Daily Archives: June 11, 2008

Virtual Book Signing

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“This Saturday, June 14, at Noon Central Time, Virtual Book Signing presents the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President John F. Kennedy, Newton Minow. As co-chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates, Mr. Minow has played a key role in organizing every presidential debate since 1960.”

Newton N. Minow. Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future. Chicago: 2008. 1st edition, 240p., illustrations.

Written with Craig LaMay, this book provides an ‘inside look’ into the history of the presidential debates. The book also examines “the many ways in which the new media might serve to broaden the debates’ appeal and informative power.”

This is your chance to ask Newton Minow all about the debates — everything from “who won?” to “who should ask the questions?”

Buying books?

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Paul recently blogged about Matt Asay’s post regarding an article in The Atlantic and quoted Asay’s discussion of “returning to reading”…..So, I was really struck by the bookstore sales numbers described in the May 19th issue of Publishers Weekly (p.11).  The headline reads: “Bookstore sales up 5% in quarter” and the article goes on to mention that the bookstore segment is doing far better than the rest of the retail segment of the economy.  Although, bookstores do sell a lot of latte these days, too.

And, speaking of books, the June 2nd issue of Publishers Weekly had an interesting sidebar on “Readership by the Numbers” (p.6).  Eleven percent of the people polled (Random House/Zogby poll) enjoy reading digital books;  forty-three percent went to bookstore for a specific title; and, true enough: seventy-seven percent make additional purchases when looking for a specific title.

 

Taking Back the Fruits of Our Labor: Leading the Way to Open Access in Helsinki

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In late May of this year, the University of Helsinki signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, agreeing to support open access to University research.  Beginning January 1, 2010, researchers at the University are required to deposit copies of their articles in an open repository at the University.  The repositories were created and continue to be maintained by the University libraries using Dspace open source repository software.

The American Idol Approach to Legal Scholarship

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From “Online Colloquy Allows Legal Academics to Vote Up or Down on Essays,” by Thomas Adcock, New York Law Journal, Friday, June 6, 2008, p. 24:

THREE PROFESSORS of criminal law are bent on demolishing a fusty convention of colloquy by using the Internet to make scholarship more efficient and more democratic.
The trio — Professors Paul H. Robinson of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Kimberly Ferzan of the Rutgers School of Law at Camden, N.J., and Stephen P. Garvey of Cornell Law School — say their effort is serious scholarship’s answer to TV’s ‘American Idol.’
Their vehicle is a Web site, launched in January, that has thus far attracted 120 academicians to ‘vote’ up or down on essays submitted for their considered debate.

 

For more information: 

http://www.law.upenn.edu/cf/faculty/phrobins/conversations/

E-books in the air

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These three paragraphs in a front-page (below the fold) story in today’s New York Times, “To Save Fuel, Airlines Find No Speck Too Small,” caught my eye:

Up in the cockpit, Delta is studying whether it is feasible to divide the heavy pilot manuals required on each flight between the captain and first officer, so pilots are not toting duplicate sets of five or six books that each weigh about a pound and a half.

Eventually, the airline wants to eliminate printed manuals and display the information on computer screens, a step the government would have to approve.

“That’s very much where we want to go,” said Gary Edwards, Delta’s director of flight control. “That’s the wave of the future.”

Law School Laptop Bans

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This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education has a front-page story Law Professors Rule Laptops Out of Order in Class which reports on new laptop use policies or procedures at the University of Chicago; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Michigan; Florida International; Georgetown; Harvard; and the University of Wisconsin.  Recently, in an editorial in the Stanford Daily, students themselves asked the university to “Consider limiting wireless access in class.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education piece discusses the pros and cons of various policies and also the technical difficulty of effecting a ban.  It quotes several law professors, including David Cole from Georgetown who offers this interesting observation:

Several weeks into one of his law classes last year, he asked the students what they thought of the ban, letting them respond anonymously. Roughly three-quarters of the students said they favored a no-laptop policy. And 95 percent said they had used their machines for purposes other than taking notes.