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worldseo123service · 14 days ago

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Enhancing Research Excellence with Proaccuracy's Academic Editing Services

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kaitkerrigan · 7 years ago

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Happy Father’s Day

My 2 1/2 year old daughter is sick this weekend. All last night and all day today, she's needed my husband and me to come to her side and tell her that we’re here - not that we can stop her from being sick but to acknowledge that she IS sick and that it's ok and that it will pass. We take shifts at night. I took the early shift - 8 til 12 and my husband took the later shift. I went in every 45 minutes for a while, finding her in a cold sweat, confused by the cough she has never experienced before. We’re lucky. I can count on one hand the number of times she’s been sick but every time it happens, she’s stunned that her body could rebel against her. She cries, blubbering “I don’t feel well today.” in her eerily accurate grammar. We’re lucky.

There are 2000 children who were on the most harrowing journey of their lives, fleeing their countries because their parents feared for their lives, and at the end of that journey, they were ripped away from the only people they had who could tell them that as hard as this is, it will pass.

Now they're alone. They're being treated like prisoners. And some of them are sick and all of them are scared and there's no one there to tell them that it's going to be ok. There's no way to know that it will be ok.

We wouldn't treat a stray nursing dog and her puppies like this. But we have done this to mothers and their babies. WE have done this.

We have the luxury of pressing our children against us and knowing that their cold will pass and then they’ll get to go out and play without repercussions. But such freedoms are on a slippery slope. The moment we start seeing “others” as more of a pestilence and less of our sisters and brothers, our democracy begins to decay. Our moral highground is eroded. “It can’t happen here” is the biggest lie that anyone can tell you. Anything can happen anywhere. We alone are responsible for what happens on our watch. And so we are responsible for the children who have been ripped away from their parents this month. 2000 children in one month. Project forward a year and that’s 24,000 children. We cannot allow that.

How can you help? SEND MONEY TO FIGHT FOR THE RIGHTS OF THESE HUMAN BEINGS - mother, father, and child.

RAICES bond fund (https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/bondfund…) gives 100% of your donation will help pay to get a parent out of detention so they can claim their own child.

VOTE. VOTE. VOTE. Are you not registered yet??? CLICK TO VOTE.

Please read the whole post below that (among all the chilling articles I’ve read in the past 24 hours, in the past week, in the past month) but especially this:

"There is a fundamental principal of international law which arose after World War II: the concept of a refugee – a person deserving of protection because she is unsafe in her country due to persecution in her country based on her race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. The United States Government has recognized its responsibility in protecting refugees for almost seventy years – in international treaties and in our own laws. Whatever your politics, it is an absolute and undeniable fact that the US must protect asylum seekers under its international treaty and internal legal obligations."

From FACEBOOK - Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch on June 8 at 4:03pm

Yesterday, I met with a mother whose 5-year-old son was literally pulled out of her arms by a Border Patrol Officer while she and her son cried and begged for him not to be taken. She is an asylum seeker who fled death threats in her country. She has not seen or spoken to her son in weeks. This mother recounted the story of her son being taken, stone faced, clearly unable to begin to access the emotions under the surface. It was the lowest, saddest, most distressing moment of my career as an immigration lawyer.

I chose to be an immigration attorney after my first experience as a law student in the immigration clinic. I was asked to do an intake with a family of Iraqi asylum seekers who were being detained with their 5-month-old daughter. The baby was wearing a prison-issued onesie. Her mother asked me to hold her, because I smelled like the outside world. All along, that moment has been my marker of the lowest moment, the catalyst for my career. Yet that was nothing compared to what is happening today.

I am writing to share with you what I am seeing so that you can be informed and take action. I want to help you know the background and combat the arguments that these parents chose this for their children, that they brought it on themselves. And to combat the lies coming from the Administration, claiming there is no choice in whether to enact the policy of separation.

There is a fundamental principal of international law which arose after World War II: the concept of a refugee – a person deserving of protection because she is unsafe in her country due to persecution in her country based on her race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. The United States Government has recognized its responsibility in protecting refugees for almost seventy years – in international treaties and in our own laws. Whatever your politics, it is an absolute and undeniable fact that the US must protect asylum seekers under its international treaty and internal legal obligations. (I am avoiding citations and legalese in this article because I want it to be readable, but I can easily provide citations for anything written here.)

In the last decade, the political situation in Central America has deteriorated. Gangs and drug cartels have taken power and the governments of Central America, particularly in the northern triangle of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, are unable to protect their citizens. People are being extorted and required to make regular payments to gang members. If they refuse, they or their family members are murdered. Boys as young as eight years old are forced into the gangs. If they or their parents refuse, they are murdered. Young girls are forced to become the property of gang members and treated as sex slaves. If they or their families refuse, they are murdered. The police are unable to help, and in many cases have themselves been infiltrated with gang members, so that making a police report brings more danger. Parents are fleeing and bringing their children here to rescue them from rape and murder.

When an asylum seeker wants to come to the United States, she has two choices: come to the bridge to ask for asylum, or sneak into the country. Why sneak in? Well, because border patrol officers often don’t permit people to seek asylum. They tell them to turnaround, we aren’t accepting asylum seekers. In fact, now border patrol officers are patrolling the Mexican territory in front of the borders to keep asylum seekers from even crossing the bridge. This leaves option two: the only way to get in. Historically, asylum seekers who crossed over got immediately apprehended (we don’t have the porous borders the Administration claims we do), then were placed in family detention centers and put through the credible fear interview process. If they passed, they got out of detention and finished out the asylum process in court. If they failed, they were sent back. This was far from a tolerable solution, but it has “worked” this way for over a decade, with subtle shifts in policies and practices.

What changed? The Trump Administration decided in May to enact a “zero tolerance” policy against people crossing the border. This means everyone, regardless of cause or circumstance of entry, gets prosecuted for illegal entry. Parents of children, including infants, are being taken to federal court and their children are being placed in custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. There is NO agency responsible for facilitating communication or reunification of these families. Parents are getting deported without their kids, and shelters are filling up. These families are being transferred and taken all around the US depending on where there is space for them. Parents are not told where they are going, where their kids are, or whether they are okay. If this does not horrify you, check your pulse.

What can you do? Here is the hard part. And I promise to keep working on this. Immigration attorneys can help – that’s easy. You can travel to detention centers and help parents pass their credible fear interviews and get out on bond. A volunteer sheet will be circulating within the next week. Nonimmigration lawyers can partner with an immigration attorney or attend a training (Mark your calendars for an opportunity for Austin Bar Association members the afternoon of June 25.) Nonlawyers – there are the obvious options: contact your legislators and demand an end to family separation. Form mom groups, dad groups, psychologist groups, contact the media, and get loud. Give money. I personally think money is best spent on the RAICES bond fund (https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/bondfund…) where 100% of your donation will help pay to get a parent out of detention so they can claim their own child.

What you should not do, in my opinion: anything to support or legitimize what is happening. This includes offering to foster these kids and take them off the hands of the agency, donate supplies, or assist the Department of Homeland Security in any way. I know your hearts are in the right place, and you want to help the kids. But if the shelters are at capacity and no one is offering to take the kids, maybe the administration will stop taking them from their parents. Maybe they need to feel the pain of what it is to care for so many distraught babies, so they stop the horror show.

Thank you for reading this far, for letting me get this off my chest, and for caring. The only positive that comes out of moments like these is the groundswell of goodness.

In solidarity, Kate

Finally, happy father’s day. Hug your babies close. Hug your fathers tight. Celebrate your connection and your liberties and find a moment in your day to talk as a family about what it would be like if you had to flee your country. What would you need? What can you as a family sacrifice to help?

#immigration #mothersandbabies #fathersday #fathers #asylum

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kennethmjoyner · 4 years ago

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International Working Group Creates Best Practices Guide for Drafting Legal Documents

An international working group of academics, vendors, lawyers and other legal professionals is today releasing the legal industry’s first comprehensive guide to best practices and workflows for creating effective legal documents in Microsoft Word.

Document Competency: What Every Legal Professional Should Know for Effective & Efficient Drafting in Word, is intended to establish for legal professionals “a baseline understanding for the document-creation work valued in the legal ecosystem, define parameters for the work, and set expectations for quality, effort, and result.”

It is the result of 18 months of work by the Effectiveness Project, an international team of experts working under the auspices of LTC4, the Legal Technology Core Competencies Certification Coalition.

The project was conceived and led by Ivy B. Grey, vice president of strategy and business development at WordRake, and co-led by Tony Gerdes, director of knowledge and innovation at Offit Kurman and a contributing member of LTC4.

“I was inspired to launch this project because I care deeply about the duty of technology competence and improving legal practice through simple, everyday technology like Microsoft Word,” Grey said. “By creating specific guidelines and focusing on a part of legal practice that everyone does, we can provide support for the technology competence mandate to have an impact.”

Sherry Kappel, a member of the Effectiveness Project team and an evangelist at Litera, said the team hoped to prompt legal professionals to think critically about every aspect of the document-creation process.

“Expectations for document creation are evolving,” Kappel said. “Legal service providers who efficiently use Microsoft Word and embrace its power will consistently and predictably create better documents. I believe this project will help.”

Others involved in developing the guide were: Rachel Baiden, global technology training manager, Squire Patton Boggs; Adrian Bailey, chief architect, DocStyle; Chris Cangero, chief executive officer, DocStyle; Dave DiCicco, senior director of product management, LexisNexis; Florentina Field, cofounder of Prelimine and litigation attorney at Quinn Emanuel; Jacob Field, cofounder of Prelimine; Colin Levy, legal tech evangelist and blogger; and Dyane L. O’Leary, associate professor of legal writing and director, legal innovation and technology concentration, Suffolk University Law School.

Seven Stages of Drafting

The guide is available through the Effectiveness Project website in three formats: interactive web pages, full downloadable PDF, and stand-alone modules organized by drafting stage.

The guide is available on the web or can be downloaded as a PDF.

The guide divides the document-drafting process into seven stages:

Planning, structure, and organization.

Research, support, analysis, and argument.

Creating content and delivering information.

Collaborating with reviewers and authors.

Reviewing, editing, and proofreading.

Finalizing the document.

On-screen review.

It also discusses considerations to take into account when re-using previously drafted documents to create new ones.

