YouTube Bought For $1.65B

Google’s amazing foray into online video advertising which the company sees as the next potential gold mine, has been given a huge boost and sent ripples through the industry with its planned acquisition of video-sharing pioneer YouTube Inc. for $1.65 billion – a company that has still to make a profit!

YouTube’s co-founders and other investors will be receiving their payment in Google stock – a currency which has increased by more than fivefold since the company’s initial public offering in August 2004 at the bargain IPO price of $85.

Read the full article from the following link:-

http://www.smh.com.au/news/TECHNOLOGY/Googles-stock-climbs-to-9month-high-amid-rising-expectationsfollowing-3Q-results/2006/10/21/1160851167829.html

Notion of Journalists’ Privilege

The issue of Journalists giving evidence and their claimed legal right not to name sources, has once again arisen in the media, with the recent Victorian appeal Court decision by Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth, reinforcing that the law failed to recognise any notion of “journalists’ privilege”.

This places the legal standpoint at direct odds with the Journalists’ code of ethics, which in certain circumstances may preclude them from naming a source – reinforcing that the code appears to have no legal status.

Following the infamous inprisonment of Derryn Hinch for contempt of court, the current case involving Herald Sun journalists Michael Harvey and Gerard McManus, relates to the pair being charged over their “refusal to reveal the source of leaked information they obtained for a story on a Federal government proposal to cut benefits to war veterans”.

The article on the unsuccessful appeal to the Victorian Supreme Court against the decision to order them to give evidence, can be viewed from the following link:-

 http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Journalists-cant-protect-sources-judge/2006/08/23/1156012602620.html

eGanges As An Expert System

It was interesting listening to the class and presentation on the eGanges expert system  designed by Pamela Gray and her son Xenogene Gray. It was the first practical working example I have seen of an expert system and functioning knowledge management technology, in the legal application.

I was quite impressed with the concept of providing legal decision-making assistance through the concept of epistemology and qualitative reasoning – esspecially when combined with the concept of a 3d logic model to enable object-oriented processing.

It was clear from the presentation that the eGanges software was developed with a focus on being a user-friendly format, and the use of the deductive River hierarchy – to counter the chaos of legal decision spaghetti in the decision making process.

It will be very interesting to see how applications/software of this type are accepted going forward in the commercial market place and the level of take-up in the legal fratenity.

Links:-

Grays Knowledge Engineering Website & Online Shop http://www.grayske.com/index.html

The Judiciary In Crisis

What is the legal profession coming to when in recent weeks judges, once inscrutable pillars of virtue, become tabloid fodder making front page news for all the wrong reasons.  

As if it wasn’t bad enough hearing allegations of judges being political plants and falling asleep on the bench, Justice Marcus Einfeld has managed to snare himself in this weeks headlines with his dodgy doctorates, questionable methods of getting out of traffic infringements and fraud squad detectives executing search warrants at his Woollahra home.

So what has brought about these scandals that expose the reputation of the judiciary lower still. None other than a newspaper subeditor discovering – using an internet search engine – that the woman central to his alibi to avoid a speeding fine, Teresa Brennan, was long dead.

This simple internet search has now triggered a State Crime Command investigation of Justice Einfield’s activities after his evidence was questioned.

Read the article at http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/einfeld-police-raid-his-home-for-evidence/2006/09/08/1157222334167.html.

Legal Expert Systems Critique

I have attached a link below to an article looking at computerised expert systems and discusses their effectiveness with regard to their reliance on pattern-matching and rule application strategies embodied in their inference mechanisms & knowledge repository.

 The article argues that this computational approach is unsuitable for use with law, arising from the complexity of the need to refer to social context and human purpose in resolving legal issues. The article concludes that a better use for computation in legal applications is in the form of decision- support systems that leave legal inference to human agents.

 The article is quite long, however provides some interesting and compelling points in relation to this topic area.

http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v1n4/greinke.txt

Expert Systems

I have noticed a lot of discussions in the Blogs and in class 3 about computer applications to the law and these so called ‘Intelligent Systems’ or ‘Expert Systems’ and their potential benefits to the legal system. One significant area however, which I think has been understated, is the reliance that these systems place on the ‘Knowledge Repository’ to process and generate a solution. The quality and effectiveness of these types of systems are entirely reflective of the quality and accuracy of the knowledge repository which the Knowledge Engineers have built and the ‘Expert’ knowledge applied.

 If the expert knowledge recorded in the ‘Knowledge Repository’ is wrong, or the facts and rules in the knowledge base in conjunction with the current conditions entered by the user is incorrectly applied, such systems will inevitably fail to draw the appropriate conclusion or issue the right legal advice. In the context of the legal environment, where obtaining correct information or solutions are critical to dealing with the issue at hand, strict controls and procedures would need to be implemented to ensure that such an ’Expert System’ will be able to deliver the benefits that have been claimed in discussions. 

The Brilliance Of Web Spiders

I have always wondered how programs like Google manage to search through the billions of web pages (and exponentially growing) on the worldwide web – in class two I learnt about the concept of the Web Spider. What an incredibly brilliant idea which the academic researchers who developed this concept came up with – to use web spiders to scan the contents of a given link and have the capability to follow any links they find to additional pages and thereby access/open a potentially huge range of web pages to search.

 It was also interesting to learn about the need for search engines to employ this technique of using web spiders on a regular basis, to ensure they remain relevant and up to date. With the dynamic and regular pace of web site contents being updated, I guess it would be critical for a good/effective search engine to ensure this process is undertaken often. On the other hand, it is interesting to note that when websites are scanned by search engines with these web spiders, they use up space quotas and slow down the sites internet traffic – thereby raising objections from some web creators. It is great to see that to resolve this potential conflicting interest situation, that a ‘gentleman’ solution was reached to define web spider access in /robots.txt.

New Law Building

Is this new building structurally sound?????

The vibrations and noises it is making is worrying!

First Class

The first class has been quite an eye opener. Becoming familiarised with computer systems and in particular the internet has been new territory – I have never done any computer studies in my life! Using HTML software to develop a basic webpage was very interesting and using some of the HTML ‘cheat’ lines I found by googling for help sites, has enabled me to put together a page which looks moderately impressive. Signing out from my first blog posting……