metarand

The History of Innovation: Technology is Greatest Ponzi

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Augmented Reality Goes Viral

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Chris Piascik: artist at work

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The iPhone as Tricorder 1.0

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CaseLaw 2.0: Google Enters The Courtroom

I fondly remember searching the case law while at law school in Cape Town in the early 90′s. Essentially I had three choices – the UCT law library, the records at the Supreme Court itself or gopher (that’s pre-browser Internet). My preference was always gopher.  It was in fact through gopher that I had my initial mindspin epiphany – the Internet was going to change our world.

Fast forward a few years – I had the pleasure of writing head notes for commercial case law and got introduced to CaseLaw 1.0 courtesy of Austlii. In 1998 I set up one of the first major legal vertical portals, Lawstream (the big picture vision was to stream live from the courts) and achieved a million page views in month 1.

Needless to say, I’ve seen the law online since its early days and I’m really excited to see Google enter the fray:

Starting today, we’re enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar.

It would be really cool if Google were to have an open API policy with respect to these cases. What I mean is that anyone should be able to write their own headnote or summary on a case or develop a set of commentary threading together how the common law has been affected by a particular judgement or other. In true crowdsourcing style, the most popular or authoritative headnotes and commentary would rise to the top to create a Legalpedia.

I really like the way that Google, in releasing Scholar,  has acknowledged the work of true legal pioneers such as Graham Greenleaf at Austlii.

Next step for Scholar? – My suggestion is that they expand out to other countries and continue to democratise the black box that is the law.

Teleprompting, Obama Style

A tongue in cheek skit by The Onion…make sure you read the newsfeed at the bottom of the screen – says a lot about television news and politicians:

Obama’s Home Teleprompter Malfunctions During Family Dinner

Augmented Reality Meets Geolocational Social Gameplay

In opening its API, the geolocational social service that incorporates game mechanics Foursquare now has a third party AR service. Provided by Layar, this app allows a user to see nearby Foursquare venues via their mobile device.

[Via TechCrunch]

Placemarking The Publishing Paradigm Shift: After Print

Jason Eppink has marked the step change in publishing which has left vacant newspaper boxes littering the urban landscape with a surreal glow.

[Hat tip to boingboing]

Algorithmic Authority versus Digital Curation: The spectrum’s edge

Clay Shirky has coalesced some thoughts around the notion of algorithmic authority. In it he talks about the nature of authority within the context of news, and notes that more people are trusting classes of aggregators and filters  such as Google, Twitter and Wikipedia.

He explores the social characteristic of trust – a person’s willingness to accept another as an authority on a topic has a direct colloration to the depth to which “some other group has vouched, formally or informally, for (their) trustworthiness”.

Clay continues:

Authority thus performs a dual function; looking to authorities is a way of increasing the likelihood of being right, and of reducing the penalty for being wrong. An authoritative source isn’t just a source you trust; it’s a source you and other members of your reference group trust together. This is the non-lawyer’s version of “due diligence”; it’s impossible to be right all the time, but it’s much better to be wrong on good authority than otherwise, because if you’re wrong on good authority, it’s not your fault.

Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.” This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority.

Clay notes that there is a spectrum of authority – for example, from basic conversational facts to legally admissible evidence. He further points out that:

Authority is a social agreement, not a culturally independent fact. Authority is as authority does.

By this he means that your acceptance of Wikipedia for providing facts you’d be prepared to front in dinner conversation is based on your experience of fact-veracity previously, but even more importantly of the experiences of others who influence you in this area.

This is a fascinating discussion, especially in light of the growing trend towards digital curation – understanding curators to be expert authorities on narrowly defined topics.

Algorithmic authority seems to be at one end of the authority-influence spectrum, with the personal authority of category overseers/guides or sherpas at the other.

My initial thoughts are that the authority index is far higher for digital curators than for algorithmic authorities. However, I believe that it would be wrong to simplify this too much – authority is also filtered by purpose. It depends on what you intend doing with the information you are receiving as to how much authority you will give to the source.

[Picture courtesy of quiquenamib - flickr]

Neuron Growth Clears Brain Inbox

The brain’s hippocampus is analogous to an inbox, with new neurons clearing away old memories, according to a piece in ScienceNOW.

[Picture courtesy of hurleygurley - flickr]