Peter James (born 1948) is an international best-selling British writer of crime fiction.  He was born in Brighton, the son of Cornelia James, the former glovemaker to Queen Elizabeth II.  James has written 28 novels, including the International best-selling crime thriller series featuring Brighton-based Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, which have sold 17 million copies worldwide.  James's books have been translated into 36 languages.  James has been involved in 26 movies in writer and/or producing roles.  Find bibliography and list of awards at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_James_(writer)

Built on top of Watson, IBM’s cognitive computer, ROSS is a digital legal expert designed to power through legal research.  ROSS claims its language processing capabilities allow it to respond “intelligently” to questions posed by lawyers.  You ask your questions in plain English and ROSS then reads through the entire body of recorded law, gathering evidence and drawing inferences about the materials it has evaluated.  It then returns a relevant answer with cited references and topical readings from legislation, case law and secondary sources to get you up-to-speed quickly.  Further, once the research is done, ROSS will keep you up to date on new court decisions that could impact open matters.  Similar to Watson, ROSS learns from its interactions and reportedly provides better results after each use.  The law firm Baker & Hostetler has recently introduced ROSS as the “new associate” in its 50-lawyer insolvency practice.  The press release from the firm insists only that “emerging technologies like cognitive computing and other forms of machine learning can help enhance the services we deliver to our clients.”  There is no indication of what those enhanced services will be.  In view of ROSS, it is only natural that Thomson Reuters, the owner of Westlaw, is collaborating with IBM to integrate cognitive computing (ie, Watson) into its “customer solutions” and has established a data and innovation lab (Thomson Reuters Labs) in Waterloo, Ontario (Canada’s Silicon Valley) to “bring together our unrivalled information assets and industry expertise with experts who can help make those assets increasingly actionable for our customers.”  It is certain that, in time, ROSS will not be the only AI-enhanced legal research service on the market and that AI will move into enterprise-level, in-house applications for knowledge management (KM) and practice management.  As a rule, technology has been used in industry not to enhance service but to realize economies.  By implementing ROSS and sparing its lawyers the onus of research, a law firm should be able to handle more matters in the same amount of time, increasing the lawyers’ productivity and the firm’s profitability.  Alternatively, with the competitive advantage provided by ROSS, a firm could lower its fees without reducing profits, a definite service to clients.  Another possibility is that, with improved productivity, the firm would be able to maintain levels of profitably with fewer lawyers.  Louis Mirando  http://www.slaw.ca/2016/06/15/artificial-intelligence-in-law-what-are-the-consequences-for-law-librarians/  Thank you, Muse reader!

Was it a saloon or an estate car or a people carrier?  Britishisms from Dead Man's Grip (Roy Grace #7), a novel by Peter James  Saloon means sedan, estate car means station wagon, and people carrier means minivan.  See https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-so-many-differences-in-car-terminology-between-British-and-American-English

Posner’s Ruling: Jargon, you’re out of order!  Posted on June 28, 2016 by thebettereditor   If you’re a writer or editor or someone who follows the latest developments (such as they are) of the English language, you’ve probably spent time on various grammar and vocabulary and writing advice sites.  You’ll know some of the popular ones (Grammar Girl) or the elder statesmen (World Wide Words), or your taste might run to the more specialized (Garner’s LawProse blog) or the eclectic (Language Log).  Today’s post is to bring your attention to the wit and good sense of Judge Richard Posner, a respected member of the the US Court of Appeals (Seventh Circuit).  I’ve been doing a lot of work lately involving research, digestion, and summary writing on legal issues.  A few times each week I’ll need to find the text of a decision and read it through for details (or at least scan it to find what I’m looking for).  While most court decisions are less tiresome than many academic papers, these sorts of court documents, on the other hand, have a special consistency to them:  they frequently are unnecessarily wordy and rely on overlong sentences and a peculiar dialect of stock phrases and repetitive constructions, liberally salted with legal jargon.  So it was with interest that I recently followed a link with the headline “Richard Posner Slams ‘Stale, Opaque, Confusing Jargon’ in Judges’ Opinions.”  Jargon actually serves some useful purposes, chief among them being to identify specialists in a field to each other.  Every profession has its jargon:  doctors and nurses use terms that others don’t (or use familiar terms in unfamiliar ways); so do engineers, web developers, soldiers, chefs, and truck drivers.  Jargon as a concept has no class or income level, although any specific type of jargon will probably be circumscribed by those things.  While jargon is a quick way to share important ideas in a field, and a quick way to identify who is qualified in the field, it’s also used in an opposite way:  it’s a quick way both to identify who is not knowledgeable in a field, and it’s a useful tool to exclude outsiders from understanding what’s going on among the ‘in’ crowd.  It can be argued that in this way jargon is no different from teen slang terms, although it’s not usually a matter of knowing who’s cool and who’s not (and the terms don’t change as quickly to exclude outsiders who’ve cracked the code).  While I concede value in jargon, Posner doesn’t—at least in the writing of legal opinions.  He’s entirely against the idea and believes that legal language should be accessible to the non-specialist (“everything judges do can be explained in straightforward language–and should be”).  His primary argument, at least in the decision getting recent attention, is that lawyers and judges must do their part to exterminate that old literary vermin, the weasel word.  He notes how “actual guilt” and “actual innocence” don’t really mean anything more than “guilt” and “innocence.”  A term like “actual” on the page follows the long tradition ofweasel words (Teddy Roosevelt railed against them in a 1916 speech) which, even if they don’t change the meaning of a sentence (and they frequently do) still manage to weaken the writing.  (That’s the original meaning of weasel words:  they suck the life out of other words, the way a weasel sucks the life out of an egg.  The idea that weasel words are used by slippery people trying to weasel out of something came much later.)  Christopher Daly   Read more at https://thebettereditor.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/posners-ruling-jargon-youre-out-of-order/

