Thursday, June 27, 2019

Knowledge Isn’t Neutral: On Radical Librarianship

'Mental retardation': Iran says 'idiotic' new US sanctions shut doors of diplomacy


Svetlana Alexievich is on a mission to collect memories before they disappear, to correct for the rewriting of history by  Propaganda  



Australian hacker who stole share tips to make a small fortune gets three years

Software called Aircrack let Steven Oakes find out what shares a financial publisher was tipping. He then used the information to play the stock market and make money. Lots of money.

The flying saddle: Would you give it a try? SFGate.  “Why not give all passengers an industrial strength tranquilizer and lay them out straight and stack them like sardines?”



Great lawyering in the modern era frequently comes from a source far removed from the confident bravado of the lawyer stereotype portrayed in films and on TV. In her fourth book, The Introverted Lawyer: A Seven-Step Journey Toward Authentically Empowered Advocacy (2017), Brooklyn Law School Prof. Heidi Brown revealed that, in a profession dominated by extroverted, self-assured and garrulous personalities, it is often quiet, withdrawn and even under-confident lawyers who shine at the heavy lifting of intellectual research, creative thinking and persuasive writing demanded at the highest levels of today’s competitive and challenging legal environment.


OLD KNOWLEDGE REITERATED: “We tend to think of our looks as separate from who we are. But it turns out that physical traits like height or attractiveness may shape our personalities, behaviours, even politics.”




5 Ways to Safely Test Your Antivirus Software - MakeUseOf (MUD): “lIf you’re concerned about how good about your antivirus software is, why wait until it’s too late? There are some safe ways you can test your antivirus to make sure it’s working properly. Here’s why you’d want to test an antivirus and how to put one through some tests yourself. Why You Should Test Your Antivirus Software – The most obvious reason why people test their antivirus is to check it’s working properly in the first place. Antiviruses work by scanning files as they arrive and blocking the ones that match its database of virus definitions. As such, the only way to know for sure if your antivirus is working is to test it. Of course, we would never recommend anyone visit dangerous websites to see if their computer can handle it. This is like testing out body armor by walking out onto a live battlefield. There are safe and benign ways a user can test their antivirus software, which they can use to see if their security is up to speed. Not everyone wants to just test the quality of the software, however. Sometimes, people have deployed the software under a specific environment, under certain rules, or with certain conditions. As such, performing these five tests are a great way to confirm that nothing can slip through the cracks


Democracy has long been the benchmark of Westernization. Talk of a crisis in democracy has relevance precisely because the rise of the Chinese economy under Communist Party leadership puts that benchmark in question. Runciman is stoical. He ends his book with an imaginative projection of the future: Monday, January 20, 2053, the inauguration of President Li, who succeeds the controversial President Chan-Zuckerberg. Due to climate change, Washington, D.C., is now balmy in January. The Democrats and the Republicans are still around, but the party system is in disarray, as it has been for decades. Congress is deadlocked. The dollar is worthless. Li’s ties to China are an open secret, but Americans are far beyond caring. In any case, he no longer controls the nuclear codes. But the flag still flies and the inaugural speech is predictable: “He reminded his audience that the United States of America was, first and foremost, still a democracy. It always would be.” As Li leaves the stage, one of his predecessors is heard to remark, “He protests too much.”
How is this fantasy meant? Presumably less as a deterministic prediction than as a provocative thought experiment. And it succeeds in posing the most pressing question of the present. Assuming current trends continue, will America accept its relative decline with equanimity? The concern must surely be that Runciman’s vision of a passive America is in fact overly optimistic. In a perspicacious Op-Ed, Larry Summers recently asked, “Can the US imagine a global system in 2050 in which its economy is half the size of the world’s largest? Even if we can imagine it, could a political leader acknowledge that reality in a way that permits negotiation over what such a world would look like?”5


Science wars, Seinfeld, Sokal:What was postmodernism? No other idea from the humanities had so major, if murky, an influence 

Knowledge Isn’t Neutral: On Radical Librarianship

Teachers & Writers Magazine, Jehan Roberson, May 28, 2019: “That titular truism is one that led many of us to teach, to write, and to examine critically the power held by stewards of “things worth knowing.” At every turn we must question not only the why’s, but the how’s and the who’s. How was this information acquired, and by whom? How did you come to access it? Who gets to decide what you access, what you see and what you don’t? Whose work, whose body is on the line? These and other questions led me to the source from which so much information flows—the library. I met with cataloguer Michelle Chan and metadata librarian Alexandra Provo, colleagues of mine at New York University, where I manage the Hemispheric Digital Video Library (HIDVL). Our discussion attempted to address the above questions and more, and how they inform the obsessively granular and massively important task of cataloguing and organizing library materials. An edited version of that conversation is here…]

See also additional resources:


Max Meyers and William D. Eggers, via Deloitte Insights
Government access to cutting-edge technology, skills, and business models involves tapping into the advances being made by outside players.


Craigle, Valeri, Law Libraries Embracing AI (2019). Law Librarianship in the Age of AI, (Ellyssa Valenti, Ed.), 2019, Forthcoming; University of Utah College of Law Research Paper . Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3381798 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3381798
“The utilization of AI provides insights for legal clients, future-proofs careers for attorneys and law librarians, and elevates the status of the information suite. AI training in law schools makes students more practice-ready in an increasingly tech-centric legal environment; Access to Justice initiatives are embracing AI’s capabilities to provide guidance to educational resources and legal services for the under-represented. AI’s presence in the legal community is becoming so common that it can no longer been seen as an anomaly, or even cutting edge. Some even argue that its absence in law firms will eventually be akin to malpractice.This chapter explores some practical uses of AI in legal education and law firms, with a focus on professionals who have gone beyond the role of AI consumers to that of AI developers, data curators and system designers…”
 





The outgoing leader of the National Taxpayer Advocate Service has formed a nonprofit to fight outside of the government for taxpayers’ rights, even as she promotes steps the advocate service is taking to broaden its own reach.


The nonprofit organization is called the Center for Taxpayer Rights, said Nina Olson, who will retire from the Taxpayer Advocate Service at the end of July after 18 years as its chief.