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April 28, 2006
OmniOutliner for Law Students
Three years ago, before setting out for SLS, I did a bit of gearing up. I bought a then-new 12" PowerBook G4 (still rollin’), an extra power adaptor, Office v.X—the basics. But without a doubt the most crucial purchase was OmniGroup’s fantastic OmniOutliner. I had used OO before, in my work at CDT, but it was in academia that OO really became a standout. If you are a law student and you use a Mac, you owe it to yourself to get this program.
Of course, there’s no shortage of praise for OmniOutliner, and all the other outliners for OS X, out there, most notably Ted Goranson’s unbelievably-exhaustive About This Particular Outliner. This note, then, is addressed to current/future law students looking for a note-taking/outlining system.
In my experience most law students instinctively embrace outline-based note taking. This is because the outline format preserves structure; when used properly it comprises not only what the professor said, but the path taken to get there. Preserving structure is tremendously important when it comes time to build an outline in preparation for finals. If I’ve taken good notes, and I’ve used outline form, I have a record of how the course material is structured in the professor’s mind. In my experience, 60–70% of succeeding in law school is developing a structured understanding of how the pieces fit together, and it’s a far easier journey when you’ve got a map of how one other smart person brought it all together.
OmniOutliner is extremely good at this structure-preservation, better than anything else I’ve used. It’s true that Word can make outlines, and it even has a (little-used) Outline Mode and, on OS X, there’s (even-less-used) Notebook Mode. Either are better than nothing, but neither is great. Outline Mode is designed to help you structure large documents using Styles, and it actually works pretty well once you’ve got a set of styles you can live with (the defaults are unusably horrendous). But because it’s designed with Word’s WYSIWYG document philosophy[1] in mind, users spend far too much time futzing with font sizes, indents, tabs, etc., and that’s distracting. Notebook Mode was made part of Word when Office 2004 hit, and by that time I was firmly esconced in OmniOutliner. It might be great, but after a few minutes with it I found its “Just Like A Paper Notebook” paradigm frustrating. My $2,400 computer owes me better than to replicate paper.
OmniOutliner, on the other hand, is a structure machine that encourages you to stop thinking about what your notes will look like when you print them out, and think about their content instead. Using it properly is like entering thoughts into a high-end database with a whole variety of ways to view, output, print, and manipulate them later on. It’s easy and intuitive to collapse parts of the outline to get a sense of the big picture, or to expand it rapidly for detail. Like Word, OmniOutliner offers some text styling capabilities; I use them to highlight text, mark citations, or note that this part of the notes is a direct quotation from some case, statute, or treaty. It’s also fast, highly usable, pleasant to look at and fully-documented.
It goes without saying that OmniOutliner is very good at the other important academic activity for law students, outlining. All the points I made about structure above come in here too.
I strongly recommend downloading OmniOutliner and checking it out. To see what I’m talking about, I’ve uploaded an archive of my notes for Trademark last term and the outline I studied from.[2] This is what worked for me; it might or might not work for you. If you’re a law student or a lawyer and you find errors in either, please remember that the notes are exactly that—raw and unrefined—and the outline was only one part of my study process; I actually did fairly well in Trademark.
fn1. If you’ve got some time to burn, check this time-honored rant against WYSIWYG generally, and Word particularly. fn2. The notes and outline are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.Posted by Rob Courtney at 12:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 26, 2006
Quick Hits: Banjo, OOTS, Sports cars
Want to know what’s up? Here’s what’s up.
- I keep on pickin’ that banjo. Can more or less play four songs now, slowly and with many errors. This weekend I plan to plug in my MiniDisc and see what I sound like.
- Need a webcomic? Rich Burlew’s Order of the Stick is plain nice. It’s stick-figure art, and the humor, nay the premise, revolves around old-school D&D, but Burlew has a knack for feather-light storytelling that keeps one coming back.
- Speaking of webcomics, Achewood Vol. VI is out, and a new character, Emeril, is breaking onto the scene.
- Saw the Dale Ann Bradley band at RBA on Saturday. They covered both “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “Me and Bobby McGee,” which was questionable. Their picker, Elmer Burchett, Jr., was what we call fast and cuts a somewhat more Hip (sparkly tunic, goatee) profile than the banjo normally connotes. Also performing were the School of Bluegrass, none of whom were over sixteen and several of whom were under ten. Molly Tuttle, guitar player, is thirteen and unbelievable. Frankie Nagle also made an appearance. This is probably the new generation of bluegrass, or at least West Coast bluegrass. Does that exist? These kids are incredible.
