Category: @work

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Open Source Methods Make the World Go Round

Slashdot | Open Source Methods Useful Way Beyond Software
“Former head of policy at the British Prime Minister’s office, Geoff Mulgan, has co-authored a paper on uses of Open Source methods in arenas far beyond the normal Sourceforge universe. The paper is jointly written with Tom Steinberg, head of UK civic hacking fraternity mySociety and explores the use of open source methods to improve academic peer review, drafting of legislation and even media regulation.“

Interestingly enough, this is a position that CALI holds and it is reflected in this year’s conference theme.

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Open-Access Academic Journals: Where is Legal Academia?

Slashdot | Free/Open-Access Academic Journals Growing
“Wired News reports on the growing number of free/open-access academic journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists 1527 journals. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is launching three new open-access journals this year: PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens. The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Public Access Policy is also part of the movement. The traditional academic journals aren’t happy, saying that it’s unethical to accept money for publishing. But the traditional journals face their own ethical dilemmas by accepting money from advertisers.“

The DOAJ listing for law journals is here. 10 American law schools list 14 titles. CLearly there is room for expansion here:)

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Duke to Giveaway Fewer iPods

BetaNews | Duke Modifies iPod Giveaway Program
“However, the faculty will be the deciding factor this year as to which students will receive the iPods.

Reaction from students has been mixed, with many claiming the program was a waste of money, as most already owned Apple’s player. Students felt that more pressing issues, such as financial aid and campus security, should have been addressed first.“

More on this here and here. The original release from Duke is here, as is the Duke iPod homepage.

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Ajax Defined

You got your Ajax in my Ruby
“Codified by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path in “Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications“, Ajax stands for “Asynchronous Javascript XML.” Essentially what Ajax does is move much of the smarts involving user-interaction from the web server to your web browser. This takes the form of an Ajax engine (a piece of Javascript code) embedded into a web page, downloaded to your browser, and springing into action upon arrival. Acting as an interaction broker, the engine takes care of all the whizbang interactivity you see (form input and validation, dragging-and-dropping, showing-and-hiding, etc.) while dealing with the web server (and it’s back-end database) as needed. “

Well, this clears up a few things. Now it the questions is how does this help me? I did find this toolkit, Sajax, that includes a PHP backend.

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Bob Barker Endows Another Animal Law Course

Bob Barker Gift Endows Animal Rights Law Course (Northwestern University News)
“Bob Barker, host of the Emmy award winning “The Price Is Right” and a longtime proponent of animal welfare, has donated $1 million to the Northwestern University School of Law to endow a course in animal rights law.

The Bob Barker Endowment Fund for the Study of Animal Rights Law will provide students an opportunity to earn course credit. Course topics could include: how humans interact with and use animals; current animal protection laws; species protection; and international wildlife law.

Barker has previously made $1 million gifts to the University of California at Los Angeles, Duke University, Stanford University and Columbia University. It all began with a similar endowment established in his name at Harvard Law School by FemantleMedia, which produces “The Price Is Right.”“