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May 29, 2008
Dina and the Jack-in-the-Box. Oy Vey!
It's hard for me to grasp just how much toddlers love a Jack-in-the-Box, but this is a genuine scream (of happiness), and watch Dina literally jump out of her seat:
If more people gave hugs like this, we might very well achieve world peace:
In this video, watch as Dina's tension/excitement mounts, then Dina shares her signature guttural giggle, and then listen closely as she channels my (long-departed) Yiddish-speaking grandma:
Bonus pix: Dina celebrated her birthday at school 3 months early. See a few photos. Can you guess how old she will be?
Posted by Eric at 03:41 AM | Family & Friends | TrackBack
May 28, 2008
Bay Area Blawgers 3.0 Recap
Last week, we had the third gathering of Bay Area Blawgers at UC Berkeley Law School. Over 2 dozen bloggers and friends convened to discuss topics of interest to legal bloggers [see list of attendees below]. Some photos from the event. This event was co-hosted by the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, and a special thanks to them for their help (especially given that the event was scheduled at a very busy time for them).
This time, we started out with a short presentation by Mark Goldowitz on the application of California's anti-SLAPP law (California Code of Civil Procedure Sec. 425.16) to bloggers. The anti-SLAPP statute is a powerful defense tool that can result in the plaintiff paying attorneys fees. It also has certain procedural benefits for defendants, such as an automatic right of appeal for an unsuccessful anti-SLAPP motion. The statute is interesting to blawgers because it should apply to common activities by legal bloggers, such as blogging about lawsuits. Anti-SLAPP protection has been rarely applied to bloggers (we couldn't think of any cases around the table, but I had forgotten that the GTX v. Left case involved a blogger), but it looks like a powerful and important tool that bloggers--especially those actually facing a lawsuit--should keep in mind.
We talked about a variety of other issues, including how to respond to grousy/threatening emails from lawyers whose cases we're blogging about, bloggers posting C&D letters, rich content tools available for bloggers (including Redlasso and iMeem), and how courts are conceptualizing bloggers as journalists for various defenses to IP claims (such as how the blogger in the BidZirk case defeated a TM claim because of his role in producing news commentary). Next time, we'll try to talk about blawgers going on vacation or hiatus--a question on several attendees' minds as they have stopped blogging deliberately or implicitly. I'm also interested in how and why some bloggers (like me) write through multiple blogs. Good stuff for the next gathering, which I'm thinking will be early next year in the South Bay. If you aren't on the mail list and would like to be, let me know.
[Attendees at this event included: Tsan Abrahamson, Jerry Bame, Hudson Bair, Robert Barr, Bob Eisenbach, Cathy Gellis, Mark Goldowitz, Eric Goldman, Joe Gratz, Beth Grimm, Greg Haverkamp, Matt Holohan, Ethan Leib, Joe Mullin, Deborah Neville, Chris Peeples, Mark Perlman, Colin Samuels, Daniel Schulman, Jason Schultz, Tim Stanley, Colette Vogele, and Fred von Lohmann]
More resources related to the Bay Area Blawgers:
* Announcements of Bay Area Blawgers 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0.
* Recap of the first gathering. Beth Grimm has written an interesting meta-recap.
* Photos from the second gathering at Fenwick & West's San Francisco office. More photos.
* List of possible issues for a blawgers' discussion.
* Census of Bay Area Blawgers.
Posted by Eric at 01:16 PM | Blogosphere Issues , California Living , Legal Industry | TrackBack
May 24, 2008
Free Classical Music Bonanza--Musopen
Last night I watched the movie The Seven Year Itch for the first time. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, but now I can't stop replaying Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto #2 in my head (the first few notes are played repeatedly in the movie). I own a recording of this concerto on cassette tape, but I haven't listened to that in a couple of decades, and I never replaced the cassette with a CD. So today I was on a mission to chase down the concerto in digital form so that I can enjoy it again until I get sick of it, which will finally get the music out of my head.
I found the options at iTunes too complex, especially because there are multiple versions and many of them are available only in album form at a bundled price above my reservation price. In pursuit of better options, I stumbled across a site I'd never heard of called Musopen. They describe themselves as follows:
Musopen is an online music library of copyright free music (public domain music). We want to give the world access to music, without the legal hassles so common today. There is a great deal of music that has expired copyrights, but almost no recordings of this music is in the public domain. We aim to record or obtain recordings that have no copyrights so that our visitors may listen, re-use, or in any way enjoy music. Put simply, our mission is to set music free.
