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Daily Archives: July 20, 2022

Hard-Wired for Distractions: Increasing Attention in Legal Research Classrooms

Drake, Alyson and Park, Christine, Hard-Wired for Distractions: Increasing Attention in Legal Research Classrooms (June 24, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4145736 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4145736

“Legal research instructors often comment on how they demonstrated a skill or discussed a concept in class, only to have their students seemingly not remember it a few minutes later. Many times, they attribute this to students not paying attention or not caring about legal research as much as their other classes. Quite often in these conversations, attention is talked about as though it is an infinite resource over which humans have full control. In reality, human attention is limited and our “distractibility” is a biological function over which we do not have full control. Understanding the limits of human attention, attention’s importance in how students learn, and strategies for sustaining and/or renewing student attention are critical for legal research instructors to design learning opportunities that will lead to retention of critical lawyering skills. Part I of this article will give an introduction to the dual nature of human brains as being both inherently distractible and capable of focused attention. Part II will discuss the primary types of distractions students face in the legal research classroom. Part III will highlight the importance of attention to all parts of the learning process from sensory impressions to the retrieval of information encoded in our long-term memories. Finally, Part IV will discuss practical strategies for increasing attention in legal research classrooms to increase student retention of the important research and analysis skills they are learning.”

The World Is Burning Once Again

The Atlantic – Climate change predictions for 2050 arrived way earlier – in 2022: “In September 2020, the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office published a hypothetical weather forecast for a mid-July day in the year 2050. Forty degrees Celsius in London. (That’s 104 degrees Fahrenheit.) Thirty-eight in Hull (100 degrees F). Thirty-nine in Birmingham (102 degrees… Continue Reading

Congress Might Pass an Actually Good Privacy Bill

Wired: “Usually, when Congress is working on major tech legislation, the inboxes of tech reporters get flooded with PR emails from politicians and nonprofits either denouncing or trumpeting the proposed statute. Not so with the American Data Privacy and Protection Act. A first draft of the bill seemed to pop up out of nowhere in… Continue Reading

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)

CRS Report – Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), July 20, 2022 [24 pages]: “Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have become popular as unique and non-interchangeable units of data that signify ownership of associated digital items, such as images, music, or videos. Token “ownership” is recorded and tracked on a blockchain (a digital database that records data on a decentralized… Continue Reading

LinkedIn Still Number One Brand to be Faked in Phishing Attempts

Check Point: “Our Q2 2022 Brand Phishing Report highlights the brands that were most frequently imitated by cybercriminals in their attempts to steal individuals’ personal information or payment credentials over the quarter. In April, May, and June we observed that the social media platform LinkedIn continued its reign as the most imitated brand after entering… Continue Reading

Disability at Home

“This website documents the ingenuity and creativity that caregivers and disabled people, including those with chronic illnesses, use every day to make home accessible. These images were shared with me during research for my upcoming book about disability and care. I spoke with 44 couples in 22 states about their daily lives. But because research… Continue Reading

Views of American Democracy and Society and Support for Political Violence

Views of American Democracy and Society and Support for Political Violence: First Report from a Nationwide Population-Representative Survey. Garen J Wintemute, Sonia Robinson, Andrew Crawford, Julia P Schleimer, Amy Barnhorst, Vicka Chaplin, Daniel Tancredi, Elizabeth A Tomsich, Veronica A Pear. [All authors are members of the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program and the California… Continue Reading

CDC finds toxic weedkiller in 87 percent of children tested

Environmental Working Group: “About 87 percent of 650 children tested had detectable levels of the ubiquitous and toxic herbicide glyphosate in their urine, according to a new analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Food is the main route of exposure to glyphosate for the children, aged 18 and under, according to CDC… Continue Reading

New American Voters Report 2022

This report was written by Tom K. Wong, Associate Professor of Political Science and founding Director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center (USIPC) at the University of California, San Diego; Maya Lu; and Lilly Amirjavad:  “Across the country—especially prominent in the last presidential election—the newAmerican majority has begun to demonstrate its power in numbers. This… Continue Reading