Cutting Law School by 1 Year Could Worsen Law Grads' Finances

(Note: I admit, this post really has nothing to do with technology.  But it might still be interesting to anyone with an interest in education, or graduate school.)

In comments that most non-lawyers probably glossed over, President Obama commented today that "law schools would probably be wise to think about being two years instead of three."

Obama made the comments during a pro-student tour in which the President is taking aim at the high and continually rising costs of education.  The logic seems sound -- if a legal education costs $70,000 per year (accounting for inflation and interest), then two years in law school costs $70,000 less than three years. If you then assume that these hypothetical students could work during what would be their third year of law school, this puts the students $100,000 or more ahead of where they would be.

Anecdotally, this proposal seems to be extremely popular, with lawyers and law students on various social networks decrying the uselessness of the third year of law school.  (A popular follow-on proposal is "add an optional third year" or "get an LL.M. if you disagree".)  Indeed, Obama himself was a law professor, and other law professors have made this proposal before.

Surely, it can't be that easy.

Red Equal Signs: A Study in Sorting?

(Now that the bar exam is over and I have had time to sort out a number of personal and professional items, this blog is being revived. Sorry for the suspense.)

Odds are, you have a Facebook account. No, really. Over 50% of Americans have Facebook accounts. So, odds are, you have a Facebook account. (25 other countries are also over the 50% threshold, including the United Kingdom and Canada.) So, odds are, you've seen a red equal sign in the last few days.

In the extremely unlikely event you don't know what I'm talking about, here's what happened. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court, highest court in the country, heard challenges to the laws known as Proposition 8 (the California law prohibiting the performance of same-sex marriages in that state) and the Defense of Marriage Act (the U.S. federal law restricting federal marriage benefits from same-sex marriages*). Among the many memes and other trends on the Internet relating to the cases, Facebook was awash in red. The Human Rights Campaign urged followers to change their profile pictures in support of marriage equality, and it caught on. I haven't seen any estimates of how many people changed their pictures, but it was a lot. It also spawned a number of spoofs, from Ernie & Bert to corgis to bacon.

This is not a post about marriage equality. Sorry to disappoint. But I am going to talk about Facebook and social sorting, so click on!

Take This DRM. It's Dangerous to Distribute Games Alone.

(I am back after a couple of weeks of intense thesis immersion.  So let's talk about The Legend of Zelda.)

Let's be honest: If you never wanted to erase Navi, link's fairy companion in The Ocarina of Time, then you never played The Ocarina of Time.  If I had to make a list of the top modifications I wanted to otherwise great games, deleting Navi would top the list, and it wouldn't even be close.  If I had the time, energy, and technical skill, I would go back and erase Navi from the game myself, just to be able to go back and play the game without her.

Entrepreneur, gamer, and candidate for Dad of the Year Mike Hoye recently modded his own copy of The Wind Waker, Link's first adventure on the GameCube in the Legend of Zelda series.  He didn't remove the fairy companion; to the best of my knowledge (I don't own a GameCube), there is no fairy companion in The Wind Waker.  Instead, he painstakingly changed the dialogue to change protagonist Link's gender from male to female.

Hoye enjoys playing video games with his daughter, but was frustrated by the lack of positive female role models in games.  So he did the sensible thing, and built one.  He didn't change the plot or the function of the game, just a few words here and there to make the game more accessible to his daughter.  He also made his modifications available to the public for other concerned parents.

But this isn't a post about gender in video games.  Everyone knows that video games have done a terrible job of handling gender in any sensible way, with very few and limited exceptions.  No, I want to talk about copyright.  Mike Hoye's labor of love is demonstrative of why our copyright system isn't just broken; it's insanely broken.

Why?  Hoye's brilliant Zelda hack is probably illegal.

Who Says Internet Surfing Harms Attention Spans?

Not Congress, apparently.

