Final Post... maybe

Hi, I just wanted to say this will probably be my last post (well, at least my last post on computer related stuff)..

Unlike Eric, I probably won't be changing this into a blog on basketball... but we'll see.

Cheers.

Wiki etiquette

I mentioned a few posts ago that there are some drawbacks to using Wikis as a source of information. In addition to those, I have now encountered the problem of Wiki etiquette. That is, given the collaborative nature of the project, where does one draw the line between being helpful and being a bit over the top. I guess the idea evolved from netiquette, and is similar to that which governs forums, etc. For instance, it is often suggested on forums that one should refrain from double posting, resurrecting old topics if there is nothing significant to add, etc. and this is carried through to the Wiki, given the note at the top when one tries to edit a page: "Please edit the page only if you can improve it."

When I have been looking at trying to improve pages, I am conscious of the fact other students may prefer to have a page set out a particular way. Luckily, everyone else seems to be conscious of this too, so the editing which has been taking place does genuinely improve our Wiki!

Law firm websites

Last class we looked at the future of the use of IT in law firms, which reminded me of something a read a while ago (somewhere) on the failure of many businesses to ensure websites have maximum impact and usability. I guess the services provided by law firms distinguish them from those businesses where the website is used mainly for placing orders (where a lot of the problems arise in terms of billing, registration of details, etc).

Most law firm websites provide a general overview of the people involved and the services offered - a quick look at the websites of major firms in Australia makes that clear. As such, law firms probably do not suffer as much as firms in other industries from poorly designed sites. However, flaws such as tiny font size and poorly structured menus can be highly detrimental to the firm. Clients may not wish to spend ridiculous amounts of time searching for the contact person best suited to their needs, particularly if the client is unfamiliar with the myriad services offered by law firms and doesn't know what they're looking for in the first place.

Some law firms have taken online interaction a step further, providing client services through their website. For instance, Phillips Fox has a range of online services available such as Client Connect and webmail, which allows clients to manage their matters and keep up to date with progress.

Smaller firms can probably get away with little expenditure on their websites, as their first point of contact with the client is likely to be by telephone or email (especially if the client is referred to the firm by another firm). Nevertheless, following initial contact clients may wish to gain a better understand of the way the firm operates, in which case the website will come into the picture.

Virtual legal disputes

Interestingly, there appears to be a whole virtual world out there, beyond that which I am familiar with. Apparently there are virtual lives people can lead, in the sense that one experiences through The Sims. Games such as Entropia Universe, Second Life and Everquest allow people to live the lives they would not be able to in the real world, some making substantial amounts of (real) money in the process, as goods and other property can be exchanged using real life money or other consideration.

This raises many legal issues such as fraud, exploitation, etc. According to an article in the Good Weekend, some entrepreneurs in China have set up virtual farming factories where workers play games in 12 hour shifts, killing beasts for gold or rare items which can then be sold to others around the world. These workers get paid very little for their time, and are akin to those in many other sweatshops. Further, there is currently no recourse for an owner who has lost his or her virtual fortune to some bandit.

Of course, similar legal issues are encountered through online purchasing and such, not only in the aforementioned games. Accordingly, there have been calls for global policing of cybercrime and other legally, socially and morally distasteful things such as preying on children. I guess that's what prompted the US to join the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime!

Bubble wrap

Okay, I know this is totally useless and has pretty much nothing to do with our course, but I found virtual bubble wrap! It's kind of cute actually... just goes to show you can find anything on the internet.

WikiHow

Following on from my post on our class Wiki, I read in the Sun-Herald that WikiHow is set on becoming the world's largest online how-to manual. (I have since discovered Vanessa's post on the same article). I think that's a fantastic idea, given that people always want to know practical things, like how to wash tomato sauce of a white blouse.

I guess the problems we experience (in terms of being able to verify information and, as Vanessa pointed out, consistency) are present in larger wikis like this, and perhaps are exacerbated by the sheer number of entries (over 12,000). WikiHow tries to address these issues by requiring all entries follow a particular format setting out the steps involved, tips and warnings. Entries can also be rated so that a reader gets a better feel for which entries to trust. However, these measures don't really prevent people from writing silly articles (although arguably the authors genuinely believe they are helping people out...). For instance, one can read up on how to discover that astrology in meaningless and how to be a happy bicycling hobo with an income (!!) Perhaps of most use to us currently is the piece on how to find wiki pages that need editing. In any case, it does make for interesting reading if you're stuck with something and need a solution.

