The latest from Gimp.org looks like a significant upgrade — better aesthetically, bigger feature set, it also feels snappier so far.
Versions seem available for just about every platform.
(GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a free and open source solution that rivals Photoshop. And did I mention free?)
Florida Supreme Court Adopts Recommendations By Miami Law Students:
In a recent opinion regarding children’s appearances in dependency court proceedings, the Florida Supreme Court adopted parts of a proposed amendment to the Florida Rules of Juvenile Procedure that was written by two law students from the University of Miami.
The students, Melissa Rossman and Caitlin Saladrigas, members of the law school’s Children & Youth Law Clinic, prepared a brief in which they commented on rules proposed by the Florida Bar Juvenile Rules Committee. In the brief, Rossman and Saladrigas laid out the constitutional, statutory, human rights, therapeutic jurisprudence, and public-policy reasons for mandating that children appear in their own dependency court proceedings.
The court adopted a rule requiring state dependency court judges to ensure that children be given an opportunity to appear and be heard in such hearings. Although the court did not adopt the precise language proposed on behalf of the clinic and three other child-advocacy organizations, the adopted amendment incorporates many of the suggestions made in the law students’ brief. Justice Barbara Pariente’s concurring opinion echoes several policy arguments in the brief that favor strengthening a child’s right to be present and heard in dependency proceedings.
Rossman, a third-year student, and Saladrigas, who graduated from the School of Law last year, worked on the brief with the director of the Children & Youth Law Clinic, Bernard P. Perlmutter, and in conjunction with Florida’s Children First, a statewide legal aid program that fights for the legal rights of at-risk children; Florida Youth SHINE, a youth-run, peer-driven organization working to change the culture of Florida’s foster care system; and Legal Aid Service of Broward County, which provides free legal advice, representation, and education to the disadvantaged of Broward County.
Bravo!
I have to admit that this is pretty good: Candidate for New Romney Campaign Song. Personally, I think it has legs. But I guess the cautious folks on Team Romney will be seeing how it plays in key markets, and if it doesn’t work out, then I suppose we’ll get something else.
I’m in New York for Cardozo Law’s Anonymity and Identity in the Information Age, speaking on the war on online anonymity.
It’s a great program, and I’m on the first panel so then I get to relax and enjoy the event.
Travelling here yesterday I learned two things: First that putting your boarding pass on your electronic device instead of a phone is not a smart move. The person in front of me at the TSA line was not able to have his boarding pass on his iPad read by the TSA screener’s machine. And at the gate, the person in front of me in the boarding queue was not able to have her boarding pass on her smart phone read by the gate agent’s scanner.
Second thing I learned, from the French person sitting next to me on the plane, is that a lot of French people with money are investing in Belgium (!) as a form of tax evasion. Apparently, if you buy an asset there you don’t have to pay tax on the appreciation if you hold it 5-7 years. Thus, among other things, there’s a property boom going on with appreciations of as much as 5% per year. (Bubble, anyone?) It wasn’t clear to me if this was legal tax avoidance, or a classic French fiddle, but my interlocutor seemed to think there was an awful lot of it going on.
Incidentally, last night I saw Venus in Fur. Highly recommended. It has three Tony Award nominations. The play is clever — arch at points, but fun and brainy at the same time — and I think that Nina Arianda in particular has to be a very strong contender for her spectacular performance.
It begins:
We are deeply troubled by the claims of the CIA’s former Deputy Director of Operations Jose Rodriguez regarding the effectiveness of the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will soon complete a comprehensive review of the CIA’s former Detention and Interrogation Program. Committee staff has reviewed more than 6 million pages of records and the Committee’s final report, which we expect to exceed 5000 pages, will provide a detailed, factual description of how interrogation techniques were used, the conditions under which detainees were held, and the intelligence that was – or wasn’t – gained from the program.
Statements made by Mr. Rodriguez and other former senior government officials about the role of the CIA interrogation program in locating Usama bin Laden (UBL) are inconsistent with CIA records.
And there’s lots more…
This is an excellent and forceful reaction to ex-CIA chief Jose Rodriguez’s recent book and 60 Minutes appearance in which he defended waterboarding “to protect Americans” and claimed that “torture works.”
In addition to his fantasy-based defense of torture, Rodriguez defended his destruction of 92 videotapes of interrogations involving waterboarding, despite a law requiring the tapes’ recording and a judge’s order not to destroy the tapes. In his book, Hard Decisions, Rodriguez justifies the tapes’ destruction because of their “bad visuals” — worse than Abu Ghraib. Those illegal actions did not lead to prosecution, see No Criminal Charges Sought Over C.I.A. Tapes, as Rodriguez claimed advice of CIA counsel. Not entirely unreasonably, the Justice Department wants US officials to feel they can rely on their government lawyers’ advice; less reasonably it was unwilling to make an exception for indubitable torture or war crimes. Not that the lawyers were prosecuted either.
Sen. Feinstein has not exactly been a progressive champion on most issues, but she seems energized over this issue — not that there should be anything partisan or progressive about condemning torture or lying, but there we are — and deserves credit for it.
(1) Joi Ito chuckles over a week of a student’s electrodermal activity, a “measure of assessing alterations in sympathetic arousal associated with emotion, cognition, and attention”, noting that it “nearly flatlined during classes”.
(2) Lior Strahilevitz:
[T]he disparities between men and women speaking up in class remain substantial. The Speak Up Report somewhat sheepishly mentions an obvious solution, which seems to have substantial majority support from the Yale students surveyed: Cold-calling via the Socratic method, especially what the Report calls “warm-hearted cold calling.” A great virtue of cold-calling is that everybody speaks. While the report details various sensible steps that can encourage more women to speak up in class, it seems nothing will work better than having the majority of the class time be devoted to Socratic discussion rather than lecture followed by Q & A from volunteers.
Actually, in my experience with cold-calling, women often turn out to dominate the list of top performers…
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