For each stage, the guide provides a conceptual framework of what is accomplished at that stage and why it is important to the overall process. It then breaks down specific tasks appropriate to that stage, and then provides practical guidance on how to accomplish those tasks using either Word’s native functionality or third-party products that work with Word.

Providing that practical guidance was a key goal of the project, Grey told me during a recent interview with her and Kappel.

Ivy Grey

“The practicality of it was super-important to me,” she said. “We tell you what to do, we tell you why it’s important, we give you ways to be competent without having to go out and buy something new. Then we tell you how to take it to the next level, so that you can be a superstar.”

For example, at stage 3, creating content and delivering information, the guide begins with a conceptual overview discussing how to deliver information in a readable and logical manner. It then outlines the tasks that are central to this phase.

These include reviewing legal authority and integrating properly formatted citations, formatting the document and creating tables of contents and authorities, making legal phrases consistent, and inserting and updating cross-references.

For each task, it then outlines how to accomplish them. With regard to creating the table of authorities, for example, it points to a Microsoft help article, but also provides links to products such as Best Authority, ezBriefs, and Lexis for Microsoft Office.

“The goal of this project is to shift the conversation from mere efficiency to effectiveness, so that we may challenge how we think about document creation in our industry,” said co-leader Gerdes. “LTC4 already has application-agnostic learning plans to encourage efficiency, so the focus on effectiveness provides the ideal complement to LTC4’s offerings.”

Developed Over 18 Months

Development of the guide started 18 months ago when all of the working group members gathered in a room and started to discuss and break down the drafting process.

They went through several rounds of drafts, peer review, and redrafts, incorporating the feedback they received.

The tools recommended in the guide are all ones that members of the team have used and vetted, and in most cases, also have a business relationship to, such as Grey to WordRake and Kappel to Litera. They also all integrate with and work within Word.

The Effectiveness Project will continue to refine this guide over time, Grey and Kappel told me, and may also create additional components and similar projects.

Bottom Line

Like all writing, legal writing is, at its core, a creative and fluid process. But it is also a mechanical process, subject to formulas, conventions and standards that dictate their organization, style and components. This guide recognizes those dualities of creativity and constriction.

“For legal professionals, the documents we create are the lasting evidence of the advice and counsel we give,” it says. “Our documents represent our substantive skill and reflect the quality of our thinking.”

At the same time, the guide says, and especially with regard to electronic documents, document quality must also take into account the attributes that enable navigation and online review. “Therefore, the technical creation and presentation of documents carries as much weight as the substance that went into them.”

This guide provides a framework for the totality of the document-creation process, both its creative and mechanical aspects, by breaking it down into its component parts and offering practical guidance for completing each part. To my mind, the result is not to constrain creativity, but to enhance effectiveness.

When I first read the guide, I could not help but think of it as the document-creation equivalent of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, or EDRM, a framework developed by e-discovery experts to map the e-discovery process and thereby help professionals understand the workflows and tools they would need to get through the process from start to finish.

In the same sense, this guide provides a set of practical guideposts and suggestions of technology tools for drafting legal documents not just efficiently, but effectively.

Just as the EDRM has withstood the test of time and remains the guiding framework in e-discovery, I suspect this guide — although it is certain to evolve — will become the guiding framework in document drafting for years to come.

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/08/international-working-group-creates-best-practices-guide-for-drafting-legal-documents.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

#law #legal

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geoffbookonline · 4 years ago

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[FREE] [DOWNLOAD] [READ] Race Racism and American Law (DOWNLOADPDF}

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The Sixth Edition of this innovative text written by Derrick Bell continues to provide students with insight into the issues surrounding race in America and an understanding of how the law interprets those issues as well as the factors that directly and indirectly influence the law. The first casebook published specifically for teaching race related law courses, Race, Racism, and American Law is engaging, offering hard-hitting enlightenment, and is an unparalleled teaching tool.Among the features that have made this text a success with both students and instructors through five editions over 35 years: Clear and readable text along with a participatory approach that encourages discussion of unresolved and perhaps unresolvable racial issues. Interdisciplinary excerpts from historical, sociological, and psychological publications that provide comprehensive coverage of all aspects of the subject and in this edition pose the question of the lawand#8217;s limitations in remedying current racial barriers. Creative hypothetical exercises for possible briefing and argument to the class by student advocates. The presentations promote a learning by teaching experience that enables students to realize the complex nature and consequences of racism in the United States Commentary on the Supreme Court's conception of a andquot;color-blindandquot; society and its adverse effects on school desegregation, voting, employment, and affirmative action Alternatives to integration in achieving the goal of equal educational opportunity. The absence or inadequacy of remedies for racial barriers facing Latino, Asian and Native American citizens.Discussion of Professor Lani Guinier's advocacy of proportional representation over majority-minority districts. The uses of nooses as racial intimidation symbols replacing flaming crosses. Racial priorities in Hurricane Katrinaand#8217;s rescue and recovery policies. The legal ramifications of the disproportionately high percentage of blacks and Hispanics in American prisonsLegal and social barriers to blacks and Latinos seeking to challengeemployment discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended. The growing acceptance and continued hostility to interracial sex and marriage. The vulnerability of black and Latino buyers to consumer schemes and sub-prime mortgages. The limited value of racial protests during a time of war and national crisis. Fully updated, the Sixth Edition includes: Increased citation to and discussion of law review articles that offer new and perhaps controversial perspectives,which Professor Bell utilizes to provide divergent views and thus better provoke class discussion and independent student thought Summaries of new Supreme Court casesA new hypothetical problem that deals with using non-racial criteria to create school diversity New sections on the adverse impact of immigration on black employment and the impact of unemployment on prison rates Race, Racism, and American Law, Sixth Edition, compiled and published initially in 1973 by Derrick Bell, in this latest addition continues its position as an essential tool to any course addressing the reasons why race remains a key to Americaand#8217;s economic, political and social functioning. If you arenand#8217;t already using this text, request an examination copy today.

#book pdf read

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sciencespies · 6 years ago

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Researchers use metamaterials to create two-part optical security features

https://sciencespies.com/physics/researchers-use-metamaterials-to-create-two-part-optical-security-features/

Researchers use metamaterials to create two-part optical security features

Researchers developed a two-part security feature that allows dynamic and reversible decryption. The figure illustrates an encrypted star pattern generated by raising the dielectric SiO2 layer by 10 nm. The star pattern is revealed when a thin-metal-coated elastomeric (PDMS) patch is applied. The star is 1 cm wide. Credit: Gokhan Bakan, University of Manchester

Researchers have developed advanced optical security features that use a two-piece metamaterial system to create a difficult-to-replicate optical phenomenon. Metamaterials are engineered to have a property that is not found in naturally occurring materials. The new security features could offer improved forgery protection for high-value products or banknotes and enhance encryption of information such as pin numbers that are physically sent to recipients.

Optical security features are often used today to verify the authenticity of currency, identification cards and valuable products such as electronics. These features include holograms that change color at different viewing angles or patterns that appear only under ultraviolet light. Security features with many hard-to-replicate features are the most secure because they are difficult to reproduce.

“An ideal optical security feature must be hard to copy by unlicensed people, easy to produce in mass, and be interrogated conveniently,” said research team leader Gokhan Bakan from the University of Manchester in the UK. “Our approach satisfies all these requirements and could offer more secure goods and information transactions for everyone.”

In The Optical Society (OSA) journal Optics Letters, the researchers describe a system in which two thin optical pieces must be placed together to form a metamaterial that reveals a hidden message or QR code that is readable to the naked eye. Re-encryption is performed by peeling off the top part, which contains no information, from the bottom portion that encodes a message.

To protect sensitive information such as a credit card pin, a customer could get the top part of the security feature (the key) from the bank at the time of application. When the encrypted pin arrives by mail the customer would use the key to reveal the pin. If the printout with the encrypted pin number on it is stolen, it would be impossible to decrypt it without the key.

Revealing the secret message

The new two-part security features have a bottom portion that is formed by coating a thin insulating material, or dielectric, on a silver film that is about 120 nanometers thick. This bottom portion is essentially a mirror in that it reflects most of the incoming light. Because its optical properties are defined by the silver film and not affected by the dielectric layer’s thickness a message can be hidden on the dielectric by simply adding more dielectric in the shape of the message.

The researchers used their two-part approach to create optical security features to hide (a) and reveal (b) a variety of patterns including a QR code pattern (c). They also demonstrated the use of plastic (d) and (e-f) aluminum foil (e-f) as flexible substrates. Different colors can be generated (g-h) by changing the dielectric thickness. Scale bars are 1 cm. Credit: Gokhan Bakan, University of Manchester

The top part of the security feature is a transparent elastic substrate coated with a metal layer that is about 10 nanometers thick. This part, which acts as a key, doesn’t hold any information and appears semi-transparent. When the two parts are put together, with the thin metal on the top part facing the bottom part, it forms an optical cavity whose properties, such as surface color, strongly depend on the dielectric thickness. Thus, as the two pieces are placed together, a stark color contrast appears and reveals the hidden message, which is readable to the naked eye. The approach can be used to create keys that are specific to each message or to make a master key that would work for any message.

“When the two parts of the security feature are stuck together, it creates an optical phenomenon known as the plasmonics-enhanced optical cavity effect,” said Bakan. “Although this effect is commonly employed for a variety of applications such as optical filters, we uniquely separated the optical cavity into two, allowing information to be hidden in one part in a way that can only be revealed with the right key.”

Flexible security

The researchers demonstrated their new approach by encoding QR codes on rigid substrates as well as flexible substrates that could be used on almost any surface, including banknotes. The QR codes were invisible to the naked eye until an adhesive patch made of the transparent elastic substrate was applied. They also used the approach to encode various patterns and words.

Although the researchers demonstrated an application specific to optical security, the approach could also be used for optical sensing for chemical or biological applications. For example, if certain proteins attached to a thin-film, the modular metamaterial could produce a read-out that was visible to the naked-eye or readable to a camera.

The researchers plan to further develop the new optical security feature by using it with other optical phenomena. They also want to communicate the technology with developers of security tags and banks so that the technology could be tested and developed for real-world applications.

“Our research shows that converting static optical features to modular ones can open up completely new applications,” said Bakan. “This offers a new perspective that scientists could use to expand other established optical methods.”

Join us on Facebook or Twitter for a regular update.

