Friend's blogs

Watching the Second Prez Debate

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:48 GMT

Tonight, I'm sitting at the Campus Center Ballroom surrounding by about 100 students watching the second presidential debate. It's heartening to me to see such enthusiasm for politics in the students in this hall. The College Republicans have their McCain/Palin signs that they wave periodically when they find McCain saying something rousing. The College Democrats have been more reticent but on occasion have raised their Obama/Biden signs. At a few moments, there were loud cheers and applause for answers and even for questions asked by citizens in the townhall.

I've written about this before, but I enjoy seeing people viewing politics like they do Sunday Football. Some may say that's problematic, as it's emotional and irrational; but I think such participation can ultimately be good. Football or politics, when you watch, you learn. You pick up names, dates, events, you learn about problems and issues and strategies. Exposure is a good thing. Even if the exposure is motivated by a desire to "root for your team."

Root away, students!

Pushing Forward on the Legal Casebook Idea

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 08:30 GMT

There's a lot of energy coming out of the Collins/Skover/Rubin/Testye workshop of a few weekends ago on the next-generation legal casebook. It's the sign of a great gathering: after you've landed at your home airport, you are still thinking about the issues that you were kicking around at the conference. I think it's also a sign of the strength of the idea: something of this sort *will* happen if we keep that energy up.

One follow-up is a call that Gene Koo and CALI has organized to see if cyberlaw law professors would want to be first up. It's a very practical next step, and one with promise. As one such cyberlaw prof, I'm definitely in. This specific project is an obvious follow-up to much of what JZ has been working on for years, through H20 and otherwise.

The Future of the Legal Course Book

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 16:55 GMT

Seattle University School of Law is hosting a workshop on the “Future of the Legal Course Book.” It's a very nicely organized, timely session, brought together by Prof. David Skover, Ron Collins, and deans Ed Rubin of Vanderbilt and Kellye Testy of Seattle University. On the table: how should we rethink the legal case book in the name of improving pedagogy in law schools?

It occurs to me is that the key conceptual shift is that virtually all information – whether or not related to the law – is now created, stored, and shared in digital format for starters. Our students, too, are “born digital.” Our students have a very different relationship to information today than they did a generation ago. They were small children when the DVD replaced the VCR. Research, for our students, is more likely to mean a Google or Lexis search from a web browser than a trip to the library. They rarely, if ever, buy the newspaper in hard copy, but they graze through copious amounts of news and other information online. (Even some law professors are now more comfortable in the use of online tools for legal research and analysis than in the system of Reporters and Pocket Parts.) Law school community members are learning, accessing information, and expressing themselves in new, digitally-inspired ways – sometimes good, sometimes not so good. Others outside our community are increasingly learning about us and what we do from our web presence.

Five to ten years from now, I think it's likely that legal case books, too, will be Born Digital — and then rendered in a variety of formats, whether a good old-fashioned book or a Kindle/eReader file or a series of web pages and interactive exercises. One could imagine that some students would click “buy in paper” and would get a print-on-demand version of the book sent overnight to them in the mail (say, for $49.95). Others would click “buy it for my Tablet/Reader/Kindle/Whatever” (for $49.95 minus some discount). Still others, perhaps hearing-impaired students, would click on “read it to me,” and so forth.

There are surely reasons why such a future may not come to pass. Some have raised concerns about legacy IP rights, strong interests by publishers in the current regime, and so forth, as barriers to such a future. I think that the primary question to ask is about new investments: the bulk of our new investment in teaching materials and platforms be placed in materials that are cleared in a way that facilitates this future. The barriers we should focus on are those that stand in the way of our shifting (at least some of) of new investments (of time, money, etc.) from one primarily oriented toward the analog to one that has a substantial digital emphasis in the first instance.

To be clear: Books remain important. Books are not going away anytime soon; nor should they. Hard-copies of books are important on many levels. Many people prefer to read hard-copies of books to digital forms of books, despite massive ongoing investments in technologies like the Sony Reader, the Amazon Kindle, and new technologies at the MIT Media Lab; we like to curl up with them in bed, collect them on bookshelves as signals of our knowledge (or for easy access), take them to the beach, and so forth. Books represent a stable format, unlikely the constantly-changing digital formats that imperil digital record-keeping processes over the long-term. Books are the cornerstone, for now at least, of the large and important publishing industry, whose leaders play an important role in democracies and cultures around the world. Books have the advantage, under United States law at least, of being covered by the first sale doctrine (you can give them away, or lend them, or sell them in a secondary market). But books have downsides, too – the “slow fire” phenomenon, the high cost of production (compared to their digital counterparts), and the high cost of storage and distribution. And, as many have pointed out here in Seattle, the presumption of *only* the traditional form of the book for case-based law teaching is inhibiting experimentation with new pedagogies.