Their database is building, so they don't have a plethora of offerings. Further, I suspect purists would find the available renditions intolerably inferior to other commercially available offerings. For example, I noticed that a fair amount of the offerings were recorded by the Skidmore College Orchestra (which isn't an accident because the site was founded by some folks affiliated with Skidmore). Nothing against this group, but even my untrained ears can identify some amateur aspects of their performances.
On the other hand, the price is right, and I'm still enjoying the music. Indeed, having stumbled upon this terrific website, I've now spent most of the day in downloading mania. My wireless modem is smoking, and I'm worried my broadband provider is going to cut me off for excessive bandwidth usage!
So go check it out yourself. While you're there, make sure to get Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto #2, as offered by Musopen, without any copyright restrictions. Yay!
If you missed it, my other online music obsession is Pandora.
Posted by Eric at 08:03 PM | General | TrackBack
May 18, 2008
Some Personal Good News
I'm pleased to share the good news of my tenure and promotion to associate professor. Some frequently asked questions:
1) You weren't nervous about the tenure vote, were you? [This question has been posed in a variety of forms, all with an implicit skepticism about a negative outcome.] Being recently hired as a lateral assistant professor, I had some reason to believe the faculty would generally support my tenure application, and I felt good about my application on paper. However, tenure is a major decision by a faculty, and faculty politics can be complicated--especially in an environment where I was a relative newcomer. So personally, I never assumed tenure was a foregone conclusion.
2) What role did blogging play? I don't have a precise answer to this question. In preparing my materials, I treated blogging as a "plus factor." In other words, I felt like my application should stand on its own merits even if blogging was completely stripped out of the application. As a result, my hope was that blogging would enhance the application but not act as a substitute for some other obvious deficiency.
3) How are you going to celebrate? To celebrate both tenure and my recent milestone birthday, next month I'm going on a 2 week guided river rafting trip down the Hulahula River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. I'll blog more about that trip over the summer!
Posted by Eric at 01:10 PM | Life as a Law Professor
May 17, 2008
Arthur Best on Student Evaluations
Arthur Best, Student Evaluations of Law Teaching Work Well: Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree, Southwestern University Law Review, 2008
Another article on the deficiencies of student evaluation forms. A couple of takeaway points:
* "data from student evaluation of teaching forms should be used to identify exceptional cases and not to make relatively small distinctions among instructors"
* "precise numerical comparisons between instructors or between different courses taught by a single instructor may often be statistically flawed"
The abstract:
Academics in the fields of psychology and education generally describe student evaluations of teaching as reliable and useful. On the other hand, law professors often criticize them as unreliable and impaired by students' biases. This Article considers resolving these discrepant views by paying close attention to the various purposes for which student evaluations of teaching are used. For some uses, such as guidance for students in course selection, shortcomings of the evaluations would be of slight consequence. For promotion or tenure decisions, despite law professors' skepticism, schools should use the data to identify outlier instructors. Basing conclusions only on large numerical differences among faculty should protect faculty members from unfair consequences caused by students' biases, since the effects of biases (if present) are likely to be relatively small. It is also consistent with the modern consensus among educational researchers.
The Article also reports findings from analysis of a large number of law school evaluation of teaching forms. Virtually all of them use phraseology that ignores the collaborative nature of teaching and learning. They focus attention on the professor, with the unintended consequence of portraying students as passive participants in their education. The Article recommends revising questionnaires to have a balance between terminology that ignores students' roles and terminology that reflects them. With regard to other attributes, there are large variations among different law schools questionnaires. The Article documents those differences and identifies some that may be problematic.
Posted by Eric at 09:23 PM | Legal Education Industry , Life as a Law Professor | TrackBack
May 14, 2008
UpTake Launches Public Beta
One of my side projects is working with a new travel search website called UpTake, which is coming out in public beta today. There are plenty of travel content websites out there, but UpTake has an important differentiator. It enables consumers to do "theme-based" travel searching, such as a search for "family-friendly hotels" in Santa Monica. Theme-based searching better reflects the way that we approach many types of travel planning, but it's almost impossible to systematically do using existing search options. Under the hood, UpTake has some impressive semantic parsing technology to automatically categorize information into themes, allowing it to sort through mountains of information to provide very comprehensive data. The tools are working nicely for a public beta, but my "secret" hope is that they will enable a vegetarian theme, which would vastly simplify the searching I do today!
