Job-killing legal technologies? They only look that way by D. Casey Flaherty It is stunning how quickly technological
advances become a ‘natural’ part of our landscape. In the mid 1990s, Richard
Susskind was being
labeled “dangerous” and “possibly insane.”
His heresy? Susskind suggested
that email would become the principal means of communication between lawyers
and clients. His detractors asserted
that he understood neither security nor confidentiality and was bringing the
profession into ill repute. Most legal
technologies look like job-killers until the facts prove otherwise. Westlaw digitized legal research. In theory, digital access to case law should
have made lawyers much more efficient.
More efficiency means less work means less demand for lawyer labor. Yet, Westlaw and other digital repositories
substantially expanded the research universe.
As a result, there were more lawyers doing more research than ever
before. Legal librarians, too, should
have been made obsolete by Westlaw and, subsequently, Google. That is, if you take the blinkered view that
a librarian’s primary responsibility is maintaining physical books. But, if you actually understand that
librarians are professional locators and managers of information, then the explosion in
information that has accompanied the transition to a digital world makes them
more valuable, not less.
http://www.abajournal.com/legalrebels/article/job_killing_legal_technologies?utm_source=internal&utm_medium=navigation&utm_campaign=navbar
Thank you, Muse reader!
Pvt. Robert
N. Jabo, of the 8th New Hampshire
infantry, was dying of tuberculosis in Washington’s Harewood Hospital and
needed to write to his family. The Civil
War had been over for months. Most
soldiers had gone home. And Jabo’s wife
and six children were no doubt wondering where he was. But he was sick and illiterate. So a cheerful, bearded man who regularly
visited hospitalized soldiers offered to write a letter for him. “My dear wife,” it began, “you must excuse me
for not having written. . . . have not been very well.” The letter explained that it was penned by “a
friend who is now sitting by my side.” And
in a postscript, the friend identified himself: “Walt Whitman.” Archive
specialist Jackie Budell's project on Civil War pension documents recently
unearthed a letter written by Walt Whitman on behalf of an illiterate dying
soldier to the soldier’s wife. The
rare Whitman “soldier letter,” one of only three known to exist, was discovered
last month by a National Archives volunteer who is part of a team preparing
Civil War widows’ pension files to be digitized and placed online. Whitman, the American poet, journalist and
essayist, was known for making the rounds of the local hospitals, where he
would dispense snacks and money. He
would also sit with wounded and dying soldiers and write letters for them. “I do a good deal of this, of course, writing
all kinds, including love letters,” Whitman wrote in a dispatch for the New
York Times in 1864. “Many sick and
wounded soldiers have not written home to parents, brothers, sisters, and even
wives . . . for a long, long time,” he wrote.
“I always encourage the men to write, and promptly write for them,” he
wrote . A century and a half later, few
of those letters have surfaced. On the
afternoon of Feb. 3, 2016, volunteer Catherine Cusack Wilson found one. Wilson, a librarian in Falls Church, was
sorting through pension files in the preparation room at the archives building
in downtown Washington when she pulled the Jabo file from its large brown
envelope. Her task was to look through
the papers to make sure nothing had been wrongly filed and check to see whether
any document was damaged and needed conservation.
Q. I have always associated multiplication with
addition (more), and division with subtraction (less), so I
don’t understand current phrases such as “three times less” and “twice as
small.” Can you explain? - Jack
Clark A. In
arithmetic, the term “times” means “instances of,” in the way “two times three”
means “two instances of three,” or six.
A person who says “three times less” probably means “one-third as much,”
and one who says “twice as small” likely means “half as small.” In short, they have it backward! - Marilyn
vos Savant
BURNT is the story of Chef Adam Jones
(Bradley Cooper) who had it all and lost it.
A two-star Michelin Chef, whose ability to create explosions of taste is
undermined by his bad habits and rock-star attitude. Dishes and recipes created by Marcus Wareing,
the internationally acclaimed and multi-award winning, Michelin starred British
Chef and Chef Consultant for Burnt.
