That’s a wrap-up folks! Monday, Oct 30 2006

Well this will be my last blog entry for this course. As I predicted in my very first post, this did indeed turn out to be an interesting course. We covered a range of topics, in particular, I enjoyed learning about the use of hypertext and text retrieval, learning a bit more about how legal web publishers work and search engines, as well as semantic data and open source software. I also learnt quite a bit about inference systems and it was good having a guest speaker come in to speak to us and seeing a demonstration of eGanges.

I think what stood out most about this course was that it is very hands-on, and it required us to consistently build and add to our blogs and the wiki, as well as to build our own rulebase. This is my first effort with a wiki, and I think the class has done an excellent job. It now boasts a large number of entries on topics from classes as well as wide range of other related topics. It’s been interesting reading these various entries as well as people’s blogs, where many have raised good insights and issues, as well as keeping the rest of us informed with developments in technology news. Working with Aide also gave me a practical perspective on what we learnt in class about rulebased expert systems.

Computer technology has brought many advances to the field of law, whether it be for legal research, decision support, administration, or transforming the courtroom. However I think it still has a lot more potential, and I will be interested to see how the technology we have studied in this course will take the legal practice further in the future.

ps: Dont forget daylight saving’s back on (turn ur clocks forward an hour), tax returns need to be lodged by tuesday, and best of luck to all for your upcoming exams!

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what user agreement? Sunday, Oct 29 2006

After my previous entry(blogger troubles) where i questioned the practical effects of user agreements for blogs, i deicded to read up on wordpress agreement we agreed to when signing up for this blog at the start of semester. WordPress’s terms fo service is found here. Hands up those who read this before clicking ‘i accept’…..I know my hand isn’t up.

The terms fo service is available as a Creative Commons Sharealike license, so users are able to copy it and rework it to fit their own needs. Most of you should also remember Russell discussed creative commons in class.

Some interesting points to note include that as bloggers:

We are entirely responsible for the content of, and any harm resulting from, that Content.

We represent and warrant that our content (amongst other things) is not obscene or libelous, and does not violate the privacy or publicity rights of any third party

By submitting content, we are granting Automattic(the guys who run WordPress) a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog.

It’s also interesting to note that when we delete content, Automattic will use reasonable efforts to remove it from the Website, but we acknowledge due to caching or references, the content may not be immediately unavailable.

The terms of service also contains (the usual) disclaimer that Automattic is not responsible for the material’s content, use or effects and it does not endorse the material posted or believe this material to be accurate, useful or non-harmful.

In terms of what Automattic can do, they can refuse or remove any content that, in their reasonable opinion, violates any Automattic policy or is in any way harmful or objectionable, or terminate or deny access and use for any reason, at their sole discretion.

Thats only a very rough run-down of the terms of service(for the bigger picture, you have to sit down and read it in detail, you may even find a ‘treat’). Funny how i’ve been blogging happily all semester without even reading this! but i guess this wouldn’t really be an issue unless I was breaching the terms. Although it’s tempting to test these terms out, I dont want to risk my blog being removed! Whether blog user agreement really holds water is something to ponder…

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Blogger troubles Friday, Oct 27 2006

Following on from what Sachin raised in his blog entry be careful what you blog, where if people defame, vilify or attack another person in their blogs, they may be liable for legal actions such as defamation, I read a SMH article today, ‘Google harbouring racists’(here), which raises further issues about blogs(I noticed Jeffrey has also blogged about this article).

This article discusses Blogger(owned by Google)’s refusal to remove racist blogs targeting minority groups. An anti-racism lobby group’s appeals have fallen on deaf ears and Blogger has refused to take them offline. One blog apparently posts photographs and full names of anti-racism activists from Australia and
New Zealand, making this information available to those who wish to do these activists physical harm.

Although Blogger has a user agreement and the blogs in question seem to have violated the agreement, Blogger’s refusal to respond really makes one wonder about any practical effects (if any) these agreements have.

