Recently in Everything else that's interesting Category

It is not possible to go to Africa without becoming immediately smitten with it. "Africa," of course, is a bit overbroad -- I speak more of what it means to visit any developing country, of which the African continent is teeming. Developing countries are such dynamic places; as they endeavor to grow into safe, stable, and successful communities, it's impossible not to root for them.

But they do have so much to overcome. Though often blessed with an abundance of natural resources, many African countries have generations-long histories of exploitation and heartache, either from external colonization forces or internal ethnic tensions, or some combination of the two.

Rwanda is no exception to this. This small but verdant country sits tucked away near the geographic crossroads of this vast continent: just below the Equator and wedged in between the large English-speaking East African countries of Uganda to the north and Tanzania to the east, and the French-speaking tiny Burundi to the south and enormous Democratic Republic of Congo to the west. Rwanda has no oceanfront; all connections to the world need to pass through at least one of its neighbors.

The upside to this situation is that Rwanda's geographic isolation protected it from some of the earlier ravages of colonization. But by the beginning of the 20th century colonization had begun to take hold, and by the end of World War I it was firmly under Belgian control.

Colonization can be something of a double-edged sword. While it often brings handy western technologies, it does so with the loss of local autonomy -- or worse. In Rwanda's case, what Belgium wrought was much worse, taking a largely stable society and turning its peoples against each other with the most catastrophic results. Thus Rwanda is not just a developing former colony struggling to attain its place among modern countries; it is also a young country struggling to heal a most grievous internal wound. By many accounts it has done remarkably well. But at the beginning of this decade Rwanda is at a crossroads: can it continue to progress towards prosperity and stability, or will it give in to the darker forces that have pulled it into pieces before?

I had a great time at last year's INTA conference in Seattle, mixing and mingling with IP lawyers from all over the world. (INTA = International Trademark Association.) This year's conference will be held in Boston, a city where I recently spent three years attending law school. So for my out of town friends, especially those from other countries, I thought I'd post some information to help get people oriented. Feel free to add more information or post questions to the comments; I included only what I was most familiar with or could readily remember, since I don't live there now. Edit 2/9/10: Also be sure to read the comments for even more handy information.

Facebook is always in the news for something or other, it seems. But this week it's in the news because of changes to its privacy model. Some of these changes are welcome and may even be effective, but many threaten to be disastrous for users' privacy, to the extent they haven't already been.

I myself do use Facebook, albeit reluctantly. It seemed like something I needed to do if I wanted to have any credibility as a cyberlawyer, to go there and see how it worked and what the appeal of it was. Because its appeal wasn't at all obvious to me: there was nothing Facebook offered in its closed, proprietary way that basic Internet technologies didn't offer in their more open and flexible way. I've never understood the point of closed systems. I didn't get them back when AOL was the closed system of choice either. As an Internet user, why restrict yourself to the finite universe of content and users AOL or Facebook provides when there is an unlimited universe just beyond its borders in the Web at large?

But perhaps I'm not sufficiently crediting individual preference. Just as I preferred a large university to a small college, many others prefer the exact opposite. Small feels safe. Predictable. Knowable. Limited. So perhaps that's why so many people have liked Facebook, because it felt like a quiet cul-de-sac away from the tumult of the information superhighway. A quiet place for just you and your friends. But maybe it's not the quiet, out-of-the-way place people thought after all, thanks to Facebook's inadequate privacy model.

There are lots of horror stories about Facebook users being "outed" in some unfortunate way in their real lives by something seen on their Facebook pages, like people being denied insurance coverage for looking too healthy, or even fugitives ending up captured because they posted about where they were. But interesting as those stories may be, what I want to focus on is the illusion of privacy Facebook fosters for its users, which thus enables so many to later be blindsided when content they thought was private is later proved not to be. In particular, I want to focus on the weakest link: friends.

The Telegraph in England is reporting on a school in Wales that has banned kids from using goggles during their swimming lessons on the grounds that they are unsafe.

As a swimming teacher -- in fact, one who doesn't actually like her students to use goggles -- I feel competent, and confident, in saying this school is insane.

The Inside Washington show today was talking about the popularity and potency of the Obama administration. Even people who don't like his policies seem to like him, which, they point out, poses a huge problem for his political opposition.

Count me among those people who like him, but are not quite behind all his policies. Make no mistake: there is no one else I'd want to have be president right now. His intellect, poise, thoughtfulness, meticulousness, etc., mean that although there's a slew of things going wrong in the world I can bear the news of them with so much less anxiety because I trust that someone capable is in charge of getting us through it. As I've said before, it's not policies I care about, per se, but the methodology by which they are developed. And his methodology I'm inclined to trust a lot.

And yet, on several big ticket issues I care about, I find many of his current policies coming up short in troubling ways. Stocking the DOJ with representatives of the content cartels and backing their litigation efforts against users, supporting the government's efforts to spy on citizens' communications with even greater zeal than even Bush had, taking a rather milquetoasty approach to the Bush administration's torture program, these policies all run completely contrary to everything I've endeavored to fight against in my personal and professional life. Moreover, they also run completely counter to the liberal ethos he espoused in his campaign, and, indeed, the values I suspect he truly believes in.