RuleBurst

I handed in my research essay on Topic 3 - Legal Inferencing earlier today. For those of you who did an essay on a different topic, the purpose of the essay was to evaluate the approach taken by RuleBurst Limited, formerly Softlaw Corporation. RuleBurst is responsible for most of the 'expert systems' used by Commonwealth and State administrative agencies, with the most notable being the Department of Veterans' Affairs Compensation Claims Processing System.

Halfway through researching the essay I started wondering whether it was actually possible to adequately evaluate the approach taken by RuleBurst, given the prevalence of their systems. I mean, if the Australian Government etc think the systems are good, how likely are we to contradict that view? I can't imagine there would be a great deal of literature dedicated to criticising the specific developers of systems employed by government agencies... though in hindsight that might have been something to look at. I suspect most criticisms would come from dissatisfied customers, clients and applicants, and would point to the inadequacy of using automated systems in general rather than specifically bagging RuleBurst. I guess the disdain most people have for automated telephone services is evidence of that... although personally I've never had a problem with such services. It might just be that the systems I have used generally have a backup option to speak to an operator... which, of course, usually means I have to listen to hold music for a while.

Wiki

I have to say I'm actually surprised our Wiki is going so well. I know I should have had more faith in it from the beginning, but it's amazing just how much stuff is in there. There is so much information, much of which I never would have thought to include, such as the piece on blogs and social networking. The section on expert systems is so comprehensive that I'm drawing on it for basic concepts to include in my administrative law essay. A slight disadvantage is perhaps the lack of referencing throughout the Wiki, which often means that information is not verifiable. This is a problem which appears to plague larger Wikis as well, like Wikipedia. I think we've all heard stories about people randomly changing entries which then have to be deleted or altered by the numerous editors so that the entries are accurate.

Use of Applications in Legal Firms

Whilst reading up on some of the law firms as part of the whole Summer Clerkship thing, I was surprised to notice that many of the firms have embraced technology in innovative ways, particularly in the provision of client service. One firm in particular has a comprehensive system online, which I assume is some sort of database (I may be wrong given that I really don't have much technical knowledge in terms of computer technology), allowing clients to track their matters and interact with the firm. The same firm even has a webmail service! I guess the firms are attempting to expand upon the traditional lines of service delivery. Which brings me to the piece I read in either the paper which featured a firm in Melbourne delivering legal advice via sms. The lawyer interviewed said one of the benefits was being able to provide advice across borders in a timely fashion, and that this initiative was akin to providing advice by email. I must say that I find it slightly dubious - especially considering lawyers aren't always known for being succinct.

I wish I still had that article...

Just for anyone who's interested, Austlii forgot to re-register their domain name so it's down temporarily... it's actually pretty amusing, but I'm sure they'll have it back up and running in no time!

Aide

I found it surprisingly difficult to come up with a topic for the aide program, which explains why I did one on identifying whether an object is a leaf! However, I don't think I know enough about rules to make a comprehensive system. I tried adding a few rules but found that it just replaced the previous rule with the new rule. It's kind of hard to explain but basically I had something along the lines of "An object is a leaf if... it is leaf-shaped" and I wanted to narrow that down so I created a rule which said "If an object is animal-shaped then it is not leaf-shaped". Again, I thought it would be good to define animal-shaped so I wrote "If an object is an animal then it is animal-shaped".

I thought after doing so that when running the program I would be asked first whether the animal was leaf-shaped, to which I could go to the next rule if I was unsure (much like the Split Up program we were playing with, which was originally accessed through JustSys), but I'm not sure how to do that. So for now my rules are very simple and few but hopefully I can add to them next class.

