Posts tagged tech
When will legal writing become a programming language?
New York Magazine reports on an interesting development in computer/human relations:
The Southern District of New York recently became the nation’s first federal court to explicitly approve the use of predictive coding, a computer-assisted document review that turns much of the legal grunt work currently done by underemployed attorneys over to the machines.
Last month, U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Peck endorsed a plan by the parties in Da Silva Moore v. Publicis Groupe — a sex discrimination case filed against the global communications agency by five former employees — to use predictive coding to review more than 3 million electronic documents in order to determine whether they should be produced in discovery, the process through which parties exchange relevant information before trial.
Analysts expect decisions like this to open the door for an eruption of computer analyzed legal work.
A few questions:
- How long will it be before lawyers are explicitly trained to write in a way which will be favorably interpreted by software?
- After this happens, how long will it be before legal writing evolves into a scripting language, more code to be compiled than words to be understood by humans? When will the first O’Reilly book be published for this language?
- Will computer/human standards emerge for other fields or discourses? SEO copywriting is already on its way. What other fields might follow suit? Sports journalism?
Pinterest, circa 1600.
Lévi-Strauss writes, as quoted by John Berger:
For Renaissance artists, painting was perhaps an instrument of knowledge but it was also an instrument of possession, and we must not forget, when we are dealing with Renaissance painting, that it was only possible because of the immense fortunes which were being amassed in Florence and elsewhere, and that rich Italian merchants looked upon painters as agents, who allowed them to confirm their possession of all that was beautiful and desirable in the world. The pictures in a Florentine palace represented a kind of microcosm in which the proprietor, thanks to his artists, had recreated within easy reach and in as real a form as possible, all those features of the world to which he was attached.
Oil Painting, as a genre, used extreme realism to communicate wealth and possession. Today, such extreme realism is accessible by anyone with an internet connection or a cheap digital camera. There’s no need to to hire expensive painters; anyone can associate with any thing.
Instead of showing off possession, sites like Pinterest allows you to show off taste.
While more egalitarian, it’s still just people posing with their associated stuff. If Berger’s argument applies to this age as well, every Like and Pin will be largely forgotten.
Mobile Design So Far
- Apple makes the Table View the default design framework in iOS.
- Loren Brichter implements stacked Table Views in Twitter for iPad, allowing users to see hierarchies and page back and forth between them naturally.
And that’s it.
I firmly believe stacked Table Views, as a framework, will be more important than the more tangible ‘pull to refresh’, which was likely inevitable. They’re designing whole OSes out of stacked Table Views these days.
Mike Krieger explains why Instagram uploads photos so quickly.
It’s slight of app.
“ The 48fps footage I saw looked terrible. It looked completely non-cinematic. The sets looked like sets. I’ve been on sets of movies on the scale of The Hobbit, and sets don’t even look like sets when you’re on them live… but these looked like sets. The other comparison I kept coming to, as I was watching the footage, was that it all looked like behind the scenes video. The magical illusion of cinema is stripped away completely. As I said above the landscape shots are breathtaking. 48fps is the future of nature documentaries. But if it’s the future of narrative cinema I don’t know if that future includes me.”
Consider this man’s humdrum playing.
Now consider the reaction Sega Genesis programers would have if you went back in time and told them we’ve replicated their cutting edge hardware in software, are running it on our phones, and playing their platform fighting levels that take place on subways on actual subways.
The future is strange, here, and we’re already over it.
Syd Lawrence noticed something worrying in Google Drive’s TOS…
Drones now have a posse: your elected officials.
Introducing the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus, a bipartisan group “dedicated to promoting greater purchase and use of aerial drones.” They, for all, welcome our robot overlords.
Two thoughts regarding the chairmen’s message pictured above:
- There was a lot of PR polishing that went into the still-creepy line, “continue to grow, and improve our lives as public acceptance progresses.” (And they still missed that extraneous comma)
- It’s amazing how blatantly these Congressmen are calling dibs on lobbying funds. How many caucuses are created for nascent sectors each year? How many of them last more than 5 years?
News.me: Leave the house, download news
This is my favorite use of iOS’s background geofencing yet:
I’ll think we’ve all been there: you get into a subway car, and just as the doors are closing, you realize that you’ve forgotten to take your phone out, pull to refresh, and wait 10 seconds to download the latest news articles to read offline. You curse under your breath and switch back to Angry Birds.
Today we’re pleased to introduce a new feature called Paper Boy. Simply set your home location so that whenever you leave home, News.me downloads your latest news in the background.
The best part about this? It’s such a clever, simple solution I imagine all serious news apps (cough-Instapaper-cough) will implement this feature shortly. Suddenly background downloading is no longer the domain of Newsstand bound apps. Hats off to Rob Haining for this sharp hack.
“ If you look at what we’re rooted in, it’s kind of obvious what we’re looking for….The most challenging problem we have right now is discovery of video, that’s the most challenging problem on the web. Social is one enabler, tagging is one enabler. It’s not like we need to solve social for YouTube, we need to solve discovery on YouTube and social is a natural enabler”
David Lawee, Google VP of corporate development and M&A chief, interviewed by Business Insider.
One large problem the web has yet to crack is the sorting, valuation, and distribution of culture –– point to point. Parts and pieces have been taken on, but none have done it on a dependable scale. People are messy and fickle, which is hardly ideal for automated systems.
And so I look to you, Tumblr. Anyone can sell ads. No one has developed, or is in a position to develop, a flexible yet predictable (a handful of post types, tags, reblogs…) system for addressing culture at scale. Pinterest, and sites like it, are––at best––socially edited catalogues, arbiters of shopping not culture.
