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Daily Archives: October 31, 2018

Assessing Online Learning in Law Schools: Students Say Online Classes Deliver

Dutton, Yvonne and Ryznar, Margaret and Long, Kayleigh, Assessing Online Learning in Law Schools: Students Say Online Classes Deliver (October 2018). Denver University Law Review, Forthcoming; Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law Research Paper Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3242824

“This is the first article to provide empirical data on the effectiveness of distance education in law schools since the ABA this summer approved increasing the total number of credits that law students could earn through online classes from 15 to 30. Our data, composed of law student surveys and focus groups, reveal not only the success of distance education in their experience, but also the methods that are most effective for them.”

The Most Common Voting Scams—and How to Get Around Them

LifeHacker: “Voter suppression tactics are as old as the United States itself. Limited enfranchisement, poll taxes, gerrymandering and, more recently, voter ID restrictions and targeted polling site closures have all been used throughout our country’s history to deny the vote to targeted populations. Social media and concerted political action have made these voter scams more… Continue Reading

Intentional Bias Is Another Way Artificial Intelligence Could Hurt Us

Scientific American – When AI Misjudgment Is Not an Accident: “The conversation about unconscious bias in artificial intelligence often focuses on algorithms that unintentionally cause disproportionate harm to entire swaths of society—those that wrongly predict black defendants will commit future crimes, for example, or facial-recognition technologies developed mainly by using photos of white men that… Continue Reading

Folksonomies: how to do things with words on social media

Oxford Dictionaries: “Folksonomy, a portmanteau word for ‘folk taxonomy’, is a term for collaborative tagging: the production of user-created ‘tags’ on social media that help readers to find and sort content. In other words, hashtags: #ThrowbackThursday, #DogLife, #MeToo. Because ordinary people create folksonomy tags, folksonomies include categories devised by small communities, subcultures, or even individuals,… Continue Reading

2018 US congressional midterm elections: case study of third-party tracking scripts on candidate websites

The 2018 United States congressional midterm elections: a case study of third-party tracking scripts on candidate websites, Valmik Patel, October 2018. “Of the 1,008 websites we collected (House and Senate candidates for the 2018 midterm elections), we were left with 981 after removing duplicates and invalid links.  We found that trackers are present on 87%… Continue Reading

Research finds large buildup of heat in oceans suggesting a faster rate of global warming

Washington Post: “The world’s oceans have been soaking up far more excess heat in recent decades than scientists realized, suggesting that Earth could be set to warm even faster than predicted in the years ahead, according to new research published Wednesday. Over the past quarter-century, Earth’s oceans have retained 60 percent more heat each year… Continue Reading

U.S. archivists release Watergate report that could be possible ‘road map’ for Mueller

Washington Post: “U.S. archivists on Wednesday revealed one of the last great secrets of the Watergate investigation — the backbone of a long-sealed report used by special prosecutor Leon Jaworski to send Congress evidence in the legal case against President Richard M. Nixon. The release of the referral — delivered in 1974 as impeachment proceedings… Continue Reading