Explore further

Researchers realize world’s thinnest optical hologram with 2-D material monolayer

More information: Gokhan Bakan et al, Reversible decryption of covert nanometer-thick patterns in modular metamaterials, Optics Letters (2019). DOI: 10.1364/OL.44.004507

Provided by The Optical Society

Citation: Researchers use metamaterials to create two-part optical security features (2019, September 12) retrieved 12 September 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-09-metamaterials-two-part-optical-features.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

#Physics

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affordable-services-seo · 7 years ago

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joshuadollar · 6 years ago

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Important Suggestion For Masters Dissertation

You are at the end of your Master’s degree, and you have lots to prove before you end the journey. Writing a dissertation paper is an excellent opportunity to showcase your skillset in your academic career. Understanding its value, students tend to seek dissertation help service.

Attempting a research paper means you have to use various research methods, look into the topic from various aspects and perspectives, and write in a detailed manner. It may seem strenuous job for you. But once you pick a topic that interests you, you will enjoy the journey. Your supervisor will be there to guide you. But here are some tips which can help you start writing your dissertation paper right away.

1. Writing an introduction

A strong opening sentence will increase the readability of the paper. Give a vague idea in the introduction of what you are going to discuss. Write the purpose and objective of the paper. Mention some facts but do not explain them. If you have a personal opinion, express it here.

2. The core steps to Drafting

i. Draw a mind map where you note down the essential ideas.

ii. Write down all the key facts and details related to the topic.

iii. Make a list of ideas under each chapter with bullet points.

iv. Add headings and create a list of it.

v. After finishing it, add citations, reference list, citation, conclusions to it. Add value to your Master’s degree dissertation by including these elements.

vi. Check the relevance of the information in all part of the paper. Make sure the format is accurate.

vii. The writing should be logical and have clarity in between the sentences.

3. Steps to research dissertation paper

The writing of the dissertation paper varies on how you build your dissertation. Furthermore, the following tips will help you to conduct research:

v You do not need to read the whole book for your research. Just pick the sources that are relevant to the topic. According to the reading materials make a schedule for it.

v Search credible resources for your dissertation paper. Visit the library or bookstore to get such resources.

v Maintain the habit of taking notes so that you do not need to chase to find important argument points.

4. Discuss with your advisor

By the time you finish your dissertation, you will notice a vast development in your analytical and cognitive abilities. Discuss various sections of the paper with your advisor. Ask your advisor how you can make it more effective and better. Show your urge of knowing what extra addition can make it more effective.

Ask him/her to read the draft of your paper and give a review on it. When you are discussing, make sure to clearly tell about the arguments so that he/she can give you the best suggestions.

A dissertation paper will be the main assignment while you will be pursuing Masters Degree. Use these tips to bring out the best in your paper. If you are stuck in your daily tasks, you can seek for dissertation assignment help service.

SUMMARY: Writing a dissertation is intimidating only at the beginning. As you start writing, you will gain more confidence. By using these tips, you can master your skill in dissertation writing.

AUTHOR BIO: Joshua Dollar is a content writer who has written various newspaper articles. Apart from English, he is also fluent in French, Chinese, German and Spanish. It has been 3 years since he is providing dissertation & thesis help service in MyAssignmenthelp.com.

Reference: https://jackhelp.kinja.com/important-suggestion-for-masters-dissertation-1838517029

#online dissertation help

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lucyariablog · 7 years ago

Text

How to Make Your Content Powerful in Eyes of Searchers (and Google)

The value of building SEO content is second to none.

However, I’m not merely talking about properly optimized content that has the right meta information, links, keywords, and technical SEO.

Instead, I’m talking about honing powerful content that speaks to readers irresistibly. It’s optimized, sure, but it’s also constructed to be the ultimate read. This kind of content is the equivalent of a best-selling novel – people invest in it and gobble it up.

Powerful #SEO content is the equivalent of a best-selling novel that people gobble up, says @JuliaEMcCoy. Click To Tweet

What happens when you build SEO content with these kinds of superpowers?

This insight comes from my company’s experience in ranking for 16,200 words on Google. The site averages 27,600 in monthly organic traffic, which would cost nearly $96,000 to replicate by paying for those same keywords on Google AdSense.

Here’s the kicker. The content is not only keyword optimized. It provides a lot of value to the readers. Packing your content full of that kind of value, along with SEO techniques, is what brings in real organic results.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: The Secrets of High-Performing Online Content

1. Create utterly original, standout, creative content

Original content is a must. Most of the 4 million blog posts published each day get lost in the noise. To rise above it, you can’t stop short at original – your content needs to be standout and creative to boot.

How do you give your content extra oomph?

Write for your niche audience persona – Each business has (or should have) a unique value proposition to offer a unique set of customers. To create content that stands out, speak to your niche. Specifically, that’s the audience persona you created when you put together your content marketing strategy.

Find your style – Your business has a unique value proposition (your content differentiation factor), so your voice and style of communication need to match. Alex Honeysett for The Muse has some great questions to help you find your voice, including:

How do you want your customers to feel when interacting with your content?

What images do you want to evoke for them?

What is your voice/personality (or your client’s distinct style), and how can you use that as inspiration, too, to make your content your own?

Image source

Find and write about niche topics – To find them, think about your content differentiation factor and your audience persona(s). Brainstorm topic ideas that appeal to both and write them down. Then, research each idea shell to make sure it’s interesting and relevant for your audience:

Example: In the loose-leaf tea industry, you do a content analysis on BuzzSumo to find which brainstormed topics would be most popular with your audience. In BuzzSumo, click on Content Analyzer (under the Content Research tab), then Analysis. Add your topic to the search bar and hit “enter.”

A results page shows for the topic “loose leaf tea.” Find the gray box, “Add comparison,” next to the topic name. Enter your other topic ideas (how to brew tea, tea brewers, how to make tea, best types of tea) separated by commas.

Hit “enter” when finished.

The next results page has great information to help you choose a popular niche topic. For example, it shows total engagement for each topic over the length of time you specify.

A graph illustrates how the engagement for each topic shakes out over time.

As you can see, “how to brew tea” could be a great topic for your original spin – there is less competition for that topic, but engagements are high.

Don’t forget to click points on the graph to see the most engaged articles during that period. You’ll find great inspiration.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How Topic Modeling Can Strengthen Your SEO and Content Marketing Strategy

2. Find the most profitable keywords for your brand

Next up in your quest for superpowered SEO content – find amazing, profitable keywords.

As you know, keywords are the foundation of organic search. If you target the right ones, you won’t necessarily get a ton of traffic. Instead, you’ll get the right traffic, or what I call the keyword sweet spot:

Find keyword sweet spot, where it’s relevant to business & it’s long-tail, low competition. @JuliaEMcCoy Click To Tweet

If you keep a couple attributes top of mind during your keyword research, you’ll find better keywords for your circumstances, customers, and products/services. These attributes are:

Relevancy

Long-tail, low competition

Relevancy means your keywords are always on-topic, on-brand, and on-industry.

Long-tail keywords are more specific than broad or seed keywords, but they’re often easier to win in rankings because not everyone is trying to target them.

Instead of blanketing your content to a mass of people who may or may not be interested in your brand, long-tail, low-competition keywords let you target who will be interested. Even better, if you target keywords with the right buyer intent, you can attract organic traffic in the form of ready-to-buy consumers.

Plus, if your keywords are low competition, you’ll have a better chance of ranking more quickly.

To find these magical keywords, I often recommend a tool called KWFinder by Mangools. With this tool, it’s easy to analyze results and you’ll get accurate data. Its focus is the same as yours. As it says on its home page, “find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.”

A free search on the loose-leaf tea topic gives lots of valuable data:

Check out the “Keyword SEO Difficulty” and the monthly search volume data.

If you’re new to trying to rank for the keyword “loose leaf tea,” you can see that it’s possible, but the level of competition is tough, based on Google AdWords. It scores 100, the highest possible.

Luckily, KWFinder gives plenty of alternatives. A bunch of keywords look more doable for ranking, including “bulk tea” and “organic loose leaf tea”:

Tools like this are indispensable for finding the right keywords for your niche. However, remember no tool alone should be treated like the holy grail of keyword data. Cross-check your findings on another tool to make sure you hit that sweet spot. A few others I like include:

SEMrush

Google search (to find keyword variations plus related/synonymous terms)

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

8+ Tools to Find Related Keywords for Your Content

3 Keyword Research Trends to Reshape Your Content Optimization

3. Focus on strategic keyword placement, not density

Where you place your keywords, including how you write the major pieces of content that contain those keywords, are huge pieces of powerful SEO content.

Here are the major points that count:

Write a multitalented, multitasking headline – Your headline has a lot of multitasking to do. It needs to attract readers and incite their curiosity effortlessly, naturally contain your focus keyword, and not overzealously promise, only to let down the searcher.

Your #SEO headline must multitask – attract readers, incite curiosity, focus on keyword, says @JuliaEMcCoy. Click To Tweet

TIP: To learn to incorporate all three aspects into your H1s, I highly recommend CoSchedule’s free Headline Analyzer. (It doesn’t just score your headline; it also tells you what you might be doing wrong – the stuff that robs your headline of its effectiveness.)

Make subheads matter – Your subheaders (e.g., H2) are only slightly less important than your headline. They:

Help the reader navigate your content

Give Google direct clues about the relevancy of your page

Make your text easier to read

TIP: Give subheads nearly as much attention as your headline to make them useful and readable. Strategically add primary and secondary keywords to almost all of them.

Give subheads nearly as much attention as your headline to make them useful and readable, says @JuliaEMcCoy. Click To Tweet

Connect with related terms and synonyms – Google relies on semantic search to determine the relevancy of your content to user queries. Semantic search relies on related terms, synonyms, and the relationship between terms. Basically, Google has gone native – the search engine is closer than ever to understanding how human syntax works. You need to appeal to this tendency by – quite wonderfully – writing like a human.

TIP: To find related terms, type your focus keyword into the Google search bar and see the auto-suggestion keyword variations. Those are your related search terms.

4. Be thorough, comprehensive, and informative

The final step to add mega value to your content and thus mega SEO power?

Dig deep into your topic and channel your inner nerd. Take your readers’ hands and invite them to follow along:

Research, research, research – If you make a claim, back it with proof. If you provide a statistic, link the study. Add background to your content with relevant news stories, research, polls, and expert insights. Link to every source you cite.