Download recipes at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8SlglBF4EknOGFaeFM2ZnFqZ1U/view Movie-inspired recipe from Castello
Cheese--Sweeney's Simply Satisfying Cacio E Pepe: http://www.brandpointcontent.com/printsite/food-recipes-and-entertaining/unlock-your-inner-chef-with-dinner-inspired-by-the-movie-burnt-,20933
Although they did not fix their schedules to the clock in the modern sense, ancient civilizations adjusted
daily schedules to the sun more flexibly than modern Daylight Saving Time (DST)
does, often dividing daylight into twelve hours regardless of day length, so that each daylight hour was
longer during summer. For example, Roman water clocks had different scales for different
months of the year: at Rome's latitude the third hour from sunrise, hora tertia, started by modern standards
at 09:02 solar time and lasted 44 minutes at the winter solstice, but at the summer solstice it
started at 06:58 and lasted 75 minutes.
After ancient times, equal-length civil hours eventually supplanted
unequal, so civil time no longer varies by season. Unequal hours are still used in a few
traditional settings, such as some Mount Athos monasteries and
all Jewish ceremonies. During his time
as an American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin, publisher of the old
English proverb, "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy,
wealthy and wise", anonymously published a letter
suggesting that Parisians economize
on candles by rising earlier to use morning
sunlight. This
1784 satire proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the
public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. Despite
common misconception, Franklin did not actually
propose DST; 18th-century Europe did not even keep precise schedules. However, this soon changed as rail and communication networks came to
require a standardization of time unknown in Franklin's day. Modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Hudson,
whose shift-work job gave him leisure time to collect
insects, and led him to value after-hours daylight. In
1895 he presented a paper to the Wellington
Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour daylight-saving
shift, and
after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch, he followed up in an 1898 paper.
Many
publications credit DST's proposal to the prominent English builder and
outdoorsman William Willett, who
independently conceived DST in 1905 during a pre-breakfast ride, when he
observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through a large part of a
summer's day. An avid golfer,
he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk. His
solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he
published two years later. The proposal was taken up by the
Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) Robert
Pearce, who introduced the first Daylight Saving Bill to the House
of Commons on
12 February 1908. A select committee was
set up to examine the issue, but Pearce's bill did not become law, and several
other bills failed in the following years. Willett lobbied for the proposal in
the UK until his death in 1915. William
Sword Frost, mayor of Orillia, Ontario, introduced daylight saving
time in the municipality during his tenure from 1911 to 1912. Starting on 30 April 1916, Germany and its World War I ally Austria-Hungary were
the first to use DST as a way to conserve coal during wartime. Britain, most of its allies, and many European
neutrals soon followed suit. Russia and
a few other countries waited until the next year and the United States adopted
it in 1918. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
William Willett's pamphlet
Sloane Square, London, July, 1907 THE WASTE OF DAYLIGHT Everyone appreciates the long light evenings.
Everyone laments their shrinkage as the
days grow shorter, and nearly everyone has given utterance to a regret that the
clear bright light of early mornings, during Spring and Summer months, is so
seldom seen or used. Nevertheless,
standard time remains so fixed, that for nearly half the year the sun shines
upon the land for several hours each day while we are asleep, and is rapidly
nearing the horizon, having already passed its western limit, when we reach
home after the work of the day is over. Under
the most favourable circumstances, there then remains only a brief spell of
declining daylight in which to spend the short period of leisure at our
disposal. Now, if some of the hours of
wasted sunlight could be withdrawn from the beginning and added to the end of
the day, how many advantages would be gained by all, and in particular by those
who spend in the open air, when light permits them to do so, whatever time they
have at their command after the duties of the day have been discharged. By a simple expedient these advantages can be
secured. If we will reduce the length of
four Sundays by 20 minutes, a loss of which practically no one would be
conscious, we shall have 8o minutes more daylight after 6 p.m. every day during
May, June, July and August, and an avenge of 45 minutes more every day during
April and September. I therefore venture
to propose that at 2 a.m. on each of four Sunday mornings in April, standard
time shall advance 20 minutes; and on each of four Sundays in September, shall
recede 20 minutes, or in other words that for eight Sundays of 24 hours each,
we shall substitute four, each 20 minutes less than 24 hours, and four each 20
minutes more than 24 hours. Read more at
http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/willett.html Source: Essay reprinted in British Time by Donald de Carle. Crosby
Lockwood & Son, Ltd. London. 1946.