The Senate voted unanimously this week to recommend that the President oppose any regulation by the International Telecommunications Union of the Internet. The resolution states that the government should "promote a global Internet free from government control." In his statement explaining the vote, Senator Marco Rubio noted that "I just want to be clear that America is on record as being in favor of Internet freedom and that we don't want to see any internationally recognized right for government interference on the Internet and the free flow of information on the Internet."

Senator Rubio authored an opinion piece in advance of the vote in Politico, discussing how important "Internet freedom" is:

"A top-down, international regulatory model goes against the very nature of the Internet. An international regulatory regime, and the politics and red tape that go with it, directly conflict with the Internet’s purpose of sharing ideas and connecting people. Governments and international bodies cannot keep pace with the Internet, and they should not try to do so." (emphasis mine)

There is a lot of room for debate about what "Internet freedom" means, and how we should react to that politically. Senator Rubio knows that as well as anyone: He co-sponsored PIPA.

Yep. That happened.

Science Professors Show Gender Bias; Only Science Professors Shocked

The headline in the New York Times yesterday read, "Bias Persists for Women of Science, a Study Finds." * I think calling that an understatement would be an understatement.

The article refers to the tediously-named article "Science Faculty's Subtle Gender Biases Favor Male Students" published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study itself was elegantly simple. The organizers sent one-page descriptions of potential job candidates to university professors in the sciences and asked them to assess the candidates for apparent competence, hireability, and potential for mentorship, as well as recommend a starting salary. Some professors received descriptions of male candidates, and others received descriptions of female candidates.

The catch? Every single job candidate was identical except for gender. Word-for-word, the female applicants were identical to their male candidates, except that the name "Jennifer" replaced the name "John".

The results are striking. Male professors rated female applicants as 17% less competent, 21% less hireable, and 16% less desirable for mentorship than male applicants, with a recommended salary 11% lower. Female professors were even harsher, rating the female applicants 19% less competent, 27% less hireable, and 17% less desirable for mentorship, with 15% lower recommended salaries.

Wait ... what?

Space Leadership Act: Innovative Government or Constitutional Minefield?

This week, five members of the House of Representatives introduced a bill that is being called the "Space Leadership Act". The proposal has gotten a lot of press this week, but some basic highlights of the bill include:

• a ten-year tenure for NASA Administrators
• an eleven-member Board of Directors whose duties would involve nominating Administrator candidates and proposing the NASA budget
• a quadrennial review of all NASA programs
• "for cause" removal of Board members and Administrators.

The five Republican authors of the bill claim that the measure will reduce politicization of NASA and provide for long-term stability and predictability in NASA programs. (It is worth noting that at least one Democrat is apparently prepared to cosponsor the bill.)  It should come as no surprise that all of the five representatives proposing the bill come from Texas (John Culberson, 7th District; Pete Olson, 22nd District; Lamar Smith, 21st District), Florida (Bill Posey, 15th District), and Virginia (Frank Wolf, 10th District).

Current NASA Administrator Charles Bolden spoke this week, and, although he didn't address the bill directly, it was obvious from his remarks that he was defensive of the current structure:

“Such talk undermines our nation’s goals at a very critical time. . . The truth is we have an ambitious series of deep space destinations we plan to explore and we are hard at work exploring the hardware and the technologies to get us there.”

It is easy to argue that NASA reform is necessary: over-budget and underfunded programs are frequently in the news, and the Administration's recent challenges have given it a lackluster reputation at best. However, this bill raises a lot of potential problems.

50 Years Ago, We Aimed for the Moon

Today is the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's famous "Moon Speech". On September 12, 1962, Kennedy spoke at Rice University in Houston, Texas, to explain the goal of getting to the moon. During the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had launched a hollowed out ICBM shell into space as the U.S. watched. The most well-known segment from his speech is this:

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."

This kind of challenge, he said, would push the United States to be better, to be stronger, and to advance the cause of peace over the shadow of war. Space would be won for peaceful nations, and it would be a place for peace and knowledge.