The NIH public-access policy has substantially increased public access to research results with benefits as described below that far outweigh the costs. Similar benefits can be expected from extending such a public access policy to other major federal funders.
from Committee for Economic Development, The Future of Taxpayer-Funded Research: Who Will Control Access to the Results? issued last week.
What if you let law students choose what they would pay for their (digital) casebook? Would you make any money?
That’s the gamble behind the Semaphore Press, the publishers of James Grimmelmann‘s, Internet Law: Cases and Problems, which is the book I am using in my Internet Law class this semester.
Semaphore Press’s name-your-own-price publishing model was publicized by Radiohead (although not invented by them). It is very different from the traditional law school casebook publishers who now charge well upwards of $100 per book. The Press suggests students pay $30 for this casebook, but allows them to pay as little as a penny:
What do you have to pay?
Each publication has a suggested price. We price full casebooks based on our belief that it is fair to ask a student pay about $1 for the reading material for each one-hour class session. Different schools use different calendars and credit hours, so we’ve settled on a suggested price for most of our casebooks of $30. We ask that you pay the suggested price either with a credit card (by clicking the appropriate link on our page), or by sending us a check, and then download a digital copy of the casebook. Note that if your professor has assigned, e.g., only 10 class sessions of material from a Semaphore Press book, then we suggest that you pay $10.We have expenses that we need to cover. Our authors hope, and deserve, to receive some royalty revenue from the works that they’ve created. But we also recognize that law school is expensive. We’ve heard stories of students not buying the required books because they just can’t afford them. These students – who want to learn just as much as those who can afford the books – borrow a classmate’s book some days, read the copy that is on reserve in the library other days, and some days simply can’t do the reading. We think that is not the best way to go about obtaining, or offering, an excellent legal education. Download the required reading and pay what you can, or what you think is fair.
The risk of freeriders
We know that the biggest risk to our business model is freeriders. If too many students pay little or nothing for the materials they download, Semaphore Press won’t be able to pay its bills over the long run, and we won’t be able to attract authors to publish their casebooks with us. Put simply, we need a critical mass of students to pay for the materials they download. Be a part of the solution to $130 casebooks, by fostering the creation of $30 casebooks: Please pay the suggested price. If you can’t pay it, please at least pay something to help Semaphore Press succeed.
In my introductory note to my students, I repeated to the language Semaphore requests faculty use:
This book has a suggested price of $30. I urge you to pay the suggested retail price in order to keep high-quality legal educational material available at reasonable prices. You might want to read the Semaphore Press FAQ before you buy the book.
I was curious: What did law students, a notoriously hard-bitten bunch, actually pay? So I asked them. Every student in my class was asked to write on a piece of paper, without their names, how much they paid, their age, gender, and what year of law school they were in. The tallied results are interesting.
Average price paid in entire class: $21.19 N=26
Average male payment: $20.63 N=16
Average female payment: $22.10 N=10
Average 2L payment: $23.40
Average 3L payment: $17.00
1 LLM @ $30Paid zero: 5 (3M 3L, 1F 3L, 1M 2L)
Paid $.01: 1 (1M 3L)
Paid $.02-$29.99: 3 (3F: $5, $15, $20)
Paid $30.00 :1 7 (11M 6F)
Paid over $30: noneAge range was 23-29, no particular correlations seemed visible.
We might also conclude from this small sample that the Semaphore Press model may have a future. This is consistent with the Radiohead experience, by the way: as Ed Felton noted in 2007, Radiohead’s Low Price Might Mean Higher Profit. Casebooks are perhaps even less highly substitutable than songs, and the demand is likely less elastic, so the parallel is far from exact. Even so, I think it’s an interesting result.
(We might also conclude from this small sample that male 3Ls are cheap.)
Meanwhile, however, even though name-your-own-price seems to have worked out well for Radiohead, for their latest album Radiohead have gone back to fixed prices.
That the Senate has bestirred itself from its gridlock and lethargy long enough to confirm Judge Jordan is really great news. Judge Jordan was not only an uncontroversial pick, he is an excellent pick and a great judge. It is not inconceivable he will be on lists of potential Supreme Court Justices some day.
U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jose Jordan, a Miami Law graduate, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Wednesday to serve on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. Judge Jordan graduated summa cum laude from the University of Miami School of Law in 1987, has been an adjunct professor since 1990, and is a member of the school’s visiting committee.
Nominated by President Barack Obama on Aug. 2, 2011, Judge Jordan is the first Cuban-American to sit on the 11th Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. The Senate vote was 94-5 in Jordan’s favor.
"Judge Adalberto José Jordan will bring an unwavering commitment to fairness and judicial integrity to the federal bench," President Obama said when he announced the nomination. "His impressive legal career is a testament to the kind of thoughtful and diligent judge he will be on the Eleventh Circuit. I am honored to nominate him today."
