Our new Dean was interviewed by Miami Today. Dean Patricia White: Seeing New Horizons for UM's Law School.
She's a pro, so there are no real surprises there (but who knew she had five children including one doing a Ph.D on international internet economics in France?).
Kenyan Birth Certificate Generator – Make your own! Invalidating legitimate presidencies since 2009!
(Please note that actually posting one of these things with otherwise accurate information invites ID theft….)
I've been saying for a long time that we ought to require all law students to learn some basic statistics. Now comes Kevin Drum, with his pulse on the body politic, in Revenge of the Nerds:
Multivariate correlations and data cluster analysis are the new black.
It's a truism that students go to law school because they are afraid of numbers. But there's no escape.
Marcello, who knows his away around this stuff, put me on to this $800 notebook, Acer Aspire Timeline AS3810T-6775 NoteBook Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 13.3” 4GB Memory DDR3 1066 80GB SSD HDD Intel GMA 4500MHD.
Half the price of the Samsung. 0.7 lbs heavier, but still only 3.5 lbs. A little slower — PC Mark Vantage of 2678, compared to the Samsung's 3158 and X301's 3157. But the Acer's battery life is even better than the Samsung's.
Three caveats (nothing's ever perfect):
While the temperatures ranged from cool to warm toward the beginning of this test, they rose from warm to hot by its end. The keyboard, touchpad, and bottom of the notebook were all 88 degrees to start (the bottom of the notebook got as cool as 82 degrees). Any temperature below 90 degrees is fine. But as time went on, the temperature in these three places rose to between 92 and 93 degrees (the bottom of the notebook even got as hot as 100 degrees). Despite these temperatures, though, both the keyboard and bottom felt more warm than hot.
Hands down, our least favorite feature is the 3810T’s stiff single mouse button. We would have preferred two separate buttons.
Even so, it looks like a steal.
Update: One other small disadvantage of the Acer: Max screen resolution 1366 × 768 of compared to the Samsung's 1280 × 800 and the X301's awesome 1440×900. (On the whole, for document work, the vertical is the key statistic.)
I got an unusual email today, and it prompts a small disclosure. Here's the key part of the email:
Hi. It's been a number of years since we've spoken, but I figured I would take a shot at inviting you to lunch when I am on campus September 10th … if you are free that day, I'd be happy to treat my favorite 1st year professor to a sandwich or something.
I choose to treat this as a good omen, and an occasion to reveal that my teaching plans for the Fall semester have undergone a radical change. As you may recall, UM over-admitted its entering class — by a lot — so much that we offered them a bribe to wait a year. But even despite that we've got a lot of incoming 1Ls.
One consequence of this, um, bounty is that we're putting on a whole extra section of first-year classes. And I've been tapped to teach Torts. So for the first time in 15 years I won't be teaching Administrative Law — we've found a fine substitute1 — and I will be teaching my first common law course ever. It's also a return to a first-semester first year course after a layoff of more than a decade; back in the Dark Ages I used to teach Civ Pro I (first semester) and more recently, but still a long time ago, Constitutional Law I (second semester).
Torts is a partial departure for me. Most of my work and all of my teaching has been national or international, procedural, or frankly theoretical (Jurisprudence). But as I think more about privacy issues, torts and tort-like thinking looms larger, and of course common-law reasoning is at the root of so much of what we do, even if it is not a common law subject. Plus, of the common law subjects, tort remains the purest, the least overrun by statutes and codes.
I am looking forward to the class, although not to its size, which could hit 130 students(!). First year students are different: they are very highly motivated, they think entirely like civilians rather than at least partly like lawyers, and there is an unreasonably high fear factor. It's this last aspect that used to put me off what is otherwise a fun and exciting teaching experience: I don't like or want my students to be afraid. By the second year students mostly see through us, so it's no big deal. But first years come in with visions of “Paper Chase” dancing in their heads, and my teaching style, which tends to the dialectic more than to lecture, does not seem to blunt that enough. Or at all.
1 Why, you might ask, move me to Torts and move someone else to Administrative Law? There are a lot of reasons (including that a few years ago I asked to teach Torts), but one of them is that the new Adlaw teacher will be a part-time member of the faculty and there's a policy of staffing first-year courses with full-time (or full-time visiting) faculty whenever possible.
!= provides photographic evidence that his is bigger than yours is.
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