- Almost done with season one of “Lost.”
- C is in D.C. next week, call her if you want to see her.
In closing I will say only that on the What sports car are you? test I got a score of “Mazda RX-8.”
Posted by Rob Courtney at 03:22 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 25, 2006
WorldChanging on Green Computers
An exhaustive posting over on WorldChanging on greening computers.
While they do a good job on flagging most of the major problems with computers, I think they give short shrift to one really big one—the fantastic amount of energy it takes to manufacture a computer. All that advanced chemistry, die-cutting, silicon-etching, etc., takes a huge amount of energy, and even though computers seem relatively efficient in the household (our iMac draws less than 180 watts), they are not efficient products when you look at the big picture. According to one recent study, when you take the cost of production into account, then over their lives computers are “probably the most energy intensive of home devices aside from furnaces and boilers.” Williams, “Energy Intensity of Computer Manufacturing,” 38 ENVTL. SCI. & TECH. at 6173 (2004).
This kind of energy profile can also dim the allure of hybrids. All those exotic materials and advanced construction aren’t cheap, and a “dust to dust” energy analysis reveals startling things.
There’s no easy fix to this kind of distortion in energy economics. The fact of the matter is that energy is very cheap—probably cheaper than it should be—so costs of production can be “hidden” even from the most eco-minded purchaser. Prius owners should be aware of it, though, before crowing too loudly.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 01:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Bach’s wife also his collaborator
Here is CBC’s story. The idea that they were influencing and helping each other—that’s how I read the story—is completely awesome.
Does anyone know of a good biography of Bach? I would like to read more about him. Mostly everything I know is from reading The Gold Bug Variations.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 10:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 21, 2006
New Trek w/ J.J. Abrams
Star Trek: Maybe not completely played out? J.J. Abrams, creator of “Lost”, has signed on to direct Trek, what, X? I didn’t see the last one. Still, Trek done right has that mix of sci-fi and soap opera that made “Lost” (and “Firefly”) so appealing.
I can’t believe I am commenting on the new Star Trek movie. Today, I am a blogger.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 11:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 17, 2006
Nuclear power an option?
Nuclear power has long been an interesting dividing line between the environmental and technical communities. As a rule, environmentalists hate/oppose civilian nuclear power, and techies like it. Personally I have always thought it irresponsible to create waste so potent that it threatens entire ecosystems, unstintingly, for several tens of thousands of years.
Then last week C and I saw Carol Browner (Clinton’s EPA Administrator, now at the Albright Group) speak at Stanford’s Business school; after the talk, speaking with the audience, Browner forthrightly endorsed nuclear energy as a necessary component of a national climate change remediation strategy. C and I were surprised; Browner’s environmental call to arms had been so strident that I assumed nuclear power would rank somewhere around burning the Irish for fuel on her list of energy supply strategies.
Now comes Patrick Moore’s recantation in the Post, citing nuclear power as superior in many ways to wind, hydro, and certainly coal while dismissing the safety and waste-disposal issues as essentially solvable (via Slashdot, where the techies are rapidly approaching Gloat Factor 5). Re waste, Moore had this to say:
Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal. Last month, Japan joined France, Britain and Russia in the nuclear-fuel-recycling business. The United States will not be far behind.
I want to emphasize my understanding of nuclear waste: nasty. So nasty that I’m not sure a thousand-fold reduction is really all that helpful. So nasty that I’m not convinced recycling the rods will correct any more problems than it creates. So nasty that DOE commissioned a major report on how to warn future civilizations about the stuff. (Ed: That’s the source for the diagram accompanying this entry.) The images/reflections in that report are haunting; if something’s changed that makes such contemplation unnecessary I want to know about it.
Climate change is a Real Big Deal, and something Must Be Done. Risk is typically involved when you set out to tackle huge challenges. But widespread use of nuclear energy means biting off quite a level of risk in this author’s opinion. It would have been nice to have averted this Hobson’s choice somehow.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 04:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 13, 2006
Quick Hits: At the airport
Emily’s flight is delayed, so this one’s a quick hit from the $1/minute airport Internet kiosk. 4m30s left… go!
- MPRE… passed!
- Current listening habits include Major League Baseball (go A’s, I guess) and Del Tha Funkee Homosapien.
- Rug Doctor is awesome and is highly recommended to all
- Banjo pickin’ coming along nicely. Have almost finished learning the song Mountain Dew (not related to the soda).
