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Announcing Law Tech Camp London 2012 – June 29, 2012 – Sponsored By Michigan State University College of Law, University of Westminster and The College of Law

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lawTechCampLondon 2012 is a BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media and technology enthusiasts and legal professionals including bloggers, twitters, legal-technology lawyers, social networkers, and anyone curious about new media and the law. Building off the strength of LawTechCamp Toronto – LawTechCamp London will be the first such event held in outside of North America.

lawTechCamp is not just for lawyers.  If you are interested in the intersection of law and technology, such as legal issues facing startups, access to justice issues, or someone just interested in technology or law, then please join us – and bring a friend or colleague.

This event is casual, with active participation between the audience and the workshop presenters and event-attendees. Attendance is free, but registration is required.

This event is brought to you by the following organizers:

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Automatic Prediction Of Small Group Performance In Information Sharing Tasks {from MIT Media Lab}

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Abstract: “In this paper, we describe a novel approach, based on Markov jump processes, to model small group conversational dynamics and to predict small group performance. More precisely, we estimate conversational events such as turn taking, backchannels, turn-transitions at the micro-level (1 minute windows) and then we bridge the micro-level behavior and the macro-level performance. We tested our approach with a cooperative task, the Information Sharing task, and we verified the relevance of micro- level interaction dynamics in determining a good group performance (e.g. higher speaking turns rate and more balanced participation among group members).”

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6,000 Pages Tell the World’s History [via GE Data Visualization]

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“It’s true. We’ve scanned 6,000 pages of GE’s annual reports to build this interactive visualization. But why? What’s the point? Not only does this provide a rich history of how GE has always been at work building, moving, powering and curing the world, but it is a true reflection of how the economy, U.S. and the world as a whole has progressed from 1892 until 2011. By diving deep into key terms, users can uncover interesting stories about innovation over the last century. Explore for yourself!

About this data: The data in this visualization is sourced from all of GE’s annual reports from 1892 until 2011.”

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You Had Me at Hello: How Phrasing Affects Memorability [via arXiv.org]

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From the Abstract: “Understanding the ways in which information achieves widespread public awareness is a research question of significant interest. We consider whether, and how, the way in which the information is phrased — the choice of words and sentence structure — can affect this process. To this end, we develop an analysis framework and build a corpus of movie quotes, annotated with memorability information, in which we are able to control for both the speaker and the setting of the quotes. We find significant differences between memorable and non-memorable quotes in several key dimensions. One is lexical distinctiveness: in aggregate, memorable quotes use less common word choices, but at the same time are built upon a scaffolding of common syntactic patterns; another is that memorable quotes tend to be more general in ways that make them easy to apply in new contexts. We also show how the concept of “memorable language” can be extended across domains.”

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Virginia Decoded – The Code of Virginia for Humans {49 States to Go}

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“Virginia Decoded is a private, non-governmental, non-partisan implemenation of The State Decoded, an open source project that provides a platform to display state-level legal information in a friendly, accessible, modern fashion. Virginia is the first state to deploy the software.

Virginia Decoded is currently in beta, which is to say that the site is under active development, with known shortcomings, but it has reached a point where it would benefit from being used by the general public (who one hopes will likewise benefit from it.) While every effort is made to ensure that the data provided on Virginia Decoded is accurate and up-to-date, it would be gravely unwise to rely on it for any matter of importance while it is in this beta testing phase.

Many more features are under development, including improvements to search, calculations of the importance of given sections of the code, inclusion of attorney generals’ opinions, Supreme Court of Virginia rulings, extensive explanatory text, social media integration, significant navigation enhancements, a vastly expanded built-in glossary of legal terms, Code download options, scholarly article citations, and much more.”

{HT: Legal Informatics Blog}