Articles and Columns for July / August 2021

• 2021 Update to Choosing Law Librarianship: Thoughts for People Contemplating a Career Move – AALL Gallagher Award recipient Mary Whisner, Public Services Librarian, University of Washington, Marian Gould Gallagher Law Library, has updated her 2008 guide about choosing a career in law librarianship. With more than 30 years of experience in the profession, Whisner discusses important topics to review when considering a career in our profession.
• Academic and Scholar Search Engines and Sources 2021 – Marcus Zillman’s new guide provides a wealth of information to enhance your efforts in conducting expert research on a wide range of subject matters. The guide is also another reminder that Google should not be your go-to subject search engine by demonstrating how choosing to use reliable topic specific sources can deliver greater scope, breath and depth of information for your analysis and reporting. These sites include metasearch, semantic and Deep Web search, with many sources offering advanced search functionality, unique and comprehensive data sets and repositories, dashboards and tools from around the world, all of which are updated and curated effectively and consistently. These sources represent the work of academic, government, consortium, firms and industry.
• Data privacy laws in the US protect profit but prevent sharing data for public good – Cason Schmit, Brian N. Larson and Hye-Chung Kum are faculty at the school of public health and the law school at Texas A&M University with expertise in health information regulation, data science and online contracts. U.S. data protection laws often widely permit using data for profit but are more restrictive of socially beneficial uses. They wanted to ask a simple question: Do U.S. privacy laws actually protect data in the ways that Americans want? Using a national survey, we found that the public’s preferences are inconsistent with the restrictions imposed by U.S. privacy laws.
• Reopening the Books – Attorney, editor and legal publisher Robert McKay discusses new and notable launches with fresh ideas and innovation in relation to the provision of actual added-value legal content from law publishers in legal and professional publishing in Europe over the past several years.
• Handling Questions: A Presenter’s Guide – OK, you have gotten through the body of your presentation satisfactorily. Time to relax, right? Nope. There is one hurdle left: The question and answer period. This is when some presenters wilt and others shine. With a few tips, some experience and a modicum of intestinal fortitude, you can shine every time. Jerry Lawson’s extensive experience as a speaker is put to good use in this article as he provides best practice advice for each stage of your presentation.
• IPCC climate report: Profound changes are underway in Earth’s oceans and ice – a lead author explains what the warnings mean – Humans are unequivocally warming the planet, and that’s triggering rapid changes in the atmosphere, oceans and polar regions, and increasing extreme weather around the world, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns in a new report. The IPCC released the first part of its much anticipated Sixth Assessment Report on Aug. 9, 2021. In it, 234 scientists from around the globe summarized the current climate research on how the Earth is changing as temperatures rise and what those changes will mean for the future. This is a conversation with climate scientist Robert Kopp, a lead author of the chapter on Earth’s oceans, ice and sea level rise, about the profound changes underway.
• Machines Learning the Rule of Law – EU Proposes the World’s first Artificial Intelligence Act – Sümeyye Elif Biber is a PhD Candidate in Law and Technology at the Scuola Sant’Anna in Pisa. In 21 April 2021, the European Commission (EC) proposed the world’s first Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). The proposal has received a warm welcome across the EU as well as from the US, as it includes substantial legal provisions on ethical standards. After its release, the media’s main focus laid on the proposal’s “Brussels Effect”, which refers to the EU’s global regulatory influence: EU laws exceed their “local” influence and become global standards. With the AIA, the EU has the potential to become the world’s “super-regulator” on AI. More than the Brussels Effect, however, the emphasis should lie on the EU’s intention to explicitly protect the rule of law against the “rule of technology”. Despite this expressed goal, the normative power of the regulation to ensure the protection of the rule of law seems inadequate and raises serious concerns from the perspective of fundamental rights protection. This shortcoming becomes most evident across three main aspects of the AIA, namely in the regulation’s definition of AI systems, the AI practices it prohibits, and the preeminence of a risk-based approach.
