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Monthly Archives: January 2020

The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of

MentalFloos – Michael Rogalski: “For 60 years, American drivers unknowingly poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their tanks. Here is the lifelong saga of Clair Patterson—a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth—and how he took on a billion-dollar industry to save humanity from itself…Over the… Continue Reading

Profs say teaching students how to email them properly is gift that keeps on giving

Journal of Higher Ed: “Somewhere between birth and college, students hopefully have learned how to compose concise, grammatically correct and contextually appropriate emails. Often they haven’t. So, to head off 3 a.m. need-your-help-now emails from Jake No Last Name, many professors explicitly teach students how to email them at the start of the academic year.… Continue Reading

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues January 12, 2020

Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues January 12, 2020 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss, highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly… Continue Reading

Book review: Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code

Joseph Savirimuthu, “Book review: Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code”, (2019) 16:1 SCRIPTed 95 https://script-ed.org/?p=3748 DOI: 10.2966/scrip.160119.95. Download PDF “Blockchains, distributed ledger technologies, bitcoins and peer-to-peer networks have reignited old debates and arguments about the implications of decentralisation for social, economic and political ordering. Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code sets… Continue Reading

100,000 Artworks Images From Paris Museum Collections Now Freely Available

Hyperallergic: “Paris Musées announced yesterday that it is now offering 100,000 digital reproductions of artworks in the city’s museums as Open Access — free of charge and without restrictions — via its Collections portal. Paris Musées is a public entity that oversees the 14 municipal museums of Paris, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la… Continue Reading

Everyone Knows Memory Fails as You Age. But Everyone Is Wrong.

The New York Times: “…The relevant difference is not age but rather how we describe these events, the stories we tell ourselves about them. Twenty-year-olds don’t think, “Oh dear, this must be early-onset Alzheimer’s.” They think, “I’ve got a lot on my plate right now” or “I really need to get more than four hours… Continue Reading

A Billion Medical Images Are Exposed Online As Doctors Ignore Warnings

TechCrunch: Every day, millions of new medical images containing the personal health information of patients are spilling out onto the internet. Hundreds of hospitals, medical offices and imaging centers are running insecure storage systems, allowing anyone with an internet connection and free-to-download software to access over 1 billion medical images of patients across the world.… Continue Reading

I finally switched from Chrome to Mozilla Firefox and you should too

Digital Trends – “The biggest draw for me was, of course, the fact that Mozilla Firefox can finally go toe-to-toe with Google Chrome on the performance front, and often manages to edge it out as well. But that didn’t happen overnight. Since Firefox’s 2017 overhaul, Mozilla has been pushing updates around the clock. Today, in… Continue Reading

The Healing Power of Gardens

Brain Pickings – Oliver Sacks on the Psychological and Physiological Consolations of Nature – “…“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of… Continue Reading

San Diego’s massive 7 yr experiment with facial recognition technology appears to be a flop

San Diego’s massive, 7-year experiment with facial recognition technology appears to be a flop – “Since 2012, the city’s law enforcement agencies have compiled over 65,000 face scans and tried to match them against a massive mugshot database. But it’s almost completely unclear how effective the initiative was, with one spokesperson saying they’re unaware of… Continue Reading

Dictionaries and the Law

Davis, Laurel, “Dictionaries and the Law” (2019). Rare Book Room Exhibition Programs. 33.   “Exhibition program from a Spring 2019 exhibit presented in the Daniel R. Coquillette Rare Book Room at the Boston College Law Library. The exhibit focused on the history of legal dictionaries published over the last 500 years.” “The law is a profession… Continue Reading