The "official" press release:
_____________
UPTAKE COLLECTS AND ORGANIZES ONLINE WORD-OF-MOUTH FROM THOUSANDS OF TRAVEL WEBSITES
Search and Discovery Site Launches Public Beta for U.S. Hotels,
Offers Web's Most Comprehensive Search for Travel Attractions
PALO ALTO, Calif. - May 14, 2008 - Travelers now have a vital resource for making better travel decisions with today's public beta launch of UpTake, a new vacation search site that has amassed the travel industry's largest database of hotels and attractions and analyzed more than 20 million online opinions from other travelers.
Founded by Yen Lee, former general manager of Yahoo! Travel, UpTake (formerly known as Kango) brings together content from thousands of trusted web sites like Expedia, Fodors, goCityKids, Travelocity, Virtual Tourist, and Yahoo! Travel, offering more than 400,000 U.S. hotels and attractions. "Unlike other travel sites, we are focused on delivering the most comprehensive coverage," said Lee. "We offer the broadest and deepest information about U.S. hotels and we'll be developing similar levels of coverage for other lodging and destinations later this year."
Sixty-six percent of American leisure travelers turn exclusively to the Web to research hotels when vacation planning*. But only 14 percent of users start their planning with online travel agencies like Expedia or Travelocity. Studies show travelers are looking for more relevant information in general and consumer advice in particular. "It's easy to make poor vacation planning decisions, especially if you're going somewhere for the first time," said Yen Lee. "Bad travel decisions are painful because your vacation time is so scarce. Our goal is to deliver relevant travel information from across the Web, to help you avoid decisions that leave you feeling dissatisfied with your vacation."
In addition to being comprehensive, UpTake provides tailored recommendations based on analysis of more than 20 million travel reviews, ratings, and opinions from over a thousand web sites. For example, UpTake recommends hotels for different travel themes based on a deep understanding of the reviews in its database. The site has also added "girls getaway" and "pet friendly" themes to its current "family-friendly" and "romantic" travel search themes, providing travelers more ways to personalize the search and discovery process.
"When you know where and when you want to travel, existing travel booking sites excel. But today's booking sites don't help you shop based on why you are traveling or who you are traveling with. UpTake is designed to give you better recommendations based on these fundamental questions of "who" and "why." said Lee, UpTake president. "UpTake matches a traveler with the most useful reviews, photos, etc. for the most relevant hotels and activities through attribute and sentiment analysis of reviews and other text, analysis guided by our travel ontology to extract weighted meta-tags. More simply, we break apart and analyze reviews and articles so we can recommend the best products for you."
For example, for a user looking for a family hotel in San Diego, UpTake analyzes its San Diego hotel catalog for attributes like "pool", "babysitting", "oversized rooms", "3 and 6 year olds" and for sentiments such as "like", "love", "strongly recommend. " UpTake users looking for San Diego romantic hotels will then get different results than those looking for San Diego family hotels. UpTake also tries to understand user intentions. If a traveler is looking for a hotel that is "good for kids", UpTake interprets it to have the same intent as phrases such as "child friendly" or "family vacation." By aggregating reviews and the most comprehensive selection of products on UpTake, the site will save travelers the time of going from site to site to find the right review for the right product to make your decision.
UpTake was developed to be complementary to existing travel sites. Like Google, it only provides a relevant abstract of the information and then offers a direct link to the site to find additional information. UpTake is also supplier friendly, providing a link to hotel websites, hotel phone numbers and addresses, photos from sites such as Hotels.com, Virtual Tourist, and Yahoo! Travel, as well as descriptions and reviews from other trusted online travel resources. In addition to lodging, UpTake also includes attractions like beaches, restaurants and parks.
"UpTake helps people make more informed decisions about where to stay. For independent hotels like ours, UpTake provides another way to convert our good word-of-mouth online into more hotel stays," said Andy Thomas, general manager of Catamaran Resorts.
