Social Media: Careful while Handling

From Michigan comes an article that warns about the evidentiary value of data posted to social media sites. The bottom line quote:

“Don’t put anything on a social network page, blog, Web site or in an email,” he said, “that you don’t want printed on the front page of the newspaper.”

Although you’ve heard it before…you’ll hear it again here.

What happens when the Review Application is Smarter than we are?

According to an article in the Science section of the NY Times, scientists have become concerned that machines may one day outsmart us.

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.

Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.

I think that there is no doubt that a profound change is occurring here, and that we need to (at least attempt to) proactively manage the change. In our industry, we have seen some displacement of attorneys reviewing documents due to outsourcing. What happens when the review application not only stores the review data, but also actually conducts the review for relevance as well? Yet trying to install limits on the growth of technology is a difficult, and perhaps ill-advised, effort.

The article continues by mentioning scenarios which have machines taking over…or at least foresee the ending of the “human era.” Interestingly, the final passages look at an interesting occurrence in these times:
Despite his concerns, Dr. Horvitz said he was hopeful that artificial intelligence research would benefit humans, and perhaps even compensate for human failings. He recently demonstrated a voice-based system that he designed to ask patients about their symptoms and to respond with empathy. When a mother said her child was having diarrhea, the face on the screen said, “Oh no, sorry to hear that.”

A physician told him afterward that it was wonderful that the system responded to human emotion. “That’s a great idea,” Dr. Horvitz said he was told. “I have no time for that.”

So here, we program a machine to simulate human emotion, alleviating the need for a real human to be supportive. Of all the ways the future can go, I would say that humans attempting to emulate machine-like behavior for the sake of efficiency is the worst choice. We cannot be better machines than machines…we can only maintain a true course in all of this chaos by embracing our own humanity. The doctor above who “had no time” to be supportive needs (ahem) to be re-programmed.

Preview of MS Office 2010

Microsoft has announced details of upgrades to its office suite, and PC Pro Posts a preview here. Among other things, the article discusses changes to Outlook:

As far as the desktop applications are concerned, the Ribbon interface first introduced with Office 2007 has now been rolled out across every application, including Outlook.

Outlook also sees the introduction of two new email features for office workers drowning under a deluge of email. The Conversation Clean-Up tool will condense long email chains into summaries of the conversation, allowing you to catch up with all the key information without having to open dozens of different messages individually.
…
Outlook will also have a new Ignore Conversation feature that allows users to opt-out of round-robin emails that don’t concern them. Adams gives the example of a long email discussion about a dinner engagement that you know you won’t be able to attend. One click of the Ignore Conversation button will junk any further emails on that topic.

Other changes include an entire line of web-based apps, a la Google; better image editing within Word and PowerPoint; and fewer licensing categories (reducing the number of ‘versions’ of the suite from its current eight to five).

H/T: Slashdot

Cell Phone Data becoming a Factor in the Court Room

From the New York Times:

The pivotal role that cellphone records played in [] two prominent New York murder trials this year highlights the surge in law enforcement’s use of increasingly sophisticated cellular tracking techniques to keep tabs on suspects before they are arrested and build criminal cases against them by mapping their past movements.

But cellphone tracking is raising concerns about civil liberties in a debate that pits public safety against privacy rights. Existing laws do not provide clear or uniform guidelines: Federal wiretap laws, outpaced by technological advances, do not explicitly cover the use of cellphone data to pinpoint a person’s location, and local court rulings vary widely across the country.

H/T: Slashdot

On the discoverability of voicemail

Mark Sidoti and Paul Asfendis, writing for Law.com, have recently posted an article discussing the different types of voicemail, and the discoverability of each:

Companies today have more options than ever for generating, receiving, storing, retrieving and disposing of voicemail messages.

In the past, voicemails were stored on analog tapes, but increasingly, organizations now use unified, digital systems that integrate telephone and computer systems. While more efficient and flexible, these advances raise a number of electronic data discovery issues.

If your organization is considering an upgrade, it’s imperative to evaluate the effect, if any, that the new system will have on your obligation to preserve, search and disclose relevant voicemail messages.

The authors discuss the differences between analog and digital systems. They also compile a list of “challenges” for the organization deciding to implement a “unified” v-mail system (that is, a digital system that is integrated with the IT Enterprise). Well worth the read.

Comparing Discovery in Canada and the US

Byte and Switch has a nice post discussing the differences between Canadian and US discovery processes. From the blog:

I expected litigation and e-discovery to be closer than it really is. Here is our overview of the situation: The Canadian provinces exert tremendous control over e-discovery practices and procedures in common and civil law. There is no corresponding natural statute such as the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, making e-discovery in Canada difficult to affect on a unified national principle.

There are national Canadian guidelines with the publication of Sedona Canada’s e-discovery principles and the Judicial Council’s practice direction for e-discovery in civil courts. (“The Sedona Canada Principles Addressing Electronic Discovery” and “National Model Practice Direction for the Use of Technology in Civil Litigation,” respectively.) These principles and guidelines for court practice are excellent steps forward and provide guidance for provinces that are developing their own sets of e-discovery rules. (British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Alberta, and Ontario have well-developed principles or drafts, and other provinces are no doubt busy as well.) Neither is statutory, and they exist as guidelines to implementation.

