Friday, January 23, 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Change in the Whitehouse
Noticable changes include:
You can view more changes here.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
OUR TRACFED SUBSCRIPTION
TracFed is a source of government information compiled from government data about its law enforcement efforts, spending and personnel allocation. If the government itself has not compiled the information, TracFed professionals make freedom of information requests and compile the data for publication. Portions of the information offered is free and some data searches require a payment or subscription.
In this case the article uses TracFed data to highlight the fact that federal fraud prosecutions have dropped because law enforcement was diverted to the war on terror after 9/11. The article characterizes the TracFed data this way:
I was delighted that the article quoted co-director, David Burnham, who made a personal trip to South Texas to talk to librarians about using TracFed:
There were 133 prosecutions for securities fraud in the first 11 months of this fiscal year. That is down from 437 cases in 2000 and from a high of 513 cases in 2002, when Wall Street scandals from Enron to WorldCom led to a crackdown on corporate crime, the data showed.
David Burnham, co-director of the Syracuse research group, which is known as the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, said the decline in stock fraud prosecutions growing out of the F.B.I. “really is no surprise. It’s a reflection of a choice that was made right after 9-11 to move investigators into terrorism, and this is the cost of that.
Mind Mapping and Law School
Jessica R. Alexander, J.D., M.L.I.S., Reference Librarian
I am experimenting with a program I heard about called PersonalBrain. The concept is "mind mapping," or "visual knowledge management." I downloaded it at home and have painfully started to use it to organize my household activities and organization. I say painfully, because I hate to tackle mundane decisions about what clothes to donate, what items to trash, etc.
An individual user can download the program free of cost at http://www.thebrain.com/. It can be used on a Mac or a PC. I found an article on the program at http://www.llrx.com/columns/notes50.htm by Cindy Curling, titled, "Notes from the Technology Trenches - If You Only Had TheBrain: Mapping Your Thoughts With TheBrain Technology," from February, 2002. The program has been around for a while, but is now in a release called Beta 5.
Reply to this post if you download the brain and start using it for any law school purpose. I am betting that some students might find it useful in visualizing legal concepts associated with a course.