Don’t skim your subject – If your readers want a general overview of any topic under the sun, they can consult Wikipedia. Instead of skimming the surface, go deeper. Think about facets of general topics you can explore, then go down the rabbit hole. Example: “Loose leaf tea” is as general as it gets. Follow this broad topic to a different branch of the topic, i.e., “loose leaf tea” ->> “how to choose the best loose leaf tea” ->> “how to choose the best loose leaf tea for recipes”

Provide high-authority citations, related links, and resources – Don’t use sources you randomly find. Link to sources with high domain authority – they’ll give your pages a boost by dint of association.

Don’t use sources you randomly find. Link to sources with high domain authority, says @JuliaEMcCoy. #SEO Click To Tweet

TIP: Use tools like the MozBar or SEOquake to quickly learn the domain authority of any page. If you use SEOquake, you’ll see the metric under DS (domain score).

Don’t use sources you randomly find. Link to sources with high domain authority, says @JuliaEMcCoy. #SEO Click To Tweet

Ready to conquer the SERPs?

Dominating the search engine results requires more than technically perfect SEO. It also demands value-packed, powerful content that delivers on what it promises.

Focus on writing with your unique angle for your unique audience, targeting profitable keywords, exploring the right niche topics, and deep-diving into your content topic research to take your readers on a ride.

The results from the effort may blow your mind.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

3 Ways to Re-Use Your Content Magnets to Dominate SERPs

Road Map to Success: Creating the Content of Your Audience’s Dreams

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

Grow your tech skills to better your content marketing. Sign up for updates on the ContentTECH Summit in April 2019 in San Diego.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How to Make Your Content Powerful in Eyes of Searchers (and Google) appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2018/10/content-searchers-google/

0 notes

a-breton · 7 years ago

Text

How to Make Your Content Powerful in Eyes of Searchers (and Google)

The value of building SEO content is second to none.

However, I’m not merely talking about properly optimized content that has the right meta information, links, keywords, and technical SEO.

Powerful #SEO content is the equivalent of a best-selling novel that people gobble up, says @JuliaEMcCoy. Click To Tweet

What happens when you build SEO content with these kinds of superpowers?

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: The Secrets of High-Performing Online Content

1. Create utterly original, standout, creative content

How do you give your content extra oomph?

How do you want your customers to feel when interacting with your content?

What images do you want to evoke for them?

What is your voice/personality (or your client’s distinct style), and how can you use that as inspiration, too, to make your content your own?

Image source

Hit “enter” when finished.

The next results page has great information to help you choose a popular niche topic. For example, it shows total engagement for each topic over the length of time you specify.

A graph illustrates how the engagement for each topic shakes out over time.

As you can see, “how to brew tea” could be a great topic for your original spin – there is less competition for that topic, but engagements are high.

Don’t forget to click points on the graph to see the most engaged articles during that period. You’ll find great inspiration.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How Topic Modeling Can Strengthen Your SEO and Content Marketing Strategy

2. Find the most profitable keywords for your brand

Next up in your quest for superpowered SEO content – find amazing, profitable keywords.

Find keyword sweet spot, where it’s relevant to business & it’s long-tail, low competition. @JuliaEMcCoy Click To Tweet

If you keep a couple attributes top of mind during your keyword research, you’ll find better keywords for your circumstances, customers, and products/services. These attributes are:

Relevancy

Long-tail, low competition

Relevancy means your keywords are always on-topic, on-brand, and on-industry.

Long-tail keywords are more specific than broad or seed keywords, but they’re often easier to win in rankings because not everyone is trying to target them.

Plus, if your keywords are low competition, you’ll have a better chance of ranking more quickly.

A free search on the loose-leaf tea topic gives lots of valuable data:

Check out the “Keyword SEO Difficulty” and the monthly search volume data.

Luckily, KWFinder gives plenty of alternatives. A bunch of keywords look more doable for ranking, including “bulk tea” and “organic loose leaf tea”:

SEMrush

Google search (to find keyword variations plus related/synonymous terms)

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

8+ Tools to Find Related Keywords for Your Content

3 Keyword Research Trends to Reshape Your Content Optimization

3. Focus on strategic keyword placement, not density

Where you place your keywords, including how you write the major pieces of content that contain those keywords, are huge pieces of powerful SEO content.

Here are the major points that count:

Your #SEO headline must multitask – attract readers, incite curiosity, focus on keyword, says @JuliaEMcCoy. Click To Tweet

Make subheads matter – Your subheaders (e.g., H2) are only slightly less important than your headline. They:

Help the reader navigate your content

Give Google direct clues about the relevancy of your page

Make your text easier to read

TIP: Give subheads nearly as much attention as your headline to make them useful and readable. Strategically add primary and secondary keywords to almost all of them.

Give subheads nearly as much attention as your headline to make them useful and readable, says @JuliaEMcCoy. Click To Tweet

TIP: To find related terms, type your focus keyword into the Google search bar and see the auto-suggestion keyword variations. Those are your related search terms.

4. Be thorough, comprehensive, and informative

The final step to add mega value to your content and thus mega SEO power?

Dig deep into your topic and channel your inner nerd. Take your readers’ hands and invite them to follow along:

Don’t use sources you randomly find. Link to sources with high domain authority, says @JuliaEMcCoy. #SEO Click To Tweet

TIP: Use tools like the MozBar or SEOquake to quickly learn the domain authority of any page. If you use SEOquake, you’ll see the metric under DS (domain score).

Don’t use sources you randomly find. Link to sources with high domain authority, says @JuliaEMcCoy. #SEO Click To Tweet

Ready to conquer the SERPs?

Dominating the search engine results requires more than technically perfect SEO. It also demands value-packed, powerful content that delivers on what it promises.

The results from the effort may blow your mind.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

3 Ways to Re-Use Your Content Magnets to Dominate SERPs

Road Map to Success: Creating the Content of Your Audience’s Dreams

Grow your tech skills to better your content marketing. Sign up for updates on the ContentTECH Summit in April 2019 in San Diego.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

from http://bit.ly/2AdetC5

#Online Marketing

0 notes

assignmentsolutions4me · 7 years ago

Text

B01CLAWL314 | Corporate Law Assignment Question | Law

Assessment Description

Question One: kate is the owner of a very successful business selling women's shoes. Kate's business is expanding rapidly and she wants to update her business structure from that of sole trader to a more appropriate structure. She seeks the advice of her accountant who tells her that she has a number of options, all of which have advantages and disadvantages. What would be your recommendation to Kate and why? What factors would influence your advice?

Questions two: Myra is the only shareholder and director of Kids Clothes Pty Ltd (Kids Clothes) which makes cheap children's clothing. The company has 10 employees. In the past Kids Clothes had operated profitably, however since 2011 it has been running at a loss. In July 2012 Myra paid herself a large bonus and then transferred all the remaining assets of Kids Clothes to a new company called Clothing for Kids Pty Ltd. The employees continue to be employed by Kids Clothes. Kids Clothes has no assets and owes each of its employees several thousand dollars in accumulated holiday, superannuation and long service leave entitlements.

What possible legal grounds might the employees have to claim their entitlements from Clothing for Kids Pty Ltd?

Could any action be taken against Myra personally?

Your essay must include:

Reference to at least 2-?3 case studies from the text book, supporting your argument.

Reference to the applicable ethical code of conduct with your argument supporting or refuting the code.

Correct argument essay structure. Refer to the Academic Learning Skills handout on Essay writing.

Harvard referencing for any sources you use. Refer to the Academic Learning Skills handout on Referencing.

Assessment Submission

This corporate law assignment should be submitted online in Moodle. You are also required to upload a softcopy of your assignment in Turnitin.

The assignment MUST be submitted electronically in Microsoft Word format. Other formats may not be readable by markers. Please be aware that any assessments submitted in other formats will be considered LATE and will lose marks until it is presented in Word.

General notes for assignments

Assignments should usually incorporate a formal introduction, main points and conclusion, and will be fully referenced including a reference list.

The work must be fully referenced with in-?text citations and a reference list at the end. We strongly recommend you to refer to the Academic Learning Skills materials available in the Moodle. For details please click the link and download the file “Harvard Referencing Workbook”. Appropriate academic writing and referencing are inevitable academic skills that you must develop and demonstrate.

We recommend a minimum of five references, unless instructed differently by your lecturer. Unless specifically instructed otherwise by your lecturer, any paper with less than FIVE references may be failed. Work that includes sources that are not properly referenced according to the “Harvard Referencing Workbook” will be penalised. Marks will be deducted for failure to adhere to the word count – as a general rule you may go over or under by 10% than the stated length.

General Notes for Referencing

High quality work must be fully referenced with in-?text citations and a reference list at the end. We recommend you work with your Academic Learning Skills site.References are assessed for their quality. You should draw on quality academic sources, such as books, chapters from edited books, journals etc. Your textbook can be used as a reference, but not the lecturer notes. We want to see evidence that you are capable of conducting your own research. Also, in order to help markers determine students’ understanding of the work they cite, all in-?text references (not just direct quotes) must include the specific page number/s if shown in the original. Before preparing your assignment or own contribution, please review this YouTube video by clicking on the following link: Plagiarism: How to avoid it You can search for peer-?reviewed journal articles, which you can find in the online journal databases and which can be accessed from the library homepage. Wikipedia, online dictionaries and online encyclopedias are acceptable as a starting point to gain knowledge about a topic, but should not be overused – these should constitute no more than 10% of your total list of references/sources. Additional information and literature can be used where these are produced by legitimate sources, such as government departments, research institutes such as the NHMRC, or international organisations such as the World Health Organisation (WHO). Legitimate organisations and government departments produce peer reviewed reports and articles and are therefore very useful and mostly very current.

