Brian Huddleston

CSU Hurricane Predictions: An Updated, Seven-Year Track Record

2011-12-03T16:13:00.003-06:00

The 2011 Hurricane Season ended Wednesday. And, as last year, and as in most recent years, the annual CSU predictions were wildly off base. I’m not sure how accurate they claim to be, since few if any of the stories every Spring with their forecasts for the numbers of storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes even mention the level of statistical confidence they believe those predictions to be.

Anyway, the Times-Picayune did run a story that included a chart tracking the CSU predictions for the past three years, But the chart isn’t included with the on-line version of the story, for some reason; so here's quick fuzzy scan of it:

Last year I also made a chart of past hurricane season predictions because there were very few follow-up stories that followed up on these predictions after hurricane season, despite how widely covered the predictions are when they are announced each spring.

Here is my updated Track Record graphic of the CSU hurricane predictions for Hurricane Seasons 2005-2011:

Again, wildly off, but as I said, I don’t know how accurate they purport their predictions to be.

My favorite numbers above are still the predictions for the 2006 and 2007 seasons. After under-predicting each figure for the 2005 season by over 50%, whatever factors they rely on apparently indicated that that season would not be a fluke. But that wasn’t the case and their predictions for the two following seasons were very high compared to what occured: by 66% or more for five of the six factors across the two seasons.

The bottom line: we can’t predict months in advance what one hurricane season is going to be like, so why should we believe predictions about what our climate is going to be like decades from now.

Twitter Versus Listserv Smackdown: Listserv Wins!

2011-11-30T20:20:00.000-06:00

I feel I’ve been living and breathing SSRN for weeks now, working to get our school’s RPS up and running. And today I needed to tweak a faculty paper one last time, hopefully. But I kept getting an error message when I tried to log in, and not just the message you get when you screw up your user name and password.

Here’s the capture of what I kept getting:

So it looks like something serious is down on their end. This kept happening for about five minutes, so I e-mailed our faculty asking anyone with an account to try to log on and, yes, one person reported back right away that they were getting the same error message.

I thought that maybe it’s just a local problem - doubtful since that was the only web page giving us problems, but who knows. So, to see if anyone else around the country was having similar problems, I thought SURELY with all the amazing web 2.0 and social media tools at my disposal, I could instantly tap into my pool of colleagues around the country. So I go on Twitter:

And post those three messages (which you have to read from bottom to top). Nothing. I am, of course, simultaneously e-mailing my contact at SSRN and asking the two professors here to make screen captures of their error messages. But I also post a message on the ALL-SIS listserv and within minutes I have two messages from people saying they aren’t having any problems like I am. Then when I try to log in again, no error message. A later follow-up from my SSRN contact:

confirms that it was a problem on their end, though it looks like it was just a brief glitch and I happened to be one of the few people to run into it.

The point is: as revolutionary as many people say Twitter is, and as useful as it can be in some situations, in this case a listserv, a 20+ year old technology, kicked its ass. Eventually all I got were exactly two responses from Twitter, both from @ssrn, and both of which were pretty useless. The first one:

was useless because I WASN’T FOLLOWING SSRN and other users do NOT see @user responses you send to them if they are NOT already following you (and I’m following them now, which is why I was able to make that screen capture).

The second one was just a useless shout-out from them to, I guess, everyone who had used #ssrn in a tweet recently:

Realistically, what this probably demonstrates is that there are, what, 1200+ law librarians on ALL-SIS, and probably not many more than 245 on Twitter, since I think I’ve found and am following everyone identifying them selves as a librarian at a law library, no mater where, what type, or what they do. If so, do we blame the librarians for being slow adapters? No, its been mainstream for, what, at least two to three years. Instead, I think we blame Twitter for not being as useful for our routine daily communication needs as some people hyped it up to be.

Now what Twitter is really useful for is stuff like this:

Mmmmm...steak. Wonder where he is? Dickie Brennans’s? The Ember’s? Crescent City Steak House?

Speaking of Ingram, now that it looks like Alabama will face LSU in the BCS Champsionship/Brawl for it All Round II, I have GOT to get a Bama jersey with his number on it.

(Oh, and if there was a real, worthwhile, final point here, I’ve long since forgotten what it was.)

Wife's Fundraising Letter from Bush II

2011-11-21T21:55:00.003-06:00

My wife got a fundraising letter from the George W. Bush Presidential Library foundation, group, flunkies, whoever:

They are wasting their money on whatever marketing firm got a list of potential donors with her name on it. I haven't laughed so hard since I got a membership invitation from the ACLU.

Catholic University School of Law Cheating at SSRN

2011-11-17T21:16:00.008-06:00

While browsing SSRN recently, I was looking at the most recent issues of various school's Research Paper Series (“RPS”). These are the e-mails with abstracts of recent faculty articles and such with links back to the text of those article at SSRN, which they send out on behalf of law schools (and other institutions) when you have an RPS account with SSRN. The general idea is that it’s a great way to highlight your faculty's recent scholarship and let other folks know how brilliant all your professors are.

So I was a bit perplexed that Catholic University’s most recent RPS consisted entirely of articles that are at least ten years old, with four of the five of them from either 1995 or 1996. They can, of course, do whatever they want with SSRN and their RPS, and a lot of schools are indeed uploading their back catalog of faculty scholarship onto SSRN, but the whole idea, generally, of these RPSs is to highlight recent scholarship and so I, and, I think, many other people familiar with SSRN, would consider fleshing out your RPSs with articles from the 1990s as very bad form.

SSRN doesn’t archive school’s RPSs, so here’s a PDF capture of this one:

And here are screen captures from this issue of their RPS; first, the top of it, showing that it is indeed from this past September:

And here is article 1, from 2000:

Articles 2 through 4, all from 1996:

And article 5, from 1995 (the year I started library school):

This is dubious at best, dishonest at worst, but its like cheating at solitaire: few people will even know because few people actually read these RPSs, and fewer people read my blog.

Happy 236th Birthday to the Marine Corps!

2011-11-10T21:32:00.005-06:00

In my fourth annual traditional United States Marine Corps birthday celebration, here is this year's Marine Corps joke, found in the humor section of MarineDevilDog.Com (a determinedly state-of-the-art-as-of-1998 web site!):

A crusty old Marine Corps Colonel found himself at a gala event downtown, hosted by a local liberal arts college. There was no shortage of extremely young, idealistic ladies in attendance, one of whom approached the colonel for conversation.

She said, "Excuse me, sir, but you seem to be a very serious man. Are you this way all the time, or is something bothering you?"

"No," the colonel said, "I'm just serious by nature."

The young lady looked at his awards and decorations and said, "It looks like you have seen a lot of action."

The colonel's short reply was "Yep, a lot of action."

The young lady, tiring of trying to start up a conversation, said, "You know, you should lighten up a little - relax and enjoy yourself."

The colonel just stared at her in his serious manner.

Finally the young lady said, "You know, l hope you don't take this the wrong way, but when is the last time you had sex?"

The colonel looked at her and replied, "1955."

She said, "Well, there you go; you really need to chill out and quit taking everything so seriously - I mean, no sex since 1955, isn't that a little extreme?"

The colonel, glancing at his watch, said in his matter-of-fact voice, "Oh, I don't know. It's only 2130 now!"

Semper Fi!!! (And if you don't get it...)

Worst Academic Press Catalog Cover Image Ever

2011-11-07T22:56:00.003-06:00

So there I was, looking for publisher information about a certain book a professor thought was representative of the type of academic press where he might try to place the book he is working on, when I’m confronted with what may be the worst choice ever for a book catalog cover (image after jump):

What the hell is that thing? I’m going to have nightmares for weeks. Turns out its from the cover of Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination and - Oh my God! its not just an illustration, but a sculpture from the exhibit for which this book serves as a catalog. The artist is Patrician Piccinini and that specific work is here.

The giant mutant sea lion thing is weird enough, but some of her other work, conveniently listed here on another site, is even more disturbing. But the more you look at it, the more compelling the pieces are.

Still, a strange choice for the Vandy press catalog cover. Why couldn’t they have used this cover image instead:

From the description:

Embodied Resistance engages the rich and complex range of society's contemporary "body outlaws"--people from many social locations who violate norms about the private, the repellent, or the forbidden. This collection ventures beyond the conventional focus on the "disciplined body" and instead, examines conformity from the perspective of resisters. By balancing accessibly written original ethnographic research with personal narratives, Embodied Resistance provides a window into the everyday lives of those who defy or violate socially constructed body rules and conventions.

That’s actually a book I would want to read.

Occupy Wall Street and Vague Statistics

2011-10-30T22:18:00.001-05:00

Besides the white-washing of the more unsavory aspects of the Occupy Wall Street kids (including public masturbation in Madison, rape and sexual assault in NYC, and a guy caught on camera defecating on a NYPD patrol car), as well as the fact that the movement is more astro-turfed than their media sympathizers will acknowledge, the protesters’ grievances and demands are still vague.

One chart related to the OWS’s “cause” that I’ve seen on-line in various places concerns the non-story about the ratio of corporate executive’s salaries to the salaries of average workers:

I saw that and thought a little research was called for and made my own chart in response:

As indicated, I got the statistics for the Global 500 Corporations and the Per Capita GDP from reliable sources(CNN/Forbes and the IMF, respectively), but I’ve never see a source for those CEO:Worker salary ratios. I wouldn’t even know how to start finding that information. Does somebody compile average CEO salaries by country? That’s a task for some slow day at the reference desk.

Bored Headline Writers

2011-10-15T23:32:00.003-05:00

Some headline writer at the Times-Picayune must be a bored Who fan.

A routine story about local restaurants composting their food scraps had this headline in today's paper:

Though its not the first time, by far, the same pun has been made.

RIP Steve Jobs

2011-10-05T20:06:00.006-05:00

"Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
- Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Speech, 2005

Marines Dominate Post-DADT Repeal

2011-09-21T23:13:00.005-05:00

I love this New York Times story about this Marine Recruiter in Oklahoma:

Elisabeth Bumiller, Marines Hit the Ground Running in Seeking Recruits at Gay Center
New York Times, September 20, 2011.

The day after the repeal of DADT was final, he was the only recruiter invited out of all the services to attend a celebratory shindig and set up a recruiting table at a gay rights community center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The story notes that:

"With the law now changed, the Marines appear determined to prove that they will be better than the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard in recruiting gay, lesbian and bisexual service members."

Semper Fi! I predict that, like a hell of a lot of political disputes, the resolution of this one is going to be a disappointment to both sides: it won't be the catastrophe that some of the right predict, and it won't be the paradigm shift that many on the left had hoped for. The article notes that of the three potential recruits the Master Sgt. talked to, two didn't meet the basic qualifications and standards.

CALI Presentation on The Internet and Learning the Law

2011-06-29T22:31:00.028-05:00

Went to the CALI Conference on Law School Computing law week. I was invited by CALI Executive Director John Mayer to be one of ten presenters an the first day's Ignite! Plenary. Every one of the presenters were given the opportunity to talk for five minutes - about ANYTHING. Very fun, but very challenging - its extremely hard to talk for ONLY five minutes about something substantive and make it worth while. But I busted my ass for a month (he e-mailed us exactly four weeks before the day of the plenary), and I got a lot of good feedback on my presentation about the internet, technology, and its effect on law students' study habits and ability to learn the law.

The video of the plenary is available on-line, but the first part doesn't have any audio, and it ran late so the last part didn't get recorded. My part starts right at the thirty-nine minute mark. (Marquette uses MediaSite for their lecture and slideshow capture - a very cool system.)

The text, and the slides, from my presentation and below, after the jump. (At least this is the final draft that I mad more or less memorized, but which I continued to tweak as I practiced it a few dozen times the day before the plenary.) (And its damn near impossible to get the text and the slides the align correctly - Blogspot doesn't let you fully edit HTML if you also use the Compose option.)

In the past few years, there have been a lot of books and articles critical of our “always on”/“always connected” technology-focused culture. Some of these even suggest that web 2.0 applications, smartphones, all this technology we use, is actually changing the way our brains work, and not in a good way.

But in response to that, others have pointed out, no, in order to survive, our ancestors had to be alert to multiple possible threats around them and stay attentive to every sound or movement heard or saw.

So maybe this drive to regularly check our e-mail, Twitter stream, Facebook, RSS feeds, etc., is just an adaptation of early survival mechanisms and the evolution of the internet is just the latest step in mankind’s evolution and so, sure, we’re perfectly capable of dealing with this modern deluge of information.

Well, if that’s true, what else have evolution prepared us for?

For one, our taste buds and appetites evolved to crave fatty, high-calorie foods. So surely we’re also capable of dealing with the modern deluge of readily available, inexpensive food, right? How’s that been working out for us?

Well, today - thanks at least in part to evolution - one-third of adult Americans are obese. Are we going to see an epidemic of “information obesity” soon? Are we starting to see that now?

The concept of “internet addiction” is debatable, but our brains do have several re-enforcing mechanisms that recent research indicates are relevant to how we work with information today.

When our ancestors were on the hunt, or seeking or searching for something, their brains released dopamine - a chemical similar to adrenaline - to help keep them sharp and alert and on edge. Then, when they found what they were looking for - a meal, a mate, whatever - that physical, concrete reward would satisfy that seeking/hunting behavior and their brains would then release endorphins to give them a nice, contented feeling. These endorphins would also balance out the dopamine, take the edge off, bring them down, and they’d feel relaxed and satisfied.

Today, we’re engaging in similar seeking/hunting behavior when we use all these on-line information resources and electronic gadgets: dopamine is responsible for that slight rush we feel when we’re on-line, searching on Google, browsing Westlaw results, checking e-mail, reading our Twitter stream, etc. BUT because the objects/targets of these electronic “hunts” are virtual, there is no concrete thing to trigger the endorphin-fueled feeling of satisfaction/contentment. So after we’ve completed our on-line “hunt”, we’re still on-edge from the dopamine rush, but it starts to wane, so to get it back, we’ll search for something else, starting a cycle of seeking behavior we’ll use to try to keep that rush going.

That’s how we’ll say “Oh, I’ll quickly look this up on Google, then get back to what I’m doing” and then forty-five minutes have passed and we’ve gone off on four or five tangents, checked all our e-mail, social media accounts, and maybe we didn’t even find what we were initially looking for.

Then the more we do that, the more we crave that slight dopamine rush, the more we want to check our e-mail, Facebook, etc., and soon we’re falling asleep with our Blackberrys on our nightstand and checking them as soon as we wake up, and during the day we start to feel twitchy if we haven’t checked our e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, whatever, for a couple of hours.

So yeah, sure, evolution may have equipped us for this behavior, but we are not cavemen any more, and when our ancestors were staying alert, on edge, and paying attention to every possible danger around them, they were not also trying to read eighty pages of Con Law for their next class.

Being able to quickly check and skim different resources and monitor multiple streams of information may be a useful skill in some situations, but the mental processes that requires are very different from the processes needed to “learn the law.”

Learning the law requires extended periods of non-distracted focus/concentration on the written word, and you cannot do that with your laptop open next to your casebook while also regularly checking Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail. When you look up from a book to a screen your brain makes several split-second decisions: is that important, do I click on that, should I respond to that? And in just that split-second you’ve disrupted the “deep reading” processes that enable your brain to comprehend what you’ve read and transfer it from your short-term “working” memory to your long-term, retentive memory.

We need to teach our students to use technology and social media deliberately, in a focused manner, to get the most use out of them: but don’t let these tools use YOU.

Do not let them interfere and distract you from concentrating on the important tasks that NEED your undivided, focused attention.

The best advice for our students may be the same common sense advice for a healthy diet: 1) All things in moderation, 2) know when to say when), 3) push away from the digital buffet - at least when doing your class readings.

The Christian Science Monitor, Bad Fact-Checking, and Plagiarism

2011-05-20T14:48:00.004-05:00

Came across this article in all the news about the Mississippi River flooding:

William Sargent, Letting Mississippi Run its Natural Course Could Save New Orleans from Hurricanes, Christian Science Monitor, May 19, 2011.

Sargent points out that, yes, it would have been good for the Louisiana coast to let the Mississippi River run wild, keep depositing sediment in the delta to build up new coastal wetlands, and shift course every five thousand years, as it has done throughout its history, and which it would have done at some point by now if man hadn’t intervened. But Sargent gets several points wrong and glosses over several important issues. Wrong is his statement comparing a possible breach of the river’s levees with Katrina’s flooding:

The full force of the Mississippi would fill up the underwater bowl in which New Orleans lies with far more force and water than filled the city when Lake Pontchetrain burst it’s levees after Katrina.

First, the lake is spelled “Pontchartrain” and its levees did NOT burst after Katrina; it was the floodwalls along the various canals in the city that burst. In fact, no levees “burst” during Katrina: some were overtopped, but it was the collapsing of the floodwalls that caused the worst of the flooding in New Orleans.

And he glosses over the drawbacks of letting the Mississippi flow down the Atchafalaya basin, as it would have done if the Army Corps of Engineers hadn’t tamed it with the Morganza Spillway and others structures along the river in that same area. Yes, all that sediment that the Mississippi washes down from the middle third or so of the country could now be building new wetlands along the middle of the Louisiana coast, but not if we wanted to keep it navigable. The reason we’re losing wetlands south of New Orleans is that the river has been engineered to not silt up and so all the sediment is going out into the Gulf instead of building up new land along the mouth of the river.

But Sargent’s most egregious offense is to rip off a memorable image from John McPhee’s 1987 New Yorker February 23, 1987 article, The Control of Nature (Atchafalaya). Sargent may have “consulted” this article in his research, as it is one of the standard works on the history of controlling the Mississippi, but he crosses the line with the second of these two paragraphs:

The Mississippi River is impressive. In New Orleans, it is straitjacketed between 20-foot high levees, and the river itself is over 150 feet deep. When President Bush finally went down to New Orleans to address the situation after hurricane Katrina, he stood on Jackson Square, facing the river that flowed by, 20 feet over his head.

You could see the superstructure of supertankers and hear the quiet thrumming of their engines as they cruised by in front of him. If the ships could have cruised over the nearby superdome they would have hovered in the air 10 feet above centerfield. It would have been an impressive photo-op, indeed, if the levees had decided to break during the presidential address.

Besides not capitalizing “Superdome” (a minor oversight, unless you’re a Saints Fan!!! Its “THE Superdome”, not “a superdome”, like there are a couple of dozen of them scattered around the country), the image of ships hovering over the playing field is clearly lifted from this paragraph in McPhee’s article:

Here’s the two key sentences, side by side:

Sargent:

If the ships could have cruised over the nearby superdome they would have hovered in the air 10 feet above centerfield.

McPhee:

[I]f somehow the ships could turn and move at river level into the city and into the stadium they would hover above the playing field like blimps.

I’ve been reading a whole lot about plagiarism for an article I’m working on, and all the definitions for plagiarism include something along the lines of “using the words or ideas of another person as if they were your own.” And that, clearly, is what Sargent has done here. Oh, and “centerfield” is part of the field where baseball is played. In football commentators generally call the area around the fifty-yard line “mid-field.”

Italian Combat Readiness in WWI

2011-05-16T21:56:00.014-05:00

In yesterday's New York Times Book Review, the title review, by Christopher Hitchens, is Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, a new book on WWI.

What caught my eye is this accompanying photograph:

The caption in the review reads “Italian soldiers killed during an Austrian attack in the mountains near Cividale, circa 1917.” Well, no freaking kidding they were killed - they brought a damn guitar into combat - that shows where their priorities were!

Jazz Fest, Professor Houck, and Global Warming: Year 3

2011-05-11T20:16:00.009-05:00

This is my second update to my original post in 2009 about Tulane Law Professor’s Oliver Houck’s prediction of how global warming will affect Jazz Fest. Prof. Houck’s article, Can We Save New Orleans?, 19 Tul. Envtl L. Rev 1 (2006) (PDF), is a very good piece written just after Hurricane Katrina and intersperses his personal evacuation tale amongst a detailed, pessimistic history of the environmental indignations that Louisiana, New Orleans, and the Mississippi River have suffered for the past century or so.

At one point Houck recites a litany of the worst predictions of rising global temperatures and, to try to make it more relevant to us here in New Orleans, flippantly says:

So what? Here in Louisiana we will be warmer in summer (think, maybe, 103 degrees at Jazz Fest) . . . . Houck, 19 Tul. Envtl. L. Rev 1, at 27.

The source he cites says that:

[It] is projected that by 2100, temperatures in Louisiana could increase about 3°F (with a range of 1-5°F) in spring and summer, slightly less in winter, and slightly more in fall. Envtl. Prot. Agency, Climate Change and Louisiana 2 (1997).

(See last year’s discussion for the minor problems with this cite in Houck’s article.)

Since I had been to many Jazz Fests when I read this article, and never remembered the temperature being in the high nineties, I thought this "prediction" was way off base and then, of course, had to figure out when the hottest JazzFests on record were. My original post on this, in 2009, talks about how I got the temperatures for all the past Jazz Fest (a pain in the ass) and about my methodologies in compiling them. Long story short, the hottest Jazz Fest ever was 2002, when the average temperature for the ten days of the Festival period was 89.7°F. Pretty damn hot, but a good thirteen degrees away from 103°F that Houck predicts and well out of even the maximum range by which the EPA says temperatures “could increase.”