While Google intends not to restrict people’s freedom of speech, it is a thin line to walk when the material concerned is discriminatory, offensive, encourages hate and can potentially violate the law, such as racial vilification.  

Google’s spokesperson says “Blogger is a provider of content creation tools, not a mediator of that content,” and that they would only take blogs offline if ordered by a court.

The article mentions the difficulties involved with bringing legal action and ensuring enforcement, especially as Blogger’s servers are not located in
Australia (do IT Law-LAWS1031as an elective to learn more about this!). And it seems unlikely anything can be done about this problem unless someone has the money and the resources to fight a difficult legal battle or if Google proactively does something about it. Throughout the semester we have discovered the many benefits to blogging and it is a great way to share information, but there may also a dark side involved for those that choose to abuse this tool. Could blogs become another medium for people to evade the law by hiding behind cyberspace?

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Google’s Custom Search Engine Wednesday, Oct 25 2006

With its recent planned acquisition of YouTube (see Michael’s blog entry on this here), Google is never far from the headlines. It really seems like we can blog about Google all day and still blog about it some more.

In other Google news, one of the newest initiative from Google is the Google Custom Search Engine(Google CSE) which allows web publishers to create custom searches on their sites or blogs (see SMH article ‘Google introduces do-it-yourself search engines’, October 24, 2006 here).

Google Custom Search relies on the same underlying database of websites as the normal Google search, but allows companies or individual users to set up customised online searches by tailoring the search to specified topics and websites to reflect the users’ interests, point of view or area of expertise. Eg: an online women’s magazine may wish to tailor their search to gossip and celebrity news.

This is one way to make searches better by letting people decide what should be searched. It allows users to select which websites, pages or topics they wish to include in their own tailored web search index. You can restrict search results to selected pages and sites, or give your selected sites higher priority and ranking than the rest of the Google index. The benefits include allowing sites to choose for users to only see results from their site or related sites. It also allows sites to be given priority over other sites, as opposed to Google’s relevance ranking system based on popularity.

Google provides the user with a piece of code for the search box to put on their site, and the user has the option to customize the look and feel of the search and results to match their website.

Shashi Seth, product manager for Google Custom Search Engine points out, “Custom search engines empower communities everywhere to organize their own information and make it searchable”. Given the incomprehensibe volume of information that is contained on the internet nowadays, I think this is a good way for making searches more selective and thus having results that are more relevant. Of course the downside is that by selecting specific sites to search you may be missing out on other potentially highly relevant sites and material. Nevertheless I think it’s a very innovative idea, and soon everyone can have their own customised search.

Read more about this on Google CSE’s FAQ.

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OpenOffice and OpenDocument Tuesday, Oct 17 2006

OpenOffice is a free alternative to Microsoft office and contains the equivalent of all the essentials such as MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access amongst a few other useful bits and pieces, and it also has extra functions like allowing you to transform a word document straight into a pdf file (available for free download here). Having used it in the CSE labs, I think it’s a great initiative and as Russell mentioned, it means HUGE savings for large organizations or institutions (like law firms or universities) as they can get it for free. I predict it its popularity will continue to grow. According to Wikipedia, OpenOffice.org has secured 14% of the large enterprise market as of 2004(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org).

I found also Russell’s discussion last class about the problem of “vendor-locking” with documents extremely interesting. Vendor-locking is where documents are locked up in a proprietary format such that its not accessible using other document processors.
This is potentially quite an important issue, and I think that perhaps we all take our data and the file format it is stored in for granted. To be honest, this was not something I had even put my mind to until now. But when something that’s written on animal skins from centuries ago is more accessible than something stored via technological means (I can’t remember the exact details of this example Russell mentioned, but the data contained some sort of survey carried out on the population), perhaps we need to think twice about this. Who knows whether we would be able to open our .doc or .ppt files in another 300 years time?