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freewhispersmaker · 8 years ago

Text

BLO 2205 CORPORATE LAW ASSIGNMENT

ICTORIA UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF LAW AND JUSTICE SCHOOL OF LAW BLO 2205 CORPORATE LAW ASSIGNMENT Semester 1 2017 The ASX Corporate Governance Council’s Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendations 3rd edition set out eight principles of good corporate governance. Principle 7 provides: Recognise and manage risk: A listed company should establish a risk management framework and periodically review the effectiveness of that framework. In late 2016 Ardent Leisure Ltd, the owner and operator of the Dreamworld leisure park on the Queensland Gold Coast suffered significant financial harm following a tragic accident at Dreamworld that caused the death of a number of patrons on one of the rides at Dreamworld. The board of directors of Ardent Leisure Ltd were criticised because of the company’s poor and insensitive handing of the fatal incident and subsequent crisis. It could be argued that Ardent Leisure failed to recognise and manage the risk that the company had to deal with arising from this incident. Required: Having regard to the above facts answer the following:- a) Did the Board of Ardent Leisure recognise and manage the risk arising from this incident? b) Assuming the Board failed to manage the risk, did the company and the directors breach Principles 7 of the ASX principles of Good Corporate Governance? What is the consequence, if any, for the company failing to comply with Principle 7? Can the ASX take any disciplinary action against the directors and company for failing to recognise and manage the risk in this instance? c) Could it be argued that the directors had breached their duty of care and diligence or is the significant financial harm suffered by the company sufficient penalty? d) After the incident did the Board review and improve the effectiveness of the company’s risk management framework? (Total of 30 marks) SUGGESTED REFERENCES: Lipton, P., and Herzberg, A., Welsh, M, Understanding Company Law, 18 edition Thomson Reuters 2016. Students should remember to look at the Lipton and Herzberg website. http://ift.tt/2da4rIH Harris, J. Hargovan, A. Adams, M., Australian Corporate Law LexisNexis Butterworths 5th edition, 2015. Austin R.P. & Ramsay, I., Ford’s Principles of Corporations Law, Butterworths, Australia, 16th edition, 2014. Baxt, R., and Fletcher, K.L., Fridman, S., Corporations and Associations Cases and Materials on, Butterworths, Australia, 10th edition, 2008. Hanrahan, P., Ramsay I., Stapledon G., Commercial Applications of Company Law. Oxford 18th edition 2017 Redmond, P., Companies and Securities Law – Commentary and Materials, Law Book Co., Sydney, 5th, 2009. Parker, Clarke, Veljanovski, Posthouwer, Corporate Law, Palgrave 1st edition 2012 Ciro T, Symes C, Corporations Law in Principle LBC Thomson Reuters, Sydney, 9th edition 2013 Li, G, Riley, S. Applied Corporate Law: A Bilingual Approach LexisNexis 1st Edition 2009. Cassidy J., Corporations Law Text and Essential Cases. Federation Press, 4th edition Sydney 2013 Harris J, Corporations Law, LexisNexis Study Guide 1st edition 2008 Harris J, Butterworths Questions and Answers Corporations Law:, LexisNexis, 3rd Edition Sydney 2009. Fisher S, Anderson C, Dickfos, Corporations Law – Butterworths Tutorial Series, 4th Edition Butterworths, Sydney 2014 Tomasic, R.,Jackson, J.,Woellner, R., Corporations Law – Principles, Policy and Process 4th Edition Butterworths., Sydney, 2002. Tomasic, R. Bottomley,S. McQueen,R. Corporations Law in Australia, 2nd Edition Federation Press, Sydney 2002. Latimer, P, Australian Business Law CC, 2017 Edition. Vermeesch,R B, Lindgren, K E, Business Law of Australia Butterworths, 12th Edition, 2011. Graw, Parker, Whitford, Sangkuhl and Do, Understanding Business Law 7th ed LexisNexis Butterworths, 2015. Davenport, S and Parker D, Business and Law in Australia, Thomson Reuters, 2012 Fitzpatrick, Symes, Veljanovski, Parker, Business and Corporations Law; LexisNexis 3rd edition 2017 Crosling G M, Murphy H M, How to Study Business Law 4th Edition, Butterworths, 2009. Research Suggestions: In addition to the above suggested references some of your research will come from the reading of newspaper reports, both hardcopy and online material, dealing with the criticism of the company’s handling of this matter. You should look for and at journal articles that discuss this situation. You should consult the textbook and the ASX website for the Good Principles of Corporate Governance. You should consult other websites generally to see what you can find on this topic. (Ardent Leisure Ltd annual report?) Submission: Essays must be submitted on or before Friday 8th September 2017 by 5.00pm. No extensions will be considered unless a request is made in writing, before the due date, stating the reason for the request. Marks will be deducted for essays that are submitted after the due date. The assignment should be written in your own words. A hard copy must be submitted. As well an electronic copy is to be submitted via the Turnitin link on Collaborate page for the subject. The Turnitin copy will be the ‘time mark’ for the purpose of the confirmation of the date and time of submission. Student must put their tutor’s name on the assignment and must not attach the Turnitin report to their assignment. All assignments must be in print form and submitted with a signed School of Law cover sheet to the assignment box located outside the School of Law Office, Level 3, Building A by 5.00 pm on the due date. Students must also submit an online copy of the assignment via WebCT by the due date. The online submission will be regarded as verification of submission by the due date. However, only the hard copy assignments that are submitted will be marked. Students on the Flinders Street campus will be advised by their lecturer about assignment submission. Presentation Readable connected prose NOT point form summaries Accurate spelling, grammar, punctuation, paragraph construction. Proofreading Effective use of HEADINGS Consistent and accurate acknowledgment of sources using a recognised style – both in relation to in-text referencing and bibliography (Note the warning about plagiarism below). The papers will be marked on the following basis: Criteria Percentage of marks awarded 1. Depth of understanding of the topic and identification of relevant issues. 2. Awareness accuracy of the nature and content of relevant law. 3. Clarity and coherence of the analysis and quality of discussion and argument. 50 per cent Writing and communication skills 30 per cent Research skills 20 per cent Referencing In law, the preferred referencing style is footnoting. Students are reminded that they will lose marks if they merely reproduce passages copied word for word from texts and other references without attempting to convey information and express ideas in their own words. Of course this does not preclude the intelligent use of relevant quotations in respect of which proper references are given. It should be noted that the references must be given in respect of all material included in the essay. References are not to be confined to situations in which the writer is citing a particular case or using a direct quotation. For example, if the writer is putting forward a legal proposition or using a statement or idea drawn from a specific source, that source must be acknowledged by reference. It is essential that references be properly acknowledged at all times and marks will be deducted if this is not done. References may be acknowledged by numbering them consecutively throughout the essay and by giving details of the references by way of numbered footnotes at the bottom of the relevant page, or by way of a list at the end of the essay. Note carefully that the edition and page numbers of references must be given: it is not sufficient to merely give the name and author of the work. When referring to cases, the full case citation must be given. In addition, a bibliography should always be included at the end of the essay. Students should contact the lecturer if they are in any doubt as to the requirements for the giving of references. Referencing: Footnotes or end-notes must be used to acknowledge the source or sources of information contained in the assignment. Footnotes are preferred, but either will be accepted. In regard to the acknowledgment of references and matters of style and presentation, students are referred to: 1. Australian Guide to Legal Citation – VU Library Homepage. For all referencing questions for your assignment or any legal writing See: Australian Guide to Legal Citation: The VU Library has a 4 page edited version under Information for researchers: Click on Information for researchers and then click on Referencing and then click on Style Manuals. A copy of the Australian Guide to Legal citation is also available on VU Collaborate. See: http://ift.tt/2cC9AEz Also see Monash Legal Abbreviations for abbreviations of legal publications. See: http://ift.tt/2da3Y9w 2. G.R.E. Phillips and L.H. Hunt, Writing Essays and Dissertations, 3. G Campbell, The Little Black Book. (available in the bookshop). Students are required to pay careful attention to spelling, expression, and legibility in the writing of their essays. There should be a margin on the left hand side of each page. Students should keep a copy of the essay submitted. Plagiarism Plagiarism is taking another person’s ideas and presenting them as your own, that is, without acknowledging the original source. You must acknowledge your sources of information including both direct and indirect quotations. A direct quotation must always be in inverted commas or in another style that indicates that it is a direct quotation. Your assignment must not consist of only quotations. Plagiarism is regarded as a form of theft or cheating. It is a serious offence and will be dealt with seriously, including a fail grade in this subject. Students should use the Turnitin software to check their assignments for poor referencing and plagiarism. Software such as “turn it in” and others are available. Format • Typed preferably and double-spaced • Title page with student name and number, Subject code and name, topic • A4 paper • Sequential page numbering • No folders Assignments must be typed (word processor), using one side of the page only and leaving a wide margin. The word limit is 2,000 words. Late Submissions Students who believe that they have a genuine case for extension of time must lodge a formal written application for such an extension, stating relevant grounds and attaching supporting documentation. Such application must be made at least seven (7) days before the due date for submission. Should the extension be granted then a new deadline will be set. Late submissions of the assignment will incur a penalty mark of one (1) mark per day. Marks may be deducted in respect of essays which are excessive in length. The assignment will have a value of 30% for final assessment.

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nancyedimick · 8 years ago

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When should courts rely on Wikipedia?

(Kacper Pempel/Reuters)

In D Magazine Partners v. Rosenthal, someone described as a “welfare queen” in a magazine article sued the magazine for libel. One question was what the phrase “welfare queen” meant, and the Texas Court of Appeals resolved this by referring to, among other sources, Wikipedia. In Friday’s Texas Supreme Court decision in the case, Justice Debra H. Lehrmann’s majority opinion considered whether this reliance was proper:

Citing Wikipedia, along with additional sources cited in the Wikipedia article, the court [of appeals] stated:

The term “Welfare Queen” has two meanings; it can mean either (1) a woman who has defrauded the welfare system by using false information to obtain benefits to which she is not legally entitled, and it can also mean (2) a woman who has exploited the welfare system by having children out of wedlock and avoiding marital relationships for the purpose of continuing to qualify legally for government benefits.

The court explained that the second definition does not apply to Rosenthal and that the article’s title therefore necessarily references a woman “who is committing fraud to receive government-assistance benefits illegally.” …

Wikipedia is a self-described “online open-content collaborative encyclopedia.” This means that, except in certain cases to prevent disruption or vandalism, anyone can write and make changes to Wikipedia pages. Volunteer editors can submit content as registered members or anonymously. Each time an editor modifies content, the editor’s identity or IP address and a summary of the modification, including a time stamp, become available on the article’s “history” tab. Wikipedia is one of the largest reference websites in the world, with over “70,000 active contributors working on more than 41,000,000 articles in 294 languages.”