This year’s Jazz Fest, with an average temperature of 82.6°F, was the 20th hottest on record. Here are the updated charts, current through the 2011 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

Conclusions? The 2011 was statistically right in the middle of all of them; three of the five hottest Jazz Fests were between 1987 and 1995, and three of the ten coolest Jazz Fests have been since 2004. There is no global warming trend evident at Jazz Fest.

Is the New York Times and/or Stephen L. Carter Wrong?

2011-05-03T15:48:00.004-05:00

Ok, so this isn’t the most timely comment. I’m catching up on stuff and cleaning off my desk after meeting two big deadlines in the past month, which is why this may have been, I think, the biggest gap in posts since I started this blog way back in aught-eight.

I had flagged James Traub’s review of Yale Law Professor Stephen L. Carter’s book, The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama, in the New York Times Book Review from back in - jeez! - January. Carter apparently takes Obama to task for continuing the Bush wars without any improved adherence to the “just war” theory that is the focus of Carter’s book.

The quote in the review that caught my eye was this:

Carter observes that the Bush administration coined the term “unlawful combatant” to place America’s new adversaries beyond the reach of the Geneva Conventions.

I read that and though, uhh, doubtful. Five minutes with Westlaw found several cases from WWII and the 1950s about “unlawful combatants”.

Here’s the relevant part of one such case, Colepaugh v. Looney, 235 F.2d 429 (10th Cir. 1956):

The case it cites is a Supreme Court case from WWII, Ex parte Quirin 317 U.S. 1 (1942), which says:

I’m no expert in this subject, but either 1) Stephen Carter is wrong - doubtful - 2) the NYT reviewer is wrong - possible - or, most likely, 3) the NYT reviewer was lazy in summarizing Carter’s statements about unlawful combatants and the Bush administration. Like all law professors, Carter is very likely a genius at grafting multiple layers of conditions and clarifications on anything he says. We have the book, and I really don’t want to read it just to find out about this, but I might have to because, based on the Traub review, Carter is absolute wrong and has completely mis-represented the Bush administration’s use of the unlawful combatant status in military law during its eight years, seven and a half of which were engaged in the war on terror, which Obama’s recent good luck in continuing Bush’s policies will probably do little to help resolve.

Annual Mardi Gras Legal Satire

2011-03-07T23:48:00.003-06:00

Every Mardi Gras seems to have some satirical take on the legal profession, and this year was no exception:

That's from a float that had several portrayals of local attorneys on it, but I was only able to capture this picture of our second floor computer lab's namesake.

Legal Education and Twitter... Jeez

2011-02-23T20:52:00.003-06:00

I think this student could be one of ours...

Of course, dumb law student Tweets are like shooting fish in a barrel, but I just happen to point my gun in this person's direction tonight.

Weird Westlaw Glitch/Typo

2011-02-22T14:14:00.004-06:00

I think some Westlaw copy editor fell asleep and hit the Y key with their nose:

Oh, and a “deck” is a copy editor term for part of the headline, like the “sub-headline,” I guess. So maybe that part was an error in the original newspaper. That story (Westlaw login required) has been on Westlaw at least since around its publication date, so say about ten months. Wonder if it will ever be corrected.

Audrey Hepburn ALA-Styled "Read" Poster

2011-02-20T22:36:00.014-06:00

Came across this lovely picture of Audrey Hepburn and thought it would make a great ALA-Style poster.

Wish I could see what book she was reading. Found this image on a Tumblr about fashion, and using TinEye found it in several other places, including on a blog post with a photo collection of celebrities and books. Also found a copy that isn't cropped. But I couldn't find any information about the source; will have to go scour her biographies one of these days at the library. Or go to Anthropologie - I've browsed several nice books about her there while my wife was shopping.

Space Tragedies and Poetry

2011-01-28T10:39:00.002-06:00

I looked it up a while back to check the date, but today is the 25th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster. In a posting on another blog that even fewer people read than this one, I use that as a jumping-off point to talk about presidential documents and how you would use the Public Papers of the Presidents if you wanted an official cite to Reagan's remarks to the country that evening. I also prattled on about the "In Event of Moon Disaster" speech that William Safire wrote for Nixon in case NASA couldn't get Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin off the lunar surface and back to earth. (Nothing I've read about the contingent Apollo 11 speech makes mention of Michael Collins, who remained in the Command Module circling the moon, but apparently his greatest fear in the entire work-up for Apollo 11 was having to return to Earth alone as a "marked man for life". (Thank you, Wikipedia!!!))

But back to Space Tragedies and Poetry. Reagan's Challenger remarks, written by Peggy Noonan, quoted High Flight by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. As that link explains, he was an American pilot who joined the Royal Canadian Air Force before America entered WWII, and a test flight at 30,000 feet inspired the poem that Noonan excerpted and which Reagan related to a nation in mourning, telling his fellow Americans that the shuttle astronauts had "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God".

Reading Safire's article about his long-forgotten Apollo 11 contingency speech, he notes that his conclusion had Nixon say:

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

and which is a variation of the end of The Soldier by Rupert Brooke, which starts:

IF I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.

At least one web page notes that both these disaster speeches - one never delivered, and one delivered memorably - used quotes from poets who both wrote about romanticized visions of war in the first half of the 20th century, but its only, as far as I've found, if you read the WikiP page for Brooke that will you discover not only did they both attend the same school in England (Magee's parents were missionaries so, though American, he got around as a kid), but that they both won the same poetry prize thirty four years apart from each other.

Did Peggy Noonan know of this connection? In both the column she wrote about the Challenger speech and in that chapter of her book about being a speechwriter for Reagan, she doesn't mention knowing about the Safire contingency speech at all, so this is likely just one of those very strange coincidences.

Noonan's column, incidentally, was written after the shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry in 2003. As far as the presidential response to that tragedy, Bush Jr. and his speechwriters, I presume, knew better than to bother with any fancy poetry (understandably, given that "There once was a man..." is probably the limits of his experience with poetry) and instead quoted Isaiah 40:36 in his response. It's a good, appropriate piece of verse, but overall Bush II's post-Columbia remarks are as unmemorable as was most everything else he said during his presidency.

The Goat-Rope that is SSRN

2011-01-05T16:20:00.012-06:00

Over the holiday break, I got another “Everyone Wins a Ribbon Day” e-mail from SSRN:

Dear Brian Huddleston:

Your paper, "Louisiana Legislative History Resources", was recently
listed on SSRN's Top Ten download list for LSN: Legal Information:
Authority, Citation, & Precedent (Sub-Topic). As of 12/30/2010, your
paper has been downloaded 48 times. You may view the abstract and
download statistics at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1361742.

Top Ten Lists are updated on a daily basis. Click on the following
link to view the Top Ten list for the journal LSN: Legal Information:
Authority, Citation, & Precedent (Sub-Topic) Top Ten.

I got a message like this soon after I uploaded this paper, and it was a joke even then: that e-mail said my paper was in the top ten downloads for the previous two months, but I only had 11 downloads at the time. Yet I was in the top ten because, yes, there were only two papers within this subject “eJournal” for that two-month period, and mine was the second of the two. (And who the hell was downloading it? - its a pretty narrow subject to be browsing for something about Louisiana legislative history research on SSRN.)

The bottom line is that SSRN has so many subject-specific “eJournals” - seven related to ConLaw and jurisprudence, six related to employment law and related matters, etc., etc. - that ANY paper can just about be assured of being a “Top Ten” download for that particular eJournal soon after you upload it to SSRN. This fact is sometimes trumpeted by self-serving law professors who conveniently leave out the detail that their paper was a Top Ten download only in the “Law of Armenian Basket Weaving” eJournal and instead represent it as a overall “SSRN Top Ten Download”. But I’m not naming names...

This recent message from SSRN was all the more suspect since my “paper” is a year and a half old - I doubt its within the top ten of anything now. But yesterday SSRN President Greg Gordon sent the follow-up e-mail to, apparently, a whole mess of people who got a similar message:

We apologize for sending you one or more incorrect email messages
last week. While testing some new functionality, our servers sent
"Top Ten" emails to the top one hundred downloaded papers in certain
ejournals instead of the top ten.

Oops! Damn that decimal point! And how disappointing! - my 2009 paper was only in the TOP ONE HUNDRED downloads for 2010 in the “LSN: Legal Information eJournal, Authority, Citation, & Precedent Sub-Topic”.

Wait - I didn’t even notice that - the eJournal is “Legal Information and Technology”, but they rank the top downloads for EVERY “sub-topic” within that journal? There are about forty sub-topics under this eJournal, including a full dozen sub-topics about the “Practice of Law Librarianship” for all my fellow law librarians to bulk up their resumes with “Top Ten Downloads” boastings.

Realizing this, its not surprising I’m in the top 100 downloads for the “Authority, Citation, & Precedent” sub-topic: there are only sixty-three papers TOTAL under that sub-topic! And I don’t think I put my paper in that sub-topic - it has nothing to do with Authority, Citation, & Precedent - its about Louisiana legislative history and was a contribution to a 50-state survey that apparently is no longer going to be published in Legal Reference Services Quarterly. Does SSRN stick papers in these eJournals and sub-topics randomly?

And let’s not even get into the poorly-thought “opt-out” requirement for authors who don’t want to participate in SSRN’s new “Hard Copies for $9.99” service. There’s no way for authors to get any royalties on this, and apparently this will violate the terms of agreements that professors sign with most law reviews. SSRN said it needed to start doing this to help cover expenses, even though they’re ~~bilking~~ charging the majority of law schools $6000+ annually to sent out four or five e-mails a year with lists of recent faculty articles, aka the SSRN “Research Paper Series”. We've been debating ponying up for our own Research Paper Series but I've repeated offered to the Dean that I would do the same thing for half the price.

Happy Winter Solstice!!!

2010-12-21T17:45:00.007-06:00

Duelling Henry James Quotes in the New York Time

2010-12-16T22:58:00.008-06:00

It was deja vu, all over again. I read last Sunday's New York Times article about Bernardo Bertolucci the other day, and it starts out his quoting a passage from a Henry James story, "The Middle Years":

“We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

A great line about artistic endeavor. So great, another writer used it in another article. I only just finished the book review section, and in the concluding essay, "Working on the Ending", by Gail Godwin, she uses the same quote, albeit without the great last line about madness:

“We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task.”

Was this a recent quote of the day on some desk calendar? It was also used in the Times a few weeks ago, in an article about a museum opening, at which the quote was recited by a speaker. But besides this recent cluster, this quote has only appeared four times since 1981 in the NYT, and only once prior to that, according to their archives search.

Explanation? I'll have to defer to someone I'm much more likely to quote myself instead of Henry James:

A star fall, a phone call
It joins all
Synchronicity

It's so deep, it's so wide
You're inside
Synchronicity

Effect without cause
Sub-atomic laws, scientific pause
Synchronicity

CSU Hurricane Predictions: A Six-Year Track Record Summary

2010-12-15T22:38:00.011-06:00

The 2010 Hurricane Season ended two weeks ago. Since then, like every year, I have not seen a post-season review of how well the hurricane prognosticators at Colorado State University did. I’m sure someone somewhere is tracking this, but the Times-Picayune, the local TV stations and the national media all seem to take a pass on this or, at the very least, do not give it the same prominence they give to the original predictions when they come out in the Spring.

So, as a public service, here, all in one handy chart, are the CSU predictions for the past six hurricane seasons, and the statistics for what actually happened in each season. (The sources for the CSU predictions are the rote news stories that come out each April when they announce their initial predictions; the data for the seasons themselves come from the obsessively-detailed summaries of each season at Wikipedia.)

2005-2010 Hurricane Seasons: CSU Predictions vs Reality

Of course, their predictions are usually not to far off the historic averages, so a 20% error of margin when they predicted four major storms for 2010 and we actually had five belies what you could argue was a pretty good effort.

When these predictions are publicized each year, they are given weight like they have an impeccable, infallible body of evidence and methodology behind them when they’re really what our former mayor C. Ray “School Bus” Nagin called S.W.A.G: a Scientific Wild-Assed Guess. You can see how random some of these "predictions" are by looking at the two years after the 2005 season: after completely under-“estimating” everything about that season, they over-compensated for the 2006 and 2007 seasons and guessed that there would be more named storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes than actually occurred that years.

The bottom line is only a third of the time are these predictions within a margin of 25% accuracy, and this is for an annual six-month season of fairly well-understood meteorological phenomena. And yet we also give similar weight to other wild-assed predictions of a much less understood phenomena: the cause and effect of variations in numerous factors that may or may not impact global temperatures over the course of the next several decades.

Deaccessioning Gone Wild

2010-12-15T19:05:00.005-06:00

The catalogers at this library are a little too exuberant in their weeding duties:

I found this in a random “weird pictures” feature at some news site, and then did a TinEye image search, through which the second hit was to a blog that had another image of it:

And which had a subsequent link and said it was an installation by an artist named Alicia Martin, who apparently works pretty exclusively in the medium of books, with further information about this installation says it was in Cordoba, Spain, with yet more images.

That blog ultimately led to a Spanish-language news story and several more pictures.

Yes, its a slow night at the reference desk with exams in full swing and little motivation on my part for slogging away at another CALI Lesson.

NYC Radio: December 8, 1980

2010-12-08T22:50:00.004-06:00

I had the MP3 of this at one time, and might still have it, but I found it online and thought I would post it here today.

After John Lennon was killed thirty years ago, someone randomly tuned his FM stereo up and down the dial and recorded bits and pieces of what was being broadcast that night in New York city.

No one is sure where this came from: the WFMU page for this clip, from which I embedded it in the above player, talks about how it was found on Napster back in 2001, and links to various debates about whether it is authentic (bottom line, probably yes). Amazing little time capsule of a tragic night, from a pre-digital age now preserved forever on-line.

Happy 235th Birthday to the Marine Corps

2010-11-10T22:18:00.004-06:00

Here is my third annual traditional Marine Corps Birthday joke. Hadn’t heard it in a while, and I like this version from the Its Humor blog the best.

The Best "Dear John" Letter ever...

A Marine stationed in Iraq recently received a "Dear John" letter from his girlfriend back home. It read as follows:
Dear Ricky,
I can no longer continue our relationship. The distance between us is just too great. I must admit that I have cheated on you twice, since you've been gone, and it's not fair to either of us. I'm sorry.

Please return the picture of me that I sent to you.

Love,
Becky
The Marine, with hurt feelings, asked his fellow Marines for any snapshots they could spare of their girlfriends, sisters, ex-girlfriends, aunts, cousins etc. In addition to the picture of Becky, Ricky included all the other pictures of the pretty gals he had collected from his buddies. There were 57 photos in that envelope....along with this note:
Dear Becky,
I'm so sorry, but I can't quite remember who you are. Please take your picture from the pile, and send the rest back to me.

Take Care,
Ricky

Semper Fi!

The Bluebook and Daylight Savings Time

2010-11-07T20:22:00.008-06:00

Turning our clocks back last night reminded me of this minor, minor citation issue. Wow - its so minor, I can’t believe I’m taking time to write about it.But I haven’t been writing so much in here lately, and since one of the things I used to do regularly is complain about other people’s sloppy citation errors, I thought I would sling some more mud around. Remember, this is a minor, minor issue.

I had to cite some e-mails in an article I wrote a couple of years ago, and did some searches to confirm that a lot of people really don’t pay any attention to this. Bluebook Rule 17.2.4, E-Mail Correspondence and Listserv Postings, says “[w]hen citing personal e-mail messages...[t]he date of the message and the time stamp may be needed for specific identification of the message”.

Yes, the date would be useful, but why the time? I guess if the author were citing a near-real time e-mail exchange, putting the time-stamps in the citation would help clarify the order the e-mails were sent. And though its not a strict requirements, most folks seem to do it. And many people botch the time stamp of e-mails.

Consider the Eastern time zone. Searching Westlaw’s JLR database for the abbreviation of “Eastern Daylight Time”, I found mostly correct usages, but the seventh document I came across had it wrong:

Leslie Gielow Jacobs, Bush, Obama and Beyond: Observations on the Prospect of Fact Checking Executive Department Threat Claims Before the Use of Force, 26 Const. Comment. 433 (2010):
Persuasive communications by executive branch officials have included formal speeches,¹²³ Sunday talk show appearances,¹²⁴ congressional testimony,¹²⁵ direct media postings,¹²⁶ and documents delivered to Congress and released publicly.¹²⁷

¹²⁶E.g., Posting of Jesse Lee to the White House Blog, The New Way Forward--The President's Address, http:// www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2009/12/01/new-way-forward-presidents-address (Dec. 1, 2009 21:35 EDT).

(Emphasis added.) December would actually be Easter Standard Time, i.e., “EST”.

Maybe people just don’t realize that the abbreviations for the time zones change according to whether we’re on Standard time - in the winter - or on Daylight time - in the summer. If they realize that, its easy to mix them up because its counter-intuitive: summer is “daylight” time and the winter is “standard” time. It seems that it would be the other way around. After all, we move our clocks back and forward twice a year so farmers have more daylight, right? And isn’t the winter the darker time of the year, when we need to save the daylight? But, no, it’s the other way - winter is standard time and summer is daylight savings time. As the National Institute of Science and Technology’s Physical Measurement Laboratory puts it:

At present, Daylight Saving Time in the United States ... begins at 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday of March and ... ends at 2:00 a.m. on the first Sunday of November.

So only one of the first ten articles I found with a time stamp that included “EDT” got it wrong. I thought I would also try “EST”. That turns up a lot of French phrases or titles. But the second time zone abbreviation I found is incorrect:

Cynthia Baker, Robert Lancaster, Under Pressure: Rethinking Externships in a Bleak Economy, Clinical Law Review 17 Clinical L. Rev. 71 (2010):
Additionally, default rates for student loans of recent law school graduates have increased sharply.^FN24

²⁴Access Group, Inc., a primary originator and servicer of private education loans for law students, reports that the default rate for law student loans jumped between the law school classes of 2007 and 2008. E-mail from Jeffrey E. Hanson, Dir., Borrower Educ. Servs., Access Group to Cynthia Baker, Dir., Program on Law and State Gov't, Ind. Univ. Sch. of Law-Indianapolis (Aug. 11, 2010, 3:42 p.m. EST) (on file with authors).

(Emphasis added.) August is actually part of Daylight time, i.e., EDT. Funny thing is, another six of the first ten time stamps that include EST were also incorrectly used for e-mails or postings sent on dates during Daylight times, for a rate of only a thirty percent correct usage. Don’t know why many more people use “EST” wrong than “EDT”.

But no one can be blamed for getting this wrong in a law review article since the example in the Bluebook for this rule muffs it at well:

September, yes, is, and always has been, part of Daylight time.

Justice Elena Kagan and Empathy versus Compassion

2010-10-04T21:55:00.007-05:00

Completely separate from any jurisprudential significance of one third of the Supreme Court now consisting of women and all the news today that mentioned that fact now that Justice Kagan took her place on the high bench, we now have two justices that President Obama has appointed to the Supreme Court and who both, presumedly, meet the President’s criteria of possessing “‘empathy’ for "people's hopes and struggles’”, that he said was important when he faced his first Supreme Court vacancy last summer.

I tracked down a lot of resources and articles about empathy and jurisprudence for a professor this summer, and with Kagan’s “First Monday” today I was reminded of a blazingly obvious problem with the use of the word. Obvious, at least, to anyone who consults a dictionary.

President Obama, in “The Audacity of Hope”, characterizes empathy as “a call to stand in someone else's shoes and see through their eyes.” (No direct cite available on-line, but the quote is referenced both here and here.)

That’s pretty on point with the OED definition of empathy (gotta have your own local subscription/access to follow that and the next link):

The power of projecting one's personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation (specifically the second definition, which is the one most relevant to the present discussion of judicial philosophies).

Contrast that with the OED definition of compassion:

The feeling or emotion, when a person is moved by the suffering or distress of another, and by the desire to relieve it; pity that inclines one to spare or to succour.

Explicit in the definition of compassion is that the subject of our compassion is suffering or in distress and if we’re compassionate we will be moved to work to spare or succour the party that is suffering or in distress. In contrast, the strict dictionary definition of empathy says nothing about what, if anything, is happening with the subject of our empathy, and also says nothing about whether by being empathetic we will be motivated to do anything about the subject of our empathy.

My ultimate point is that, very strictly speaking, empathy is value-neutral, but the empathy that most commentators have written about, and that President Obama wrote about in his book and spoke about when nominating Justice Sotomayor, is definitely not the strict, value-free dictionary-definition variety of “empathy”; the better word to have used in all these instances would have been “compassion”.

But with politics being what it was, and with President Obama lacking, as I said in another context, the courage of his convictions, he would have faced even more scorn for using “compassion” to describe his ideal judicial candidate than “empathy”. And I think that’s probably why “empathy” has been used in all the legal scholarship I found this summer: it’s a more academic term, a slightly less “touchy-feely”, greeting-card term, but strictly speaking, I think Obama and his fellow travelers want judges and jurisprudence that are compassionate, not empathetic.

One could, strictly speaking, say you feel empathetic for the homeowner who blew away a burglar with his shotgun and was acquitted because of justifiable homicide (to use a random, bizarre example that came to me when thinking about all this). That would be an awkward use of the word, but not incorrect given the OED definition (the more commonly used term would be sympathetic, of course).

Again, since empathy is defined as “the power of projecting one's personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation” it says nothing about what that object of contemplation is or what the object it. I think we could legitimately argue that the majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick that was truly empathetic: empathetic with the the legislators, citizens, and lawmen of Georgia who passed, supported, and enforced the anti-sodomy law that the Supreme Court upheld in that case (to take another random example that comes to mind). But that’s not the empathy that the legal literature contemplates because the “wrong” party prevailed in that case: the party that was suffering, distressed, and which were deserving of pity and to which most commentators were inclined to spare or succour, to use the terms from the OED definition of “compassion”, but not the definition of empathy.

To use a related, but more current, example: Obama surely hopes that now with Justices Sotomayor and Kagan on the bench, when California's Proposition 8 reaches the high court, a majority of the justices will be compassionate to the "suffering or distress" of the same-sex couples denied the benefit of marriage by Prop. 8 and not empathetic to the majority of citizens represented in that case, those who passed Prop. 8 in the first place. The value-neutral OED definition of empathy would seem to require a cold, value-neutral weighing of the “full comprehen[sion]” of the various “object[s] of contemplation” and rule on the side that had the most numbers, regardless of which side warranted "the desire to relieve" any afore-mentioned suffering and distress, as a compassionate approach would require.

Blogging Drought?

2010-09-28T21:17:00.003-05:00

Almost two months with only two blog posts to show for these hot summer months? And with two years now and 150 or so posts this far!!!???!!! (What the hell did I write about in all those posts?)

Guess when I’m working on something substantive I have less time and energy to ~~bullshit~~ blog. I must be such a disappointment to my one “follower” and all the Taiwanese porn spammers who make it past the CAPTCHA screening.

2010 New Orleans Saints Who Dat Nation Membership Quiz

2010-09-09T17:15:00.007-05:00

On the occasion of the start of the regular season today, all Saints fans should take the following quiz to determine their true level of committed Who Dat-ness!

1) The 2010 Super Bowl Champion New Orleans Saints were:

A) The greatest team fielded by the Saints in franchise history.

B) The greatest team fielded by any NFL franchise in league history.

C) The greatest team ever fielded in any sport in all of history from the dawn of time to the end of the universe.

2) The Saints' successful on-side kick at the start of the second half of Super Bowl 44 was:

A) The gutsiest play ever called in a Super Bowl game.

B) The gutsiest play ever in any football game.

C) The single most significant strategic decision ever made by a human being.

3) Tracy Porter’s fourth-quarter Super Bowl interception that took the Saints to their decisive 31 to 17 winning lead was:

A) The best turnover play in the history of the Super Bowl.

B) The best and most decisive victory-sealing play in the history of sports.

C) The single greatest accomplishment in human history, surpassing agriculture, writing, and the discovery of fire.

4) New Orleans Head Coach Sean Peyton is:

A) The best coach the New Orleans Saints have ever had.

B) The greatest coach ever to walk the face of the Earth.

C) The most supreme strategist ever to command men, usurping all other piker wannabes like Napoleon, Rommel, and Sun Tzu.

5) New Orleans Saints Quarterback and Superbowl 44 MVP Drew Brees is:

A) The greatest quarterback in Saints history.

B) The greatest athlete ever in human history.

C) So amazing and all-encompassing in his athletic skills and leadership abilities that he transcends human experience and cannot be fully appreciated by such mortals as we who are merely fit to touch the hem of his jersey as we grovel before him and avert our gaze from his face.

Answer Key: If you answered anything but “C” to any of these questions, burn all your Saints memorabilia and gauge your eyes out before game time because you do not deserve to call yourself a true member of the Who Dat Nation.

Do "Hi and Lois" Live on the Gulf Coast?

2010-07-04T22:08:00.007-05:00

I thought that at least the Sunday comics would give me a reprieve from the Oilpocalypse coverage. But, no, apparently not.

It's probably just a printing error - or so I thought at first. In the last panel of today's "Hi and Lois", the family is at the beach:

That looks like some particularly nasty black, oil-fouled water. But if this was a subtle effort at drawing further attention to BP's environmental catastrophe and its effects on the economy of the Gulf Coast during this holiday weekend, then why are they letting their kids swim in the petrol-muck? What the hell, Hi?

But then - look at the sky behind the clouds! They're as black as the apparent oil slick in the ocean. If the GIF at the ComicsKingdom web site above didn't have a black sky as well, I would have thought the local Times-Picayune printing plant had screwed up.

Maybe this is the start of a cross-over series of strips and next week Lois's brother Beetle Bailey will see his platoon deployed to the Gulf for clean-up assistance duty. (I spend WAY too much time thinking about newspaper comic strips for a man my age.)

Groucho Marx on Father's Day

2010-06-20T08:38:00.002-05:00

Not sure why I thought of this, but in honor of fathers everywhere this Father's Day, here is Groucho Marx on the Dick Cavett show lamenting the lack of songs about Fathers, compared to the amount of songs about mothers, and singing the two songs about fathers he knew:

He did this same basic routine - though a bit tighter - in his Carnegie Hall performance of his 1970s one man show, An Evening with Groucho. As a kid I wore out the album made from the recording of that show. Someone has parts of that recording on YouTube with subject-specific still photos accompanying the audio, but I didn't see the segment with the Father's Day routine on it, but another site has the entire album on-line as separate downloadable MP3s.

"Because according to our Mother, you're our Father! And that's good enough for us."

TO: Barack Obama, President; FROM: The Nation; RE: Oilpocalypse

2010-06-15T21:45:00.005-05:00

President Obama addressed the nation while sitting in the Oval Office, which, every pundit told us several times, he had not done so far in his administration and thus speaking from the Oval Office signaled the seriousness of his message and the anticipation for some substantive proposals and a call to action was thicker than the black crude choking the turtles and pelicans in the Gulf.

Then... Then...

What that it? Was that FREAKIN' IT??? BP is to come up with a reparations fund that will be administered by a neutral third party? That was ALL the President has? Where is the rumored excise tax to fund a massive public works coastal restoration fund to undo the coastal wetlands damage inflicted by decades of oil drilling and dredging of the Mississippi River? Where is the Kennedyesque moon-shot call to action? Obama's predecessor forty-eight years ago knew how to exercise authority and mobilize a nation from that desk where Barry O. now takes up space:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. (President John F. Kennedy, We Choose to Go to the Moon, speech at Rice University, Texas, September 12, 1962)

The most concrete thing suggested tonight is probably not something that the president can do. President Obama said he would "inform" the chairman of BP that "he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company's recklessness."

Or, to put it in other words, Obama will tell BP that the rule of law and due process no longer apply to their company and that they should just hand over the company checkbook so the feds can dispense BP's as they see fit.

Douglas Brinkley, formerly of Tulane University and now teaching in Texas, has been in several media venues over the past week touting how his White House sources had let him know that Obama was going to propose a massive TVA-style public works project to save the wetlands. He was on Anderson Cooper 360 June 9th and said that a new "conservation excise tax" was going to fund this needed restoration effort.

Brinkley gave more details about this supposedly soon-to-be-announced project on Garland Robinette's local show Monday here on WWL 870 AM, and suggested that Obama's plan would call for $10-20 billion dollars to re-direct the Mississippi River into the wetlands to help flush out the oil and replenish them with the sediment that is now flowing off the continental shelf. He said that this would come both from BP initially and from the afore-mentioned "conservation excise tax". The full interview can be heard through WWL.Com:

(Or peruse the sloppy computer-generated auto-transcript.)

These are the sort of dramatic, decisive proposals that many of us were expecting from President Obama tonight. And we got nothing. NOTHING. Is Brinkley sucking up in hopes of getting an administration position? Sorry, Doug, the position of Policy Pimp in Chief is already taken.

Mr. President, you do NOT have the courage of your convictions. You hardly talk the talk, let alone walk the walk. And you trick notable public figures like Douglas Brinkley into floating your trial balloons to see what the public reaction will be. One question for Professor Brinkley: Did Obama at least have the courtesy to give you a reach around? We didn't get one.

Obama Kicking Ass, Media Kissing Ass

2010-06-13T21:18:00.009-05:00

Playing the “if a Republican did that” game is boring because the results are nearly always the same: a republican wouldn’t get the same free pass from the media that a democrat often gets. In an alternate universe President McCain would not be receiving the kid glove treatment from the media that President Obama is getting over the Gulf Coast Oilpocalypse. A republican president so detached, so cool and so removed from this catastrophe would be flayed alive by the pundits.

The president hasn’t personally talked to the top dog at BP? McCain would be accused of letting his big oil buddies run the show with minimal federal oversight. But when President Obama, on Matt Lauer’s “who’s ass to kick” Today show interview assured the nation that “we have communicated”, with BP officials, that was that: OK, no problem, we can check off that minor criticism because Obama says he has it covered because, essentially, “my people have called his people”.

Similarly, in that same interview, President Obama gave a relatively optimistic prediction that many of the coastal areas damaged by the spill may bounce back sooner than the more pessimistic prognosticators have stated:

[T]hese ecosystems are more resilient than I think we anticipate right now, if we act swiftly, if we act seriously. There are going to be marshes, for example, where the oil goes in and the sea life that's there is decimated for a season, maybe two. But potentially we can preserve those estuaries and those marshes so that three years from now things have come back; things have bounced back.

(See full transcript.)

By the end of the interview there were surely officials from environmental groups all over the country preparing statements to counter what the President had said, but which would be worded in such a way that they will essentially say, “ummm, excuse me, mister President, but with all due respect the effect on the Louisiana shoreline may be a good bit more serious and long-lasting than your statement would lead folks to believe”.

But if a President McCain had made a similar statement of tempered optimism, we would have every environmental activist and political commentator in the country belching a fire-and-brimstone torrent of hatred about how clueless the president was and how the oil along Louisiana’s shore may very well damage the entire regions’s wetlands for our lifetimes (such similar and unfounded apocalyptic predictions weren’t true in Prince Williams’ sound after the Exxon Valdez spill, either, and its bounced back better than most anyone expected).

And if a President McCain, when asked about it, admitted that he didn’t know whether his head of MMS had been fired or had resigned, he’d be portrayed as being too far removed and hands-off from the day-to-day operations of his administration to ever be an effective chief executive of anything, let alone of the United States. Ans, yes, admittedly the MMS is one of many minor agencies, but it had been at the forefront of the crisis by the time Elizabeth Bernbaum left over a month after the Deepwater Horizon platform exploded and sank.

Speaking of former MMS director Birnbaum, she was an Obama administration appointee, not a direct holdover from Bush the Second, though she had formerly worked at the Department of the Interior for a short time under both the Clinton and Bush Jr. administrations. This is another point glossed over amidst the many vague allusions to how MMS is chock-a-block full of Bush-era oil industry crony holdovers. That was the point alluded to in Friday’s June 11th Times-Picayune letter to the editor from Tulane School of Law Enviro-shyster Oliver Houck, who I’ved ragged on before about sloppy cites and mis-leading sources about Jazz Fest and Global Warming (long story - read it for the full details). Professor Houck’s main point echoed one of the major themes in the media coverage of the Obama administration’s response to the spill:

“But harsh criticisms of the White House for something set up by its predecessors and over which it has few viable options is not helpful.” (Houck, Don't Blame Obama for Inherited Oil Problems, Times-Picayune, June 11, 2010, at B6)

So, again, Obama gets a pass though he’s been in office for sixteen months and hasn’t been able to bend the federal bureaucracy to his will, but Bush completely owned all responsibility for 9/11 after being in office only eight months and had inherited a gutted intelligence apparatus from the “it’s the economy, stupid”, foreign-policy ducking Clinton administration.

There’s no shortage of ways the media has been kissing up to Obama in their oil spill coverage. If a President McCain had had the similar ill-fortune and bad timing to have said, coincidentally just three weeks before the platform explosion, that “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills”, that singular video clip would be repeated during every news story about the oil spill from now through perpetuity:

Yes, Obama’s lack of precognition in making this statement has been noted, but it has been reported with the air of “tsk-tsk, isn’t that a bad spot of the wrong words at the wrong time” by Obama’s media sycophants, not the “He was wrong, blatantly wrong, couldn’t be more clueless, we can’t believe a thing this president says” that the same story would have if McCain had made this statement. (For the full transcript of Obama’s comments, see Remarks at Celgard, LLC, and a Question-and-Answer Session in Charlotte, North Carolina, DCPD-201000228, Friday, April 2, 2010.)

And imagine if it had been President McCain’s administration that was the subject of this news story:

May 21st, 2010 CBS Evening New with Katie Couric:

COURIC: We just heard Chip Reid in Cheryl`s piece. Now he`s standing by at the White House. And, Chip, last week, President Obama was accusing BP and other companies involved in the drilling operation of playing the blame game, and, clearly, White House officials are concerned that some fingers are starting to point at them.

REID: Well, Katie, they`re doing everything in their power to make sure that does not happen. At the briefing today, very contentious as you saw, Robert Gibbs did not give an inch. He insisted over and over again the federal government is in charge and they`re doing everything humanly possible to respond to this disaster. In fact, they continued fighting back even after the briefing was over, calling reporters, some reporters, one by one, up to the West Wing to criticize them for asking the same questions over and over again for weeks.

And, you know, they`re right-- we are. But I think the reason is that there`s a growing frustration in that room, on Capitol Hill and in the region that some questions about what the government is doing still haven`t been adequately answered. Katie.

If a republican president’s press secretary had chided the White House Press Corps because they were asking too many questions about the oil spill? Meltdown! White House in full crisis! MacCain’s administration can’t even handle the media asking legitimate questions about the federal response to the oil spill! Can this administration survive with any shred of credibility???

On a related point, I never heard new stories mention how President Bush always traveled with state of the art communications equipment so he could stay in touch with his cabinet and other government and military officials wherever he is, but I’ve heard the media shills for Obama mention that. So its OK if Obama isn’t in the White House when something happens and we don’t hear from him for three days after someone attempts to bomb an airplane on Christmas, or if he has played more golf in sixteen months than Bush II played in eight years. Yes, these things have been mentioned by the press, but as criticism they’re the pats on the wrist that a parent gives an adorable toddler when they misbehave compared to what would be heaped upon a republican president.

So after floundering in a sea of perceived inattention, the administration decided the best way for President Obama to show a little backbone was to say he’s talking to experts and advisors to find out “which ass to kick.”

“And I don't sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers so I know whose ass to kick, right?”

And this wasn’t even the first time a nebbish Milquetoast of a democratic president tried to butch himself up by saying “ass”: back in 1979, President Carter was asked about the possibility of Senator Edward Kennedy challenging him in the upcoming presidential election. Carter said that if Kennedy ran, “I’ll whip his ass”. One big difference is that back then the networks weren’t as comfortable airing the word “ass” and, like the Time magazine story in that link says, “Tom Brokaw of NBC'S Today show mumbled slyly about a ‘three-letter part of the anatomy that's somewhere near the bottom’”. The other difference is that at least’s Carter’s comment was completely off-the-cuff and honest. Obama’s ass-kicking comment was so carefully preceded by the reference to how his administration isn’t a college seminar that there is no possible argument that this key statement in his “interview” with Lauer wasn’t anything but a very carefully vetted and scripted sound byte.

Most Amazing - and Impractical - Library Design Concept Ever

2010-06-07T21:42:00.005-05:00

This looked like the world’s coolest - but least practical - library ever:
(Direct link to full-sized image.)

When I saw this, my breath was taken away like, I imagine, most fellow librarian/book-geeks would be (and, yes, we’re not librarian because we “love books” - most of us love helping folks find information they need in the never-ending quest for each new answer that is daily service at the reference desk), and not all librarians are book geeks, nor are all book geeks librarians, by a long shot.

But - sigh - this isn’t a photograph of an existing facility: it’s apparently a rendering of an architectural design/proposal for the Stockholm Library. I found information about this image at something called the Long Now Foundation (a non-profit co-founded by Stewart Brand that strives to “creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years” - sounds very cool and very impressive: did they get part of their name and/or inspiration from the “Long Range Foundation” in Heinlein’s Time for the Stars? Jeez, now I’ve got to go track that book down and read it again.)

As gorgeous as this looks, its, of course, ridiculously impractical as a functioning library, unless it’s closed stacks or an archive, and even then: only three “skyways”, apparently, to get to the books, then all those stairs, which should be on the outside of the balconies/rows/whatever, instead of flush up against the books.

But it looks SOOOO COOOL!!! Which, apparently, is the whole point - a link from the Long Now page leads to a discussion at a computer graphics/digital design site. So this may have just been a “concept” and not a full, practical, serious proposal for the Stockholm Library but rather just a “wouldn’t it be neat to have a single, giant wall of books for an entire library” idea.

The comments on the Long Now blog post are both practical and clueless:

With sunlight falling right on the books?

Good point - it looks like the direct sun, even diffused, on the books on those top rows would bake the bindings in a few years.

As for the problem of reaching the top shelves – libraries do this all the time. They put books that are hardly ever used where they can only be reached after going through some trouble. For example using a sliding ladder.

Ummm, no, we don’t organize books by how often they’re used.

I couldn’t find a good picture of it on-line, but this sort of reminds me of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville: roughly half is the museum and the other half is the working archives of the Country Music Foundation. The archive half is enclosed in glass walls that you see from the museum half so that from most of the museum you can look into the archives where all those rows of compact shelving hold their collections and you can watch the archivists and staff at work. Its pretty awe-inspiring, like this fantastical library concept would be on a much larger scale, to see such a vast accumulation of material all in one sweeping view.

Fuck You, Tony Hayward

2010-06-03T21:16:00.005-05:00

(From Inger Klekacz via Facebook "Spill Baby Spill - BOYCOTT BP" group; original photo by Charlie Riedel.)

Law Professor Self-Cititillation Presented with Additional Symptoms

2010-05-25T19:10:00.012-05:00

Routine cases of what would normally be considered minor instances of self-cititillation not worthy of note may approach the level of pathology when manifested in combinations with other citation pathologies. A case in point:

Kathryn Abrams, Exploring the Affective Constitution, 59 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 571, 593 (2009)

These insights aren't unique to the constitutional area, but there are particular advantages to acknowledging the role of emotion here, because the claims of dispassion and objectivity are particularly prominent, even exaggerated, in this area.¹²²

¹²²The confirmation hearings for Justice Sonia Sotomayor, which were marked by acute anxieties on the part of several Senators about the threat to objectivity implied by the nominee's “wise Latina” remarks, provided a vivid illustration of this tendency. See Kathryn Abrams, Empathy and Emotion in the Sotomayor Hearings (Oct. 1, 2009) (manuscript on file with author).

Thus in this case the patient presented both an instance of self-cititillation and premature publication, the cited reference being both one "written" by the author herself, and which had not, yet, technically been published.

In fact, this was a cite to not even a draft article, but an unpublished speech (which, of course, the professor may be turning into an article), that she gave at at Ohio Northern College of Law last fall:

Dr. Kathryn Abrams will speak on "Empathy and Experience in the Sotomayor Hearings" to kick off the Ohio Northern University Pettit College of Law Dean's Lecture Series in the Moot Court Room on Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009, at 11:30 a.m.
(See http://www-new.onu.edu/node/22101)

Also, notice that in the article, she doesn't indicate the "manuscript" is from a speech. And that's another rant for another day: citing AS AUTHORITY something that is "unpublished" and which only the author, or the law review, has on file. I admit the possibility of some LEGITIMATE use of doing this: if, for example, you're citing to some rare document you viewed at the national archives, I guess. But... oh, God - I just ran a quick search in Westlaw's JLR, just to see how often this is done, just trying the first thing that came to my mind:

"unpublished manuscript" /5 "on file"

And - just guess - well, I don't really have any readers, but if anyone ever comes across this, think to yourself how many hits you imagine this would get. I was thinking MAYBE one or two hundred, at the most, and THAT would have been excessive. But, no. Wow. This query maxes out the Westlaw search engine and returns the default TEN-THOUSAND hits.

I do NOT have time to process that. TEN THOUSAND cites to unpublished manuscripts? I know that a few law reviews are putting these "on file" resources on their web sites and are including links to them in the articles, but most are not.

OK, concluding point to the original blog topic: Yes, if you’re the top, leading expert in a narrow area of law, and you’re building on some earlier research that you published, citing your own work is acceptable. But to support a statement that, basically, says the debate about the role of "dispassion and objectivity" in judges' interpretation of the Constitution is on-going and controversial, and how Justice Sotomayor's confirmation hearings dealt with that debate (said hearings and accompanying were, I believe, well-covered in the news last summer, right?), by citing to your own unpublished speech transcript is both lazy and self-aggrandizing.

BP Oilspill and Possible Related Graffiti?

2010-05-07T15:07:00.008-05:00

My update Tuesday about Professor Houck, Jazzfest, and Global Warming is sort of a minor issue these days here in town because of the largest Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 30+ years that’s now threatening Louisiana and the rest of the central Gulf Coast. Technically, its not a “spill” since its still flowing out of this uncapped well; I think “oil spew” is more accurate, even if #oilspill is the main Twitter hashtag for this event (I really liked #oysterocalypse, @agramsci’s hashtag, but I think he and I were the only ones using it, and I think we both realized as funny as that is, this isn’t really a situation to make light of.)
This is tragic in so many ways, the main way, I think, is that no one is sure how much oil is flowing out of this uncapped well and just what the long-term consequences may be. I’ve seen statements that the flow may have already exceeded the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez, and that at the current rate, the Valdez spill will be matched in a month or so.

And as bad as all this sounds, some perspective is helpful. For example, the low end estimate of the flow, 210,000 gallons a day is, like the PBS site linked above notes, is the equivalent of filling up one olympic sized pool every three days. Yes, it doesn’t take much oil to contaminate a lot of water, but how many olympic sized pools could you fit into the Gulf of Mexico? We’re probably talking about the equivalent of a few drops in a bathtub, right?

I’ve also seen several references which mentions that seven million gallons of oil and fuel were spilled in southeast Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina. One contemporaneous news story I found backs that up:

44 Oil Spills Found in Southeast Louisiana, MSNBC, Sept. 19, 2005
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9365607/

This story notes - and this was three weeks after Katrina - that by then “1.3 million gallons had evaporated or dispersed”. As nasty as all that oil on the open water is, its not going to be an ocean of black sludge forever, or possibly even into the near future. Some of it will evaporate and much of it will eventually be dispersed naturally: the Gulf of Mexico is BIG and as horrific as these images are, and as bad as New Orleans has smelled a few days this past week, the lingering effects will probably not be as horrific as some of the current predictions suggest. A few stories I read even noted that, yes, crude oil is biodegradable. All of it isn’t just going to evaporate and biodegrade overnight but, yes, it bears repeating, crude oil is biodegradable. I even found an authoritative source that supports this:

Biodegradation, in The Environment Dictionary By David D. Kemp
p43-44

Ahh - and a story on the National Geographic web site I just read (Twitter really is most useful during events like these), mentions that the smell we smell when the wind is coming our way, and which people down on the coast are apparently smelling all the time, is

[T]he pungent scent of evaporating surface oil, which rises into the atmosphere and gets broken down by sunlight.

So there are natural processes at work that will help mitigate the oil spew. We shouldn’t wash our hands of BP’s culpability and leave it at that, but, no, its probably not going to be the end of the world for the Gulf Coast and the fishing industry.

But it’s the unknowable aspect of this that is most alarming and, like many other people have said, its like watching the possible projected path of a Cat 5 hurricane when its three days out: you just don’t know for sure what’s going to happen, and you feel completely helpless while you’re waiting.

And on a possibly related tangent: inspired by one of the only blogs I look at regularly, What I Saw Riding My Bike Around Today (the excellent photo-journal/blog of a nameless fellow bicycler), I’ve started carrying my small digital camera with me. And Thursday, while taking a varied route to work, I saw this stenciled message on Prytania:

Since I don’t ride by there regularly, I don’t know if its new, I’m not sure what it means, and I’m not even sure if this has anything to do with the BP oil spew. No references online to the phrase “Oil Dances Uninhibited” that I could find. Is it a comment on the oil spill? On dancing? An exhortation that we should dance in as uninhibited a manner as the oil spill is dancing over the Gulf waters? I’m baffled.

Despite my possibly unfounded optimism, I am still concerned, so concerned I put that PBS Gulf Leak Meter up on the right there. Yes, like a lapel ribbon, it shows my sincere, deep concern.

Jazzfest, and Global Warming: The First Annual Update

2010-05-04T20:50:00.018-05:00

Well, “first annual update” since I initially addressed this last year. In brief summary, Professor Oliver Houck of Tulane School of Law, in his article Can We Save New Orleans?, 19 Tul. Envtl L. Rev 1 (2006) (PDF), mentions several possible effects of climate change on New Orleans, including:

Here in Louisiana we will be warmer in summer (think, maybe, 103 degrees at Jazz Fest) .... Houck, 19 Tul. Envtl. L. Rev 1, at 27.

But the source he cites to:

Envtl. Prot. Agency, Climate Change and Louisiana 3 (1997) available at http:// yosemite.epa.gov/OAR/globalwarming.nsf/UniqueKeyLookup/SHSU5BURCA/$File/la_ impct.pdf

merely says:

[It] is projected that by 2100, temperatures in Louisiana could increase about 3̊ F (with a range of 1-5̊ F) in spring and summer, slightly less in winter, and slightly more in fall. Envtl. Prot. Agency, Climate Change and Louisiana 2 (1997).

(Yes, I found that on page 2 of this report; I didn't see any discussion of temperatures on page 3 like Prof. Houck cited. And the EPA report is no longer at the URL he provided in his article - a perfect example of link rot in law reviews - so I put it on DocStoc.Com.)

Last year I finally got around to researching the average temperatures of all Jazzfests during the past 40 years and, long story short, its never been so hot at Jazzfest that a 3 degree increase (or even, at the high end of the EPA range, a 5 degree increase), would get us anywhere close to 103 degrees: the hottest Jazzfest ever was 2002, with a average daily high temperature of 89.7 degrees (and, yes, I know, I know, you can argue that Prof. Houck was just being all folksy and informal, essentially saying “gosh-its-gonna-be-a-hunnert-an-three-at-Jazzfest-if-we-don’t-DO-something!!!”).

But this WAS written in a leading environmental law journal published by one of the country’s top fifty law schools and if this is the level of argument that counts as serious scholarship, then law professors everywhere should give up all pretense at objectivity and logic and just preach what they think the law SHOULD be. (Most of them are already doing this, but if they didn’t bother with “supporting” sources, citations, and footnotes, all these beleaguered law review students could be saved a lot of needless effort doing their sub-and-cites.)

So here’s my update of the charts I made last year, now including this year’s average temperatures at Jazzfest. (For the methodology, read last year’s post.) This year’s Jazzfest was in the cooler half of all 41 Jazzfests, with an average daily high of 81.0 degrees. Here’s the charts:

First, the average temperatures of all 41 Jazzfests, in chronological order:

Yes, we had a very mild week and a half of Jazzfest, a full 2.6 degrees cooler than last year. And, yes, the climate change alarmists will say that normal variations may results in an unusually cool week and a half in a certain location despite “global warming”, but you’d be hard pressed to find one say that, by the same reasoning, normal variations may also result in an unusually hot week and a half (like Jazzfest was in 2002). The bottom line is we’re 23 degrees away from Prof. Houck’s apocalyptic - and totally unsupported by the source he cited in the relevant footnote in his article - prediction, and in the four years since he wrote this Jazzfest temperatures have been trending down.

Here are the 41 Jazzfests ranked hottest to coolest:

And ranked coolest to hottest:

Conclusions, like last year, to be drawn are that, yes, the planet got measurably warmer in the past century but temperatures have reached a plateau and stayed at about the same point for the past decade, despite predictions that global temperatures should keep increasing steadily.

Even some of the anthropogenic global warming alarmists will admit this, though they can't all keep their stories straight. Last month, in his New York Times Magazine cover story, Building a Green Economy, Paul Krugman wrote:

Second, climate models predicted this well in advance, even getting the magnitude of the temperature rise roughly right. While it’s relatively easy to cook up an analysis that matches known data, it is much harder to create a model that accurately forecasts the future. So the fact that climate modelers more than 20 years ago successfully predicted the subsequent global warming gives them enormous credibility. (Id. (Emphasis Added))

Except that, according to a story on NPR - which you would expect to be hand in hand with Krugman and the New York Times on this:

Global warming skeptics have made quite a fuss over the fact the planet hasn’t actually warmed that much over the past decade, and there lies a genuine scientific mystery. The planet has been receiving more solar energy than it's been releasing back into space. Heat ought to be building up somewhere but scientists can't find it. Richard Harris, Examining A Climate Conundrum, All Things Considered, April 27, 2010.

So which is it? Is the planet warming like the scientists predicted or are they baffled by how global warming has stalled in the past ten year? The NPR story at least references a few scientists and articles, which Krugman does not, and it concludes with a discussion of one scientist who has what is apparently the only working theory on this, and that he is finding

[E]vidence of warming deep in the ocean. He's still analyzing that data, so he can't yet say whether it will explain the entire paradox. But he says it will explain at least a chunk of it, and thats how science proceeds: mysteries, explanations, more questions and gradually deeper understanding. (Id.)

So the data is still fresh, but the scientist is sure it will explain away the “apparent” lack of warming in the past decade. Thus NPR placates the alarmists with a pat re-assurance that this new research will explain the lack of predicted warming in the past decade and that - oh, relief - yes, mankind IS causing a catastrophic increase in global temperatures, but its just not evident right now. So please continues buying carbon credits from Al Gore.

Self-Cititillation Syndrome (SCS)

2010-04-27T15:45:00.010-05:00

After seeing one too many law review articles where every other footnote seems to cite to one of the author's earlier articles, I think I found the term to describe this: Self-Cititillation Syndrome ("SCS"). Definition: "the propensity of some law school professors to overly cite to their own earlier published works", from "cititillation", "the excessive pleasure taken in seeing someone else cite to your own article or other publication".

Possible usage:

"Yes, its a good article, but he better be careful - he comes close to excessive self-cititillation a few times."

"I had to stop reading after two pages because she kept self-cititillating herself."

"There's nothing wrong with a little self-cititillation. I mean, everyone does it. Just do it in moderation."

The Times-Picayune, Judah Benjamin, and a Poor Choice of Words

2010-04-20T22:50:00.005-05:00

I almost choked on my oatmeal when I read this over breakfast. In a decent article in today's Times-Picayune about a nice-sounding exhibit on one of the most significant figures in Louisiana legal history, Judah P. Benjamin, the article mentioned that the driving force behind the exhibit was a state congressman's wife. She was interested in Benjamin because he is a distant relative, or, as the article put it:

Even in Louisiana, "very few people have heard of Judah Benjamin, unless they are Jewish or Civil War buffs," said Laura Cassidy, a fifth-generation descendant of Benjamin through his sister, Rebecca Benjamin Levy. (Emphasis added.)

(Jonathan Tilove, Resurrection: Groundbreaking Statesmen Judah Benjamin is All But Forgotten Today, But a New Exhibit Could Change That, Times-Picayune, April 20, 2010, at A1.)

Yeechhh!!! She's descended from Benjamin and an incestuous union with his sister? Very, very, sloppy, poor choice of woods. Yeah, obviously she's not a "descendant" of Benjamin, but of her sister. Maybe a "descendant of Benjamin's family through his sister..." or, even better, "her great-great grandmother was Benjamin's sister, Rebecca Benjamin Levy". But not descended "through his sister". Sounds like another sequel to Mandingo.

March Netflix Report

2010-04-17T13:51:00.005-05:00

February 2010 Netflix Summary	Arrived at Home	Received at Netflix	Days at Home	Monthly Average Days at Home	Cost Per Movie
Cutter's Way	03/03	03/11	8
Hurricane Season	03/05	03/11	6
The King of Marvin Gardens	03/08	03/10	2
Assassination Tango	03/11	03/26	15
Ballast	03/12	03/19	7
Cirque de Freak: The Vampire's Assistant	03/12	03/16	4
Up in the Air	03/18	03/22	4
The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day	03/20	03/30	10
Brothers	03/23	03/31	8
The Men Who Stare at Goats	03/27	04/01	5
An Education	03/31	04/13	13
	March 2010			7.5	$1.68

I kept up a good pace of movie-watching this month: 11 from Netflix, and it would have been more except for the Curse of the King of Marvin Gardens.

I'd love to know more about Netflix's internal statistics, like the how many movies per month the average viewer watches, how many days they keep it, BUT particularly I'd love to see their statistics on damaged discs and on how often the a damaged disc is replaced with another copy of the movie that turns out to ALSO be damaged.

This is a screen capture of part of my rental history this month:

I got three copies of that disc that were all damaged. And by "damaged" I don't mean just scratch - these discs was cracked like they all had been crushed by a heavy package during shipping. This happened to me once before and I swear I got the same damaged disc twice, but this time I noted the cracks and I swear it was three different damaged discs they sent me before I got one that was in playable condition. How many people are out there trying to watch The King of Marvin Gardens? Actually, probably a good number, given how great a lot of other Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern movies are, a lot of folks probably got suckered into putting this on their queue thinking it would also be a good flick. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Some interesting characterizations and, yes, Nicholson and Dern are playing against type and have their typical movie personas reversed here but, jeez, I don't mind movies where "nothing happens" - all those Eric Rohmer movies I saw back in college about French people on vacation come to mind - as long as the characters are people you care about or find intriguing. But that's not the case here.

Cutter's Way was another one that was built up in anticipation: I guess the New York Times weekly DVD new releases story has to fill up its column inches with something; it featured this movie when Jeff Bridges was riding the build-up to Oscar night for Crazy Heart, and so I put this at the top of my queue. Notable for John Heard's portrayal of a early, proto-typical "crazy" Viet Nam vet, but there's wasn't much else that stayed with me.

The two best recent movies this month were Up in the Air and An Education; my wife said An Education made her want to go to London, and I said it made me want to go to 1962. And I thought Up in the Air was probably the best of all the best picture-nominated movies I've seen so far, but I think Hollywood was really desperate to demonstrate their relevance and after a series of really lame Iraq/Afganistan war movies, they anointed a decent one made by a female director to be best picture of the year.

But the best surprise this month was Ballast; this was a Netflix recommendation based on other things I've watched and rated highly, and these recommendations don't always pan out but in this instance they got the algorithms right. This movie felt more real than anything I've seen in a long time and though slow-paced it is compelling and populated by characters that were real and made me hope they prevailed by the end. You don't really know whether they do, but that's part of the real-life feel of this movie.

Bad Beatles Fan Art

2010-04-14T22:31:00.003-05:00

I saw this down in the French Quarter last week and snapped a quick picture:

The Beatles as jesters, harlequins, whatever, huh?

I can't imagine what the hell the painter was trying to do here. Maybe this was the result of a challenge, an attempt at deliberate, cheesy, bad-taste anti-art? Trying to think of something more ridiculous, considered, maybe, a portrait transforming the Rolling Stones into a bunch of sad puppies on black velvet. Or something by someone who's both a Beatles fan and a Lion King fan:

Or, vice versa, a Lion King fan who is also a Beatles fan:

Here we have perfect examples of the type of internet-enabled media mash-up that I referred to in an earlier post. (The Jester-Beatles poster could have even pre-dated the Web 2.0 internet revolution; it sure didn't need the internet for someone to pull it out of their ass.) Is the world a better place because someone spent time creating these works?

CBS News Typo in Justice Steven’s Retirement Letter

2010-04-09T15:26:00.013-05:00

One of our professors forwarded the text of Justice Steven’s retirement letter to the faculty listserv, but with an obvious typo:

My dear Mr. President:
Having concluded that it would be in the best
interests of the Court to have my successor appointed
and confirmed well in advance of the commencement of
the Court's next Term, I shall retire from regular
active service as an Associate Justice, under the
provisions of 28 D.S.C. § 371(b), effective the next
day after the Court rises for the summer recess this
year.

Most respectfully yours,
John Paul Stevens

I figured the professor hadn’t transcribed it, but had copied it from somewhere and, yes, CBS News, among other sites, apparently did a rush OCR/transcription of the letter.

Here's a screen capture for when they catch the error:

The PDF copy of the letter, also from the CBS News web site, of course did not have the typo:

(Wow, the embedded version from DocStoc looks like crap; better to view it in full size mode.)

Peter Singer, the Internet, Libraries, and "Crowd-Sourced" Content

2010-04-08T00:13:00.003-05:00

Maybe 5% of what I see via Twitter is worth reading. This wasn't really among that 1%, but was short enough for me to scan:

Peter Singer, The Unknown Promise of Internet Freedom

Yes, its that Peter Singer, but he's tackling less-controversial topics here. He notes that even as Google has decided to stop kow-towing to China, the Austrailian government is planning to go into full nanny-state mode and start blocking all manner of offensive stuff on the internet.

Most of this article summarizes several well-worn points about information and the internet: "[e]ven with censorship, the Internet is a force for change" and "we are still only beginning to grasp the extent of what [the internet] will do to the way we live", but the passage that ticked me off is some boilerplate about the vastness of the information on the internet:

Today, if you have an Internet connection, you have at your fingertips an amount of information previously available only to those with access to the world's greatest libraries – indeed, in most respects what is available through the Internet dwarfs those libraries, and it is incomparably easier to find what you need.

Remarkably, this came about with no central planning, no governing body, and no overall control, other than a system for allocating the names of Web sites and their addresses. That something so significant could spring up independently of governments and big business led many to believe that the Internet can bring the world a new type of freedom.

Wait - take away the government and big businesses contributions to what's on the internet and you have, what? Wikipedia (where the article on Britney Spears - 8512 words today - is longer than the one on George Washington - 7719 words today), 10,000,000 blogs mostly about mindless drivel, and all the cutting-edge political back-and-forth in most news site's discussion and comment forums? The internet dwarfs the world's greatest libraries only if you consider that all great libraries lack an authoritative, sixteen-thousand entry encyclopedia about Pokemon.

Singer seems to be fixating on the Clay Shirkey "Here Comes Everyone" aspect of the internet. All this user-generated stuff from the countless unwashed masses is great for the millions of niche obsessions and hobbies for which you can find kindred spirit(s) on the internet, but its crap at producing anything of enduring value. For example, I've been slowly trying to watch every available Audrey Hepburn movie and after seeing one that was new to me, I stumbled upon a fan site for her that is fantastic - it looks great and has a lot of interesting content, but its mostly trivia and photos scrounged up elsewhere on-line. Its a great example of what the internet can do (and apparently mainly the work of one guy), but if I really wanted to learn something substantive about her life, I'd read that recent biography about her that was well-reviewed in the New York Times a few years ago, not the brief Wikipedia overview that this fan site gussies up with some additional pictures. Similarly, although its amazing that a fan ther has painstakingly dubbed her version of some of the songs from My Fair Lady onto those clips from the movie, I'd maybe watch that on YouTube once for the minor novelty of it, but it would only make me want to watch the full movie, on DVD, not streaming wherever it might be available on-line.

February 2010 Netflix Report

2010-03-18T23:56:00.004-05:00

Jeez, only seven movies again last month? Well, there WAS Mardi Gras and the Saints WINNING THE SUPERBOWL!!!!

February 2010 Netflix Summary	Arrived at Home	Received at Netflix	Days at Home	Monthly Average Days at Home	Cost Per Movie
Zombieland	02/05	02/10	5
Cinderella Liberty	02/05	02/25	20
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell	02/06	02/10	4
Jumper	02/10	02/23	13
Black Snake Moan	02/10	02/25	15
Sorority Row	02/26	03/02	4
Brothers in Arms	02/26	03/04	6
				9.6	$2.65

Zombieland was a lot of fun - don't know why I missed that one in the theaters, it would have been fun to see it on opening weekend. And I see at IMDB they have a page for Zombieland 2 and the studio may apparently go ahead and greenlight two sequels. Sorority Row was a decent slasher movie - I saw the previews for that so many times I had to eventually see it (I guess coming attractions saturation works afterall, eh?) And I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell was as stupid as everything I read indicated it would be, but was worth watching as its proof that any minor publishing success - on-line and/or in print - can lead to a movie deal if a studio thinks a property will have a large built-in audience.

The best movie from Netflix this month was Cinderella Liberty. I had just read The Last Detail and learned that another book by the author, Darryl Ponicsan, was the source for this movie. Like The Last Detail, its a gritty, realistic portrayal of Nacy life. Marsha Mason was great in it and maybe I've come to associate James Caan with Sonny Corleone too much, but I thought he was mis-cast in this and I didn't really buy him as the directionless, needy sailor. I picture someone like Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy mode being better for this role. But still a great flick. And I hadn't realized before I saw it that it was set and filmed in Seattle - I recognized some of the settings, and it must be a great record of what the city looked like in the late seventies, pre-urban renewal.

World War II, The New Yorker, and Fact Checking

2010-03-13T16:08:00.015-06:00

I know there's at least one web site devoted to taking pot-shots at The New Yorker, but its more about the people writing for it and gossip and such and I don't think they quibble over factual errors. And I'm sure there are other folks catching errors when they know a lot about a particular subject, but one error in the current issue was glaring to me and I had to check it out.

In a review of HBO's new (airing this Sunday) mini-series "The Pacific", Nancy Franklin talks about the various source material the writers used (and one of those, Eugene Sledge's book, is one of the best first-person war narratives I've ever read). One source Franklin mentions is the war experience of "John Basilone, who was a hero of Guadalcanal and the first enlisted marine to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor." (Nancy Franklin, Hell On Earth: HBO's The Pacific, The New Yorker, March 15, 2010, at 68.)

I couldn't keep reading until I did a little research on this. Back in boot camp, we were drilled about the big historic Marine heroes until we knew the details back and forth. This included the two Marines who won two Medals of Honor apiece: Smedley Butler and Dan Daly. I was pretty sure that Daly was an enlisted Marine and that he pre-dated World War II. And, yes, twenty years later my spotty memory was right on those points: as a private in 1901 Daly won his first Medal of Honor in China and fifteen years later, as a Gunnery Sergeant, he was awarded his second one for action in Haiti. (Oh, and THANK YOU Wikipedia - jeez - for the clarification that Butler and Daly were the only two Marines awarded dual Medals of Honor for separate actions: it used to be possible for two Medals of Honor to be awarded for the same action - the Drill Instructors at Parris Island didn't go into that level of detail.)

So on its face this part of the review is completely wrong. How about putting a charitable spin on it? There was another recent factual fudge that stuck in my craw and some other fellow scifi fans noticed the same thing: in the January 25, 2010 New Yorker profile of Neil Gaiman by Dana Goodyear, this passage appears towards the end:

"A boy with curly red hair and glasses sprang up and offered his [copy of a book]: Max Calderon, aged twelve, the great-grandson of the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein." (Dana Goodyear, Kid Goth: Neil Gaiman's Fantasies, The New Yorker, January 25, 2010)

Other folks, more knowledgeable of the master than I am, noted that this kid is actually the grandson of a close friend/obsessive fan of Heinlein's from way back when (and God help this poor kid, born a dozen years or so after Heinlein died, if he really goes around introducing himself at book signings and scifi conventions as his great-grandson). That error is maybe understandable: the article is just providing what the kid said, and it would have taken a too-long explanation to clarify who he really was. But the "Heinlein's great-grandson" aside is pretty damn extraneous to the whole article, so why stick it in there anyway, especially if its completely wrong?

So maybe Franklin, to look at her statement about Basilone in the most favorable light, meant that he was the first Marine to be awarded the Medal of Honor in World War II? Wikipedia's detailed information on the Medal of Honor gives all the recipients, by war, and says Basilone's was awarded for actions at Guadalcanal on October 24-25, 1942. (And, yes, I completely trust Wikipedia as a source for names and dates in this matter: enough military history buffs and descendants of these men are out there to police these articles and ensure their accuracy.) But scanning the list of WWII Medal of Honor recipients turns up another enlisted Marine, Clyde A. Thomason, who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for actions at the Island of Makin (where the hell is that?) on August 17-18, 1942. His separate entry even says that he was "the first enlisted Marine to be awarded the Medal of Honor during World War II." (And the awards's correct name IS just the "Medal of Honor", though it is often referred to as the "Congressional Medal of Honor"; the citation mentions Congress but Congress is not actually involved in the process of awarding the Medal, in most cases.)

The only other possibility I can think of is that maybe the date of Basilone's actual Medal of Honor citation came first: since Thomason died earning his, and they needed to get Basilone back stateside to sell war bonds, its possible his Medal of Honor was the first one issued for an enlisted Marine in WWII. But that's really stretching things: I think most historians focus on the action behind the award, not when the award was presented (and though you can find the text of most of these Medal of Honor citations on-line, Thomason's didn't have a date on it.)

So the most you can say about Basilone, then, is that he was the first enlisted Marine to receive a non-posthumous ("prehumous"???) Medal of Honor. (And that is a significant distinction: a majority, like three-fourths or so, of all modern Medals of Honor have been awarded posthumously.) In Franklin's article, that wouldn't take much clarification to state correctly. So is the New Yorker just getting sloppy and folks with any sort of specialized knowledge or command of trivia in certain subjects can point these things out when they come across an article in their area of expertise? (Or even "area of passing acquaintance" - I'm no expert in Marine Corps history or the Medal of Honor.) John McPhee even wrote a great piece last year ABOUT New Yorker fact checkers and all the effort he's had to put forward meeting their demands during his decades writing there; even little errors like the details of Basilone's Medal of Honor wouldn't get by the fact checkers he described.

OK, that's enough of a rant. Don't get me started about how the New Yorker, like all other publications, don't capitalizes "Marine". (Allright, just a little bit of a start: "soldier" and "sailor" are generic terms, because there are other armies and navies. There are the "British Royal Marines" and such but only one "Marine Corps", whose member are "Marines", capital "M". Like members of a particular political party. Or a religion. Especially like a religion.)

Good Work, Google Books!

2010-03-11T23:39:00.006-06:00

One of the most useful things I've learned recently via my fellow law librarians on Twitter: Google books has scanned in a full run of the Weekly World News! (Thanks, Sarah Glassmeyer!)

I'm not positive if it's a FULL full run; the main page shows the front cover of an issue from 1993, and I don't know when the WWN started publishing. But FINALLY I can get the digital images from the issue I have framed and which I hang up in my office during carnival season:

As well as the interior pages for this story that I didn't save:

Excellent! (A little tweaking of the method described here, together with only some mild aggravation, got me the images I wanted without doing a lot of screen captures.)

Professor Kingsfield's Secret

2010-03-08T21:24:00.015-06:00

How did Professor Kingsfield maintain his sharp legal mind throughout his career? The answer is revealed in one of the episodes of the Paper Chase television show (which I've been plowing through recently):

Yes, Gilbert's Law Summaries! Not once, but twice:

In this episode (Season 1, episode 6, "Nancy", with guest star Elyssa Davolos, playing the titular, this-episode-only girlfriend of Hart), he's seen carrying a Gilbert's around!

Obviously, Kingsfield doesn't need to consult Gilbert's for Contracts, and if you zoom in on the first picture, you can sorta make out the title and see he's boning up on constitutional law:

Perhaps he finally got tired of the statute of frauds, the speluncean explorers, and all that crap and wanted to teach Con Law for a change?

Mardi Gras and Lawyers That Suck

2010-02-18T22:43:00.001-06:00

Mardi Gras has always had a large satiric component to it, but whatever big political and news stories that may have provided fodder for costumes this year were dwarfed by the jubilation this city has been experiencing since the Saints won the Super Bowl!

But even in the midst of all the black and gold, we found this costume:

At first, yes - great, clever, funny. Even better was her companion, dressed as the truck that ran her over:

But, even better was his bumper sticker:

Michael Hingle, of course, is one of the local ambulance chasers with those ever-present commercials on late-night television. Many of his spiels start out with “If you get caught in a wreck with an eighteen-wheeler...”

That reminds me of an example of why these types of ads may promise just a bit too much. I forgot where I heard this, but it was a story about a father and daughter asking one of these types of attorneys to represent them. After seeing the commercial promising a big check after getting in a wreck with an eighteen-wheeler, they go to see the attorney. The daughter had luckily survived a near-head-on collision with a big rig, and she and her father wanted to know how much they could recover from the trucking company. So the attorney started asking his questions, one of the first being “What were you doing at the time?” To which the daughter said, “well, I had accidentally crossed into the oncoming traffic...”

That’s not verbatim, but I swear I read that somewhere. I’ll try and find it some other time.

New Peyton Manning Breakfast Cereal

2010-02-08T20:58:00.002-06:00

Peyton Manning has a new breakfast cereal coming out after his resounding loss to the New Orleans Saints in Superbowl XXIV!

January 2010 Netflix Report

2010-02-06T13:15:00.006-06:00

January 2010 Netflix Summary	Arrived at Home	Received at Netflix	Days at Home	Monthly Average Days at Home	Cost Per Movie
The Crazies (1973)	1/06	1/13	7
The Comfort of Strangers	1/08	1/27	19
All That Jazz	1/14	1/27	13
The Hurt Locker	1/16	1/27	11
Hounddog	1/28	02/04	7
The Small Back Room	1/28	02/05	8
Splendor in the Grass	1/28	02/04	7
				10.3	$2.65

Damn, only seven movies from Netflix this month? I’m slipping, gotta buck you and get going. Watched The Crazies because I heard it was being remade - pretty much what it sounded like it would be, fun but forgettable. Finally got around to watching All That Jazz - fantastic movie! I didn’t think I’d be able to buy Roy Scheider as a song-and-dance choreographer/director, but wow - he was amazing and this is easily one of the best movies I’ve seen in a while.

Finally saw The Hurt Locker and it may be the best war movie of recent vintage I’ve seen, and I think I’m now close to having seen all the big ones. Very understated (take a hint, Irwin Winkler - if you had taken Home of the Brave down a couple of dozen notches, it might have been a decent movie), and I would pair it with The Lucky Ones as perhaps the best two recent war movies, with Stop-Loss a third, but a distant third.

Coincidentally, soon after The Hurt Locker I watched The Small Back Room, which is an EOD tale from another place and war: England during World War II. Very good, very British, very detailed and technical war picture. I get the impression that it might be revered as one of the best and most accurate “bomb squad” movies by whoever out there has researched and watched movies like that in detail.

There wasn’t much to Hound Dog: the shock value got it all the publicity it deserved when it was being made. My one classic movie this month was Splendor in the Grass: very good, and very much a period piece, both in its setting - the 1920s - and when it was made - the early 1960s. It makes me want to watch more Natalie Wood movies - I might have to dig out my copy of This Property Is Condemned.

Saints Superbowl Countdown and the NFL's Lack of Overseas Trademark Enforcement

2010-02-05T23:21:00.005-06:00

If you don't live here, you can't imagine what the Saints winning the NFC Championship and going to the Superbowl for the first time in its 42 year franchise history has done for this city. When Hartley kicked that field goal in overtime, the entire city transformed into a giant block party: like everyone else not in the Superdome that night, our regular game day party crew streamed out shouting and yelling and started randomly hugging our neighbors and high-fiving strangers. Its been impossible to get much work done and all of us real fans are listening to WWL-AM 24/7 and its seems the local TV stations are in a ongoing duel to see who's coverage on Sunday will start the earliest - 7:00am local is what one of them announced tonight: that's ten and a half hours before the game actually begins. The other day I surprised my wife with a second cable box for our kitchen TV so that she can watch the NFL network while cooking, and now I'm hooked myself and have been watching it 2-3 hours a day.

In the middle of all this - four days after the championship - my mother, who has been spending her golden years globe-trotting all over the planet (50+ countries so far, extra pages needed for her passport, etc., etc.) came back from a three week trip to Jordan and Israel and when I called her she said that she would wait to give us most of the knick-knack gifts that she picked up for us, but that she was mailing one that she wanted us to have right away.

I thought nothing about that until Wednesday when a small but thick envelope came in the mail. I opened it but couldn't figure out what it was before my wife realized - "It's a Saints yarmulke!" she said.

Oh my freaking Yahweh! My mom enclosed a note that said she didn't want me to convert, but I wish there was a fast track slip-the-rabbi-a-few-bucks express lane route to Judaism so I could go to services at one of the local temples Saturday just to wear this!

With all her traveling, generosity and shopping prowess, this was not, however, my mother's first experience with circumventing the NFL's licensing police by finding non-sanctioned Saints swag overseas. Last summer she went to Russia and bought us a set of Russian nesting "matryoshka" dolls:

As with the yarmulke, I wish she had grabbed a dozen of these - I would have split the profits with her 50/50: the NFL lawyers can't catch EVERYTHING, no matter how much they try to muscle local entrepreneurs over half-assed overly expansive trademark claims.

The matryoshka dolls are part of our Saints shrine below our TV:

And all this compliments my favorite Saints memorabilia: the neon Budweiser Saints sign that I purchased - late in the afternoon when, amazingly, no one else had snagged it (but, it was before the current season when we only 8-8 the previous year) - from the old Rock and Bowl.

And so, given as superstitious as all Saints fans are, I know that the combination of Saints memorabilia is why we are going go KICK THE COLTS ASS on Sunday! Who Dat!!!!!!!

WestlawNext Anticipation (Zzzzzzzzz....)

2010-02-01T20:49:00.001-06:00

Our rep hasn't told us anything about WestlawNext, so I'm just learning about it second hand from various sources. Someone posted the link to the preview page:

http://west.thomson.com/westlawnext/default.aspx

and the first thing that strikes me is the photo on the page:

WestlawNext is so exciting and revolutionary that it puts customers to sleep while they wait for it...

How can the NFL be so RIGHT, and then so WRONG?

2010-01-29T17:55:00.000-06:00

The NFL has stepped on its own....well, you know...by sending cease and desist letters based on what is very likely a way over-broad trademark infringement claim to local merchants selling Who Dat shirts.

It wasn’t long ago that I thought they really had their act together. For a few years there’s been a sizable traffic in bootleg copies of NFL games - people record them, burn them, and sell DVD-Rs of them for $10 or so (I ponied up for a copy of the post-Katrina Saints return to the Superdome versus the Falcons in 2006). But now the NFL is selling select games from the season - you can buy three of our games for $20 or so (probably cheaper elsewhere), and I presume they’re doing that for other teams.

Then, just five days after we won the NFC championship for the first time in franchise history, the game is available on DVD for just $15! Excellent - I don’t want to burn through our DVR watching the game over and over. I know the NFL has made official copies of recent Superbowls available for purchase, but I think this is the first season they’ve made other games available (I may just not have noticed like year when we were 8-8).

Now if they would just make ALL NFL games in a given season available. There are fans who would definitely buy most games, right? And since the NFL is partnering with Warner Brothers, who is pioneering what has been described as essentially DVD-on-demand of otherwise unavailable movies with their Warner Archives, they’ve got the infrastructure to do this. So come on, commissioner Goodell - stop harassing small businesses in New Orleans and open up the NFL game archives to the fans by making all games available on DVD!

Law School Faculty and On-Line Course Outline Repositories

2010-01-24T16:10:00.003-06:00

I don't think our faculty are too much behind the curve when it comes to how law students are using the internet these days, so hopefully faculty at other law schools would be just as surprised to learn that there are web site where students can post and download outlines for their courses.

One of our professors posted a message to the faculty e-mail list that noted this:

Hello all,

I just ran across a site offering outlines based on Loyola Professors'
courses for sale. Here is the link:
http://www.outlinedepot.com/schooloutlines.aspx?schoolid=78

Would this explain why, I am sometimes under the impression that some
students anticipate my questions, eagerly volunteer answers which sometimes,
and to their dismay, call for some tweaking on my part?

Doesn't this practice raise some intellectual property issues?

[Name Redacted]

Its a slow day at the reference desk since its early in the semester, its a gorgeous Sunday afternoon, and especially since the Saints are about the kick the Vikings' ASS in the first NFC championship that the Saints have ever hosted at home in the dome (I'm leaving early to go watch, DUH!), so I spent some time composing the following reply and posted it back to the faculty list:

[Name Redacted] (and everyone else),
This web site is indeed an amazing trove of outlines from/for our students. If the faculty here weren’t aware of these sort of sites, your message is a definite wake-up call. But the internet has really only made the sharing of these outline more efficient - I think we all knew long ago that these things were shared and passed down from class to class in paper longer before centralized web sites like these were available (when I graduated law school in 1995, we were still, uhhh, I mean my FELLOW STUDENTS were still swapping outlines via xerox machine).
The intellectual property issue here is an interesting question, but one that I don’t think would help to stop anything like this. (I presume you don’t mean the IP issue of the students sharing their outlines on-line with each other, but of the possible IP issues of the students’ outlines of your law school courses existing on-line at all.) Hypothetical: if a student surreptitiously RECORDED a class lecture (easy to do technologically - all those laptops students use in class have decent built-in omni-directional microphones that they could be using) and posted it on-line, that would be an unauthorized use of your classroom “performance” and would very likely raise some serious IP issues.
But a student’s outline that they wrote him/her-self would most likely be considered, as I understand the law, a derivative work of a professor’s class lectures, the casebook, any other readings the student may have done, discussions with classmates, etc., etc., and would most likely NOT be a successful target of any copyright or IP suit.
At a CALI conference a few years ago there was a presentation by a law student (U. Cincinnati, I think) who went beyond the idea of distributing outlines of his classes on-line: he took his class notes, the readings, etc., and created his own podcasts - audio files that he distributed on-line - that consisted of his own lectures/discussions of the material covered in his classes. He was essentially creating his own on-line courses based on what he was learning in class (and he said he had 50,000+ people downloading and, presumedly, listening to these podcasts). BUT, before his first year of law school started, he met with each of his professors and told them of his plans - he wasn’t asking PERMISSION because he already had a good idea of what the law in this area was - and only one of his professors had any qualms about it, and, ultimately, there were no efforts to stop him from what he was doing and by now, I think, he probably has an entire law school education’s worth of podcasts on-line.
Having these outlines on-line just changes the scale of what our students already had available to them: the internet long ago made the exchange of all manner of information and data much easier. And, yes, this is probably why more students these days may seem to anticipate your lines of discussion and questions in class but, again, its really just a change of scale from fifteen years ago when students had to physically exchange floppy discs containing course outlines that they had written or that they had obtained from upperclassmen.
The bottom line, I believe, is that dealing with this situation as an IP issue would be a distraction from dealing with it as one of pedagogy.

I'm curious to who will be the first person on our faculty to say, no, there ARE serious intellectual property issues with students sharing their outlines on-line.

Haiti Earthquake, Twitter, and Dating Sites Spam

2010-01-13T23:54:00.001-06:00

Glad to see the spanners stay on top of all trending topics:

December 2009 Netflix Report

2010-01-09T23:19:00.002-06:00

December 2009 Netflix Summary	Arrived at Home	Received at Netflix	Days at Home	Monthly Average Days at Home	Cost Per Movie
Mexico City	12/01	12/03	2
Sangre Costena	12/04	12/05	1
Observe and Report	12/07	12/10	3
Funny People	12/07	1/07	31
Not Quite Hollywood	12/11	12/21	10
The Legend of Boggy Creek	12/15	12/21	6
Brothers	12/26	1/15	20
World's Greatest Dad	12/22	1/05	14
	Dec 09			10.4	$2.65

Only eight movies from Netflix in December - our annual Christmas trip to the in-laws in Colorado and six days in Mexico City before Christmas ate into my available movie-watching time this month. And the latter of those two trips is the reason for the continued run of Mexico-set movies. None of them were as good as Amores Perres from November's Netflix summary, but Mexico City was decent, despite the careless dumb errors that hopefully resulted in someone's exit from the movie business. The three "comedies" I saw were among the best movies I saw this month. The two that got wide release - Observe and Report and Funny People - were both marketed as being more straight-forward gutbusters than they were: both were rather dark/black comedies, Observe and Report so much that its humorous momebts are so overshadowed by its darker moments as to maybe rate a new genre: the "black non-comedy"? The "black, bleak, dark movie with a few incidental laughs"? World's Greatest Dad is in a similar vein, and though it didn't get a wide release, to me it confirms that Bobcat Goldthwait is a unsung comedic movie genius.
And Brothers - the original Danish version - stands out as the best war movie to come out of the Iraq/Afganistan era that I've seen, by far.

Christmas and Desperate Mothers

2009-12-28T19:51:00.001-06:00

You know your mother REALLY wants a grand-daughter when she sends you a dress for your cat for Christmas:

(Or maybe its a decorative kitchen towel...)

November 2009 Netflix Summary

2009-12-27T21:46:00.001-06:00

November 2009 Netflix Summary	Arrived at Home	Received at Netflix	Days at Home	Monthly Average Days at Home	Cost Per Movie
Saw	11/02	11/05	3
Zack and Miri Make a Porno	11/06	11/13	7
Timeline	11/06	11/11	5
Hard Candy	11/12	11/23	11
The Boondock Saints	11/12	11/17	5
Overnight	11/13	11/17	4
Twilight	11/18	11/25	7
Dirty Pretty Things	11/18	11/30	12
Streets of Mexico City	11/24	12/24	30
El Callejon De Los Milagros	11/27	12/05	8
				9.2	$1.85

Ten movies from Netflix this month - most of them are catch-ups for things I've missed in the last few years. Timeline sucked, I can understand the appear of Twilight, and Zack and Miri, yeah, whatever. Dirty Pretty Things was very good and deserved all the acclaim it got, but my two favorites this month were Hard Candy - very intense and extremely hard to watch, even besides the obvious core revenge-fantasy scene - and Boondock Saints, a great little action/vigilante flick that is all the more amazing given the story of the guy who made it, told in the documentary Overnight. And El callejón de los milagros was a pretty good Mexico city movies, not as good as Amores Perres, but it tells a couple of compelling stories and stars a very young Selma Hayek (she was what, sixteen like her character here was?).

Myths, Truth, and Fiction About Presidential Death Threats

2009-12-07T20:18:00.005-06:00

A horrifying statistic was bandied around last summer - the number of weekly death threats against President Obama is 400% higher than those against President Bush the Second. To cut to the chase, that was never true and Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan said so last week in his congressional testimony about the two party crashers at the recent White House state dinner:

"The threats right now ... is the same level as it has been for the previous two presidents at this point in their administrations," Sullivan said.
Secret Service: Threats Against Obama No Higher than Normal (CBSNews.Com)

(His full testimony should eventually be available on the house committee’s hearings page.)

The alleged 400% increase was given in several places, including on the air at CNN (search for “400"), though the CNN anchor didn’t give a source, but other media, like the U.K. Telegraph does and provides the source, “according to Ronald Kessler, author of In the President's Secret Service”. So it was a journalist with a new book to promote who was the source for this figure, so it should have been suspect from the start.

And it turns out that this wasn’t the first story rebutting the 400% increase figure, but now with the Secret Service Director saying this in congressional testimony, that should put the matter to rest. If their budget was really as slashed as Kessler alleges and threats had increased, why would Sullivan deny that?

Another, related, story, ran this week in the Times Picayune because it look place just up the road in Poplarville (though it, too, is really old news):

Mississippi man receives probation for Facebook death threats
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2009/12/mississippi_man_receives_proba.html

The twist here, though, is that the threat-maker was black and only posing as a white supremacist on Facebook. And what is absent, again, from this and a few other stories about threats against the president are any details about how he was found - it just says he was charged with sending the threat from a Poplarville computer. So like the skin-heads who were apprehended a week before the 2008 presidential election and whose internet activities were part of the case against them, the Feds must be able to get access to server logs and such without too much trouble in these cases. Fine by me; I guess its just when alleged terrorists have their e-mail monitored and libraries are asked to turn over information about their public access internet computers in related investigations that people complain.

So its a good thing that threats against the president remain constant no matter who is office; race and policies don't affect the number of crazy people out there. What we won’t see during this administration are fictitious representations of presidential assassinations and assassination plots against the president, like the movie and at least one book, that came out when Bush II was in office.

Saints Beat Redskins to Go 12-0

2009-12-06T19:38:00.002-06:00

My prediction/mock-up for the front page of the Times-Picayune tomorrow:

Alabama Wins SEC Championship!

2009-12-05T23:08:00.001-06:00

Where is your God NOW, Timmy Tebow?

Careless Military Uniform Errors in Movies

2009-12-05T21:48:00.000-06:00

Anyone who’s an expert in any field or, hell, just works in any profession, can point out all manner of errors and mistakes in a movie that touches upon their area of personal experience. And any veteran knows that just about every military movie gets at least some details wrong. Minor uniform errors are common but, jeez, you’d think the wardrobe people could at least get the rank insignia oriented in the correct direction, right?

“Mexico City” has several scene set at the U.S. Embassy. The Marine Corps guards in their Dress Blues look authentic, but at least two of them have their enlisted rank insignias on their arms upside down. This is one screen shot:

And this is another:

Stupider still is that in another scene, the rank insignia is correct:

There’s discussion in some forums that such uniform errors are deliberate either because its illegal for people to wear uniforms who aren’t actually in the military (try, with exceptions, including for actors portraying military personnel, duh), or because it’s a not-too-subtle anti-military protest. More likely its just some lazy costumers and continuity people on set.

Dictionaries Most Cited by Law Reviews?

2009-11-16T22:52:00.005-06:00

I had a professor ask about this - what dictionary is the most “authoritative” and best to use for a law review article. I had looked into this once before but couldn’t find anything in my notes, so I ran some basic searches in Westlaw’s JLR database.

To me, the answer is the Oxford English Dictionary, but the professor had mentioned Webster’s International, the full title and most recent edition of which is “Webster's Third New International Dictionary”, so I searched for that first, restricting all my searches to only the past five years. There were 845 references to Webster’s 3d; I also looked just for “Webster’s” and found 3341 hits - there are a handful of other Webster’s dictionaries that get cited and not a lot of consistency in HOW they are cited: Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (124 hits), Webster's College Dictionary (116), Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law (34), Webster's Ninth New College Dictionary (3). It looks like many authors care less about authority and more about convenience and just use whatever dictionary they have at hand. Webster’s Third is also cited - 116 times - with the even fuller title “Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language”.

But the Oxford English Dictionary is cited 1185 times during this same period, so for a single edition of any dictionary, it comes out on top. I ended up copying the definitions that this professor wanted from both dictionaries, telling him what I had found with my searches, and letting him decide.

Some of these cites discuss cases where these dictionaries are being cited, but most of them are used in law reviews in the style of “Webster’s define paroxysm as ... ”, usually when analyzing some statute or legal concept in minute detail.

So just what sort of words are law review authors defining? Here are the words from the first seven hits I got where authors were citing to Webster’s 3d:

testimonial
best
nonsectarian
dirigisme
program
activity
original

And here’s the first seven hits when citing to the OED:

testimonial
conscience
neutral
sovereign
entity
stereotype
return

(Yes, it’s the same article that gives both Webster’s and the OED’s definition for “testimonial”.)

And, not that I’m surprised by this, but a many law reviews apparently ignore everything the Bluebook says about citing on-line sources and cite to the on-line editions of both the OED and Webster’s. Including this article, which cites to both in a single footnote:

Lynn D. Wardle, A Response to the “Conservative Case” for Same-Sex Marriage: Same-Sex Marriage and “The Tragedy of the Commons”, 22 BYU J. Pub. L. 441 (2008)

...
First, conservatism seeks to preserve things from the past that are of value. [FN19]
...

[FN19]. See Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “conservative,” http:// dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50047828?single=1&query_ type=word&queryword=conservative&first=1&max_to_show=10 (last visited Feb.7, 2008) [hereinafter Oxford English Dictionary] (“1.... preservative.”); Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, s.v. “conservative,” http://m-w.com/dictionary/conservative (last visited Feb. 7, 2008) (“1: preservative”); Watkins, supra note 14, at 638 (conservatism seeks to “maintain things as they are”).

Now M-W.Com is free, but the OED web site is proprietary so if you’re not at an institution that subscribes to the OED database and you take the time and effort to type in that URL, you’re going to be very disappointed. For the record, the Bluebook only provides for citing to on-line resources only when

“(1) the information cited is unavailable in a traditional printed source; or (2) a copy of the source cannot be located because it is so obscure that it is practically unavailable. Only in these two cases should citation be made to the electronic source alone.” (Rule 18).

Dictionaries are traditional printed sources and are as non-obscure as you can get, so there is not reason to cite to these on-line version, but 22 articles cite to Webster's on-line and two to the OED on-line. I guess its just a trend and pretty much anything on-line will soon have its URL included in law review footnotes. But most of the definitions provided in these articles add little substantive weight to whatever arguments the author is making and serve as just padding (or "intellectual falsies", perhaps), so I guess adding the on-line resources serve the same function.

Veterans Day 2009: Applebee’s and Rudyard Kipling

2009-11-11T22:45:00.002-06:00

As Marines, we get a full two-day boost of testosterone and nostalgia each November - the Marine Corps birthday is November 10th, and Veterans’s Day is November 11th (and, as one version of the saying goes, there are no ex-Marines, only Marines no longer on active duty). Having already been pleased this past summer that all veterans can get 10% every purchase at Lowe’s EVERY DAY (unlike the holiday-only veteran’s discount at Home Depot), I was - belatedly, too late to take advantage of it - pleased to learn Applebee’s is giving all veterans and active duty military personnel a free choice of six of their basic entrees.

I could have had one of my semi-annual steaks today. If I knew where there was an Applebees around here. No where here in the city for sure, maybe our in the ‘burbs. Funny thing is, as much this may cost them, I don’t see that they’re being too strict about it. The official details state that their standards of “Identification” are pretty loose:

“Photograph in uniform?” Does she qualify? I wonder if they report how many vets took them off on this offer.

I probably read less than five poems a year, and most of those are random stuff in the New Yorker just remind myself that I hate that crap. But this morning, I pulled my Rudyard Kipling book down and re-read Tommy, his testament to the two-faced attitude towards men in uniform under the British Empire. A representative stanza of the whole thing is:

Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?"
But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll.

The official - I guess its official - web site for Kipling has some great information about this poem. One interesting tidbit is that the newsletter of the Veteran’s Law Section of the Federal Bar is called Tommy after this poem. The web page also includes both a similar sentiment in verse that preceded Kipling’s take on treatment of members of the military:

In times of war, and not before,
God and the soldier men adore;
When the war is o’er and all things righted,
The Lord’s forgot and the soldier slighted.

And part of a modern update:

O then we're just like 'eroes from the army's glorious past.
Yes, it's "God go with you, Tommy," when the trip might be your last.
They pays us skivvy wages, never mind we're sitting ducks,
When clerks what's pushing pens at 'ome don't know their flippin' luck.
"Ah, yes" sez they "but think of all the travel to be 'ad."
Pull the other one. Does Cooks do 'olidays in Baghdad?
It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, know your place,"
But it's "Tommy, take the front seat," when there's terrorists to chase.

Amen. Of course in legal education, the professors don’t advocate chasing down the terrorist: they would prefer that the a lawsuit be brought against the Taliban in the International Court of Justice under the 1971 United Nation Convention on Aviation Sabotage. (And some day, I swear, I will find that listserv posting where this was urged.) What’s the corporate agent for the service of process for the Taliban? How would the U.S. go about requesting the execution of a summary judgement after they don’t show up?

Happy Birthday, USMC

2009-11-10T16:37:00.004-06:00

In my second annual Marine Corps birthday posting, here's another well-worn humorous piece you can find floating around on-line, and which probably pre-dates the internet by a good bit:

Letter Home from Marine Corps Bootcamp

Dear Ma and Pa,
I am well. Hope you are. Tell Brother Walt and Brother Elmer the Marine Corps beats working for old man Minchby a mile Tell them to join up quick before all of the places are filled. I was restless at first because you got to stay in bed till nearly 6 a.m. but I am getting so I like to sleep late. Tell Walt and Elmer all you do before breakfast is smooth your cot, and shine some things. No hogs to slop, feed to pitch, mash to mix, wood to split, fire to lay. Practically nothing. Men got to shave but it is not so bad, there's warm water. Breakfast is strong on trimmings like fruit juice, cereal, eggs, bacon, etc., but kind of weak on chops, potatoes, ham, steak, fried eggplant, pie and other regular food, but tell Walt and Elmer you can always sit by the two city boys that live on coffee. Their food plus yours holds you til noon when you get fed again. It's no wonder these city boys can't walk much. We go on "route marches," which the platoon sergeant says are long walks to harden us. If he thinks so, it's not my place to tell him different. A "route march" is about as far as to our mailbox at home. Then the city guys get sore feet and we all ride back in trucks. The country is nice but awful flat The sergeant is like a school teacher. He nags a lot. The Captain is like the school board. Majors and colonels just ride around and frown. They don't bother you none. This next will kill Walt and Elmer with laughing. I keep getting medals for shooting. I don't know why. The bulls-eye is near as big as a chipmunk head and don't move, and it ain't shooting at you like the Higgett boys at home. All you got to do is lie there all comfortable and hit it. You don't even load your own cartridges. They come in boxes.

Then we have what they call hand-to-hand combat training. You get to wrestle with them city boys. I have to be real careful though, they break real easy. It ain't like fighting with that ole bull at home. I'm about the best they got in this except for that Tug Jordanfrom over in SilverLake. I only beat him once. He joined up the same time as me, but I'm only 5'6" and 130 pounds and he's 6'8" and near 300 pounds dry.
Be sure to tell Walt and Elmer to hurry and join before other fellers get onto this set up and come stampeding in.

Your loving daughter,
Carol

Happy 234th Birthday, to my beloved Corps! Semper Fi!, etc., etc...

October Netflix Report

2009-11-08T22:26:00.005-06:00

October 2009 Netflix Summary	Arrived at Home	Received at Netflix	Days at Home	Monthly Average Days at Home	Cost Per Movie
Babel	10/01	10/03	2
Away We Go	10/06	10/08	2
Wait Until Dark	10/06	10/23	17
Sir, No Sir	10/13	10/23	10
The Girlfriend Experience	10/19	10/23	4
The Fountain	10/24	10/31	7
Amores Perros	10/24	11/10	17
The Children's Hour	10/24	11/05	12
FTA	10/26	11/05	10
				9.0	$2.06

Nine Netflix movies this month. Babel and Ammores Perros were the best two of the bunch, and I didn't realize until after I saw them that they were made by the same director: Babel came up because its one I missed when it was out, and Amores Perros is one of several cities set in Mexico City that I've been watching in "preparation" for the early vacation my wife and I are taken there two weeks before Christmas. She didn't want to watch Amores Perros after the opening dog-fighting scenes, so I watched that by myself and those scenes indeed - and there were worse to come - were harrowing, but it was an excellent flick and, duh, you can see how it and Babel are similar in structure and scope. The Fountain was the other really good movie in the bunch, and both Wait Until Dark and The Children's Hour are two more in our efforts to watch all the Audrey Hepburn movies on Netflix.

How Prevalent is Plagiarism of Unpublished Decisions?

2009-10-27T17:26:00.005-05:00

After the situation with the professor who was cribbing the summaries and quoted language from unpublished opinions without seeing the actual opinions or citing the sources in which he read the summaries and quoted language (see earlier post), I got to thinking about this. It is, of course, possible that an author might come across a reference to an unpublished opinion, track it down somehow, read it, summarize it, cite it, and include it in whatever article you’re working on, but I would bet anything that what happens more often is that an author reads an article or book that does a good enough job of summarizing the unpublished opinion and the author doesn’t bother to track down the opinion, but just cribs the summary and quoted language without citing to the original source where they found the discussion of the unpublished opinion that they’re stealing.

So I was curious if I could find an example of this, just by searching for articles that quote language from unpublished opinions. Turned up at least one so far, in a unrelated bit of work where I noticed the following discussion of an unpublished decision.

In this student note from the Michigan Law Review:

Jennifer L. White, When It's OK to Sell the Monet: A Trustee-Fiduciary-Duty Framework for Analyzing the Deaccessioning of Art to Meet Museum Operating Expenses, 94 Mich. L. Rev. 1041 (1996)

There’s a discussion of several unpublished cases at footnote 23:

23 There have been relatively few court cases dealing with deaccessioning. Judges tend to give one-time orders that do not provide insight into their decisionmaking processes and, as a result, offer no direction for future applicability. See, e.g. [...] Hammond Museum, Inc. v. Harshbarger, No. 92E- 0067-G1 (P. & Fam. Ct. Essex County, Mass. Oct. 5, 1992) (issuing no opinion, only a judgment stating that the museum was authorized to make the sale, to use the proceeds to pay off a bank loan, and, “if residual funds are available, to preserve the remaining artifacts of the museum and purchase similar ones, and do repairs, maintenance, and to make necessary improvements on the museum's real estate insofar as any of these are necessary to keep the museum open and functioning”)

(Emphasis added.)

So this student at law school in Michigan quoted language from a four-year-old unpublished Massachusetts county court decision. Did she actually get a copy of the case? Possible, but not likely. But poke around for the quote and you’ll find this:

Elaine L. Johnston, Deaccessioning to Raise Operating Funds: Recent Cases, in Legal Problems of Museum Administration, American Law Institute - American Bar Association Continuing Legal Education ALI-ABA Course of Study March 24, 1993

Which says, at 173:

The Massachusetts Attorney General consented to the Hammond's proposed deaccessioning, and the Court granted the Museum's request for approval. The Court did not issue a written opinion, but stated in its Judgement that the Museum was authorized to sell the designated artifacts and to use the proceeds from the sale to pay off the bank loan and, “if residual funds are available, to preserve the remaining artifacts of the museum and purchase similar ones, and do repairs, maintenance, and to make necessary improvements on the museum's real estate insofar as any of these are necessary to keep the museum open and functioning”.

So the Michigan law student “quotes” the exact same language as the CLE author. Coincidence? Not likely. Lazy student dancing way too close to the line between sloppy research and plagiarism? Very likely.

Also, the student’s summary of the case that precedes the quoted text:

[I]ssuing no opinion, only a judgment stating that the museum was authorized to make the sale, to use the proceeds to pay off a bank loan [...]

Is only a slight re-working of the CLE author’s summary:

The Court did not issue a written opinion, but stated in its Judgement that the Museum was authorized to sell the designated artifacts and to use the proceeds from the sale to pay off the bank loan [...]

This is what I see our students do fairly regularly when they ask me to find some obscure document or case and it turns out they’ve already used it in some paper, but only read ABOUT it in some other resource but now need the original thing because a faculty member, or one of the journal editors, wants some other detail for the citation or something that the intermediary source where the student found the document or case did not contain.

Leading - and TEACHING - by Example

2009-10-23T14:33:00.015-05:00

One of my biggest pet peeves working with law students is a form of academic dishonesty that is some cases falls short of plagiarism but in some cases definitely goes over the line. At the least, its misleading and misrepresents the students' work. I find a few students each year doing this, either in the papers they're writing for seminars or for the journals, or in the articles the law review and journal staff are sub-citing.

Students can usually find a couple of relevant articles on Westlaw to get themselves started, maybe even a few good books on the subject, but if they find a good discussion or point about an additional case or some other resource - “Source 2” - in an article or book - “Source 1” that they’re reading, they'll often just cite to Source 2 without including an intervening "as cited by" or "as discussed in" citation to Source 1.

It is perfectly acceptable and the Bluebook provides rules for using “as cited by” or “as discussed in”, and if that Source 2 is really obscure or too hard or prohibitively expensive to track down, that’s what you do. But when you DON’T do this and just crib whatever Source 1 said about Source 2 and pass it off as your own research by citing to Source 2 as if you actually found that resource and read it, you’re mis-representing your work. That, to me, is plagiarism, though maybe of a lesser sort than copying an article’s language verbatim and not attributing it.

To make it clear - in case all this “Source 1" and “Source 2" is too confusing - here’s the example I came across recently, with dummy text and citations in place of the real things. This is the case a patron asked me to find:

Frenkel v. Ministry of Corpuscles, No. JK9817-03 (Fred. H.Ct., 1998)

This request came to me by e-mail, and the patron says its unpublished and he’s looked on Westlaw and Lexis and its not there (he had a list of several cases like this he needed). So I poked around and found a few references to it in some law reviews, including this one from the Topschool Journal of International Law:

As the Fredonia High Court said in Frenkel v. Ministry of Corpuscles:

The essence of undulations is that they should be ... a measure of the loss of highhandedness.

Frenkel v. Ministry of Corpuscles, No. JK9817-03 (Fred. H.Ct., 1998) (unpublished opinion), in Jones and Spurious, Law and the Way of the Untoward (2003).

Yes, its unpublished, but it was apparently re-printed in some treatise, which we have, so OK, happy ending - the patron can cite to the case in this book like the Topschool Journal author did.

But, curious about the general availability of Fredonia case law, I googled the case and find several other references to it, including this one:

As the Fredonia High Court said in Frenkel v. Ministry of Corpuscles:

The essence of undulations is that they should be ... a measure of the loss of highhandedness.

Frenkel v. Ministry of Corpuscles, No. JK9817-03 (Fred. H.Ct., 1998).

Wow, that looks familiar. Long story short, the punchline is that this wasn’t a student patron: the list of cases I was asked to find came from a junior professor who busies himself helping to shape the next generation of lawyers and the second cite above, the one I found through google, the one WITHOUT the Jones and Spurious treatise cite, is from SSRN and is his “accepted paper” from a top 50 law school journal that is publishing his article. So he needed me to find these obscure cases because the law review staff is sub-citing his article and needs copies of them, including Frenkel.

But how did our intrepid author find it in the first place if he needs me to get a copy of it? By reading the article by the author who ADMITTED he found the Frenkel case in the Jones and Spurious treatise. But not only has our junior faculty cribbed from Jones and Spurious, he’s blatantly plagiarized the summary of the case from the Topschool law review author, same exact quote, same exact ellipses, etc., etc.

So if the faculty pull this shit, we can’t be surprised that our students plead ignorance about similar stunts.

Now I have to go play diplomat and say “um, maybe you should cite to the law review where YOU found the Frenkel case, or to the treatise where THAT author found it”. I love my job, I love my job, I love my job....

September 2009 Netflix Report

2009-10-16T18:31:00.002-05:00

September 2009 Netflix Summary	Arrived at Home	Received at Netflix	Days at Home	Monthly Average Days at Home	Cost Per Movie
Trouble the Water	09/03	9/11	8
Duplicity	09/04	10/05	31
12 Rounds	09/08	9/12	4
Sunshine Cleaning	09/12	09/19	7
Stop-Loss	09/14	09/30	16
Lookin' to Get Out	09/20	09/29	9
Charade	09/30	10/17	17
				13.1	$2.65

Back working full-time now for the Fall semester, so only seven movies this month, and it sure took me a hell of a long time to get around to watching Charade. That's the classic movie this month that I have seen parts of several times, but never watched start to finish. Most of the rest of this month's movies were recent releases I'd missed. Duplicity was very good but suffered at the end from the one-twist-too-many/my-aren't-we-clever-filmmakers syndrome. Sunshine Cleaning was very good with characters and situations that played very real for the most part, with only a few scenes played a bit too much for laughs.

Trouble the Water is one of the best Katrina documentaries that I've seen so far. I was hoping it would be better than Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke, but after the home movie footage of the Ninth Ward flooding in Trouble the Water, the evacuation story of the protags begins to play out as too much of a "look at me" cry for attention. So despite its flaws, When the Levees Broke is still the definitive cinematic statement about Katrina, at least of the ones I've seen - a few still haven't seen wide release.

But Stop-Loss, on the other hand, I think is the best movie about the Iraq war so far. I haven't seen them all, but they've generally gotten lousy reviews and one of the one I did see - whatever that one where Jessica Biel loses her hand in an IED explosion - was pretty wooden and sterile except for Sameul Jackson's story line upon returning to the states. But Stop-Loss had real heart to it and all the character and the situations they're in played very real.

Happy Birthday, Leonard Cohen (Oh, and is Michael Jackson still Dead?)

2009-09-21T19:38:00.007-05:00

A scary bit of news Saturday was that Leonard Cohen collapsed on stage in Spain. We saw him in Austin this past Spring and it still stands out as one of the best concerts I've ever seen. I got my wife the CD/DVD of the London show from this tour, and we play it at least once a week or so.

Today he turns 75, and even though he's in amazing condition for a man his age - he may look small and frail, but he was all over the stage when we saw him, up and down taking a knee regularly, and doing a little jig as he went offstage during the encores - but, sure, he's not going to be around forever.

When Michael Jackson died and we had 24/7 news coverage, it struck me that when Leonard Cohen departs this world, he'll probably get thirty second on the national news and maybe a few minutes on Entertainment Tonight or VH1. Yes, MJ's tragic death was perfect for the tabloid-style coverage that the cable networks love, but as far as anything you can define as "artistic merit" and the value of a life well lived, the attention given to Michael Jackson and the eventual coverage of Leonard Cohen's passing will be completely out of proportion to what they should be.

To me, Exhibit One in the debate over just how screwed up Michael Jackson was as a person and as an artist is the opening sequence to his movie "Moonwalker". That came out in 87 or 88, and it was one of the only American movies playing at this theater one afternoon in Toulon when I was in France during my time in the Marines. I didn't see that whole clip shown anywhere in any of the media coverage I saw because it is so bizarre. But, yes, its on YouTube. It consists of him performing "Man in the Mirror" in concert before a huge crowd of adoring fans interspersed with clips of - among others - Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat, and Menachem in their famous three-way handshake in 1979 at the Israel-Egypt peace treaty signing (at 1:40), Ghandi (at 1:48), Martin Luther King, Jr. and JFK (at 2:00 or so), RFK, Mother Theresa, Bishop Desmond Tutu (at 2:25), and so on. No further elaboration on the egotism of Michael Jackson is necessary.

Then there's the damn lyrics to the song:

Gotta make a change
For once in my life
It's gonna feel real good
Gonna make a difference
Gonna make it right
...
I'm starting with the man in the mirror
I'm asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself, and then make a change

Make what change? He was still black in this video, so I guess he was contemplating his supposedly vitiligo-inspired cosmetic lightening (though with vitiligo, a condition where your pigment becomes lighter in patches, the usual remedial action is to use dark make-up to cover up the light patches). So he’s basically saying, if you want to make the world a better place, look at yourself and just GO FOR that makeover, new wardrobe, whatever. You don’t have to actually DO anything external to your own narcissism.

Compare that with this clip from the Leonard Cohen DVD of his London concert; it’s the same basic show we saw in Austin (embed is disables for this clip, so you have to click the link):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttv5dyvtF4o

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
...
Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Michael Jackson never wrote anything that comes close to poetry like that.

NPR’s Scott Simon Insults All Louisianans

2009-09-20T22:15:00.001-05:00

I’m not sure why I’m semi-obsessed with obvious errors in what are otherwise very reliable media and other sources. It must be a librarian thing. Anyway, I’m rarely up at 6:00am on a Saturday, let alone listening to NPR, but in another episode of what is a typical, riveting middle-aged married life, I wanted to get to both Home Depot and Lowe’s soon after they opened.

So I was listening to Scott Simon on NPR wax poetic about Twitter. He had listeners read the “poetic”, “witty”, whatever Tweets that he had solicited from them. But in discussing political Tweets, Simon mis-spoke and referred to - I swear this is what he said - “Congressman Joe Wilson of Louisiana”. The President-heckling Congressman is, of course, from South Carolina, not Louisiana, and we’re so happy that a politician from somewhere ELSE was a national embarrassment for a while.

But when I went to capture the audio from NPR.Org, the error had been edited and he now mentions the correct state. But because this segment was about Twitter I had immediately got on-line and Tweeted my offense at his error, and, luckily, found one other Louisianan who also was not happy with Simon’s confusion about Southern States.

So except for Twitter there is no evidence that this error occurred. And because Twitter doesn't, as far as I know, archive all our Tweets in perpetuity, those two pieces of "evidence" won't be around forever. A minor point about a minor error, sure, but still. Its nice to know that NPR edits such errors out of its on-line archives. And I remain agnostic about Twitter being a revolutionary information/news resource and/or tool, but I’m regularly surprised at how it can be useful for random little things like this.

Oh, and Scott Simon’s whole segment was people reading their “clever” Tweets that he had asked them to submit. A few were cute, but one was about public libraries and was pretty clueless. The caller/Tweeter, Amanda Elend - @amandaelend - read her following Tweet:

Finding myself extremely thankful that the public library system already exists. Imagine trying to get that one past Congress.

Public libraries funding is, of course, mostly local, but the federal government does give a big chunk of change to help at almost every level. But there was no initial “Public Library Act” that had to “get past Congress” in some past halcyon day. In fact Congress still ponies up a big pile of money each year - $158 million for state library agencies in 2005 (out of a total $1.1 billion total revenue, so right at 15% comes from the federal government). I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised because I imagine a majority of the country can’t believe that any government program or function exists that doesn’t flow from the benevolence of the federal government.

August 2009 Netflix Report

2009-09-08T20:58:00.005-05:00

August 2009 Netflix Summary	Arrived at Home	Received at Netflix	Days at Home	Monthly Average Days at Home	Cost Per Movie
The Whole Shootin' Match: Bonus Materials	08/01	08/04	3
Session 9	08/01	08/04	3
Silver City	08/04	08/11	7
Robin and Marion	08/05	08/10	5
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog	08/05	08/07	2
Emergency Kisses	08/07	08/11	4
The Soloist	08/08	08/11	3
The Inglorious Bastards (1978)	08/11	08/13	2
The Strange One	08/12	09/02	21
Hamlet 2	08/12	08/25	13
Shakes the Clown	08/13	09/03	21
Sleeping Dogs Lie	08/14	09/05	22
				7.6	$1.54

These 12 movies are all over the board. A recent big release - the Soloist - was neither as cliched or as good as it could have been. Session 9 looked more interesting than it was when it was a "suggested" title at Netflix. Emergency Kisses was the worst of the lot - I only watched it because its a follow up to I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar, which was in last month's queue, and both of which, again, were mentioned in the Sunday New York Times' DVD new releases column and both of which I would gouge my eyes out before watching again - indulgent, autobiographical crap. But the NYT also highlighted the two Bobcat Goldthwait titles - Shakes the Clown (starred and directed) and Sleeping Dogs Lis (directed). The first one was damn funny, but the second one was really good, especially given a premise that must have been a hell of a pitch to try to sell.

And - I think I just realized this - when your next Netflix movie is not available from your closest distribution center, they'll let you know that its being shipped from wherever, BUT they'll also ship an additional movie that is next in your queue at the same time so you have an extra at home at no extra charge. This month, two movies - Shakes the Clown and Emergency Kisses - were extras for me.

3 Weeks Out: Finally a NYT Book Review Katrina Correction

2009-09-07T22:40:00.001-05:00

I guess other folks more concerned and more motivated about this than myself took a bit more effort to point out the problems with Timothy Egan's book review of Dave Eggers' Zeitoun: the Sunday NYT Book Review yesterday had a correction and there is now one appended to the on-line version of the review.

Here in New Orleans, the Times-Picayune did a bit of a better job by quickly publishing a letter to the editor from the founder of Levees.Org about President Obama's characterization of Katrina as a "natural disaster". That statement was made in an interview with the President by local reporters, so his mis-statement didn't get picked up nationally and, besides this one letter, I don't think it got much coverage locally. But, again, in some parallel bizarro world if a President McCain had made such an oversight, he'd be lambasted for being clueless about what flooded New Orleans after Katrina.

Even Published Authors Can Mis-speak

2009-09-02T07:07:00.007-05:00

Occasional errors in the morning paper don't surprise me any more. Even the Sunday New York Times we get delivered each week (but at thirty dollars a month, maybe not for much longer when I can walk down the block and get it for $5 at Starbucks) has routine mistakes that I chalk up on too much reliance on spellcheck and not enough on real editorship and skull sweat.

But this egregious mis-use/mis-wording nearly made me do a spit-take with my yogurt this morning. Its from an article-slash-interview with Ethan Brown, the author of "Shake the Devil Off: A True Story of the Murder that Rocked New Orleans", an otherwise fine-sounding book about a horrible post-Katrina murder-suicide committed by an Iraqi war vet. Brown worked as a reporter for a while and talked about applying his investigative skills to this story:

"That's what I was doing. Scavenging. Getting everybody's story right. Trying to get these two apocryphal events -- the Iraq war and Katrina -- right. " (Gag-inducing emphasis added.)

Of course - duh - he meant to say "apocalyptic", not "apocryphal", because for damned sure Katrina and the Iraq war are NOT "of doubtful authenticity".

Even a published author, skilled and experienced in weaving words into precise, poetic combinations, can mis-speak. But though these words are similar ... well, they start with the same two syllables, but they really ARE NOT EVEN CLOSE TO BEING SIMILAR ... they are as different in meaning as two words can be. A total, complete, mistaken choice of words.

And isn't it the interviewer's, or the editor's, job to catch this? Doesn't this deserve at least a [sic] after the word? Does anyone at the Times-Picayune own a dictionary that has actual pages?

Follow-Up: Hurricane Katrina, No New York Times Correction, and Pres. Obama Makes the Same Mistake

2009-08-24T22:09:00.006-05:00

Yesterday's New York Times Book Review didn't contain any correction or mention of the mis-statements that Timothy Egan made in his review of Dave Eggars' Zeitoun that I wrote about the other day. I searched both the NYT web page and the relevant database on Lexis and found nothing. (And, apparently, you can't leave comments on book reviews on the Times' web page. Huh?)

But I guess that the New York Times' error in this doesn't matter since President Obama is saying basically the same thing:

"I think that Katrina was really a wake-up call for the country...that all of us can fall prey to these kinds of natural disasters". Rebuilding New Orleans Still a Priority, Obama Says, New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 23, 2009, page A-21. (Emphasis added)

Oh, the shitstorm that would rain down in some parallel-hell of a universe where a President McCain made a statement referring to Katrina as just a natural disaster. The New York Times, President Obama, and the entire country may have forgotten this, but we in New Orleans still remember an important detail about Katrina: the catastrophic flooding wasn't due to the hurricane overtopping the levees, but resulted from the breeching of floodwalls that we now know were improperly designed and constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers over the past forty years.

Are the Times and the President glossing over this because now, all of a sudden, they don't want to draw attention to the inefficiencies and ineptitude of the federal government because the current administration is proposing that a big, new bureaucracy be created to provide a federalized health insurance option for one sixth of our population and take its place besides other great government success stories like Amtrak, the Post Office, and, yes, the Corps of Engineers?

Hurricane Katrina and Sloppy Errors in the New York Times Book Review

2009-08-21T20:41:00.005-05:00

I guess with the increase in corrections in the New York Times, spotting errors isn't hard, but getting the date and details wrong on Hurricane Katrina is pretty egregious. Yes, its just in the Sunday NYT Book Review of Dave Eggers' Zeitoun, but saying that

"Katrina hits on Sunday, Aug. 28 2005" and that "[i]t's a Category 5 storm..."

as reviewer Timothy Egan does, is like talking about the 9/10 Terrorist Attacks.

Yeah, OK, on Sunday those still in town were definitely feeling the effects of Katrina, but it didn't make landfall until Monday morning; though that's the correct meteorological meaning of "hit", we can let that one slide. But though Katrina had been a Cat5 storm, it was down to a Cat3 by the time it made landfall in Louisiana; Egan just plain got that wrong in his review. (The Saffir-Simpson scale categories are based solely on wind speed; though Katrina's winds had decreased when it came ashore, it still packed a record storm surge and was one of the largest hurricanes ever. Maybe Egan and his editors just .... know, no excuse for this sloppiness, but OK - it was a powerful, big damn storm, Cat5 or not.)

Perhaps these are only things that locals would care about, but in what sounds like perhaps the best book about Katrina so far (haven't read it myself yet), and even perhaps the best book that Eggers has written out of his entire oeuvre, I think these oversights only serve to sour us in New Orleans on this otherwise great review. We're perfectly willing to forgive his sloppiness in specifying what neighborhood the Zeitoun family lived in (a lot of us can't keep some of those straight), but for us, 8/29 is just as evocative of the date our tragedy took place as 9/11 is for the entire country.

But what is unforgivable is the dilettantesque mistake that the reviewer makes in attributing New Orlean's deluge to just the shear force of nature. In describing the second day after the storm, Egan says:

"Day 2, the world changes. Zeitoun wakes to a sea of water, after the levees have been overtopped. He’s neck-deep in a city of a thousand acts of desperation."

If the New York Times and the rest of the country has forgotten that the catastrophic flooding wasn't due to Katrina overtopping the levees, but to the failure and breeching of the levees due to their improper design and construction, then we've learned nothing and made no progress in how we allocate resources and plan for risks such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and other disasters. (On the other hand, Eggers, apparently, gets it right - the local reviews and discussions of the book I've seen would definitely mention it if he had botched that critical point.)

So this Sunday I'm look for a big, fat, kiss-ass apology to New Orleans in the New York Times Book Review.

Astroturfing via Twitter in Support of “Health Care Reform”?

2009-08-20T22:12:00.000-05:00

This is really a brilliant idea, and its essentially a Twitter-based version of the “grass-root” campaign results I found that both supported and opposed proposed FCC rules on “Broadcast Localism” and which resulted in thousands of comments to the FCC web site that were identical to the form letters that different advocate groups urged their supporters to send.

Now to drum up support for health care reform, this blogger has provided easy cut-and-paste Tweets that users can Twitter themselves without having to think of an original thing to say, complete with the bit.ly-shortened URLs to the White House “Reality Check” web pages.
But yet it’s the opponents of current “health care reform” efforts that get accused of astro-turfing this issue when they swap messages and post notices about how and where to voice their concerns.

One thing I’m really just understanding about bit.ly’s url-shortening service is that it will let you track the hits for the web site through ANY bit.ly-shortenered URL, whether yours or someone else’s. So I plugged in those pages and see that he’s apparently had several of his Tweets propagated by as many as two thousand people, but some of the others only have two-three hundred hits. So either folks are being very selective about the dozen or so Tweets he provides. And at the bottom of this post he says this is something similar to what he, and others, I guess, did during the Iran election in July.

Good use of Twitter to get your message out via other people who can’t communicate in 140 characters on their own without help!

Dead Blue Dog Graffiti

2009-08-16T21:09:00.004-05:00

Great graffiti, presumedly somewhere here in the city:

Finally something useful from Twitter! Thanks, NolaMaven! For my ~~many~~ readers not from New Orleans, the target of this is New Orleans artist George Rodrigue's ubiquitous Blue Dog motif/mascot/moneytrain.

Twitter Over Capacity? Did I Miss Some News Story?

2009-08-12T20:59:00.003-05:00

Maybe I don't use Twitter enough to have seen this before, but I was logging out and had this screen come up:

There isn't even any big breaking news story? I thought when Michael Jackson's death fried Twitter they learned how to "upscale" their servers on the fly. Guess it was just a glitch, or someone is doing another DOS attack on it. But the fact that they have this nice graphic ready to go means they know they're not up to the task of handling all the traffic they're getting these days, right?

CALI, AALL, Social Media, and the Coming Backlash (Hopefully?)

2009-08-10T00:11:00.005-05:00

Feels like I lost late June and most of July to the annual CALI and AALL meetings, and mostly to the bathroom renovation from hell, and now its August and school is ready to start again.

This year both the CALI and AALL meetings will big on Web 2.0 and social media - Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc. But the question I had at the CALI "unconference" session - a big, open free-wheeling discussion about anything - is still unanswered: what mission-critical tasks can these things do for us that we aren't already doing with the tools we've had for a good while now. In law schools, the two primary mission-critical tasks are educating our students to be lawyers and supporting our faculty in their teaching and scholarship.

I've had a lot of fun with Facebook getting in touch with old friends - though learning what they got on any one of the dumb surveys that propagate like weeds on Facebook or that they need help in whatever Mafia Wars task they're doing isn't my idea of "getting in touch", but I've had a few worthwhile exchange with some of my fellow high school alum and its looking like Facebook is going to be very useful in organizing our 25th reunion next year. (And our dog's campaign for the Mayor of New Orleans is making good use of Facebook and is going gangbusters so far.)

And Twitter is a blast during the conferences - very useful at CALI and very snarky at AALL since everyone could Tweet anonymously via @aallsecrets. Yes, there were a few useful Tweets at AALL about simultaneously scheduled programs and some folks posted some useful related resources live during the program, but less so than at CALI, which makes sense given who goes to each.

Two answers have been offered for what these Web 2.0/Social Media stuff can do for us at law schools - one was at that unconference session and involved publicity and I agree about that - one point made at another CALI session was that at the least every law school should have a presence on Facebook and probably elsewhere if only to serve as the official Joe Blow School of Law Facebook page and thus be able to point folks there if they are confused by ad hoc pages created by the school's students. But with the economy in the tank applications are up across the country and luring applicants to your law school is not like marketing sneaker brands where you better be up to date on every social media site and tool. But I do not believe anyone is losing enrollment because their school isn't on Facebook or Twitter or whatever.

The second answer was from a casual conversation at AALL and involved RSS feeds and using them to aggregate/push/whatever articles and blogs and other information to our faculty and students. I'm an RSS agnostic - a thread on ALL-SIS mentioned RSS feeds and one school mentioned a survey of incoming students that said only something like 15% of them used RSS feeds, which sounds a whole lot more accurate to me than the figure I saw stating that 65-70% of all internet users use RSS feeds; I'd believe that 65-70% of all internet users who happen to take a survey about social media probably use RSS feeds, but that survey sure seems like the respondents were self-selected.

RSS feeds may be neat but roping in some blogs as part of your research probably isn't mission-critical to what our faculty and students need. Faculty are going to be most concerned with the 600+ law reviews that Westlaw and Lexis can provide and for which I can set up a thorough, accurate automatic search and have new matching articles e-mailed to them regularly. (And when I last played with RSS, I clicked on the little orange RSS icon on two different web sites - one seemed to look for newsreader software on my computer, and the other asked me to choice between a half-dozen or so news "aggregator" services that it assumed I would have subscribed to. If I can't figure out RSS in five minutes - and, yes, I'm sure its easy once I spend 10 minutes or so with it - its not ready for prime time for the tens of thousands of students and faculty who would need help with even more basic on-line tasks.

It seems to me we're allowing ourselves to be converts to too much of the hype from the marketing types - where some of the hype may indeed be justified - and trying to be "cool librarians" by applying the lingo and mindset to what we do. But screw Clay Shirkey and his contention that "the tradition of one-way authoritative delivery of information is becoming extinct". Yeah, I thought it was neat that Skittles.Com turned their web site into 100% content other people are putting up about their product on social media sites, but in any field besides trying to sell more people your particular brand of stomach-rotting crap candy - i.e., all fields that really matter and strive to accomplish something to oh, I don't know, improve humanity's lot and more us forward as a species, like law, medicine, economics, whatever - questions need to be answered with a significant degree of authority and not cobbled together by people uploading photos to a communal web site or creating a wiki.

Yes, "authoritative" answers to a question may change over time as we learn more about the universe we're in (or, in law, as judges tease out new principles from the cases before them), and the answer to other questions are often really just another question or two, but we, as librarians, are responsible for getting those authoritative answers, or the means of finding those authoritative answers, or even determining that there is no definitive answer, to our patrons.

Are people getting useful answers via Twitter? Yes, I'm sure. But if you ONLY post an important question on Twitter, you're doing a shit job. Law-lib still answers more question on a day that I've ever seen on Twitter. (And please, you're just trying to show off your "cool librarian" cred if you post a survey question on law-lib and they ask for responses via DM .) Twitter is just a weird chimera that seems like chat, micro-blogging, or even e-mail, depending on how you use it but is it game-changing, paradigm-shifting, chose-your-cliche-here, as Shirkey et al says? Shirkey's Ted lecture on the page linked above is mis-labeled there "How Twitter Can Make History" (ummm, no, it can't - and I've ragged on the grandiose claims made for Twitter a few times already so enough said about that). Its a bit broader and is actually called "How Social Media Can Make History" and I'm still not convinced (guess I should listen to the whole thing). Twitter has only made it even more easier (read: more idiot-proof) for people to post stuff on-line, like blogs did a few years ago.

E-mail and the web itself - those were game-changers. All this Web 2.0 and social media hot-topicalism is just the hype-of-the moment. AALL and CALI both had a hell of a lot of sessions about wikis and blogs when those were the new hot things. OK, having students create a wiki in a faculty member's "banana and the law" course may be neat, but sorry if I didn't read about which Federal Circuit is now allowing pleadings in the cases it hears to be submitted via wikis - like I said, I'm RSS feed agnostic so I may have missed that news story.

Blogs were going to make it so much easier for us to reach our patrons but most of the law library blogs I've seen are on-line version of the "books we've acquired this month" newsletters we all used to print and distribute. A blog makes it a lot easier to put that sort of newsy stuff on-line, and at least the students are not throwing away that much paper because they can now not read it on-line instead of not read it when we waste a student worker's time putting a copy in each of their mail boxes. (And I may be baffled about RSS but you can NOT say I don't understand blogs - this post is longer and has more links in it than 90+ % of every other blog I've ever looked at.)

E-mail and the web did revolutionize the way we work and increased exponentially the ways and the ease with which we can connect with our colleagues around the country and around the world. To some extent, Web 2.0 and social media are just tools bringing this more to the masses who couldn't master effective e-mail use and basic html and who, let's admit, don't have that much to say anyway. These new tools aren't paradigm-shifters and in two to three years these annual meetings will have sessions on whatever new tools are being hyped then and which, upon later sober reflection will be seen, like blogs, wikis, social media networks, Web 2.0 collaboration sites, etc., etc., before them, as nifty but non-mission critical ways to get some things done but not the monumental advances they once were thought to be.

