Thanks,
   -- Mike & Seeta

In Response to Gilmore

Steve Jobs seems to be at ends with Gilmore's assertion of engineered scarcity being a product of the marketplace, or so says the reigning king of the marketplace. Considering Apple's stake in the digital pie, at first glance, it would appear that Steve Jobs is just on another one of his holier-than-thou fits. On further inspection though, Jobs makes a few interesting points as to the competitiveness of DRM and its place in digital content communication.
Perhaps the most telling sign of a changing marketplace is Jobs' nudging of his business partners in the music industry to drop DRM to increase sales. Jobs explains that DRM forces digital consumers to be locked into a set network of content providers and hardware, which just doesn't square with the move towards open information systems. I don't care if I got my mp3 on Rhapsody as long as it'll play on my ipod and can be burned on CD.
Additionally, recent rulings in Norway concerning the legality of a locked system of legally purchased content may have forced Jobs ahead of the curve. Job's Itunes was at the center of the ruling and may have decided that this ruling is writing on the wall, at least for this type of system in Europe. As information flows freely, so do effective legislative ideas concerning digital content rights. I won't be too long before cries of a European approach to digital content start appearing stateside.   
Whatever Jobs's intention, it is clear that engineered scarcity is no longer in the best interest of business for this  market. With flat Itunes sales and no clear competitive advantage gained from DRM, it may well be in the better interest of business to open up standards to digital content.   

Journal Nature Opens Peer-Reviw Process to Comments Online

Today's Wall Street Journal (Sept 14, 2006) has an article on page B1 entitled: "Journal Nature Opens Peer-Reviw Process to Comments Online" (subscription required).  For more about the project, see http://blogs.nature.com/nature/peerreview/trial/

"Nature, one of the world's most prestigious scientific research journals, has embarked on an experiment of its own. In addition to having articles submitted for publication subjected to
peer reviews by a handful of experts in the field, the 136-year-old journal is trying out a new system for authors who agree to participate: posting the paper online and inviting scientists in the field to submit comments praising -- or poking holes -- in it."  The Journal goes on to report that: "Nature says it's taking both sets of comments into account when deciding whether to publish."

The site is, quitely simply, a weblog.  It's an easy and accessible way to get open feedback on scientific content.  Participating scientists are required to list a name and institutional email address.

Apropos of the idea of "open review," I have posted a draft of "Peer to Patent: Collective Intelligence, Open Review and Patent Reform."