Last week, the dean of the law school at Villanova, John Y. Gotanda, admitted that the school had knowingly reported inaccurate data to the American Bar Association. In a letter circulated Feb. 4, Gotanda wrote: On Thursday, January 20, 2011, I became aware of inaccuracies in the admissions data reported to the American Bar Association (ABA) by VLS for years prior to 2010. The inaccuracies were discovered and reported to me by a special Law School committee charged with assessing and enhancing the effectiveness of our Academic Success Program. Click here for a post, which contains the contents of the letter, over at Above the Law. Click here for ATL’s follow-up post. A university spokesperson later told the ABA Journal that “at this point it appears that it is limited to LSAT and GPA scores.” Villanova spokesman Jonathan Gust declined to speculate about why the inaccurate reporting to the ABA occurred. An investigation is reportedly continuing. WSJ Law Blog February 8, 2011

A piece of legislation proposed February 9 would require University of Iowa to sell the famed Jackson Pollock "Mural," which had an estimated value of $140 million in 2008, to provide scholarship assistance to UI undergraduate students from Iowa. House Study Bill 84 was introduced by state Rep. Scott Raecker, R-Urbandale, who is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Raecker did not immediately return a message seeking comment. Peggy Guggenheim donated the 1943 painting to UI in 1951. The regents' review described it as "one of the most important works by one of the most important American artists. Its cultural value to the nation is such that it would be welcome in any major museum in the country. But it also has a unique value to the University of Iowa." http://www.press-citizen.com/article/20110210/NEWS01/102100341/Has-time-run-out-for-the-Pollock-

Emerging Legal Issues in Social Media: Part I by Ken Strutin Social media is engaging masses of people in unprecedented ways. At the same time, the diversity of social networking applications has permeated and extended the range of legal investigation, discovery and litigation. As human activity is played out and recorded online, the laws governing cyber-behavior, privacy and discovery continue to evolve. And the distinction between public and private discourse blurs as the demand grows to fill limitless self-published cyber-columns. The materials collected in this article aim to provide a sense of the emerging issues created by the crosshatch of social media and legal practice. They represent a current sampling of notable developments in law enforcement, law practice, civil and criminal litigation, and technology's influence on human behavior. Due to the breadth of this topic, the article will be published in two parts. Part I covers select statutes, case law, ethics opinions, and news media. Part II will address pertinent materials appearing in professional journals and blogs, law reviews, reports, books and secondary resources. http://www.llrx.com/features/legalissuessocialmedia.htm

Deep Web Research 2011 by Marcus P. Zillman, Bots, Blogs and News Aggregators (http://www.BotsBlogs.com/) is a keynote presentation that I have been delivering over the last several years. Much of my information comes from the extensive research that I have completed over during this time into the "invisible" or the "deep" web. The Deep Web covers in the vicinity of 1 trillion plus pages of information located through the world wide web in various files and formats that current Internet search engines cannot find or have difficulty accessing. The current search engines locate and provide access to hundreds of billions of pages at this time. In the last several years, some of the more comprehensive search engines have written algorithms to search the deeper portions of the world wide web by attempting to find files such as .pdf, .doc, .xls, ppt, .ps. and others. These files are predominately used by businesses to communicate their information within their organization or to disseminate information to the external world from their organization. Searching for this information using deeper search techniques and the latest algorithms allows researchers to obtain a vast amount of corporate information that was previously unavailable or inaccessible. http://www.llrx.com/features/deepweb2011.htm

To my knowledge, you can no longer buy powdered cleansers, only liquid cleaning agents. For homemade cleanser, try: straight baking soda for scouring away soap scum and mildew. Sprinkle it into the tub and add just enough water to make a paste. Then scour away. Spray the chrome with the counter top mixture (above) of vinegar and water then wipe down to make it shine. If you have heavy mold or mildew, straight vinegar sprayed directly on the affected area works well for loosening it. Many other recipes are at: http://www.savingadvice.com/articles/2008/06/24/102178_recipes-for-homemade-cleansers.html

Buzz marketing Chief Executive Officer Kitty Kolding of Irvington, New York-based House Party has a database of about 900,000 potential hosts, who fill out online demographic profiles and compete to throw product parties. Corporate clients are willing to pay House Party an average of $250,000 for 2,000 parties because the company's staff uses such criteria as age, ethnicity, and breed of family dog to select the hosts best suited to talking up a certain product or brand, according to Kolding. That level of targeting is nirvana for those pitching consumer products—but often tough to achieve using conventional marketing. While companies such as Kraft, P&G, and Kimberly-Clark (KMB) continue to pour money into TV and Web advertising, they're mindful that consumers are programmed to "resist the sales push," says Ronald C. Goodstein, a marketing professor at Georgetown University. "The advantage of word-of-mouth is if I'm giving you a personal recommendation because we're friends, you don't counterargue that." http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_07/b4215030210139.htm?campaign_id=rss_topStories

The GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over eight million placenames that are available for download free of charge. http://www.geonames.org/ Sample search for Castile, NY produced eight records http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=castile%2C+NY&country= I was surprised to find elevation, latitude and longitude for each item found.

Greg Prickman, a University of Iowa Special Collections librarian, took an 800-year-old book out of a large box and placed it on a table. Prior to now, students had to make a special trip to the Main Library to see the tome's animal-skin pages, but with more than 400,000 pieces of the library’s archives digitized, students can access them online. Now, library officials are pushing digitizing further, working on all of the 20,000 items in the Civil War collection in time for its sesquicentennial. http://web.resourceshelf.com/go/resourceblog/63799

Byron Bennett can legally call his East Village shop the Chocolate Library. This fall the education department — which regulates the use of the words library, school, academy, institute and kindergarten in certificates of incorporation and company names — rejected Mr. Bennett’s application. The thought was that the store might be confused with one of those places that lends out books or provides free Internet access. But after a call from Diner’s Journal, officials reconsidered. Mr. Bennett received a letter from the department on January 31 telling him that he could amend his business’s incorporated title, Chocolate 101, to reflect the name on his shop’s awning. http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/o-k-youre-a-library-state-tells-chocolate-shop/

Government investigators have rejected claims that electronic defects caused Toyota cars and trucks to accelerate out of control, a finding released Tuesday that offers a measure of long-awaited vindication for the world's largest automaker and shifts blame to the drivers who reported the incidents. The report, based on work by NASA engineers, deflates accusations by drivers suing Toyota that mysterious electronic glitches instigated the episodes of runaway cars. It also supports the industry trend of entrusting critical engine operations to ever more sophisticated electronics and microprocessors. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/08/AR2011020806400.html