As I’ve done before, I thought I’d offer up some recent highlights from my Twitter feed that may be of interest to TFL readers but escaped notice. Alors, in no particular order:
— First up is an interesting draft by USC economists Isabelle Brocas and Juan D. Carrillo, The neurobiology of opinions: can judges and juries be impartial? The authors draw on neuroscience to model belief formation and decision-making by judges and juries, concluding that “early cases in a judge's career may affect his decisions later on, and that early evidence produced in a trial may matter more than late evidence,” and that “the distribution of preferences in a jury affects the way information is interpreted by individual jurors.”— Anyone who has been paying attention knows that adjuncts get a raw deal. But this adjunct really got a raw deal. (To be fair, her former institution may have been distracted by more pressing matters.)
— In (much) lighter news (which you will need after you read about the adjunct), I give you The Hotness-IQ Tradeoff in Academia. The philosophers, apparently, are to be congratulated. Alas, legal academia is not represented, although perhaps that’s for the best; I fear that the law types may have ended up below the line with their med school counterparts (a placement that suggests that such faculty are even dumber than their physical appearance would have predicted).
— I’ve always
thought that the 1L curriculum could do with some informal logic. And with An Illustrated Book of Bad
Arguments, it really couldn’t be easier. Come to think of it, I’ve found
myself on the business end of the Guilt By Association fallacy (illustrated right) more than once while workshopping a paper. So maybe we could
all use a refresher course.
— UNC and Harvard have apparently both seen the light and (consistent with a pending proposal by federal regulators) largely taken away from IRBs responsibility for assessing information privacy risks and given that responsibility to actual IT experts. What’s that adage about a thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean?
— Maybe this is only an issue for those of us who work in or near the sciences, but you know those emails you get inviting you, on behalf of your Extraordinary Contribution to a field (often, one in which you have contributed precisely nothing) to be the Most Honored Speaker at some random conference? You guys know that those conferences are fake, right? Well, this guy didn’t get the memo, and boy is he (rightly) pissed.
— Think bickering among legal academics sometimes gets heated? Hey, in the sciences, it’s not a party until one academic calls another a “bitch” (and “crook” and “con artist”) while critiquing her work. (The author has since edited his blog post to replace “bitch” with “ma’am.” Apparently “Dr.” and “Prof.” were already taken.)
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