References to Wikipedia in judicial opinions began in 2004 and have increased each year, although such references are still included in only a small percentage of opinions. These cites often relate to nondispositive matters or are included in string citations. But, some courts “have taken judicial notice of Wikipedia content, based their reasoning on Wikipedia entries, and decided dispositive motions on the basis of Wikipedia content.” While there has been extensive research on Wikipedia’s accuracy, “the results are mixed — some studies show it is just as good as the experts, [while] others show Wikipedia is not accurate at all.”

Any court reliance on Wikipedia may understandably raise concerns because of “the impermanence of Wikipedia content, which can be edited by anyone at any time, and the dubious quality of the information found on Wikipedia.” Cass Sunstein, legal scholar and professor at Harvard Law School, also warns that judges’ use of Wikipedia “might introduce opportunistic editing.” The Fifth Circuit has similarly warned against using Wikipedia in judicial opinions, agreeing “with those courts that have found Wikipedia to be an unreliable source of information” and advising “against any improper reliance on it or similarly unreliable internet sources in the future.”

For others in the legal community, however, Wikipedia is a valuable resource. Judge Richard Posner has said that “Wikipedia is a terrific resource … because it [is] so convenient, it often has been updated recently and is very accurate.” However, Judge Posner also noted that it “wouldn’t be right to use it in a critical issue.” Other scholars agree that Wikipedia is most appropriate for “soft facts,” when courts want to provide context to help make their opinions more readable. Moreover, because Wikipedia is constantly updated, some argue that it can be “a good source for definitions of new slang terms, for popular culture references, and for jargon and lingo including computer and technology terms.” They also argue that open-source tools like Wikipedia may be useful when courts are trying to determine public perception or community norms. This usefulness is lessened, however, by the recognition that Wikipedia contributors do not necessarily represent a cross-section of society, as research has shown that they are overwhelmingly male, under forty years old, and living outside of the United States.

Given the arguments both for and against reliance on Wikipedia, as well as the variety of ways in which the source may be utilized, a bright-line rule is untenable. Of the many concerns expressed about Wikipedia use, lack of reliability is paramount and may often preclude its use as a source of authority in opinions. At the least, we find it unlikely Wikipedia could suffice as the sole source of authority on an issue of any significance to a case. That said, Wikipedia can often be useful as a starting point for research purposes. … “Selectively using Wikipedia for … minor points in an opinion is an economical use of judges’ and law clerks’ time.” … In this case, for example, the cited Wikipedia page itself cited past newspaper and magazine articles that had used the term “welfare queen” in various contexts and could help shed light on how a reasonable person could construe the term.

However, the court of appeals utilized Wikipedia as its primary source to ascribe a specific, narrow definition to a single term that the court found significantly influenced the article’s gist. Essentially, the court used the Wikipedia definition as the lynchpin of its analysis on a critical issue. As a result, the court narrowly read the term “welfare queen” to necessarily implicate fraudulent or illegal conduct, while other sources connote a broader common meaning. See, e.g., Oxford Living Dictionaries, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/welfare_queen (broadly defining “welfare queen” as a “woman perceived to be living in luxury on benefits obtained by exploiting or defrauding the welfare system”); YourDictionary, http://www.yourdictionary.com/welfare-queen (broadly defining “welfare queen” as a “woman collecting welfare, seen as doing so out of laziness, rather than genuine need”). In addition, and independent of the Wikipedia concerns, the court of appeals’ overwhelming emphasis on a single term in determining the article’s gist departed from our jurisprudential mandate to evaluate the publication as a whole rather than focus on individual statements.

Justice Eva M. Guzman concurred, in an opinion that began with this image, and a footnote reading “Screenshot of unsaved edits to Welfare Queen, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W elfare_queen.”

The opinion went on:

I write … to emphasize the perils of relying on Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia as an authoritative source for any controverted, decisive, or critical issue. As a general proposition, I believe Wikipedia is not a sufficiently reliable source of information to serve as the leading authority on a case-determinative matter, particularly when the court’s reliance is sua sponte without notice to the parties, as it was in this case.

Wikipedia has many strengths and benefits, but reliance on unverified, crowd-generated information to support judicial rulings is unwise. Mass-edited collaborative resources, like Wikipedia, are malleable by design, raising serious concerns about the accuracy and completeness of the information, the expertise and credentials of the contributors, and the potential for manipulation and bias. In an age when news about “fake news” has become commonplace, long-standing concerns about the validity of information obtained from “consensus websites” like Wikipedia are not merely the antiquated musings of luddites.

To the contrary, as current events punctuate with clarity, courts must remain vigilant in guarding against undue reliance on sources of dubious reliability. A collaborative encyclopedia that may be anonymously and continuously edited undoubtedly fits the bill.

Legal commentators may debate whether and to what extent courts could properly rely on online sources like Wikipedia, but the most damning indictment of Wikipedia’s authoritative force comes directly from Wikipedia:

“WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY”

“Please be advised that nothing found here has necessarily been reviewed by people with the expertise required to provide you with complete, accurate or reliable information.”

“Wikipedia cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here.”

“Wikipedia is not uniformly peer reviewed.”

“[A]ll information read here is without any implied warranty of fitness for any purpose or use whatsoever.”

“Even articles that have been vetted by informal peer review or featured article processes may later have been edited inappropriately, just before you view them.”

Indeed, “Wikipedia’s radical openness means that any given article may be, at any given moment, in a bad state: for example, it could be in the middle of a large edit or it could have been recently vandalized.” Even if expeditiously remediated, transient errors are not always obvious to the casual reader. As Wikipedia states more pointedly, “Wikipedia is a wiki, which means that anyone in the world can edit an article, deleting accurate information or adding false information, which the reader may not recognize. Thus, you probably shouldn’t be citing Wikipedia.”

Apart from these candid self-assessments, which no doubt apply with equal force to other online sources and encyclopedias, a more pernicious evil lurks — “opportunistic editing.” Because “[a]nyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles” and “can contribute anonymously, [or] under a pseudonym,” reliance on Wikipedia as an authoritative source for judicial decision-making incentivizes self-interested manipulation. Case in point: a Utah court of appeals recently described how the Wikipedia definition of “jet ski” provided “stronger support” for one of the parties in a subsequent appeal than it had when considered by the court in the parties’ previous appeal. The court observed the difficulty of discerning whether the change was instigated by the court’s prior opinion, perhaps “at the instance of someone with a stake in the debate.”

Still, some have argued Wikipedia is “a good source for definitions of new slang terms, for popular culture references, and for jargon and lingo including computer and technology terms.” Perhaps, but not necessarily. While Wikipedia’s “openly editable” model may be well suited to capturing nuances and subtle shifts in linguistic meaning, there is no assurance that any particular definition actually represents the commonly understood meaning of a term that may be central to a legal inquiry.

In truth, Wikipedia’s own policies disclaim the notion: “Wikipedia is not a dictionary, phrasebook, or a slang, jargon or usage guide.” Whatever merit there may be to crowdsourcing the English language, Wikipedia simply lacks the necessary safeguards to prevent abuse and assure the level of certainty and validity typically required to sustain a judgment in a legal proceeding.

Take, for example, the Wikipedia entry for “welfare queen,” which was first created in November 2006 by the user Chalyres. Since the entry was first drafted, 239 edits have been made by 146 users. But there is no reliable way to determine whether these edits (1) deleted or added accurate information, (2) deleted or added false or biased information, (3) were made by individuals with expertise on the term’s usage, or (4) were made by individuals actually representative of the community.

As a court, one of our “chief functions” is “to act as an animated and authoritative dictionary.” In that vein, we are routinely called upon to determine the common meaning of words and phrases in contracts, statutes, and other legal documents. Though we often consult dictionaries in discharging our duty, rarely, if ever, is one source alone sufficient to fulfill the task. To that end, I acknowledge that Wikipedia may be useful as a “starting point for serious research,” but it must never be considered “an endpoint,” at least in judicial proceedings.

Wikipedia’s valuable role in today’s technological society cannot be denied. Our society benefits from the fast, free, and easily-accessible information it provides. A wealth of information is now available at the touch of a few key strokes, and a community of Wikipedia editors serves to increase the accuracy and truth of that information, promoting the public good through those efforts. However, in my view, Wikipedia properly serves the judiciary only as a compendium — a source for sources — and not as authority for any disputed, dispositive, or legally consequential matter.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/17/when-should-courts-rely-on-wikipedia/

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wolfandpravato · 8 years ago

Text

When should courts rely on Wikipedia?

(Kacper Pempel/Reuters)

Citing Wikipedia, along with additional sources cited in the Wikipedia article, the court [of appeals] stated:

The opinion went on:

“WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY”

“Please be advised that nothing found here has necessarily been reviewed by people with the expertise required to provide you with complete, accurate or reliable information.”

“Wikipedia cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here.”

“Wikipedia is not uniformly peer reviewed.”

“[A]ll information read here is without any implied warranty of fitness for any purpose or use whatsoever.”

“Even articles that have been vetted by informal peer review or featured article processes may later have been edited inappropriately, just before you view them.”

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/17/when-should-courts-rely-on-wikipedia/

#Law #Lawyer

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abistuckontheweb · 8 years ago

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What Does Generosity Have to Do With Linked Open Data?: A Lit Review

The following is a partial lit review of recent conversations surrounding Linked Open Data within the humanities with a focus on what generosity means in the context of the Semantic Web. I’ve experimented with form in this post by lifting key voices out of the text and styling them as block quotes in order to better visualize the range of opinions presented in this review. I have also set up a corresponding (open) annotated bibliography on Zotero which you can find here. The annotations can be found in both the Notes attached to each citation, as well as under Extra so that readers may quickly move through the citations, rather than having to open each Note separately. Where possible, I have processed the text of the essays, blog posts, and articles featured in this annotated bibliography using Voyant Tools and included up to ten tags of the most frequently used words.

