Berkman webcast: Academic Uses of Social Media: Exploring 21st Century Communications Webcast Event

Tuesday, May 312:00-2:15pm
Webcast Event; the live webcast of this event will be available at the following URL: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcastat 12pm on 5/3
Co-sponsored by the Office of Faculty Development & Diversity at Harvard and the Harvard Office of News and Public Affairs

Social media — from blogs to wikis to tweets — have become academic media, new means by which scholars communicate, collaborate, and teach. Hear from a distinguished faculty panel, moderated by John Palfrey, about how they are adopting and adapting to new communication and networking tools, following a keynote by social media thought leader danah boyd.

New book on Law and Development Perspective on International Trade Law

Law and Development Perspective on International Trade Law (Cambridge University Press)

Edited by: Yong-Shik Lee, The Law and Development Institute, Sydney
Edited by: Gary Horlick, Georgetown University Law Center
Edited by: Won-Mog Choi, Ewha Womans University School of Law, Seoul
Edited by: Tomer Broude, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

BOOK ABSTRACT: Economic development is the most important agenda in the international trading system today, as demonstrated by the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) adopted in the current multilateral trade negotiations of the World Trade Organization (the Doha Round). This book provides a relevant discussion of major international trade law issues from the perspective of development in the following areas: general issues on international trade law and economic development; and specific law and development issues in World Trade Organization, Free Trade Agreement and regional initiatives. This book offers an unparalleled breadth of coverage on the topic and diversity of authorship, as seventeen leading scholars contribute chapters from nine major developed and developing countries, including the United States, Canada, Japan, China (including Hong Kong), South Korea, Australia, Singapore and Israel.

Contributors: Yong-Shik Lee, Tomer Broude, Bryan Mercurio, Maureen Irish, Faizel Ismail, Gary Horlick, Katherine Fennell, Andrew Mitchell, Joanne Wallis, Moche Hirsch, Mitsuo Matsushita, Anthony Cassimatis, Colin Picker, Caf Dowlah, Young-Ok Kim, Hye Seong Mun, Xiaojie Lu

Berkman Event: Building a More Diverse and Inclusive Legal Profession: A Call to Action Brad Smith, General Counsel of Microsoft

A new methodology for legal service delivery?

Thursday, April 15, 5:30 pm
Austin East Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School (Map)Free and Open to the Public
RSVP Required via the form below
Co-sponsored by the Harvard Law Program on the Legal Profession

The diversity of the legal profession continues to lag the diversity of the American population. Despite rising awareness of the issue over the last decade and even a number of well-intentioned efforts, progress has been slow. In this speech, Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith will make the case for more rapid progress, outline the types of practical steps that are needed at law firms and companies, and speak to new initiatives across the legal profession to make the next decade more successful.

About Brad

Law and Development Review- another Special Issue

The 3rd of the 'Specials' of this series (see my posts on the previous first and second special issues here and here respectively), the 2011 Law and Development Review Special Issue is devoted to the Law and Development Institute Inaugural Conference entitled, “Future of Law and Development, International Trade and Economic Development”, which was held in Sydney, Australia, on the 16th of October, 2010. Articles:

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Introduction
Yong-Shik Lee

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Export Promotion Policies, Export Composition and Economic Development of Korea
Jai S. Mah

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WTO Rules and Agricultural Development Cooperation between Developed and Developing Countries
Won-Mog Choi

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International Trade and Development Law: A Legal Cultural Critique
Colin Picker

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Special and Differential Treatment, Trade and Sustainable Development
Maureen Irish

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International Development Disputes
Tomer Broude

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Law and Development in the Islamic World: New Possibilities
Salim Farrar

You can also access the all the (Special and Regular) issues here: 

Berkman Event- Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Self-Branding in Web 2.0

Tuesday, March 29, 12:30 pmBerkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person to Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

In the mid-2000s, journalists and businesspeople heralded “Web 2.0” technologies such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook as signs of a new participatory era that would democratize journalism, entertainment, and politics. By the decade’s end, this idealism had been replaced by a gold-rush mentality focusing on status and promotion. While the rhetoric of Web 2.0 as democratic and revolutionary persists, I will contend that a primary use of social media is to boost user status and popularity, maintaining hierarchy rather than diminishing it. This talk focuses on three status-seeking techniques that emerged with social media: micro-celebrity, self-branding, and life-streaming. I examine interactions between social media and social life in the San Francisco “tech scene” to show that Web 2.0 has become a key aspect of social hierarchy in technologically mediated communities.

Berkman Event: An Optimization-Based Framework for Automated Market-Making

I am thinking of ways that this might be used for the delivery of legal services:

CRCS Lunch Seminar
Date: Monday, March 21, 2011
Time: 11:30am – 1:-00pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

While computers have automated the operation of most financial markets, the underlying mechanism was designed for people to operate it. It is simple, not necessarily efficient, and has room for improvement. This work is an endeavor to design efficient automated market-making mechanisms that take into consideration of the logical relationships of securities.

We propose a general framework for the design of securities markets over combinatorial or infinite state spaces. The framework enables the design of computationally efficient markets tailored to an arbitrary, yet relatively small, space of securities with bounded payoff. We prove that any market satisfying a set of intuitive conditions must price securities via a convex cost function, which is constructed via conjugate duality. Rather than dealing with an exponentially large or infinite outcome space directly, our framework only requires optimization over a convex hull. By reducing the problem of automated market-making to convex optimization, where many efficient algorithms exist, we arrive at a range of new polynomial-time pricing mechanisms for various problems. We demonstrate the advantages of this framework with the design of some particular markets. We also show that by relaxing the convex hull we can gain computational tractability without compromising the market institution’s bounded budget.

This talk is based on joint work with Jacob Abernethy and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan.

Berkman Event: Whose choice? ICTs for “development” and the lives people value

ICT4D debates by Dorothea Kleine, Lecturer at the UNESCO Chair/Centre in ICT4D, Royal Holloway, University of London

Tuesday, February 15, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person to Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

Recognising that ICTs are powerful tools shaping people’s everyday lives, practitioners, policy-makers and academics in the ICT for development (ICT4D) field engage with these technologies in the name of “development”. Yet understandings of development differ and too often remain implicit and removed from participatory processes involving the intended users. Techno-euphoria and the focus on universal access distracts from the very individual choices people should have to integrate technologies in their everyday practices (or not). Working with Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach and its view of development as freedom, this open conversation will discuss the diverse and potentially conflicting ideologies embedded in state ICT policies and technical artefacts and the intended and unintended consequences. It will explore potential technological and process innovations which could lead to more participatory decision-making on policy and technology design – an area where all countries can be classified as “developing”.

Berkman Webcast: The Internet, Young Adults and Political Participation around the 2008 Presidential Elections

Something that developing countries can learn from best practices, especially in light of Uganda's elections which is close to my hear now?

Tuesday, February 22, 12:30 pmBerkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person to Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

How are online and offline political activities linked? Using data collected soon after the 2008 presidential elections on a diverse group of young adults from Obama's home city of Chicago, this presentation will look at the relationship of online and offline political engagement. Thanks to detailed information about political participation, political capital and Internet uses in addition to people's demographic and socioeconomic background, we are able to consider the relative importance of numerous factors in who was more or less likely to vote and engage in other types of political action.