The post states that U.S. attorneys can learn from the Canadians’ attempts at reigning in costs, while Canadians could benefit by using proper tools.

FTC Unveils New ‘Red Flags’ Website

The Red Flags rule, designed to tighten data security and fight ID theft, come into force on May 1. The FTC has launched a web site designed to help businesses determine if they need to comply, and how to do so.

According to the agency’s “How-to” guide (click here for a pdf version), the Red Flags rule mandates:

• The establishment of a program that includes reasonable policies and procedures
  to identify the “red flags” of identity theft you a business may run across during its day-to-day operations.
• the Program implemented must be designed to detect the specific red flags that have been identified.
• the prorgram implemented spell out appropriate actions that will be taken red flags are detected.
• a process to re-evaluate current policies and programs
• implementation of policies into business practices.

Those institutions who must comply with the new rule include:

• Financial Institutions; and
• Creditors (entities who regularly grant or arrange loans or extend credit to consumers or businesses, or make “credit decisions.”)

The rules were initially slated to become effective on November 1, 2008, but the FTC granted businesses a six-month delay. That reprieve is now ending, however.

Doubts about Self-Regulation

Info World has posted an article casting doubt on the wisdom of using self-regulation to ensure compliance. The article highlights a story in which Macy’s has refused to provide contact information for customers who bought toy necklaces later found to contain lead. From the article:

Macy’s was one of the retailers that pulled the necklaces. But when L.A. Deputy District Attorney Daniel Wright asked for the records of customers who bought the necklaces, Macy’s refused to turn over any information. At issue is the ability to notify parents who purchased the necklaces for their children.

The article speculates that the reason for Macy’s refusal may be that the retailer is not in compliance with Payment Card Industry standards. That aside, the bottom line is that self-regulation is being given a black eye.

A study released in December of 2008 pointed out issues with respect to the EU-Dept. of Commerce Safe Harbor scheme. That study claimed that only 22% of those companies that were “self-certified” as compliant to safe harbor principles were actually compliant. The report’s basic conclusion was that the program had been ineffective.

The operational rationale behind self-regulation is undermined when we see figures such as those reported above. Information Technology’s best practices contain, as a substantial portion of its foundation, the principles embodied in active self-regulation. Recent events, from the collapse of the financial sector, to the misdeeds behind the situation facing mortgagees, illustrate the limits to self-regulation, and recall to our consciousness the maxim: trust…but verify.

Automating Science

Post Process has, in the past, posted small articles on the changes in technology that are transforming society. We pointed to the new field of computational journalism. We also put up a post discussing the “age of the petabyte,” in which we discussed the consequences of having so much data available. In that post, we highlighted a defense attorney’s use of Google analytics to more objectively examine a community’s definition of “obscenity.”

Now, from Wired, comes word that a computer (or robot, if you like) not only stores and analyzes facts, but uses the presence of the data now available to discover laws of physics on its own. That is, the discovery is made by the computer, rather than a human being:

“It’s a powerful approach,” said University of Michigan computer scientist Martha Pollack, with “the potential to apply to any type of dynamical system.” As possible fields of application, Pollack named environmental systems, weather patterns, population genetics, cosmology and oceanography. “Just about any natural science has the type of structure that would be amenable,” she said.

Compared to laws likely to govern the brain or genome, the laws of motion discovered by the program are extremely simple. But the principles of Lipson and Schmidt’s program should work at higher scales.

The researchers have already applied the program to recordings of individuals’ physiological states and their levels of metabolites, the cellular proteins that collectively run our bodies but remain, molecule by molecule, largely uncharacterized — a perfect example of data lacking a theory.

Their results are still unpublished, but “we’ve found some interesting laws already, some laws that are not known,” said Lipson. “What we’re working on now is the next step — ways in which we can try to explain these equations, correlate them with existing knowledge, try to break these things down into components for which we have clues.”

One wonders if the “automation” of scientific discoveries will now bring such a rapid pace of discovery, that we will all be left behind, hopeless swimming against an ever-stronger tide.

The Search Engine as Electronic Brain: Wolfram Alpha goes Live in May

CNet blogger Dan Farber discusses the upcoming release of Stephen Wolfram’s latest venture: a new search engine that is being touted as a breakthrough:
[Entrepreneur Nova] Spivack gave some insight as to how the Wolfram’s search engine works:

Wolfram Alpha is a system for computing the answers to questions. To accomplish this it uses built-in models of fields of knowledge, complete with data and algorithms, that represent real-world knowledge.

For example, it contains formal models of much of what we know about science — massive amounts of data about various physical laws and properties, as well as data about the physical world.

Based on this you can ask it scientific questions and it can compute the answers for you. Even if it has not been programmed explicity to answer each question you might ask it.

But science is just one of the domains it knows about–it also knows about technology, geography, weather, cooking, business, travel, people, music, and more.

It also has a natural language interface for asking it questions. This interface allows you to ask questions in plain language, or even in various forms of abbreviated notation, and then provides detailed answers.

The vision seems to be to create a system which can do for formal knowledge (all the formally definable systems, heuristics, algorithms, rules, methods, theorems, and facts in the world) what search engines have done for informal knowledge (all the text and documents in various forms of media).

As the article mentions, Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, and the writer of a book (not always warmly received) entitled A New Kind of Science.