Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Research Assistants Wanted

As Director of Faculty Development, I act as a clearinghouse for some other faculty — especially new and visiting faculty — who are looking for research assistants for the coming academic year.

The hours are negotiable, but 10-15 hours per week are most common, with a few professors seeking as much as 20 hours per week. It would be best if you could start soon.

The salary has just been raised to $13/hour as of yesterday, and the work is sometimes interesting.

These jobs are only open to currently enrolled UM Law students. To apply please send me email with subject RESEARCH ASSISTANT. I will forward your information to interested faculty. Include the following in your application:

  • Information on how to contact you;
  • How many hours you would ideally like to work per week;
  • When you are free to start;
  • A copy of your c.v.;
  • A copy of your transcript (need not be official);
  • A writing sample other than anything produced in the LRW process. (A non-legal writing sample is fine if you have something fairly recent.)

I'm also looking for a research assistant of my own. I'd like someone who can write clearly, can do research, and is well-organized. If you happen to have some web or programming skills (some or all of WordPress, HTML, PHP, MySQL, Perl, Debian), that would be a plus but it is not in any way a requirement. Apply as above.

If you submit an application to me for forwarding, you should also feel free to respond to any other ads or requests from other faculty as many faculty hire their own research assistants directly.

Posted in Law School | Comments Off on Research Assistants Wanted

Looks Good

The Surveillance Studies Network » Call For Participation: Cyber-Surveillance in Everyday Life

Not sure if I'm up to writing a good pitch yet; although by the time it happens I should be fit to go.

Posted in Talks & Conferences | Comments Off on Looks Good

David Rivera – Candidate as Demolition Derby Driver

This CBS4 story treads gingerly on the subject, but from the facts presented it would be possible to conclude that back in 2002, local GOP Congressional candidate David M. Rivera tried to drive a truck off the Palmetto Highway in order to insure that highly negative campaign mailers by his primary opponent did not make it to the post office in time to be mailed.

According to Howie Klein, the mailers were the ones that first revealed the domestic violence charges against Rivera.

Earlier posts: More Dirt on David Rivera (8/6/10); This Could Be an Interesting Lawsuit (7/28/10).

Posted in Politics: FL-25/FL-27 | 2 Comments

Nerdwear

Who knew there was an IETF LogoWear Store? But it's still a bit vestigial. And it seems to lack this classic.

So far, I like the Jotwear store better.

Posted in Internet | 1 Comment

First Day of Classes

It's time for Vosberg v. Putney again.

Posted in Law School | 2 Comments

Blog Changes

I've enabled gzip compression on most pages on this blog. This should be seamless to everyone, but please let me know if you get an error message that might be related. Amazingly, all I had to do was add

<? ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); ?>

to every page. You can test the results at the web page compression tester.

I've pretty much decided that I'm going to port Discourse.net to WordPress fairly soon. Why?

1. The sp*m-fighting tools available to me on that platform are a whole lot better than what I'm using now.

2. It will standardize me on one platform — every other blog-related project I do, from class blogs to Jotwell is on WordPress, and it will be a little easier to have that consistency.

3. I've gotten tired of the current dowdy look, and changes will be easier on WordPress, which supports themes (and widgets) much better than this ancient version of Movable Type.

The move raises three issues I need to resolve:

First, how to convert the archives to be compatible with the new system while maintaining compatibility for existing incoming links. That problem is complicated a bit by my frequent use of Textile 2 formatting when I write posts. It's not real clear to me that wordpress has a functioning and maintained plugin for this — it's Textile 2 plugin seems like it might be a bit of an orphan. I may have to hire help for this.

Second, what should I use for the new design? (I realize most readers use the RSS feeds these days, but I still care.) Graphic design is not my strong suit. Suggestions? Please?

Third, how will my shared server react to a blogging platform that serves up each page individually rather than creating static pages? WP-Super Cache here we come…

Posted in Discourse.net, Software | 4 Comments