• Robots are coming for the lawyers – which may be bad for tomorrow’s attorneys but great for anyone in need of cheap legal assistance – Imagine what a lawyer does on a given day: researching cases, drafting briefs, advising clients. While technology has been nibbling around the edges of the legal profession for some time, it’s hard to imagine those complex tasks being done by a robot. And it is those complicated, personalized tasks that have led technologists to include lawyers in a broader category of jobs that are considered pretty safe from a future of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. As Professors Elizabeth C. Tippett and Charlotte Alexander discovered in a recent research collaboration to analyze legal briefs using a branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, lawyers’ jobs are a lot less safe than we thought. It turns out that you don’t need to completely automate a job to fundamentally change it. All you need to do is automate part of it.
• It’s not just bad behavior – why social media design makes it hard to have constructive disagreements online – Good-faith disagreements are a normal part of society and building strong relationships. Yet it’s difficult to engage in good-faith disagreements on the internet, and people reach less common ground online compared with face-to-face disagreements. There’s no shortage of research about the psychology of arguing online, from text versus voice to how anyone can become a troll and advice about how to argue well. But there’s another factor that’s often overlooked: the design of social media itself. Amanda Baughan and her colleagues investigated how the design of social media affects online disagreements and how to design for constructive arguments
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 4, 2021 – Four highlights from this week: CISA Begins Cataloging Bad Practices that Increase Cyber Risk; Google Is Adding Support for Digital Covid-19 Vax Cards into Android; How a Burner Identity Protects Your Inbox, Phone, and Cards; and Scientist Finds Early Coronavirus Sequences That Had Been Mysteriously Deleted.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 11, 2021 – Four highlights from this week: The anatomy of a ransomware attack; The Evolution of Cybercrime as a Service; The Older You Are, the More Likely You Are to Fall Victim to Cybercrime; and Capitol rioters who deleted social media posts of their involvement may have further incriminated themselves.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 18, 2021 – Four highlights from this week: YouTube Algorithm Recommends Videos that Violate the Platform’s Very Own Policies; State Data Privacy Bills Growing More Widespread; NIST Outlines Security Measures for Software Use and Testing Under Executive Order; and State Data Privacy Bills Growing More Widespread.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 25, 2021 – Four highlights from this week: Protect your smartphone from radio-based attacks; New emergency weather alerts set to begin in July – here’s what they mean; Accused Capitol Rioter Forced to Unlock Laptop With Face Recognition; and Connecticut pushes cybersecurity with offers of punitive damage protection.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, August 8, 2021 – Four highlights from this week: How to Defend Yourself Against NSO Spyware Like Pegasus; NIST revises flagship cyber resiliency guidance; Researchers Say They’ve Found a ‘Master Face’ to Bypass Face Rec Tech; and Ransomware poses threat to vulnerable local governments.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, August 15, 2021 – Four highlights from this week: Here’s How Amazon Third-Party Sellers Reportedly Hound Customers Who Leave Bad Reviews; Microsoft Edge’s ‘Super Duper Secure Mode’ Does What It Says; The Ethics of Data: Anonymity Vs Analytics; and Apple Can Scan Your Photos for Child Abuse and Still Protect Your Privacy – If the Company Keeps Its Promises.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, August 21, 2021 – Four highlights from this week: Protect Yourself From Abuse: How to Find and Remove Stalkerware on Your Phone and PC; 10 Ways to Protect Your Personal Information; How to protect digital citizen identities through identity management; and Which Social Media Platforms Are Banning the Taliban?
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, August 28, 2021 – Four highlights from this week: How Extortion Scams and Review Bombing Trolls Turned Goodreads Into Many Authors’ Worst Nightmare; Facial Recognition Technology: Current and Planned Uses by Federal Agencies; FBI sends its first-ever alert about a ‘ransomware affiliate’; and Who Will The Cybersecurity Bells Toll For?

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