Not only does Microsoft ‘vendor-lock’ their document formats, there are also problems that exist between different versions of MS Office. I have previously had problems opening MS Word files using an older version of MS Word reader on the computers in the main library where the formatting and the layout of my file came out different (in other words completely wrong).

I did a little research and found out about OpenDocument , or ODF, which is an open format for saving office documents. It was developed by OASIS (Open Document Format for Office Applications), and is based on the XML format. OpenDocument is intended to provide an alternative to proprietary document formats (like Windows) so these documents won’t be locked into a vendor. Its objective is to guarantee long-term access to data without legal or technical barriers. This standard is supported by OpenOffice and is publicly accessible and can be implemented into any system or product, whether open-source or proprietary. Microsoft has since followed, and according to Wikipedia, it has announced it would finance the creation of a plugin to allow Office to save to ODF(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument).

I think OpenDocument is a fantastic initiative for guaranteeing access to our documents in 10, 100, or even 1000 year’s time. With even Microsoft acknowledging the need for such an open format, hopefully it will become more widespread, and become a format we will all be familiar with.

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how to wikihow? Monday, Oct 9 2006

woohoo finally got my research essay out of the way, now i just have one more to go!

I read about a new wiki in the paper over the weekend called “Wikihow”, a wiki of “how-to” instructions. Since launching in 2005, it currently has just under 12,500 articles, and it’s aiming to be the world’s largest how-to manual.

Useful articles include how to Fight a Traffic Ticket and Wake Up Without an Alarm Clock, as well as things we’re all dying to know like how to Make a Basket From an Old Orange Juice Carton and Run up a Wall and Flip.

So if you have special skills or a uniqe and efficient way of doing something, why not let your wiki skills shine and share it with the rest of the world.

Now if only I could find an article on how to complete a research essay on market manipulation in 3 days…

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eGanges part 2 Friday, Sep 29 2006

Last class we ploughed into eGanges in greater depth, with Ms Gray leading us through an example of building an eGanges Map using International Accounting Standards (IAS) 24 which concerned related party disclosures. This exercise really illustrated the fact that a map is dependent on how the user interprets the text and how they choose to build it. The river paradigm means that all the nodes (tests at each node) forms a part of the flow. Thus it is possible that if one node was incorrect (either due to incorrect interpretation or typographical error, eg typing “disclosed” instead of “undisclosed”), the outcome is likely to be incorrect or at least the quality of the outcome would be adversely affected.

I think using a colour scheme in the river hierarchy such that the colours represented the depth of the map is a good idea so users can tell the different branches of the map apart. Once a user knows the colour scheme, they will also know which branch is the primary flow and also how deep in the map they are. eGanges also has extensive functionalities for glosses and notes. They can be in the form of positive, negative and uncertain lists, or they may be a link to another node,  a website, a database or other software.

We only covered a small rule in building the map in class. I can only imagine what a task it would be to create a map for a full piece of complex legislature. There will be a lot of effort involved, and it may require a few runovers to check its accuracy. Modelling case law would be an even bigger and more problematic task as the “rules” (if you can call them rules) from cases will not be so clear cut and nor will you necessarily be able to provide it with a straight answer of yes/no.

One area I think needs improvement is the user interface. I didn’t find it very attractive nor aesthetically pleasing, a view shared by fellow classmates Sachin and Lanny. There are quite a lot of buttons crammed into the bottom lefthand corner, and I remember at one stage during the demonstration of building a map, Ms Gray’s assistant tried several times to give input to a node but the system did not react. The reason was because he was still in ‘build’ mode. Perhaps a tool-bar at the top of the screen with all the commonly used features would make buttons easier to find, and a status box showing what mode the system is in might help make the system clearer.

Overall, I feel like I have a better understanding of what eGanges seeks to achieve and how it works after seeing it in action. I see that it can model rules or processes and act as a way of checklisting all relevant steps are satisfied, as well as providing a possible conclusion/outcome. I guess now we’ll just have to wait and see if such expert system shells will take off amongst the legal profession.