- Fish sent me a copy of the book How to Work a Room. I appreciate the thought but it sends a sightly odd message
One minute left! Got to preview and post! Sayonara.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 11:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 12, 2006
Tribally-owned wind farm
Catherine pointed out that public ownership of wind farms is an active issue in the Environmental Justice community. In many cases, the places that are rich in wind are poor in many other areas, so monetizing wind energy could be very important.
Enter the Rosebud Sioux Wind Turbine. It’s an awesome 750 kW wind turbine on the Rosebud Sioux reservation, creating power for the community and selling some back to nearby Nebraska and South Dakota utilities. And get this—phase 2 of the project is a 30 MW wind farm. Check out photos at NativeEnergy.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 09:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 11, 2006
Who should own wind farms?
Lining Rt. 20A through central N.Y. last week, were maybe a dozen placards urging the reader to reject a proposal from EcoGen to put wind farms through the area; they included a URL to saveupstateny.com. The proposal, it seems, is to put a number of turbines in Prattsburgh and Italy; opponents complain about noise, hurled ice (!), and general unsightliness. They are also claiming that the turbines will not generate local electricity.
Now, wind farms are a necessary part of sustainable power generation, and most of the problems with them can be ameliorated with proper siting—that is, local government needs to step up and get involved at the front end. Now it turns out that Tom Golisano, the primary underwriter of saveupstateny.com, is backing off of his outright opposition to the farms and is urging local governments to go one step further—into actually owning the farms themselves. Wired News is reporting that Golisano has dropped his opposition to wind farms per se, but wants to see them “done right.” To that end, he is going to the affected cities and towns and telling them that EcoGen will pay at most $300,000/year to erect the farms, but cities running them themselves could make up to $9 million/year.
Publicly-owned utilities have been around the fringes of U.S. energy policy for quite some time; right here in the Bay Area I know that Palo Alto owns its own water, electric, gas, and sewer systems. There’s also been a ton of talk about municipally-owned fiber networks for Internet delivery. The counterargument has always been based on efficiency—private actors > state actors when it comes to providing these kinds of services.
Is Golisano right? That’s a question for an energy economist. But even if he’s wrong about the virtues of public ownership, I suspect Golisano is doing a public service by giving Plattsburgh, Italy, and the other wind-rich municipalities a little bit of extra bargaining leverage with EcoGen. Maybe they’ll get more than $300,000/year, now that the threat of municipal ownership is on the table.
Oh, and these things really ought to generate at least some local electricity. Do you know how much energy we lose in long-distance transmission?
Posted by Rob Courtney at 10:52 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 07, 2006
Quick Hits: Technical difficulties
Not much to tell right now… the only real news is that my hard drive mushroom-clouded. I have some backups, so I should be back in action soon, but I did lose the photos and other things accumulated over spring break, and a few days’ worth of class notes. If you’re reading this, go and back up your computer.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 12:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 06, 2006
Computer probs, no posting
No blogging right now, folks. I think my hard drive is failing. LATER
Posted by Rob Courtney at 02:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 04, 2006
Smart disassembly
When I was in New Haven, Cynthia and I talked a little bit about industrial ecology—so important, but so hard to actually bring about. Well, probably in response to WEEE, Nokia is moving along on this with an astonishing concept phone that can be entirely disassembled in about one second. The idea is that you use special shape memory springs that pop the phone apart when heated with a certain laser. That’s clever design, kids. Check it out over at WorldChanging.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 04:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Climate change NGOs and Industry
Two interesting threads at WorldChanging and Treehugger yesterday, with an important question: If I’ve got a little cash, and I want to support a credible NGO working on climate change, who should I make the check out to? There’s been a few responses so far, but not much, so if you’ve got someone in mind, please speak up. But it’s notable that this conversation is about attracting individual contributions, not large-scale support from industry. To what extent is that going on in the climate change advocacy community?
When I was at CDT, it was clear that a major part of that organization’s success was its ability to reach out to industry as well as the civil liberties crowd (of course, that did lead to complications some of the time). Seems like the climate change advocacy community needs a similar bridge-builder. I’m not the only one who’s noticed, of course; when C and I saw Al Gore speak here on campus a few months ago it was extremely clear that he knew how important industry support was too. The audience was peppered with top Sil Valley execs (I spotted Vint Cerf from Google), as well as execs from some of the major environmental groups, like NRDC, Sierra Club, EarthJustice, etc. It was announced that these groups would be starting a major Sil Valley initiative to get buy-in from the industry—but I haven’t heard anything since. Updates would be welcome.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 10:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack