Starting today, we're enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the “Legal opinions and journals” radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of “separate but equal” facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.
The Prediction Market Clusters founded in 2004 in Silicon Valley, are a global commons and open community for prediction markets and collective intelligence networks worldwide. The open and agnostic community is a focused action/research collaboration network of vendors, academia, traders, users, developers, markets, regulators and stakeholders. All are welcome. The goal is to provide Next Practices, awareness, diffusion, adoption and pull-through for enterprise, institutional and consumer prediction markets. PM Clusters conduct popular, distributed leadership retreats for enterprise prediction markets, Wisdom of Crowds, collective intelligence networks and collaborative forecasting worldwide.
Phi Beta Iota: David Pozen, JD Yale 2007, has provided advance access to the complete draft on his paper forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review, and we are both appreciative of this offering, and impressed–deeply impressed–by this seminal work. At a time when the U.S. “security clearance” system is so totally hosed up (and 70,000 clearances behind) that we might do better with with “spin the bottle,” the author is highlighting the reality that most of the secrecy we buy with $75 billion a year in taxpayer funds is not really that important–not only have others, such as Rodney McDaniel, made it clear that 809% to 90% of all “official” secrecy is about turf protection and budget share rather than national security, but it is administrative secrecy rather than “deep secrecy” that is leveraged by a very few with their own informal system for assigning trust, generally at the expense of the larger mass of uninformed individual who are treated as “collateral damage” that is of little consequence. The download options are at the top of the linked page
Fortunately, most librarians have gotten used to the fact that the Internet is a tremendous boon to researchers and that free information is a fantastic idea. Sure, we haven't yet reallocated our organizational resources to recognize this fact—our staff time is much more likely to be devoted to acquiring and messing about with purchased information than in making good information from our archives, our labs, or the web more easily available. [Emphasis added.]
Barbara Fister
We need to separate our value—the way we curate information, champion its availability in the face of intolerance of unpopular ideas and economic disparity, and create conditions for learning how to find and use good information—from the amount of money it takes to acquire stuff on the not-so-open market. We need to be quite clear that good information is good information, no matter how it's funded. And we need to find creative ways to partner with those who add value to information and find sustainable models for the editorial work that can make good academic work better.
There are many expensive programs for video teleconferencing. Some even require a monthly fee. Luckily, we have found Skype and VSee. These two programs are full of useful features, easy to install, user-friendly and, best of all, cost you nothing to use.
Skype, available at www.skype.com, is a free program that allows video and audio conversations with other Skype users. All you need is an internet connection and a microphone. Skype also allows you to make calls from your computer to any phone in the world for a small fee (less than 2 cents a minute).
VSee, from www.vseelab.com, is a lesser-known free program that allows you to share your desktop (application sharing) while conducting audio and video conferences. Any window on your computer screen can be shared with other VSee users in your teleconference. The better data collaboration lets you share ideas as if you were in the same room together.
Internet visionary fears an end to openness as Internet rivals consolidate power.
The Web, which began life as an open community where information and tools were freely shared across geographic, political, and social boundaries, is in danger of becoming segmented into a federation of closed camps led by a handful of increasingly powerful vendors, said Internet pundit Tim O'Reilly.”We're heading back into an ugly time,” said O'Reilly, during a keynote address Tuesday at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City.
O'Reilly said efforts by Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), Apple, and other tech vendors—as well as publishers like Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones—to create closed communities around their products and services are jeopardizing the freedom, and the spirit, of the Web. Continue reading “Journal: Web War II”