Austlii vs LexisNexis

I attended a class yesterday held by Professor Greenleaf on Advanced Legal Research and found that he spent a fair bit of time explaining the advantages of using Austlii in legal research, perhaps as a result of his experience working there. My friend, who currently happens to be an editor for LexisNexis, mentioned the fact that the general attitude to Austlii at LexisNexis is one of immense distrust. They tend to dismiss it as an inaccurate and unnecessarily bulky tool, highlighted by the numerous irrelevant hits obtained through the Noteup function - most of which refer back to the Act in question! CaseBase, on the other hand, will only bring up cases that have considered various Acts etc, rather than requiring the user to sift through a mountain of results. Apparently this is because the LexisNexis people decide which cases will be shown in relation to particular sections of an Act, while Austlii doesn't (I can't remember if it's because the system does a little search and brings up everything which mentions the Act, or if it's due to something else)

Despite this, it seems most people (well, people I know who happen to do law at university) go directly to Austlii when faced with some sort of legal research task (I guess just as people will go to Google for just about anything). Personally, I always go to Austlii when I need to look up legislation as I find their collection of Consolidated Acts very useful and easy to navigate. Before yesterday I hadn't even heard of ComLaw, despite it being the official (Commonwealth?)legislation hotspot. Even when it comes to finding cases (particularly more recent ones), I catch myself typing the names of parties into the search box - which brings me to a quirk identified in the Austlii system...

I thought it was rather odd that if I were to, say, search for Official Trustee in Bankruptcy v Mateo, I would not get the case until around the ninth hit if I typed in "Official Trustee Mateo" as the search term. However, if I searched for "Official Trustee v Mateo" I would hit it immediately. I think it's a bit inconsistent.. I understand that in many instances people will inclue the "v", but what if, like me, you get used to leaving out things like "and" in search strings? It's essentially the same sort of thing, isn't it? Maybe it was just too difficult to get the system to recognise that having more than one word in the search string may mean that more than one party was involved!

In any case, I suspect all research tools have shortcomings (as identified in Mark's post) and don't think my LexisNexis friend will be able to convince me to cut Austlii out of my life.

Did you know Google used to be called BackRub??

What a terrible name for a search engine! Anyway, apparently the dudes who were working on the search engine as an extension of their summer project named it BackRub because of its ability to identify and analyse back links that led back to a given website.

The software Google used to rank web pages was called PageRank, which not only ranked the pages according to the number of direct links to it (which it interpreted as a vote from one particular page to another) but also analysed the quality of every page that cast a vote (by looking at the number of back links that particular page had).

But that wasn't it... Google also used something called Hypertext Matching Analysis to anaylse the content of a page, taking into account factors like font size and type, precise location of each word, etc. ensuring the results were relevant to the user's enquiry.

It's little wonder they've done so well~

For more information, especially on the importance of Google's business strategy, see "Strategies for E-Business" by Jelassi and Enders.

Hypertext Genius

I don't think I ever really knew what hypertext was and I'm not really any closer to finding out - though thanks to yesterday's class, I now have a bit of an idea about what it does and just how nifty it is. For more information, Wikipedia has a nice summary (personally it still sounds a bit technical).

Interestingly, by linking Wikipedia to my blog I may have bumped it up in terms of relevance rankings if anyone decides to search for 'hypertext' in Google or any other search engine. However, I doubt my one link will have made a significant impact given how popular Wikipedia is...

In addition to using hypertext as a basis for ranking search results, or indeed for returning results, hypertext appears to be used by Austlii for linking words in particular Acts to the relevant section that contains the definitions, which is actually really useful (besides the fact that 'cattle' apparently includes camels and some other animals I've never even heard of).

...


Oh oh and did you know you can change the colour of a link by using specific HTML tags? Maybe that's why the links are green in our Wiki! I haven't managed to do it here because tags aren't allowed when posting, but for anyone who cares or is curious please go here. It's just something I found through Google when my friend mentioned it to me.

My Web Page

Originally I thought I could just paste all the html from my attempted webpage in here because there's a window called Edit Html that you can use to post.
I think I'll just have to be content with the few tags I'm actually allowed to use though...

The cool thing is that I can do half of it in the Edit Html bit and half in the normal compose thing...though I'm not sure why anyone would want to because it's much easier to let Blogger do all the work!



I AM A BLUE

HEADING

This is unfortunately not

very sophisticated.. I think some of my

computer science friends will disown me

WANT TO GO TO

GOOGLE?

Welcome to my Computer Applications in Law Blog!

Hi!

I'm not sure exactly what I'm supposed to write yet...

I assume this is meant to be a journal of sorts so I will update this during the semester.

Meanwhile, I'll start with what we did today. Eric has managed to get in ahead of me, posting his webpage as well as some other interesting stuff. I've done better by linking his blog to mine!

Anyway, feel free to post comments as we go along~

Toodles