“Digital Cops in a Virtual Environment”.

Check out this conference on cybercrime and digital law enforcement to be held at the Yale Law School next month. It’s being organized by folks at the Information Society Project and features a list of interesting speakers from related fields. Some of them are frequent bloggers (Balkinization, Discourse.net) so hopefully we’ll get to read about it as it happens. It’s not too late to get a spot on a panel (or a publication in a related special issue of IJCLP and YJOLT) thanks to a paper-competition [pdf] they are having.

[Crooked Timber]

New JASIST. The March issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology is now online. Here are the OA-related articles.

• Marcia Lei Zeng and Lois Mai Chan, Trends and issues in establishing interoperability among knowledge organization systems
• Padmini Srinivasan, Text mining: Generating hypotheses from MEDLINE
• Massimo Melucci, Making digital libraries effective: Automatic generation of links for similarity search across hyper-textbooks
• Peter Vinkler, Characterization of the impact of sets of scientific papers: The Garfield (impact) factor
• C. Christiaan van der Eijk and four co-authors, Constructing an associative concept space for literature-based discovery
• Corinne Jšrgensen, Unlocking the museum: A manifesto

[Open Access News]

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the fourth and sixth papers are especially interesting I think. the fifth, i have issues with because I think that I've done it differently, but it might be because i don't use terms like hebbian type, instead i use more humanities oriented terms. In any case, i also still think that conceptual maps arise as much from usage as from analysis of the text, but that's just me. I'm happy someone else has time to do this kind of work though at least it is progress in the field.

Playing dumb at Bowdoin, too. In response to yesterday's post about the responses of Duke faculty and administrators to the news that a strikingly disproportionate… [Critical Mass]

Another victory! US withdraws subpoena of antiwar meeting

Facing growing public pressure from civil liberties advocates, federal prosecutors on Tuesday dropped subpoenas that they issued last week ordering antiwar protesters to appear before a grand jury and ordering a university to turn over information about the protesters.

From the National Lawyers Guild press release

The U.S. Attorney announced this afternoon that it withdrew the subpoena seeking records relating to the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) chapter at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Subpoenas directed at four activists were also withdrawn. The NLG subpoena sought records relating its leadership and to a forum held at Drake on November 15, 2003, the day before a protest at which 12 were arrested. A gag order placed on employees of Drake University has also been lifted.

NLG President Michael Avery said, “The government was forced to back down in this case and it shows that people can and should stand up to the government when it is abusing its powers. The Lawyers Guild is grateful to our many friends and allies who supported us in the face of this attack by the government. This experience demonstrates that the American people cherish their right of free expression and the right of political groups to dissent from government policies.”

The NLG does huge amounts of behind the scenes work negotiating with police and authorities prior to big demos. Plus, they are always present at demos, monitoring the police, negotiating when needed, etc. They're the people wearing the iridescent green caps. Be happy they are there!

[Politics in the Zeros]

Bush to Back Marriage Amendment. WaPo: Bush Plans To Back Marriage Amendment President Bush plans to endorse a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as the union of a man… [Outside the Beltway]

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from dictionary.com
bigotry: . The state of mind of a bigot; obstinate and unreasoning attachment of one's own belief and opinions, with narrow-minded intolerance of beliefs opposed to them.

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pluralism: condition in which numerous distinct ethnic, religious, or cultural groups are present and tolerated within a society.

the president is acting as one of these, which is it…. which one….