The dream of the Semantic Web and the emergence of LOD

Popular buzz surrounding the Semantic Web has been going on since the early 2000s, later epitomized in a TED talk Tim Berners-Lee delivered in 2009. In his talk, Berners-Lee announced to the world that he needed some help revamping the World Wide Web: a world in which web documents and data coexist. What he asked for was a collective push towards making raw data available on the Web, by which he meant machine-readable data. The same year Berners-Lee, Christian Bizer, and Tom Heath published a paper in the International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems titled, “Linked Data - The Story so Far.” In it, they describe Linked Data as “a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web” which opens up the possibility of establishing a “global data space.” Where Open Data means data that is freely accessible on the web in non-proprietary form, Linked Open Data (or LOD) at its most basic is hyperlinked data, meaning data that references and connects to other data on the Web. Structurally, LOD is created through the use of URIs (Unique Resource Identifiers), the vocabularies that identify and define relationships between resources (which make up web ontologies), and RDF (Resource Description Framework). If the World Wide Web is made up of documents, then the Semantic Web is a Web made up of data. For a complete technical overview on LOD, I recommend a look at linkeddata.org, the W3C, or the Berners-Lee and co. paper referenced above. There is still much confusion surrounding the relationship between the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data. Where some believe the Semantic Web and LOD to be one and the same, others understand the Semantic Web as made up of Linked (Open) Data -- this review subscribes to the latter. The lack of consensus, however, is interesting and perhaps representational of the spirit of Linked Open Data in that it reflects both its charm and difficulty, that is, the nature of LOD’s conflicting ontologies and unregulated vocabularies.

Tempting the star-collecting achiever in us all, Berners-Lee’s Five Stars of Open Data is a LOD deployment scheme which urges users to free their information from documents that rely on proprietary software so that others may access their data. These five stages towards open data are perhaps best represented in the following graph and legend (taken from their posh site and pasted here):

At the heart of Berners-Lee’s five star systems is a desire for people to make available the data they have now and worry about refining the structure of that data later, a point made clear in his talk:

We want unadulterated data. OK, we have to ask for raw data now. And I'm going to ask you to practice that, OK? Can you say "raw"?...Can you say “data”?...Can you say “now”?

Although this approach is effective at getting data out and onto the Web, the question of how many return to refine or clean up their data, let alone work up the five-star ladder, is still up for debate (see amazing article on “metacrap”). Perhaps the most crucial moment in his talk is a reminder that “data is relationships,” where each node is connected to another and that node to another, making up a complex network of relationships. LOD, then, is a social practice that relies on shared labour for the greater good. This spirit of social responsibility fuels the collective work, a philosophy summarized in the concluding remarks of Berners-Lee’s talk:

It's about people doing their bit to produce a little bit, and it all connecting. That's how linked data works. You do your bit. Everybody else does theirs. You may not have lots of data which you have yourself to put on there but you know to demand it.

The structural politics of LOD

LOD is valuable in its ability to publish data that is interoperable and to quickly build up networks of connectivity. In the last ten years, the ecosystem that supports linked and open datasets, more formally known as the LOD cloud, has grown 47.5 times since it was first captured in 2007.

A screenshot of the LOD cloud in 2007 featuring 12 datasets.

A screenshot of the LOD cloud in 2014 featuring a total of 570 datasets (here’s a link to an explorable graph).

Like these LOD cloud graphs emphasize, the structure of RDF itself represents the “data is relationships” philosophy in its subject-predicate-object statements, which describe the relationships between resources within local as well as external datasets. What’s more, LOD supports meaningful, that is context-based, connections between data from a wide range of sources, aided by the easy integration of RDF’s forgiving non-hierarchical structure. In “Zen and the Art of Linked Data,” Dominic Oldman, Martin Doerr, and Stefan Gradmann praise the use of RDF for humanities driven research, writing

Of particular significance to humanists is that semantics can be embedded (rather than described separately) within exactly the same structure. This provides far greater potential for integrating vast repositories of data using the standard Web protocol, and provides the foundation for additional technology layers with increasingly sophisticated levels of expressivity. It also provides the type of flexibility that researchers require to quickly incorporate new information and data structures that are necessary as their research progresses, and creates the opportunity for consistent forms of knowledge representation for all research activities.

In other words, RDF serves as a kind of common language in the world of Linked Data with which to establish semantic connections across the Web. This history of a shared interest in knowledge representation is charted in James Smith’s chapter on “Working with the Semantic Web,” in which he explains

The Semantic Web and linked data are computational applications of pre-existing scholarly practices: linking to primary and secondary sources, signalling trusted vocabularies and authorities, and positioning a work in a larger conversation.

In other words, humanities scholars are uniquely qualified to participate in the creation of the Semantic Web in that the standards of Linked Data mirror the methods and practices we employ in our own scholarly writing. Beyond how we create content, John Unsworth points out the need for increased humanist inquiry in the field of LOD, writing

In some form, the semantic web is our future, and it will require formal representations of the human record. Those representations – ontologies, schemas, knowledge representations, call them what you will – should be produced by people trained in the humanities.

For Unsworth, the creation of “formal representations of the human record” need humanities-authored ontologies with a particular focus on their expertise in the mechanics of knowledge production and representation. Though a still emerging field, Alan Liu reminds us that the task of the digital humanities now is to bring the values of the humanities back into computation and consider “how the digital humanities advances, channels, or resists today’s great postindustrial, neoliberal, corporate, and global flows of information-cum-capital” as a way of addressing the lack of cultural criticism that “blocks the digital humanities from becoming a full partner of the humanities.” Digital humanists, in other words, need to get into the habit of thinking critically about their metadata, about the web applications and tools they use to conduct their research, and about the culturally-bound infrastructures that support those technologies. As Tara McPherson reminds in her essay “Why are the Digital Humanities so White”, as much as computation responds to culture, “we must remember that computers are themselves encoders of culture.” With this history in mind, McPherson (and others like Amy Earhart, Lisa Nakamura, Moya Bailey, and Kim Gallon) urge for attention to be paid to the white epistemologies that underlie the structures of our digital world, writing

We need to privilege systemic modes of thinking that can understand relation and honor complexity, even while valuing precision and specificity. We need nimbler ways of linking the network and the node and digital form and content, and we need to understand that categories like race profoundly shape both form and content. (McPherson)

There are a handful of projects (Linked Modernisms, Linked Jazz, InPho and Huviz (in beta), to name a few) that have begun some this work -- but there is much work that lay ahead.

Corinna Bath takes the task of modelling the future of the Semantic Web as one that must rely on feminist ethics. She draws on the work Donna Haraway and Karen Barad’s concept of diffraction as a way of facing the challenges automatic reasoning pose in an environment that supports competing ontologies within the LOD cloud (3). Pointing to Barad’s term “onto-epistom-ology,” Bath calls for more attention to be paid to the misleading division between ontology and epistemology when creating LOD, especially when conceptualizing ontologies as representational of the “real world”(4). This call for more attention to be paid to feminist ethics as sources of knowledge modelling is echoed in the works of Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Cham in “Data: the new four-letter word for feminism”. In their article, Gurumurthy and Cham argue the importance of reclaiming data from hegemonic rule, writing

Assuming that data can indeed enable a powerful reconstruction of reality, the process by which it constitutes knowledge for transformative change must be based in deeper ethical-political debates. Unhinged from the complexity of ethics and politics, a world of data – as we are witness to – can end up as an absolutism that endangers the very essence of democracy as feminism would know it.

What’s at stake, then, is a world of data without critical thinking -- a world in which the processes by which data is generated, contained, and accessed are left unchallenged. Jeni Tennison expresses similar anxieties surrounding the social processes that govern the production and dissemination of information on the web, asking

Is it the case that opening data simply increases the gap between the information haves and have-nots, and that leads to wider economic inequality, or does everyone benefit when information is more widely available? Are there tipping points of availability at which we start realising the benefits of open data? What is the role of government in encouraging data to be more widely available and more widely used? To what extent should government invest in data infrastructure as a public good? How can local or specialist cooperatives pool resources to maintain data?

Others like Ingrid Mason remain weary of the standards (or lack thereof) surrounding the representation of people in data. Put simply, “People matter and representing “people” in data and turning that into linked open data is no small feat.” For Mason, one way of tackling the complexity of representing identity on the Web and avoiding harmful representations of people in LOD -- harmful in the sense of placing people in categories that overlook the discursive categories of gender and race -- is through collaboration. The organization of post-Summit meetings (ie. Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums Summit 2017) is one small step towards addressing the challenges surrounding the treatment of data about people, but crucial nonetheless.

More than a feeling: cultural challenges, social responsibility, & LOD

If we are to promote broader engagement with LOD and widen the field to include the humanities as full partners, formal standards must be established when it comes to how we publish Linked Data on the Web (ie. context, provenance, and data integration). Despite the incredible growth of LOD within digital humanities and cultural heritage sectors (#LODLAM), the recycling of data, however, what Michele Barbera calls “creative reuse,” has been limited despite the recent technological advances that make it possible (91). What this suggests, Barbera argues, is a need to shift social and cultural habits of digital scholars from humanities and cultural heritage backgrounds. The discomfort around sharing content and collaborating online is a feeling that continues to persist in the humanities. Where collaborative scholarship may be business as usual in the sciences, the humanities still have much work to do in establishing a culture that not only supports but encourages collaborative work. Digital collaboration -- indeed collaboration of any kind -- will likely always require an initial leap of faith. When done right, however, this kind of work, this effort to make oneself open to the possibilities of working with others, exchanging best practices, and sharing the burden of research and writing (while celebrating the pleasures too) proves powerful and worthwhile. For recent work on collaborative scholarship online see Susan Brown’s “Towards Best Practices in Collaborative Online Knowledge Production” and Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Sarah Manekin’s “The Accountability Partnership: Writing and Surviving in the Digital Age.

To return to Barbera, beyond the discomforts of sharing content online, cultural heritage and digital humanities researchers continue to remain caught in so-called “two-dimensional paper thinking,” that is, reproducing print technologies on the web rather than designing projects that derive from and are built for the Semantic Web (96). We cannot continue to rebuild old models with new technologies, we must, as Berners-Lee urges, encourage “thinking in the graph.” Likewise, technological innovation in the field of LOD cannot flourish if the shifting cultural demands of the Semantic Web are not first addressed. One way of bringing about the kind of cultural change required to support a rich and diverse linked open data economy, I propose, begins with what Kathleen Fitzpatrick calls “generous thinking.”