I finally had an excuse to put all this down here because I was inspired by an article in the New York Times today, Party On, but No Tweets, about how some social events and some venues are adopting strict no-Twitter, no-cell-phone pics, etc., policies, and people, though uncomfortable at first, are finding its actually enjoyable to just live in the moment and not obsessively share and document the moment. One of the clubs mentioned enforces this by blackballing members if they find Facebook pictures taken during its functions. Another recent article mentioned how membership in Facebook and other sites may have peaked in the under-30 or so demographic. One explanation proposed was that since the over-30 on up to the senior citizen demographics have only recently discovered all this stuff, it was no longer "cool". I don't think kids are going to give up their cell phone texting and Facebook pages, but it soon may be the "cool" trend to actually NOT chat on your phone during half the party and to let your Facebook page go un-updated for a significant length of time. So maybe "backlash" is not what we're going to see in a year or so - maybe "The Coming Ho-Hum" is more accurate.

Henry Miller, Library Censorship, and a Honky-Tonk Pickup

2009-08-08T15:25:00.005-05:00

This was one of the most unlikely movies to find a passing reference to censorship, libraries, and Henry Miller, let alone to find it used as part of a pick-up in a scene at a Texas Honky-Tonk bar:

This is from "A Hell of a Note", the first short film by Glenn "Eagle" Pennell, and is included on the Bonus Materials disc for the recent DVD release of Pinnel's best-known film, The Whole Shootin' Match.

Eagle Pennell was a 1970s independent filmmaker who worked mostly in Texas and was based in what was apparently a huge burgeoning arts scene in Austin in the 60s and 70s. "The Whole Shootin' Match" was made entirely without financial support or creative input from the film industries in Hollywood or New York, and so was an early "regional" film that eventually got national press.

Both "Shootin' Match" and "Hell of a Note" are rough on the edges and are definitely low-budget indie movies, but wow - the characters, stories, and settings ring more true than most current "art-house" type movies with budgets many times more than what Pennell had to work with.

July Netflix Summary

2009-08-04T21:37:00.002-05:00

July 2009 Netflix Summary	Arrived at Home	Received at Netflix	Days at Home	Monthly Average Days at Home	Cost Per Movie
Vicky Christy Barcelona	07/01	07/13	12
Carnal Knowledge	07/01	07/09	8
Days of Heaven	07/01	07/14	13
Honkeytonk Man	07/10	07/16	6
I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar	07/14	07/24	10
Tender Mercies	07/15	07/21	6
Last Holiday (1950)	07/17	07/20	3
Youth Without Youth	07/21	07/31	10
Tideland	07/22	07/31	9
The Whole Shootin' Match	07/25	08/03	9
				8.6	$1.85

Only made it through ten movies this month, what with the AALL meeting and the bathroom renovation from hell. It was mostly movies I've been meaning to get around to for years - Days of Heaven (really good), and Tender Mercies and Honkeytonk Man, which are a great pair of movies that I wish I had watched as a double feature. I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar is exhibit #1 for why making Netflix choices based on the New York Times' DVD column is a very dicey business - that was the biggest waste this month, with Tideland coming in a very close second. My third favorite after Eastwood's and Duvall's individual turns at country music movies, though, was The Whole Shootin' Match, which also was a NYT DVD column selection, so I guess it all comes out in the balance.

"How I Spent My Summer Vacation (The Boring Middle-aged Married Homeowner Version)"

2009-07-21T11:27:00.004-05:00

Alternate title for this post: the bathroom renovation from hell. Two weeks, including a full two days with a heat gun just removing the old, ugly, cheap vinyl peal-and-stick flooring the previous owners had slapped down and the linoleum beneath that, then five days prepping the floor, laying the natural stone tile, and fixing what I'd screwed up, misc time replacing and re-painting the trim, then a day and a half playing plumber to replace some old shut-off valves and supply lines.

But it does look great:

My wife indeed has the whole "vision" thing going on and her taste is impeccable and I'm not going to block HGTV like I swore I would do in the middle of all this. In fact, as much of a pain that it was to do this job - and it really only took so long because most of the time I was either being very careful doing something I'd never done before or fixing something I had screwed up because I had never done it before - the bad parts of it when I swore to myself I would never undertake such a big job again are fading from my memory in light of the completed project, and I'm confident I can do the other bathroom just as well and in a lot less time. But my wife says we can wait until next summer for that.

Best discovery during this process? Lowe's offers a 10% discount for veterans ALL THE TIME! But they seem incapable of registering you AS a veteran and I had to keep showing them a copy of my DD214 so I'm debating just getting it tattoed on my chest:

(NOTE: Stunt chest used, not author's actual body.)

Happy Independence Day!

2009-07-04T09:40:00.000-05:00

Our holiday decorations for the peeing boy statue this year made him look more like "Little Mr. Stars and Striped Riding Hood":

June 2009 Netflix Summary

2009-07-02T21:22:00.008-05:00

After starting this last month, I, of course, have to do this every month. Here's my Netflix activity for June:

June 2009 Netflix Summary	Arrived at Home	Received at Netflix	Days at Home	Monthly Average Days at Home	Cost Per Movie
Eagle Eye	06/02	06/05	3
Hard Eight	06/02	06/04	2
Labou	06/03	06/04	1
Rounders	06/06	06/10	4
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)	06/06	06/15	9
You Can't Take it With You	06/06	06/09	3
Crazy Love	06/10	06/12	2
Goodbye, Columbus	06/11	06/15	4
25th Hour	06/13	6/22	9
Defiance	06/16	6/23	7
David and Lisa	06/16	6/22	6
Secretary	06/23	06/30	7
Thumbsucker	06/23	06/30	7
Powder Blue	06/24	06/30	6
				5.0	$1.32

My Netflix queue basically breaks down into a few categories based on why I'm watching them: stuff I'm just getting around to seeing, whether recent mildly-intriguing recent releases (Eagle Eye, Powder Blue), stuff I've encountered while flipping channels on TV and I want to see the whole movie (You Can't Take it With You, David and Lisa), and stuff I'm genuinely interested in seeing and for which I thank God that Netflix exists (Crazy Love, Hard Eight). Whatever the reason, I think I'm equally surprised and dissapointed whatever reason I'm watching a movie. David and Lisa was mildly intriguing when I saw part of it on TCM, but turned out to be one of the best old movies I've seen in a while (Keir Dullea is great, and Janet Margolin playing opposite him is also amazing - a great "nuthouse" movie). And for the first half of "The Postman Always Rings Twice" I was puzzled about why this seemingly-rountine noir intrigue was so reknowned, but then after ther great mid-point courtroom sequence (which should be mandatory for trial practice courses!), the movie really hits high gear and I agree it one of the classics. Goodby Columbus was alright - think a Jewish "The Graduate" - and Ali MacGraw os gorgeous, but its one like so many films of the late sixties and early seventies that doesn't really hold up.
The best surprise this month was Powder Blue - I thought it was just a gritty urban angst drama centered around the strip club where Jessica Biel's character works (she got most of the press for this movie as far as I can tell), but it was much, much more than that. A very sweet, very real movie that carefully veers just this side of being cheesy, but movies like this are why I endure watching a wide variety of movies I don't know a lot about (I really want the hours spent watching Thumbsucker and Eagle Eye back).

Elton John to Perform at Michael Jackson Funeral:Will Re-work "Candle in the Wind" Yet Again

2009-06-29T21:11:00.004-05:00

Candle in the Wind 2009

Goodbye Michael J.
Everybody knew all too well
How you molested little boys
And now you'll burn in hell.
You grew up near Chicago
And you daddy whipped your behind
He handed you a microphone
And he made you sing your lines.

And it seems to me you lived you life
Like a pop star in decline
Still struggling for a melody
And some words to rhyme
I'm glad I didn't know you
When I was a little kid
Your legend burned out long before
Your lifetime ever did.

Raptor on the Road

2009-06-26T19:34:00.003-05:00

The power was out for an hour or so after today's refreshing thunderstorm, so we were out on the front porch for a while and noticed this guy across the street on a neighbor's porch, trash can, and eventually up in a tree. It was hard to get a decent photo, but these are the best:

We've seen various "raptors" in Audubon Park - which isn't unusual - and that's apparently just a loose catch-all term for a wide variety of hunter birds, including falcons, eagles, hawks and condors. We have a big bird book some friends gave us when we were feedings some Monk Parakeets in the backyard, and the closest I could figure was that this was a Cooper's Hawk or something similar. That's one of several types of birds apparently commonly called a chickenhawk, which is what our neighbor said he used to call these when saw then as a kid. One of the others, the Sharp-Shinned Hawk is also sometimes called a chickenhawk, and the WikiP picture of it looks more like the pictures of what we saw.

Michael Jackson Dies and Twitter Fries

2009-06-26T13:26:00.005-05:00

I was almost willing to concede that Twitter was a useful new type of communication/news tool during the post-Iran election protests, counter-protests, and government crackdown over there, but just almost: everything still seemed to be second-hand - reports of what CCN, MSNBC, and other cable news networks were showing, and links to different news website. But Michael Jackson's death yesterday seemed to show all the shortcomings of Twitter - nothing new was to be found through Twitter but everyone seemed to want to use it to say nothing new.

I made a few screen captures. This first one is from 5:53pm Central Standard Time.

It was taking a long time for any search to run, and when I searched the provided "trending topic" nothing was found. I'm not sure how twitter generates the "trending topics", but I figure they're suggested searches based on common text in some threshold of tweets - they're not manually suggested by read people, are they? So something seemed screwed up early on.

This second screen capture was from about an hour later.

The hashtag search for #michaeljackson took about five minutes to load (and other web sites were loading normally, so it wasn't my connection); the most recent tweet listed was an hour old and about ten minutes later when I took this screen capture, the "more results" listing was up to over 10,000. An hour's worth of tweets queued up? "Real-time" my ass.

In the middle of all this, someone decides this is the perfect time to resurrect what is apparently some old net-rumor that Jeff Goldblum has also died. This image is from 8:24pm CST:

This is about 10-15 minutes after that twending topic loaded and new results - rumors, denials, requests for confirmation and the link to the same fake news story on some joke web site in New Zealand or somewhere else down under - are also well over 10,000 and, as the image shows, the most recent one for this hot topic was from two hours ago. (The tweets do not actually re-load even as the as "more results" thing updates itself.)

Then at 9:47pm CST, Japan and the rest of Asia are just waking up and Twitter is really screwed. My page was loading but anytime I searched for anything this is what I was getting:

Luckily I had saved the #michaeljackson hashtag search saved because about forth-five minutes later:

there's no "trending topics" on Twitter anymore!

At the peak last night, there were about 100 tweets PER SECOND for #michaeljackson, by my rough estimate. Wayyyyy too many to follow. And eventually Twitter had, it seemed, finally "up scaled" its servers or whatever and wasn't hanging up and taking minutes to search for specific hot queries and "trending topics". So was this just a case of Twitter servers not being as quickly "scalable" (or whatever the jargon is) as they had hoped they would be?

Poster for 2010 CALI Conference

2009-06-20T21:49:00.004-05:00

I had thought of this movie and poster earlier because of what year the next CALI conference will be in, but I couldn’t figure out how to make the tagline relevant. But when the location for next year’s conference was announced at the today’s end-of-conference plenary, I had my tagline, but calling it “relevant” is a long stretch. Below the jump...

Pretty dumb, but its just a proof-of-concept. Need a better tagline. “The Year we Make WHAT?” What techspeak or legal education jargon will work with that? Probably nothing. But because it will be the 20th CALI conference, the eventual logo should incorporate something like this:

2009 CALI Conference is Now History

2009-06-20T21:09:00.003-05:00

I know now what our professors are dealing with, since I finally dragged a laptop to a few programs at the CALI conference and when the speaker lost my attention I checked my e-mail, looked up stuff, and tweeted about both the program I was watching and about the tweets from people watching the other programs (I actually have some useful notes and suggested resources from the tweets from people watching the other programs - wow). Based on the many laptop screens I’ve watched at this and other conference for years, this is nothing new (except for the tweeting). But I don’t think I”ll do this during the AALL meeting next month.

But overall I thought the conference was above average in content and usefulness and I have a lot of things to investigate further and tell the faculty and administration about, but the biggest thing I’m taking away from it is that there was no answer to the question of whether Facebook, Twitter, etc., etc., can do something, give our students and faculty something, do ANYTHING critical to our mission of educating future lawyers and supporting our faculty’s scholarly “pursuits” that we’re not doing already with some other set of tools we already have. And in the absence of a “yes” answer, by default the answer to that question would be no.

Oh, and I just thought - there WERE a lot of useful tweets about the content of the conference - but Twitter doesn't archive all tweets forever, right? Surely there's some other website or tool that helps you do that. I don't fell like looking into that now, but I just tweeted about it. Hahahaha.....

CALI Theme Song?

2009-06-19T16:19:00.004-05:00

I’ve always thought that “Information Undertow” by Dada would be a good theme song for CALI.

Hadn’t listened to it in a while, and now I realize its more about media/information saturation in general, but some of the lyrics in the middle come to mind at some many of the CALI sessions I’ve been to over the years:

I picked up a new toy
To get me some quick joy
It's got all the whistles and bells
My friends are all jealous
That's what they tell us
So why do I feel like hell?

I lit up my Apple
Surfed through the shrapnel
Accessed my online babe
She reads Aristotle
Says she's a model
But I've never seen her face

If I got this BLIP.Fm thing to embed correctly, this should be a link to streaming audio of the whole song:

No, not working. I swear I've done this before. Maybe this? -
dada - Information Undertow

Huh, no luck - you can listen to it AT Blip, but via and embedded link, it tries to play and then is listed as "unavailable". But I also found it streamable at Last.fm.

Videoconferencing is NOT Necessarily Always Eco-Friendly

2009-06-18T23:42:00.000-05:00

In the CALI Conference program today, “Videoconferencing Without Busting Your Budget” - which had a LOT of good information - a clip was shown from a professor talking about how videoconferencing (“VC”) was more eco-friendly than taking a plane to whatever meeting where he needed to speak ("the increase in emissions from the speaker boarding and flying an airplane are significantly greater than the electricity used in VC").

If you have to drive a car to your destination, like another professor in a different clip said then, yes, VC is more green. But unless you’re talking about the alternative of flying your private jet to the distant class/presentation/whatever, VC is not necessarily more eco-friendly compared to air travel because any given commercial airline flight to whatever destination is still going to fly whether or not the professor is on it. If empty seats are available the additional fuel expenditure due to the presence of your body and luggage on the plane probably pales in comparison to the environmental cost of videoconferencing for the 20+ students who will have to fire up their laptops and stayed glued to them for the hour or so you are videoconferencing with them: not all of them will have been on their laptop for that hour anyway, and I would bet that the environmental impact of the extra electricity that it takes for them to be on-line with your VC feed is more than the impact of you being an extra body on the airplane. (And even if that flight was overbooked, bumping passengers to other flights will still only result in a slight marginal increase in the total passenger/baggage mass being flown.)

CALI Conference 2009 & Boulder via Bike

2009-06-17T20:15:00.001-05:00

This bike-share thing in Boulder is great - sponsored by some realty company, there are apparently stations where you can pick up the bikes all around town, including at the two hotels for this year’s CALI Conference. So since I got here early this afternoon, I biked all around and after exploring downtown on foot promptly got turned around and forgot where I had locked the bike up. Luckily it was near the farmer’s market (which has more German sausage and beer than the farmer’s market back home) and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (which has some great exhibits as well as free admission on farmer’s market days!).

And, belatedly, I saw the Twitter hash tag for the CALI Conference. Call me clueless/newly clued - I see how that can be useful for things likes this - someone tweeted that there is another farmer’s market on Saturday, and noteworthy stuff going on tonight around town. Excellent! I still think its over-rated as a news tool, but it can be worth using at times.

Bill Hemmerling, R.I.P.

2009-06-17T13:33:00.009-05:00

All who loved his art learned a few weeks ago he was at home under hospice care, but it was still sad to learn that Bill Hemmerling finally succumbed to cancer and died Monday.

Like the Times-Picayune obituary described (and the video further below documents him accounting first-hand), he had a significant spiritual experience years ago when he had coffee at the Café du Monde in the French Quarter with a man who looked like, and who Bill believed was, Jesus. His simple explanation for coming late in life to creating his unique and often very spiritual art was

“One day when I let God out of the box I built, he danced with me.”

(Endure a sporadic 15 second commercial at the link below and watch the WWL news profile of Bill from a while back: http://www.wwltv.com/video/?z=y&nvid=371820&shu=1)

My wife and mother-in-law found his gallery in Ponchatoula several Strawberry Festivals ago and with her near-impeccable artistic instincts she (my wife, not mother-in-law) insisted we buy what eventually became our own mini-Hemmerling gallery. This being his pre-Jazz Fest poster period, we could both afford them and get a few of his more early, unique pieces, one of which we bought at a festival in Lafayette. That was a hot, swampy day, and I was in my Greg Allman phase but a few years later when the Ogden Museum feted Bill in honor of his aforementioned poster and I stopped by right after work and recently shorn, I waited in line and when I talked to him briefly I described the piece we had bought in Lafayette and he looked at my coat, tie, and buzzcut and said “yes, I remember - you weren’t dressed up and you had longer hair”.

We’re just two among many Hemmerling fans and he was like that with everyone he met, but that’s the special memory of him that came to mind when I learned he was finally at peace and having that second cup of coffee with Jesus...

Swiss Lawyer Hot-Tubbing Nude with Female Clients!!!

2009-06-10T09:41:00.007-05:00

(NSFW image below the jump...)

Well, its just a medieval wood cut, but being a lawyer back in 16th century Switzerland sure looks like it was a lot more fun that it is today:

Bailiffs back in 16th-century Switzerland were, apparently, some sort of municipal legal officer. But the husband seems to be upset because of the legal matters the wife is pursuing, and not because of the whole nude bathing thing since the tub looks like its on a porch or something else semi-exposed to the passersby with the cart and donkeys.

This was one of many great illustrations in the excellent book by Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History. There was no further explanation of whether Swiss bailiffs (who were, apparently, municipal legal officers and not private attorneys) regularly conducted business nude in a giant tub, and the notes didn't have any more information about the "Schweizer Chronik", but this is definitely a subject for further research.

"CALI Graphics", not Calligraphy

2009-06-06T16:47:00.007-05:00

Got this e-mail, and was about to delete it when I realized it wasn't spam:

Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 14:46:24 +0530
From: Pankaj PXXXXXX
To: bhuddle@loyno.edu
Subject: About CALI 2004

Hi,

As I seen your site on Web, My Daughter very much interested on
Calligraphic, she has done one month crease course as well,

I am very glade, as If you can send me some guide line, which will help
her in same.

thanks a ton.

Pankaj PXXXXX
XXX - Information Technology
Information Technology
XXXXXX & XXXX, Mumbai
Office: +91-22-4434 XXXX
Fax: +91-22-4434 XXXX
Cell: +91-98201XXXX
E-mail: pankaj.pXXXXXX@XXXXX.com

I think the language barrier was why he thought my page about the 2004 presentation I did on "CALI Graphics: Tips and Tricks":

(which just says to contact me for the handout - forgot I still had it up) was about calligraphy. He e-mailed me back when I explained that my handwriting sucked and I wouldn't be much help with his daughter's calligraphy:

Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 22:32:43 +0530
From: Pankaj PXXXXX
To: bhuddle@loyno.edu
Subject: Re: About CALI 2004

Hi Brian,

Thanks for your reply, Yes you are right I have confuse.

Pankaj PXXXXXX
E-mail: pankaj.pXXXXXX@XXXXXX.com

The presentation itself is archived online (Windows streaming video). Forever, apparently. Long after all CALI conference presenters are gone, our archived video presentations will still be on-line.

May 2009 Netflix Summary

2009-06-02T11:03:00.019-05:00

Everybody tracks their Netflix rentals with a spreadsheet, right? That makes it easy to measure the average time at home for all your movies in a given month and determine the per-movie breakdown of the membership fee. :)

May 2009 Netflix Summary	Arrived at Home	Received at Netflix	Days at Home	Monthly Average Days at Home	Cost Per Movie
Atlantic City	05/05	05/20	15
Factory Girl	05/05	05/11	6
Frozen River	05/05	05/20	15
Wendy and Lucy	05/12	05/20	8
The Da Vinci Code	05/21	05/27	6
Steal This Movie	05/21	05/27	6
Time of the Wolf	05/21	05/27	6
Last House on the Left (1972)	05/28	06/01	4
Irreversible	05/28	06/01	4
Sunshine State	05/28	06/02	5
				7.5	$1.85

Irreversible and Atlantic City were probably the best two out of this bunch. Frozen River was also very good. I was just curious to finally watch Da Vinci Code since I saw Angels and Demons the other day but had never seen Da Vinci Code. The original Last House on the Left is probably pretty deserving of its reputation, but like a lot of notable movies its hard to tell how ground-breaking it was way back then. It made for a good double-feature when I watched it and Irreversible, and luckily I had no grisly nightmares than night.