BC Law IPTF Blog

Lifehack.org has an interesting post on Taking Notes that Work. Probably pretty applicable for law school students.

I think a lot of people, students and professionals alike, attempt to capture a complete record of a lecture, book, or meeting in their notes — to create, in effect, minutes. This is a recipe for failure. Trying to get every last fact and figure down like that leaves no room for thinking about what you’re writing and how it fits together.

I’m going to try the first bit which generally says to just focus on the new stuff you’re learning; don’t write down the stuff you already know.

Your focus while taking notes should be two-fold. First, what’s new to you? There’s no point in writing down facts you already know. If you already know the Declaration of Independence was written and signed in 1776, there’s no reason to write that down. Anything you know you know you can leave out of your notes.

How Stuff Works: How much coal is required to run a 100-watt light bulb 24 hours a day for a year?

The answer? About 714 lbs. of coal. Let’s say you don’t run that one light bulb non-stop, but only for about 10 hours. That’s still almost 300 lbs. of coal. I can very easily imagine that I at various locations and times run at least 100 watts of electricity through light bulbs at least 10 hours a day every day. That’s a lot of coal.

Also, here’s a link from How Stuff Works about how much energy a transformer pulls, regardless of whether the appliance is on or not.

Oh, and FYI: A Google search on “What the fuck is a what?” doesn’t result in anything informative.

I’ve recently been using del.icio.us a lot in keeping track of bookmarks for my legal research at work. When you’re doing Google searches all over the place, the bookmarking in-browser isn’t sufficient. Yes, you can put bookmarks into folders. But you don’t get the snapshot view that you can create with the description and tags in something like del.icio.us.

So, for example, I have a list of bookmarks I’ve saving for the corporate work I’ve been doing lately.  Pretty nice, if you ask me.

I’m not sure, though, if del.icio.us is the best bookmark manager. I think the code is a bit clunky, and it’s made to be a social bookmarking tool—and I’m doing nothing social with this. I use edtags.org for my law school and education-related tags, for bookmark managing and for the social aspect, but I don’t think that bookmarks on corporate and real estate law would be of interest to teachers.

It seems like a lot of law school students come to the IPTF thinking that they want to be “intellectual property lawyers.” But the concepts of IP bleed over into a lot of areas. For example, I’m helping a partner write a presentation on trade secrets; but neither of us are IP lawyers. And then what I’ve learned about trade secrets has helped me in writing up a non-competition agreement within a corporate acquisition.

So I think that when folks come in with an interest in IP they shouldn’t limit themselves to pure patent practice, but just leverage those interests into making an informed impact in broader areas that overlap with IP. It opens a lot more options for jobs, too.

Today, my buddy Adam and I presented at a roundtable at MiT5 about Adam’s project, Edtags.org. Here’s the abstract from the presentation:

Identifying Online Experts, Paul Ham, Adam Seldow
Our research involves building a community of experts at the Harvard Graduate School of Education around a socio-semantic networking web site, Edtags.org. Through our work with the web-site, we have come across a recent set of questions regarding the make-up of the community and culture. How do we ensure that populations of participants are “experts” in a field? Is it a matter of “numbers” or must there be a screening process to verify the users for participation? Should we screen the content for our specific field, and if so how? What is the critical mass of endorsed sites on a socio-semantic network that changes it from a place where educators save bookmarks to a place where educators save bookmarks and discover new ones? Lastly, how can search engines best distinguish “credible” sites from “socio-spites” (socio-semantic networking spam sites)?

We presented alongside sam smiley, a professor at Lesley College, and ended up having a great discussion about ownership, copyright, content management, as well as identifying experts in an online community site. We also got to show off the latest version of Edtags.org, which just keeps on getting better and better.

Our biggest questions were regarding how to identify experts: are they self-identified (I’m a professor or through self-tagging), community-identified (through votes or friends), or moderated (by Adam)? Though we didn’t end up with concrete answers, we did receive a lot of feedback on how to think about expertise on-line and safe ways of developing community.

One thing that I’m definitely going to keep track of is avoiding “forcing” people to have friends. You can suggest friends and explain why: these are users who are similar to you based upon their tags or their bookmarks; these are bookmarks recommended to you based upon your bookmarks; etc. But don’t force people into communities.

Also, it sounds like right now that self-selection and organic-selection of experts seems to work and won’t inhibit our user growth.

Adam also announced our new project, through Seth, to open source and distribute the Edtags code hopefully by the end of the summer.

Here’s the relevant purpose regarding copyright from our publication agreement:

1. I, ___________________, hereby represent and affirm that I am, or am authorized to act on behalf of, the copyright holder[s] of the Article, that I submit the Article for publication to the Forum, and grant the Forum a perpetual, world-wide, sublicensable, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to publish the Article electronically on the Forum, to reprint the Article or portions thereof in any medium now in existence or later invented, to cause the Article to be republished on electronic legal research services, including but not limited to LEXIS and Westlaw, to excerpt from the Article, to distribute, reproduce, transmit, and display the Article, to add hypertext links, graphics, images, and formatting to the Article, and to use the author’s name and likeness in promoting the Forum.