Generous scholarship: towards critical cyberinfrastructures

Fitzpatrick's work (her excellent blog can be read here) is known for advocating for scholarship that is open to displaying works-in progress and honest about mistakes made along the way -- including the countless drafts (or version, if you like) a project goes through before “completion.” Her latest project focuses on “the possibilities that might open up for scholars not just in doing more of their work in public but in doing more of that work in conversation with the public.” Drawing on the recent critiques of criticism by Bruno Latour and Rita Felski, “generous thinking” is offered as a way to encourage better practices of communication within the academy. In its most basic form, generous thinking roots the humanities in a practice of generosity, meaning, “the practices of thinking with rather than reflexively against both the people and the materials with which we work” while fostering “more productive relationships and conversations not just among scholars but between scholars and the surrounding community” (Fitzpatrick). For Fitzpatrick, now is as good a time as any to tackle our institutional problems:

We have the opportunity, if we take that care seriously, to create a kind of dialogue that might help further rather than stymie the work we want to do — and that might not simply improve the standing of the humanities in the popular imagination, but dramatically transform the relationship between the university and the broader public.

This philosophy of academic life is compelling in its emphasis on cultivating small moments that affect great change, including: “a greater disposition toward listening, toward patience, toward engaging with what is actually in front of us rather than continually pressing forward to where we want to go” (Fitzpatrick). When faced with the question of what the humanities offer universities and the general public, Fitzpatrick points to the many possibilities we open up when we think generously. For her, “generosity of mind” encourages genuine dialogue that builds rather than stifles a work, an attitude that places value on the importance of listening for the sake of understanding rather than a means to an end (Fitzpatrick). This is the difference between paying attention to your colleague during their talk instead of focusing on what you’re going to say during Q&A (guilty). At the core of Fitzpatrick’s model is a desire to learn and build better together, to work collectively with a reminder to pay attention to fellow collaborators, to honour the subjects we study, and to “encounter the other in all its irreducible otherness.” It’s about trying to slow down the demands of the academy and focus on true engagement, whether it’s with perspectives that are not our own or making time to revisit that project you keep putting off. It’s about hard work, yes, but of a different kind: work that cultivates the ability “to listen — to the text, to our communities, to ourselves — without attaching or rejecting” (Fitzpatrick).

Other voices have been pushing for generosity too. Mitchell Whitelaw takes up the “ethos [of] generosity” in his work on “generous interfaces,” writing:

The qualities of generosity I am interested in here are “to be liberal in giving or sharing”; also to be “large, abundant, ample” . Both of these qualities seem well aligned with the aims and missions of cultural collections. Our digital collections are certainly large, abundant and ample; and the charters of our cultural institutions place a high value on sharing these riches liberally with the public. Generosity seems to be very much in line with the aims of our cultural collections. (2)

Within this context, generosity in interface design means presenting the user with the richness of a collection and empowering them to explore its contents in ways that are both intuitive and delightful. Arguing for a different kind of generosity, Miriam Posner voices her concerns regarding how data is conceptualized within the digital humanities, noting, “most of the data and data models we have inherited deal with structures of power, like gender and race, with a crudeness that would never pass muster in a peer-reviewed humanities publication.” Returning to Fitzpatrick’s definition of “generosity,” the bulk of digital humanities work has been rather ungenerous, that is, not paying attention to the white epistemologies that continue to inform the ways in which concepts like race and gender are treated in our datasets and represented on the Web. To borrow again from Posner, we must

. . . stop acting as though the data models for identity are containers to be filled in order to produce meaning and recognize instead that these structures themselves constitute data. That is where the work of DH should begin. . . [we need to be] more ambitious, to hold ourselves to much higher standards when we are claiming to develop data-based work that depicts people’s lives.

She goes on to challenge criticism that would paint calls for more engagement with race and gender theory as “a kind of philanthropic activity.” Generous thinking too can be read can be read in a similar light -- but this is of course nonsense. Rather than scoff at attempts to rally efforts and challenge systems of oppression in all its shapes and forms, Posner reminds us that

DH needs scholarly expertise in critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, and other interrogations of structures of power in order to develop models of the world that have any relevance to people’s lived experience. Truly, it is the most complicated, challenging computing problem I can imagine, and DH hasn’t even begun yet to take it on.

What does generosity have to do with LOD?

I’d like to end with some thoughts on “this most complicated, challenging computing problem” (Posner) and imagine a Semantic Web made up of generous Linked Open Data. If the voices I’ve gathered here in this review have demonstrated anything, it's that the academic community needs to reclaim its sense of responsibility by conducting research that builds rather than fragments, remaining ever conscious of the needs of the communities they serve, and creating a kind of digital legacy worth investing in. In this sense, the hard work that lays ahead for humanities-driven LOD has more to do with Fitzpatrick and Whitehall’s radical application of generosity than it does with technological innovation. Where “generosity” means generous as in linked (an abundance of meaningful connections to external resources), generous as in open (free for others to access, reuse, or build on), and generous as in thoughtfully managed data (with attention paid to how data is categorized, represented, and made explorable).

Major Works Cited

Barbera, Michele. “Linked (Open) Data at Web Scale: Research, Social and Engineering Challenges in the Digital Humanities.” JLIS 4.1 (2013): 91-101.

Bath, Corinna. “Towards a Feminist Ethics of Knowledge Modeling for the Future Web 3.0.” 10th IAS-STS Annual Conference. May 2011. Graz, Autria. Abstract.

Berners-Lee, Tim. "The Next Web." TED. Feb. 2009. Lecture.

Bizer, Christian, Tom Heath, and Tim Berners-Lee. "Linked data-the story so far." Semantic Services, Interoperability and Web Applications: Emerging Concepts (2009): 205-227.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “Generous Thinking: Introduction.” Planned Obsolescence. Last updated 5 October 2016.

Gurumurthy, Anita, and Nandini Chami. “Data: The New Four-Letter Word for Feminism.” GenderIT: Feminist Reflection on Internet Policies. 31 May 2016.

Mason, Ingrid. “People in Linked Open Data.” Summit2017: Linked Open Data in Libraries Archives and Museums. 29 Nov. 2016.

Oldman, Dominic, Martin Doerr, and Stefan Gradmann. “Zen and the Art of Linked Data.” A New Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd (2015): 251–273.

Posner, Miriam. “What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016.

Smith, James. “Working with the Semantic Web.” In Compton, Lane, and Siemens (eds.) Doing Digital Humanities. Routledge, 2016.

Tennison, Jenni. “Agent-Based Model of the Information Economy: Initial Thoughts.” Jeni’s Musings. 9 Feb. 2016.

Whitelaw, Mitchell. “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9.1 (2015).

Photo credit: Milada Vigerova via Unsplash

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mollyjimbly · 2 years ago

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🚨🚨IMPORTANT UPDATE!!🚨🚨

Update on KOSA and all these other bills:

We know DesignItForUs is visibly frustrated these bills have gone nowhere. "Child Safety" bills like KOSA, earn it, stop CSAM, have all not moved much and Schumer has slightly shifted to focusing more on AI. DesignItForUS and a bunch of other child orgs are heading to DC this weekend to lobby for KOSA this upcoming week. It is very very likely that it will move to markup in the week following that, which means it will pass out of committee and onto the Senate Floor where it will most likely pass due to the massive bipartisan support it has both in and out of congress. After KOSA is marked up, all these bad internet bills could very much get rolled up into one package and passed like that, destroying the internet all together.

My advice is go all out this weekend and throughout July. This month is *the* decisive factor for what happens going forward. Call call call call the Commerce committee **__(202-224-0411)__** and Cantwells office **__((202) 224-3441)

__**.

Contact influencers and orgs by dming them and asking them to speak about KOSA. We already have done stuff like this in and have a masterlist of orgs and influencers in under a google doc sheet. Do follow ups if you sent emails already. Be on tiktok under queer peoples tiktoks and ask them to speakout against KOSA and tell them its a bill that will censor the internet. Idc if its shy or awkward to do so, do it. Spread this all over tumblr and twitter and reddit. This is our only chance to stop these things.

🚨🚨ATTENTION🚨🚨

Another Disgusting anti-LGBT bill, planning to censor queer content online.

Yet again another law that infringes on privacy. and anonymity.

The bill is KOSA

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/1409

KOSA is a threat to LGBTQ+ youth.

It allows right-wing AGs to censor LGBTQ+ content in the name of "protecting kids".

This doesn't protect kids. This actually hurts kids even more.

It will snuff out LGBTQ+ spaces and makes the internet more of a dangerous place for them, more or less...

"Of course, like so many of these “bipartisan” anti-internet bills that have bipartisan support, the support on each side of the aisle is based on a very different view of how the bill will be used in practice. We went through this last year with the AICOA antitrust bill. Democrats supported it (falsely) believing that it would magically increase competition, while Republicans were gleefully talking about how they were going to use it to force websites to host their propaganda."

"Now, with KOSA, again you have Democrats naively (and incorrectly) believing that because it’s called the “Kids Online Safety Bill” it will magically protect children, even though tons of experts have made it clear it will actually put them at greater risk."

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/24/heritage-foundation-says-that-of-course-gop-will-use-kosa-to-censor-lgbtq-content/

KOSA will also undermine privacy in the name of "protecting children".

"This bill would effectively place many internet services behind an age verification wall, prevent anonymous surfing, and would require all users – adults or teens – to verify their age before they can access information or content.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association supports the enactment of comprehensive privacy legislation at the federal level, but has concerns about KOSA’s duty of care, vague requirements that would prevent teens from accessing critical information, and compliance provisions that conflict with current trends toward data minimization."

https://ccianet.org/news/2023/05/ccia-statement-on-unintended-consequences-of-kosa-legislation-would-place-most-internet-services-behind-age-verification-wall/

Age verification technology is just not secure enough for usage at the moment, leaks are likely to happen, it will be especially dangerous if the leaked Age verification information has a government ID linked to it. That would mean that malicious individuals may get a hold of personal addresses, bank details, basically you'll get doxxed by the government...

You may be asking, "well is there anything to do about it?"

Of course there is, but we really need your help spreading awareness around, because the bill is most likely to pass this July!

This website was put together by Fight for the Future. It has everything, from petitions to calls scripts. It's very easy to understand and use and one of the best links to spread. I urge you to use this when calling your members of congress. All you need to do is put in your phone number once and read off the script provided and it does the rest for you.

https://www.badinternetbills.com/

Signable petitions and open letters;

If you live in the states, call your state representatives;

Joinable Discord server;

More information;

I have to say again and I am not exaggerating, this is URGENT the bill could be passed THIS MONTH!

I am begging you, please OPPOSE KOSA!!

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