As law schools, I think our work in the area of academic computing should be to facilitate this bright future of course materials born digital and rendered in various formats. We need to make it easy for faculty to experiment with new technologies in support of their teaching, research, and scholarship – especially in an era of large-scale curricular reform at places like Vanderbilt, Harvard, and others.

And there's a need for leadership across schools, too, to develop the platform that makes this future possible. There are building blocks coming together: CALI's eLangdell, Rice's Connexions, and so forth. Publishers have a role to play here, too, both through their own experimentation and participation with broader, open efforts. It will be fun to be part of such an effort.

New article: The 2008 Digital Campaign in the United States: The Real Lesson for British Parties

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 05:00 GMT

Nick Anstead and I have just published an article "The 2008 Digital Campaign in the United States: The Real Lesson for British Parties" in a special double issue of the journal Renewal. The issue is timed to coincide with the UK Labour Party's annual conference, which takes place next week. It contains a range of interesting papers.

Here's an excerpt from our conclusion, followed by the editors' description of the volume.

"Our analysis leads to an important conclusion for British politicians seeking to harness the power of the internet.

While it is certainly the case that British parties and candidates can learn something from the United States, precisely how they should measure their success in so doing is far from straightforward. The challenge is as much one of institutional design as it is about the adoption of the latest technology: how do we reform British politics to set free the full democratic potential of the internet? This is a long term project, but it could lead to huge rewards. Many of the issues identified in this article as significant are now frequently debated in the UK: democratising party organisations, forging links between parties and broader citizen campaigns, reforming campaign finance laws, and entrenching a culture of constitutional pluralism, to name but a few. It is now imperative that the relationship between political institutions and technology is considered in these debates.

The real lesson of Obama 2008 is that British parties need to approach this issue from two complementary perspectives. They should design their online campaigns so that they mesh with the aspects of their organisational structures and Britain’s electoral environment that they value and wish to maintain. But they should consider simultaneously how they might democratise their organisational structures and the electoral environment in ways likely to catalyse internet-enabled civic engagement."

RENEWAL Vol 16 No 3/4

A special double issue for autumn 2008 offers essential reading on the present economic, political, environmental, social, and ideological crisis. And it points to the new ideas, initiatives and alliances that could contain the right's revival and renew progressive politics.

With contributions from ADAM LENT on the excesses of the City and the crisis of civility ... MATTHEW WATSON on Gordon Brown's choice of intellectual hero... GRAHAM TURNER on the credit crunch as the consequence of unequal globalisation ... JOHN HOUGHTON on the failure of the market to deliver affordable and sustainable housing ... WILL DAVIES on the limits of New Labour's expertise ... SUNDER KATWALA on the need for a new pluralism ... JON CRUDDAS on reclaiming aspiration ... ANDREW SIMMS on the prospects for a green New Deal ... ROBIN WILSON on social democratic solutions to today's global challenges ... DAVID LAMMY on what we can learn from the US elections ... NICK ANSTEAD AND ANDREW CHADWICK on online campaigning ... DEBORAH LITTMAN on building grassroots movements ... KARMA NABULSI on mobilising to reanimate political institutions ...

PLUS.

a major essay by STUART WHITE on the economic thought of Andrew Glyn...

Notebook: LEN DUVALL on Tory London; and GIDEON RACHMAN on McCain vs Obama...

...and reviews by COLIN CROUCH on 'bad capitalism'; PAUL SEGAL on the causes of global poverty; and BEN JACKSON on the return of American liberalism

RENEWAL 16.3/4 is being sent out to subscribers now and can be ordered online from http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals.html

RENEWAL

Email info@renewal.org.uk

Website http://www.renewal.org.uk

A New Way to Predict Election Outcomes

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:30 GMT

I don't have time to go into why public opinions polls are so problematic at election time.

But, there's a new predictive model out there, that's worth some attention. Fivethirtyeight.com is the brain child of Nate Silver. He takes a large swatch of polls, their current results of the "if the election were held to today, whom would you vote for" question, then plugs it into a statistical model that is then re-run dozens of times to establish the likely outcome of the election. His poll was an excellent predictor of actual outcomes during the primary.