Miami Dean Patricia D. White called Judge Jordan’s elevation to the appeals bench "a magnificent appointment," and said the University of Miami "could not be prouder to have Judge Jordan as its alumnus and regular member of the adjunct faculty."
Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who graduated from Miami Law in 1996, told the Daily Business Review in an article published Wednesday that Judge Jordan "has an extraordinary reputation in our community" and that he is "highly regarded for his intellect."
Judge Jordan has been a U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida since 1999. He received the highest possible rating from the American Bar Association and has a stellar judicial record. Prior to that, he was an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. While at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he was Chief of the Appellate Division and Counsel on Legal Policy from 1998-1999. In the late 1980s, after obtaining his law degree, he was a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Before that, he had graduated magna cum laude from the University of Miami with a B.A. in Politics and Public Affairs.
Miami Law Professor Mary Coombs had Judge Jordan as a student in her first class at the school. He later served as her summer intern. "I haven’t found any better since," she said. "I am absolutely fantastically delighted. He is the combination of brilliance and decency and kindness. He is just extraordinary."
Judge Jordan will be the commencement speaker for Miami Law at its graduation ceremonies on May 12.
— University of Miami | School of Law – Judge Adalberto Jordan, JD '87, Confirmed To Appeals Court.
A geek met a gal online. After they had been dating for a while she brought him home to meet her family. Her uncle seemed amazed that they had met over the Internet and asked the geek what kind of line he had used to pick her up. “I just used a regular 56K modem,” he replied.
Yes, last year’s joke was better.
About two years ago, I was worrying about whether I could fly to DC to go to a great conference. To my enormous good fortune, I was snowed out.
As a result, when my aorta burst on Feb. 12, 2010, I was home, and the drive to the hospital to find out why I felt like I had been stabbed in the back was quick and easy. And as a result of getting care quickly, I survived an emergency aortic dissection, serious surgical complications, and the implantation of a metal aortic valve. It would be 11 days before I was recovered enough to be allowed to emerge from my induced coma. And it would be five weeks before I returned home, much enfeebled, barely able to walk with a walker.
Today I feel almost fully recovered. I tire a bit more easily than I used to. I have to watch what I eat in order to avoid the foods that counteract my medicines. But I’ve returned to a pretty full schedule. Things are basically good.
There’s quite a lot I probably will write about the experience someday, maybe on the anniversary of my return home, which seems to me to be a much more significant date than the date I collapsed while filling out forms outside the local emergency room (a good place to collapse, as it turned out).
For now, four statistics:
(1) People whose aortas burst have at most 60 minutes to get treated, or they die. After a little dithering, I made it to the hospital in about 20 minutes or so.
(2) The survival rate for aortic dissections is not great. Wikipedia gives the statistics for aortic emergencies as “80% mortality rate, and 50% of patients die before they even reach the hospital.”
(3) The rate at which people make a full recovery without heart or brain damage is, I gather, even worse than that. (Much aortic surgery is planned, when a problem is detected before the crisis; the success rate for that surgery is much better so don’t panic if you are diagnosed with this problem — be grateful it got caught in time.)
(4) I do seem to be one of those very lucky people. And people who survive two years past their valve replacement surgery generally have a life expectancy almost equal to what they had before — the “almost” being due largely a greater propensity to die in accidents because the blood thinners one must take to keep the metal valve unclogged increase the chances of bleeding out internally when hurt.
As I said, I’ve been very lucky. I beat some bad odds. And people have been so very supportive during my recovery.
I am very grateful.
Juan Cole:
Houston’s death was front page news in many Arab dailies, and elicited an outpouring of grief from her fans. Arabic newspapers said that the suddenness of her death magnified the shock. Her passing was also commemorated in Arabic on Twitter and Facebook.
Yemeni political activist and dissident Hind Aleryani ( @Dory_Eryani ) tweeted, “When I was a teenager in my room in #Yemen wondering what’s love, #WhitneyHouston was the voice that introduced Love 2 me #IWillAlwaysLoveYou.”
This recollection is a powerful reminder of the reach of American popular culture, and its influence in shaping ideas about, e.g., romantic love in the global South, including the Arab world.
The tragedy was marked in Beirut, the center of Arab pop music. …
Egyptian director Khalid Hagar went political, expressing his grief that Whitney is no longer with us, but Egypt’s military dictators still live. “We will always love you, Whitney, and we will always hate them.” Houston thus stands, for this supporter of the Arab Spring, for beauty and potential cut short.
Houston’s meteoric career made her part of what Joseph Nye has called American “soft power.” The love of world publics for American popular culture translates into favorable views of the US among many people who otherwise would be tempted by anti-Americanism. Nye cautions that the militarism and torture of the past decade threaten that soft power, creating a negative image of the US in the place of the one creative artists often project to the world.
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