Congratulations to Carl Malamud and publicresource.org for being selected as a Google 10^100 project winner! Among other things, the $2 million grant “will support the Law.Gov initiative, which aims to make all primary legal materials in the United States available to all.” I had the pleasure of presenting at the UC-Boulder Law.gov meeting and Texas Law.gov meeting earlier this year. Thus, I am very excited about Google’s decision to fund this very worthy project. For those who are interested in reading more, O’Reilly Radar has additional information on the law.gov / google 10^100 announcement here.
As we speak, I am currently in route to Portugal for the very exciting High Throughput Humanities meeting on Wednesday. As we believe it fits well within the goals of the meeting, I will briefly present our work on the United States Code (including a brief preview of our still unreleased new paper). Anyway, for those not familiar with the meeting, if you click on the image above you will be taken to the main page. Also, here is the announcement for the meeting:
“The High Throughput Humanities satellite event at ECCS’10 establishes a forum for high throughput approaches in the humanities and social sciences, within the framework of complex systems science. The symposium aims to go beyond massive data aquisition and to present results beyond what can be manually achieved by a single person or a small group. Bringing together scientists, researchers, and practitioners from relevant fields, the event will stimulate and facilitate discussion, spark collaboration, as well as connect approaches, methods, and ideas.
The main goal of the event is to present novel results based on analyses of Big Data (see NATURE special issue 2009), focusing on emergent complex properties and dynamics, which allow for new insights, applications, and services.
Utilizing a complex systems approach to harness these data, the contributors of this event aim to make headway into the territory of traditional humanities and social sciences, understanding history, arts, literature, and society on a global-, meso- and granular level, using computational methods to go beyond the limitations of the traditional researcher.”
As a new semester is here at Michigan CSCS, I have made several revisions to the content of our global reading list for the Computational Legal Studies Working Group. The content of this interdisciplinary reading list features work from economics, physics, sociology, biology, computer science, political science, public policy, theoretical and empirical legal studies and applied math. I wanted to highlight this reading list for anyone who is interesting in learning more about the state of the literature in this interdisciplinary space. Also, for those interested in learning model implementation, please consult my my slides from the 2010 ICPSR Course Introduction to Computing for Complex Systems. Feel free to email me if you have any questions.
With nine weeks to go before the 2010 Midterm Elections, it is worth checking in with Iowa Electronic Markets to see where things stand. “The IEM 2010 Congressional Election Markets are real-money futures markets where contract payoffs will be determined by the votes cast in the 2010 U.S. Congressional Elections. “Congress10” (plotted above) is based on the composition of both houses of Congress.”
Take a look at the plot above. You will notice there has been significant movement in the past few weeks. Consistent with the beliefs of a number of pundits, the dominant scenario for 2010 is split control “RH_DS10” (i.e Republican House and Democrat Senate). Whether you view this outcome as good or bad, it is important to emphasize there is still time left and these trends could reverse.