So I comfort myself with the thought that he is just getting started. It is a new administration, only slightly more than 100 days into his multi-year marathon, with an enormous list of crises and tasks to deal with. That he has already handled so many with the deftness someone with much more experience in his role could only hope to have is to his credit and inspires tremendous confidence. Thus I feel it's only a matter of time before he realizes the folly of some of his administration's positions, including how they may prove counterproductive to his larger policy goals. There are already some good and talented people in his midst ready willing and able to point this reality out to him, and others like me on the outside who will continue to advocate for these polices' reversal.

I still believe he's the kind of president who will hear us.

I've only had HBO once in my life, and it was about 15 years ago, so I did not see the Sopranos when it was first broadcast. But flipping channels recently I started catching bits of it on A&E. I didn't want to ruin it by starting to watch it in the middle, so it was off to my local independent video store (sadly closing this summer!) to rent the DVDs. It took a few weeks, but I worked my way through the entire series, from pilot to finale.

It really spoke to me. Not because of the mob thing, or even necessarily because it's a highly-regarded show, with great acting, a novel storyline, and intriguing characters. For me, it was all about New Jersey.

When I was in law school, BU, like many other law schools, started offering students a chance to get professional-looking business cards through the career development office. I thought it was a great idea: business cards are a nice, convenient networking tool that can quickly and concisely convey basic contact information, and, instead of using chintzy, homemade cards, by getting them through the law school we could take advantage of their sophisticated branding. Who wouldn't want to get these?

Well, apparently some people. Former law student Jeremy Blachman, of Anonymous Lawyer fame, once had a blog post questioning the need. Or, rather, the need to be any more pretentious than we already were just by being law students. OK, maybe that's more an issue for students who were at Harvard than for those of us across the river at Boston University... But, really, business cards? For students? Still, networking is networking, and it's always good to have a convenient way to do it that doesn't make you look like a shlump.

Especially because you never know who you're going to need to network with.

This weekend I added a link to my Twitters on the sidebar of the blog. I'm still embroiled in a love-hate relationship with Twitter, enthused by some of the potential it offers and frustrated by its limitations of that potential that keep me from using it as I want.

As someone who has pointedly studied innovation diffusion, it is interesting to see Twitter slowly spread around the world and watch social norms rise up to accompany it. While some tout Twitter as a microblogging tool, its capacity to create social networks through the following of other people is where the most interesting behavioral norms are sprouting. What does it mean to have a follower (someone who reads your updates)? What does it mean to follow someone else (so you read their updates)? When do you want to follow? When should others follow you? And when is it ever appropriate to unfollow someone and stop reading their posts?

It wasn't even a month ago that I found myself in the US Air terminal at LaGuardia, waiting endlessly to continue my journey up the East Coast. I was very grumpy about it, too, because it was due to US Air's moronic stand-by policy, which I've complained about before. From an operations standpoint, it doesn't make sense to prevent people from getting to their final destinations as expediently as possible if on the day of travel the passenger is ready and willing and the earlier flights have capacity. Last month I was trying to get from DC to Boston and was worried about approaching bad weather. But because the weather in DC at the time was fine, the agent made me go to LaGuardia to catch my connection. Where I got naturally got delayed by the weather there. I could have paid to change my ticket, but as I noted earlier, I refuse to pay for the privilege of solving their flight operations problems.

But even camped out in LaGuardia I acknowledged that as long as US Air eventually got me where I was going in one piece, I guess that would be ok. And it turns out that they're pretty good at that part.

I write on my blog a lot about air travel, partly because I do a lot of it but also because I love to do a lot of it. I am at my happiest when I can log onto United's website and see a list of upcoming booked itineraries laid out for me. It fills me with glee, not just knowing that soon I'll be somewhere interesting but that I get to ride a plane to get there.

I've always been enamored with flight, and I subscribe to the philosophy of Patrick Smith, a pilot and columnist for Salon regarding air travel: isn't it so cool we can do this?

The economy definitely seems to be going down these days, but my question is, when was it actually up? In 2001 and 2002, after the Dot Com bust, applications to law school doubled, reflecting the sense that there was just nothing else to go get a job doing. Had that situation really ever improved?

On retrospect, though, even if it hadn't, those years still seem like good times. There may not have been many technology jobs, but the rest of the economy more or less seemed to hold itself together. Fewer law firms seem to have laid people off, at any rate.

Which is kind of what makes now so scary. Not that the law firms are laying people off, per se, but that the wealthier sections of society seem to be struggling. Now, maybe that's not quite true. It's hard to shed tears for a law firm laying people off and also returning $1.8 million in profits per partner. "Struggling" may be a relative term. But bankers are out of work too, and even wealthy philanthropists are unable to share what they once did now that their portfolios have shrunk.