Alvin Toffler, the U.S. author whose visions of accelerating social change guided Chinese leaders, American politicians and business moguls through the best-selling books “Future Shock” and “The Third Wave,” died June 27, 2016 at the age of 87.  Working with his wife Heidi, Toffler predicted the unfolding of what he coined “the Information Age” and became a guru of sorts to world statesmen.  Read extensive article at https://www.denverpost.com/2016/06/29/author-alvin-toffler-dies/  Find quotes by Alvin Toffler at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/alvin_toffler.html

Experts say Zika virus may be spreading in mosquitoes and people in Texas, other states y Seema Yasmin   published 29 June 2016 01:52 PM  updated 29 June 2016 02:36 PM  The Zika virus may be spreading through local mosquito and human populations in Texas, Arizona and California.  The infection could go undetected until babies are born with birth defects, some tropical medicine experts say.  The virus has been linked to nerve damage in adults and to brain, skull and eye deformities in babies.  Zika is the first mosquito-borne disease known to cross the placenta and cause birth defects in humans.  More than 800 people have been diagnosed with Zika in the continental U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  The CDC reports that 265 pregnant women in the U.S. have the virus.  All of those infections were acquired in South America and the Caribbean, except for 11 cases of sexually transmitted Zika in the U.S.  But experts warn that mosquitoes in the Gulf Coast area and warmer parts of the U.S. could be infected with the virus and that local outbreaks of Zika are to be expected.  http://www.dallasnews.com/business/health-care/20160629-experts-say-zika-virus-may-be-spreading-in-mosquitoes-and-people-in-texas-other-states.ece  Dr. Seema Yasmin, a physician and former CDC epidemiologist, is a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.  Check out her new column, Debunked at http://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-news/20160627-introducing-debunked-dr.-yasmin-separates-fact-from-fiction-about-science-and-medicine.ece  

8-year-old’s donation is one for the books by Ryan Dunn   Lucas County (Ohio) jail inmates received a fresh set of reading material June 30, 2016 thanks to 8-year-old Parker Felt.  He and his mother parked outside the building with 100 new novels for the jail’s library.  They hope this donation can help inmates while they wait in incarceration.  Sheriff John Tharp thanked him in a meeting outside the jail, and employees helped unload the books from their van.  The gifts include mystery and war novels.  "This means a lot for the jail that we have additional books for inmates to be able to read, and stay busy, and think ahead,” Sheriff Tharp said.  The gift was also a morale builder for deputies, who appreciate his giving back, the sheriff said.  “These are good things that they get to see.  So often throughout their day, they see a lot of negatives, but this is something positive that they’ll remember too for the rest of their lives,” he said.  http://www.toledoblade.com/local/2016/07/01/8-year-old-s-donation-is-one-for-the-books.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1491  July 1, 2016  On this date in 1862, the Russian State Library was founded as the Library of the Moscow Public Museum.  On this date in 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg began.