UpTake's management team has extensive experience in travel, search and customer acquisition. Lee has more than 12 years of online travel and search entrepreneurial experience starting as a co-founder of the CitySearch San Francisco office and as general manager of travel, helped grow the overall travel category at Yahoo! to approximately $300 million in annual revenue. Co-founder Gene McKenna is UpTake's vice president of product, and was previously vice president of product at Acxiom Digital, a leading e-marketing and database marketing company. Dr. Huanjin Chen is UpTake's search architect, a role he had previously at eBay, and Dr. Boris Galitsky is UpTake's natural language scientist with more than 70 patents and publications. Elliott Ng is the company's vice president of marketing. Previously Ng founded two companies, Loyalty Matrix (sold to Responsys) and Netcentives (sold to Cendant and InfoUSA), where he launched the largest online loyalty program backed by frequent flyer miles. Ng most recently ran web marketing for Intuit QuickBooks.
UpTake recently changed its name from Kango, but the service will be available on both sites. To experience Uptake's vacation search site and take your first step to a great trip, simply go to www.uptake.com or www.kango.com.
About UpTake
Founded in 2006, UpTake has collected and organized more than 20 million traveler reviews, ratings, blogs and articles from across the web to help travelers to make better decisions about destinations, lodging and attractions. UpTake uses a travel ontology and natural language analysis to extract meta-tags from the collective intelligence it has collected and returns unbiased, personalized recommendations based on travelers' facts and feelings. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with global engineering teams in Beijing and Moscow. More information can be found at www.uptake.com.
* Source: YPB&R/Y 2007 National Leisure Travel MonitorTM
Posted by Eric at 06:48 AM | Travel | TrackBack
May 10, 2008
Writing About Legal Topics for Non-Lawyers
Brandt Goldstein, Lost in translation? Some brief notes on writing about law for the layperson. 52 N.Y.L. Sch. L. Rev. 373-385 (2007-08). This article provides an overview of the issues that arising when writing about legal topics for a non-legal audience--which, of course, is what many bloggers do. This article doesn't break a ton of new ground, but it provides an interesting contrast between the issues faced by mainstream journalists and legal bloggers.
Posted by Eric at 09:01 PM | Blogosphere Issues , Legal Industry | TrackBack
May 08, 2008
Thursday Grumbles--Errors in Speeches, and Forwarding Private Emails
Maybe I'm just in a cranky mood today, but two issues have been bothering me recently.
1) Every now and then, I hear a speaker make a major factual error. (For some reason, this seems to happen a lot with keyword advertising law talks.) The most recent example: a recent speaker on Internet keyword advertising said (1) Google indexes keyword metatags (WRONG), and (2) no Internet keyword defendant has ever won on the use in commerce issue (WRONG and WRONG!). I probed the speaker offline about the latter mistake and the speaker was working from slides prepared in mid-2006 that apparently had been poorly updated. Note to conference organizers: if you're going to have someone speak on keyword advertising issues, you might make sure they aren't using 2 year old material.
Don't get me wrong; mistakes can happen to anyone, and I'm sure I've made a few in my time, but I'm not sure what to do in these circumstances:
* Should I point out the error(s) to the speaker in the Q&A (assuming there is Q&A)? It's awkward to publicly put a speaker on the spot like that, and when it comes to factual errors, there is always the risk of the Q&A degenerating into a public he-said/she-said irresolute discussion.
* Should I point out the error(s) to the speaker privately after the event? This will at least correct the speaker's misperception, but the audience walks out of the event with misinformation.
* Should I just ignore it? After all, I've got plenty to do, and I can't fix every problem.
Let me know if you have a preferred solution to this problem.
2) With some frequency, a person forwards my email without my permission to third parties who were not the intended audience. This is especially pervasive at Santa Clara University, where there appear to be absolutely no norms against forwarding private emails to non-recipients because I see it numerous times a week. Of course, this forwarding can be problematic in at least two ways. First, the non-recipient may not like the email's content, especially if it is about them. Second, I try to be pretty careful with what I say in email, but this norm creates a Panopticon phenomenon of inhibiting my ability to speak the truth. So I'm toying with the following solutions:
* adding a legend to the front of my emails saying "DO NOT FORWARD THIS EMAIL FURTHER"
* stop sending email that discusses third parties at all
If you have any thoughts about this problem, I would welcome them as well. Send them by email... :-)
Posted by Eric at 05:42 PM | Legal Industry | TrackBack