2. The Licensor retains the right to register, in the Licensor’s name, the Licensor’s copyright in the Article with the appropriate governmental office.

3. The Forum agrees to include in its publication of the Article, a notice of the Licensor’s copyright ownership. Notice will be in the form, “© YYYY [Licensor’s name]. Published with permission of the copyright holder.” Upon the Licensor’s request said notice will also include a restriction on use by guests to the Forum.

4. This agreement does not require that the Forum be the first publisher of the Article.

5. If, after the Forum’s publication of the Article, the Licensor subsequently causes the Article to be published, the Licensor agrees where reasonable to include or have included in such publication an acknowledgment in the following format: “Reprinted from the Intellectual Property and Technology Forum at Boston College Law School, YYYY B.C. Intell. Prop. & Tech. F. MMDDXX.” and, if published in electronic format, a hypertext link to the Forum. (YYYY B.C. Intell. Prop. & Tech. F. MMDDXX. is the chronological citation assigned the article during publication on the Forum.)

I wonder if we should just instead consider incorporating a Creative Commons license–or option for other licensing if appropriate–within our license? Here’s Lawrence Lessig’s quick take on the whole copyright licensing of law journal articles.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that I was hyperactive child. (Is that what they used to call ADD?) But today I stopped for a burrito and decided to take a look at my paper on privacy and electronic communications. I’ve been editing this paper that I finished last semester, and updating some of the law, cleaning it up, and adding some stuff on MMORPGs. It’s been slow, what with all the classes and clinic and such.

But at the burrito joint, I cruised through 10 pages and wrote about a page extra in about half an hour. There’s something about me where it’s hard for me to just sit down and work. I need to be doing something else.

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BC Law’s own Prof. Alfred Yen is now a guest blogger on Concurring Opinions.

For those who read the Times (do I even have to specify which rag I mean?) or pursue graduate studies, the globalizing world is one of those basic les chose de la vie. (Please attempt your best authentic French accent.) But there are segments of our culture that are, for one reason or another, blind to this phenomenon. (See my post on casual drug use and the globally deleterious effects.)

What’s more interesting is when facts and ideas of globalization reach into areas where those players aren’t forced to read books about it from professors or peers flaunting their intellects. Worker protests against the WTO in South America. African farmers using the Internet to track global crop prices. And Southern rappers removing themselves from their otherwise provincial “ghetto mentalities” as a hierarchical claim to their alpha status above their peers.*

From “Momma I’m So Sorry” by Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury (2006):

But it’s a bigger picture, homes, trust I done seen it
From Frankfurt to Cologne, Oslo to Sweden,
From Italy’s Milan to the shores of Napoli.
Now I consider Ferrari and Salvador Dalis.
I’m no longer local, my thoughts are global.
That’s why I seem distant, son, expand ya vision.

* Though Clipse constantly profess the heights of their status apart from the hoi polloi of players, they still allow for others to join them in their ranks. In “Hello New World,” they sing: “Can’t wait for the next n*** from my hood to say, ‘Look out world, I’m on my way!’”

Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, has launched a pilot site to rival Wikipedia: Citizendium:

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a “citizens’ compendium of everything,” is an experimental new wiki project. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on that model by adding “gentle expert oversight” and requiring contributors to use their real names.

Sounds look a good idea–but they’re late in the game, late on the meme. It just reminds me of so many examples in technology where “better” just doesn’t win. Mac lost to PC. Friendster lost to MySpace. Et cetera.

The beauty of Wikipedia is ease of participation–anyone can do it. But to use Citizendium, I *have* to register with my name and seek the approval of a “gentle” guide? I just don’t think they can achieve the growth that will drive it off the ground the same was as PCs and MySpace. Wikipedia wins because of its growth–I have a better chance of finding at least *something* there that I can’t find in an encyclopedia.

Maybe Citizendium should just grab all the Wikipedia content and use that as their base. It’s like using a public domain dictionary and adding all your new words to it or fixing the old definitions. That way, they have the size and content, and they can work at their slow growth rate to complete their content in quality.

I remember that Nupedia (the Wikipedia predecessor) had an editorial process involved–but they were just trying to streamline articles for releases. And they ditched this for the anti-editor process involved with Wikipedia.

I’m not a total nay-sayer. I think that CZ could become a valid rival. But it serves a different purpose than Wikipedia. Wikipedia is like having access to the “crowd”–like being able to talk to friends, friends of friends, etc.–whereas CZ will be more like being able to e-mail a professor who may have a response. With the former, I will probably get an answer, but I don’t know how correct, but if I ask enough I’ll probably get something close enough to correct. For the latter, I might not get a response, but I know the response will be right. This makes a great opportunity for a meta engine that searches CZ first and fills the gaps with Wikipedia.

See CZ’s thoughts on this Big Question on their blog.