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Where have the law journals gone? Saturday, Sep 9 2006

While i’m on the topic of newspaper articles, there was some controversy over the throwing out of journals by our law library (enough for it to make page 3 of the Sydney Morning Herald on 5/9/06, “Uni staff in a bind over binned journal” by Stephanie Peatling, complete with a picture of the said journals dumped in recycling bins- online version here). Throwing away books over a century old was criticised by some to be vandalism, and having access to a soft version is viable only on the assumption that the university will continue its subscription with legal publishers.

Indeed it would be convenient to have a soft copy of everything(not just in terms of searching and access, but also all the space that could be saved), and it’s probably only matter of time before it comes to that. By which point, the only hard copies of journals that exist will be those used for the sole purpose of doing photoshoots in the legal profession. I have to say though, that personally, if the case or article is lengthy, I still prefer reading from a hard copy. Reading for long hours in front of a computer screen is not highly appealing. I guess thats when the printer comes in handy.

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10 websites that changed the world Saturday, Sep 9 2006

According to today’s copy of ‘Good Weekend -The Sydney Morning Herald Magazine’, 9th September 2006, page 38-43, the 10 websites that changed the world are as follows:

1. MySpace

2. Wikipedia

3. eBay

4. YouTube

5. Amazon

6. Napster

7. Salon

8. Google

9. Yahoo

10. Blogger

Categorising these generally, we have 3 for sharing/uploading of music and media(with some social networking thrown in), 1 encyclopedia, 2 search engines, 2 online retailers/auction/shopping sites, 1 blog publishing system and …well Salon, never heard of it but its an online magazine and media company.

I was suprised to see YouTube on there, given it is still relatively new (newest out of the 10- Yahoo and Amazon being the oldest, both founded 12 years ago in 1994). But even though it was only launched in 2005, you can’t deny its popularity. From a simple site for uploading home-made videos, though word-of-mouth it now boasts 100 million clips are watched on its site a day.

I have to admit Google and Yahoo are probably sites I can’t live without. Without these 2, I would probably be at a loss if told to look something up on the internet. Wikipedia is always useful (and generally a reliable source), while youTube is good for some entertainment and you might dig up some gems. As for the others I think it comes down to your need for them, whether you have a creative flair to create and share or if you’re addicted to shopping online. How have these websites changed your world?

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aide Thursday, Sep 7 2006

I wrote my first rule using Aide yesterday. I wasn’t sure what to write a rule about. It might seem easy to come up with one, but when you sit down to think about it, you realise its not quite that simple. I decided to pick something related to being enrolled at UNSW. The rule i ended up writing was a simple one to determine whether a particular student is currently enrolled in LAWS1032.

To come up with a basic rule, you need  some sort of a unique determinative attribute about a thing in order to identify it. For example a dog and its bark, or in my example, a UNSW student and a valid UNSW student card. Problems may arise where there exists another animal that also barks, or conversely if a UNSW student doesn’t hold a student card (ie if they have misplaced it).

Writing this rule reminded me of the good old days of programming under my computing degree, where we wrote programs using if, then, else, else if etc etc. If you miss out one small condition that you did not manage to think of, the output will not be 100% accurate(that is if you were lucky enough to get your program running and producing output in the first place). And thus you spend hours in front of your code de-bugging into the early hours of the morning, ripping our hair out, and slowly losing your sanity bit by bit as the hours tick by until you realise hey, it’s dawn.

To form a rule using a piece of legislature, the legislature itself will already provide some form of a structure. Many provision would have set out what elements it contains. Important terms would normally also be defined.This would hopefully make the job easier. But the person writing the rules will need to have a very good understanding of the piece of legislation because often understanding one section is not enough to get the big picture. These are just my quick thoughts so far.

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