Pages 152-157.
On March 12, 2016 in South
Korea, a Google artificial-intelligence program dubbed AlphaGo beat world
champion Lee Sedol in Go, an ancient and complex board game in which strategy
and tactics collide with intuition and cunning.
"When I look back on the three matches, even if I were to go back
and redo the first match, I think I would not be able to win because I
misjudged AlphaGo," Lee said at a postgame press conference, following his
third straight defeat. Against the odds,
Lee came back and beat Google's computer the following day, but it wasn't
enough to tip the scales of the contest.
The Google DeepMind Challenge, which has taken place at the Four Seasons
Hotel in Seoul, has drawn tens of thousands of online spectators who have
followed the matches live on YouTube. Streams
of the software versus wetware competition have received more than 3 million
views since the contest started. Though Lee has officially lost the
best-of-five contest, he will play one more match to establish a final score in
the face-off, which ends March 15, 2016.
The public interest wasn't piqued solely by the popular game, which is
played widely in Japan, China and Korea. Oren Etzioni,
the CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, says teaching
computers to read and then answer questions about that content is still a work
in progress. For example, when Etzioni had computers read eighth-grade science
texts, they could answer only about 60 percent of the questions on a test.
Understanding
a single sentence can be a lot more complicated than playing Go," Etzioni
says. Computers, he says, have yet to
demonstrate that they "can solve fuzzier problems where things are more
nuanced." Go, which
originated in China thousands of years ago, is played on a 19x19 grid with
black and white stones. The board's size
means the number of possible moves is greater than the number of atoms in the
universe, according to Google, making it a more difficult programming challenge
than chess. Artificial intelligence
expert David Levy says Go's complexity makes Google's win a bigger victory than
IBM's 1997 triumph over world chess champion Gary Kasparov. Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, was also
impressed by AlphaGo's feat. "Go is
the most important game in my life," Bushnell said. "It's the only game that truly balances
the left and right sides of the brain. The
fact that it has now yielded to computer technology is massively
important." "For all its
difficulty, Go is still an artificial problem with very simple rules,"
says Pedro Domingos, a computer science professor at the University of
Washington. "Building a home robot,
for example, is something of a different order of magnitude altogether -- the
robot needs common sense, physical dexterity, etc, which are all still sorely
lacking in AI." Max Taves http://www.cnet.com/news/googles-alphago-isnt-taking-over-the-world-yet/
March 14, 2016 is Pi Day, a national celebration of the mathematical concept,
which is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter and equals 3.14... Last year, 3-14-15, was the
only day this century that matched pi, commonly approximated as
3.14159. As is the case every year, schools and museums across the
country have planned events to celebrate the concept, which has fascinated
humans for centuries. Look for
pi-related deals and freebies, too. In
1897, Indiana state legislators tried passing a Pi Bill that legally defined pi
as 3.2. Edward J. Goodwin, a physician,
convinced a well-known mathematical monthly newspaper that he had solved what
mathematicians had tried to do for generations: squaring the circle. Simply put, squaring the circle is the
impossible task of finding the area of a circle by finding the area of a square
around it. Goodwin claimed that pi was
3.2 instead of a continuous number. The
bill never became a law thanks to Professor C. A. Waldo who convinced the
Indiana Senate that Goodwin’s discovery was not possible. http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/Pi-Day-2016-314-Things-to-Know-Freebies-371966492.html
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