My Palin number

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:55 GMT

During South Korea's latest presidential election last December, my colleague Han and I closely followed the race and collected Web data built around the candidates' respective e-campaigns. We were very excited when a preliminary analysis of a part of the data was invited to the plenary poster session at the Harvard Networks in Political Science (NIPS) conference last June, but for a combination of various reasons, neither of us could make it and we therefore had to turn it down. Childish as it may sound, I was most disappointed that I had missed the chance to see with my own eyes if the campus is really like how it was romantically described in The Paper Chase. Things are kind of “on pause” at the moment as {In the most determined voice} it's time for me to end my student life first.

Anyway, from this occasion, I was put on the PolNet-L, a moderated listserv set up as an outcome of the conference and have been regularly receiving messages about what's going on in this field (For anyone interested, the moderator Scott McClurg can be reached at mcclurg [at] siu.edu). This post is about a recent entry by James Fowler.

As many of you know, starting in the 1960s, mathematicians had fun at parties (no, really) by trying to figure out their Erdős number. This referred to their minimum collaboration distance between themselves and the extremely prolific mathematician Paul Erdős — Erdős has number 0, people who coauthored a paper with him have number 1, their coauthors have number 2, and so on.

[...]

Well, today I learned from my neighbors that Timothy Carr, the man from whom I bought my current house, was leaning towards voting for Obama until McCain announced his vice-presidential nominee (stay with me here). But in what must have been a stunned voice, he said “I can't vote for Obama now — I kissed Sara Palin when I was in high school!” (Needless to say, Carr is from Alaska)

So, astonishingly, this seems to give me a “Palin number” of at most 2 [...]

As American politics always sounds very far to me, I didn't think it was a message relevant to me at first and was gonna quickly cast it aside. Then it struck me that a friend from high school worked as an interpreter at the meeting between President Lee of South Korea and President Bush at Camp David last April. This means, hang on, my Palin number is actually no bigger than 3!!!

Me — Kim JY — Bush — Palin

Hmmm, the world might be as small as people say it is.

When the machine stops

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:58 GMT

Internet access in the student halls of residence was down over the weekend. As an official Internet addict, I was feeling disoriented and unsettled, evidently. You might be thinking that my thesis must have finally received my undivided attention that it deserves, but the thing is that nowadays even my writing doesn't seem to advance much if I cannot do occasional Web searches along the way. I kind of laughed off when I came across an article in Telegraph about the Queen's visit to the Google headquarters scheduled for next month, but perhaps it was more illustrative of the technological influence we are under than I first noticed.

Anyway, since I had no other choices, I went through the old stack of papers - the academic articles and reports that I have collected and labelled as ‘to-read'. Funnily enough, the first one I ended up reading in bed was E. M. Forster's “The Machine Stops” (1909). If you have read it, I'm sure you've got the irony already. If you haven't, you will see the irony as soon as you start reading the first paragraph. The story was just so very fitting for me to read under the Internet-deprived circumstance. It's not the only story that describes the future with human-beings' growing technological dependency, which eventually leads them to commit themselves - whether knowingly or not - to the point of being controlled by “the Machine”. Still, it's quite impressive given the fact that this particular piece was written a century ago.

I wouldn't paint such a dark picture of the future. And despite the growing cynic in me, I would certainly never compare the Internet with “the Machine” or any other mean mechanical villains in sci-fi. However, the thought that occurred to me on this occasion was that I might be looking for some sort of assurance, if not anything else, when I'm taking in information delivered by Web search engines. This could potentially be a dangerous thing.

Why am I suddenly getting all philosophical about technology? Well, I'm not. This whole yada-yada is in fact a *prelude* to the song below: The Humans Are Dead (by Flight of the Conchords).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGoi1MSGu64

How could you not adore them?

My favorite poem

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:02 GMT

I'm in a poetry mood.

My favorite poem is by Theodore Roethke. This one reminds me of my dad.

My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

Kay Ryan, Poet Laureat

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 11:59 GMT

I heard Kay Ryan on a show last night. I went hunting for a few poems of hers. I found this one. It speaks to me. Makes me think of my mom and my grandmother.

THINGS SHOULDN'T BE SO HARD

A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space—
however small —
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn't
be so hard.

Trying to Vote in the Primary

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 10:35 GMT

Today is primary day in New York. I just went to vote. The poll worker pushed the reset lever on our ancient pull-lever voting machines too hard, and it jammed the system. No voting. The poor guy whose vote was now screwed up had to vote absentee.

Will New York ever get its new voting machines?!? We're the last state in the country still voting on 50 year old (or older!) machines. Incredible.