It's making me wonder if there might be something to "trickle down economics." At least insofar as when the wealthy suffer, all below them do as well, as the wealthy no longer have any wealth to be shared. But I hate to validate an economic policy that creates such rigid class strata. I note a dynamic, not a solution. I don't think the solution necessarily is to bolster the wealth of the wealthy and hope that it will trickle down; on the contrary, I think it's much better to bolster the wealth of the larger lower classes so that it might then trickle up.

To some degree the current financial crisis seems to have resulted from a world of Warner Brothers cartoon coyotes suddenly looking down and noticing they'd run themselves off a cliff. Things didn't get bad until we started noticing they were bad.

But I'm not sure everyone noticed at the same time. Almost a year ago I noted that the English newspapers I was reading were full of doom and gloom about the economy. But in the US, there remained a pervasive optimism. Naturally some of that could be due to the kind of naive obtuseness our foreign friends often accuse us of. And the election helped too, energizing us in a way we hadn't been in years. But I think a lot of that optimism was rooted in something real, something that needs to cultivated and nurtured in order to nurse us back to economic health.

Even after bank insolvencies, market turmoil, and worldwide government scrambles to right the global economy, there remained a sense of normalcy in ordinary society. People who had jobs went to them. People who had friends still saw them. People who had families still loved them. There's an obstinate inertia in normalcy, and it's not going to be given up by normal people lightly. Especially when the problems around them seem so far from their own making. Most people are not bankers or finance experts. While many may have stocks in retirement accounts, the markets exist in a world apart from most people's daily lives.

And yet they will be affected if they fail, even though that failure would be through no fault of their own. As the financiers panic and blanche and pull capital, even the healthiest companies will struggle as they lose either their capitalization or their customers, or both. If enough of these dominoes fall, everyone falls.

It is this very dynamic in fact which is at the root of the current crisis. For too long too much of the financial health of the world has been in the hands of too few people. To recover from the crisis, and to ensure that it never happens again, we must ensure that this schism is erased.

A few weeks ago Gordon Smith at the Conglomerate referenced a proposal floated by Alan Sloan in the Washington Post, which in broad terms basically encouraged a tax on oil to make up for the current dip in prices. Gordon seemed to pan the idea as silly, and indeed, perhaps the way Sloan proposed it, Gordon might right. I don't care, though, because instead of reading Sloan's piece I decided to rethink the idea for myself, and in doing so, I've decided there's some merit in such a tax.

I like London a lot, but it's been a bad influence.

The London congestion charge, a fee charged to drivers who enter the city center during peak hours, has put dollar signs in the eyes of American politicians who would try to impose a similar scheme in the US, in New York and San Francisco in particular.

Although I'm a firm advocate of mass transit and its ecological benefits, and although I recognize the public fisc must be funded through some sort of revenue generation, my egalitarian notions find these plans abhorrent. Should congestion charges be implemented they will disproportionately tax lower-income people, putting our city centers out of affordable reach of many and turning them into gated communities enjoyed only by the wealthy.

Although things have settled down since I began drafting this post a few weeks ago, the blogosphere is surely teetering on the edge of once again erupting with debate over whether one's legal blogging might interfere with one's professional development.

Part of this debate centers around the Twitter Wars. Many law blogging enthusiasts are equally enthusiastic about Twittering for many of the same reasons, including that it encourages connections between otherwise isolated lawyers and promotes the exchange of information. On the other hand, I recently met a lawyer on a bus ride home whose opinion of me seemed to rapidly drop when I let it slip that I had a blog. "Well, do you also Twitter?" he ventured skeptically. "I consider any lawyer who twitters to be committing malpractice."

I'm not so sure that there's anything inherent to Twittering, or blogging for that matter, that supports such an extreme opinion, although there may also be other downsides, including information overload and network fatigue.

For my part, I have experimented with Twitter and I'm considering renewing my experimentation, but thus far I haven't found that it (or any other information product) fills my needs the way I want them to be filled (I'm looking for something I can use to publish frequent, short -- although not necessarily "micro" -- posts through my website without detracting from my regular essays). I do blog, however, because it definitely does fill a need by giving me a place to explore the ideas and I want to explore and say the things I want to say.

But whether blogging itself is good or bad is also again under scrutiny. Not only is there news out of Louisiana that bar rules may (or may not?) effectively forbid the activity, but apparently the Obama transition team is considering people's past writings when vetting them for administration jobs. While the Obama camp may simply be trying to prepare in advance for any potential political fallout that might result during the course of the nomination process, the unpleasant specter of blog posts being held against their authors may have an unfortunate chilling effect on their inclination to ever blog again. And that would be a shame. Able thinkers should be encouraged to share their thoughts, not *discouraged* for fear that they may poison their prospects for future professional work.

Warning: this post may read like a lot of braggadocio, and for that I would like to apologize. I don't tell this story in order to wallow in my own celebration but rather because I've come to realize it explains a lot about how I see the world and approach solving its problems, and I want to be able to point back to this explanation from future posts that might implicate this particular perspective.

So, without further ado: did you know I invented the suspension bridge?