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Comment Natural-Language Legal Expert System Builder (Score 1) 278

by Baldrson (#31909762) Attached to: SEC Proposes Wall Street Transparency Via Python
Example of Normalized English Input to NLESB

Normalized English has been developed by Layman E. Allen and his colleagues; see for example, Layman E. Allen, ``Language, Law and Logic: Plain Legal Drafting for the Electronic Age,'' Computer Science and Law (Bryan Niblett ed.), 1980, pp. 75-100. Normalized language has been used in the Tennessee statutes (Tenn. Code Ann. sect. 33-6-104(a) (1991)).
An example of the form of Normalized English used as input to the NLESB system follows. Note that the formatting is for the sake of readability, and is not necessary for NLESB.

Subsection (a).    IF AND ONLY IF
(1)(A)    A person has threatened or attempted suicide or to inflict serious
    bodily harm on himself, OR
    (B)    The person has threatened or attempted homicide or other violent
    behavior, OR
    (C)    The person has placed others in reasonable fear of violent behavior
    and serious physical harm to them, OR
    (D)    The person is unable to avoid severe impairment or injury from
    specific risks, AND
(2)    There is a substantial likelihood that such harm will occur,
THEN
(3)    The person poses a "substantial likelihood of serious harm" for
    purposes of subsection (b).

Subsection (b). IF AND ONLY IF
(1)    A person is mentally ill, AND
(2)    The person poses a substantial likelihood of serious harm because of
    the mental illness, AND
(3)    The person needs care, training, or treatment because of the mental
    illness, AND
(4)    All available less drastic alternatives to placement in a hospital or
    treatment resource are unsuitable to meet the needs of the person,
THEN
(5)    The person may be judicially committed to involuntary care and
    treatment in a hospital or treatment resource.

http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/NLESB-normal.html

Natural-Language Legal Expert System Builder (NLESB)

NLESB enables a lawyer to build a useful legal expert system in ordinary English without being a computer expert. It accepts rules in ordinary English, though in normalized form, and parses them into propositional data structures that it can use to draw inferences. NLESB has some features, particularly in its logic, that are peculiar to the needs of legal expert systems.
Send me mail for reprints or if you are interested in using our prototype implementation.

Publications (reverse chronological order):

A Logic for Statutory Law, by John Nolt, Grayfred B. Gray, Bruce J. MacLennan, and Donald J. Ploch, Jurimetics 35, 2 (Winter 1995), pp. 121–151. Winner of Loevinger Prize.

Legal Expert System Building: A Semi-Intelligent Computer Program Makes It Easier, by Grayfred B. Gray, Bruce J. MacLennan, John E. Nolt & Donald R. Ploch, John Marshall Journal of Computer and Information Law, 12 (1994), pp. 555–583.

Readability of the Law: Forms of Law for Building Legal Expert Systems, by Donald R. Ploch, Bethany K. Dumas, Grayfred B. Grey, Bruce J. MacLennan, and John E. Nolt, Jurimetrics 33, 2 (Winter 1993), pp. 189–221.

Law Reading Experiment, by Donald R. Ploch, Bethany K. Dumas, Grayfred H. Gray, Bruce MacLennan, & John Nolt, Pre-Proceedings of the III International Conference, Logica Informatica Diritto: Legal Expert Systems, A. A. Martino (ed.), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto per la documentazione giuridica, Florence, Italy, November 2-5, 1989, Vol. 2, pp. 681–704.

Comment aah, the old cli vs. gui debate in wolfs clothing (Score 1) 411

by jnowlan (#31909642) Attached to: Adding Some Spice To *nix Shell Scripts
sure, I'll chime in.

I use unix and windows but would no longer consider myself an expert in all the bits. Thats why a gui wins when I need to search through files in a file system ... but I digress.

The best advice I've read for scripts had something to do with ennabling a script to know if it was interactive or not and present and appropriate interface accordingly. Whether it was through a flag or checking for some other interactive vs. non type thingy (which I can't recall at the moment. :)
Idle

Submission + - Who dat say you gotta cease and desist? (neworleans.com)

Submitted by margaret
margaret writes: Now that hell has frozen over and the New Orleans Saints are amazingly good, the NFL has decided to start issuing cease and desist letters for use of the fleur-de-lis, a symbol dating back to the 12th century which has long been ubiquitous in Louisiana culture. Hell, it's on the official city flag. And Quebec's flag too — is the NFL going to go after the Canadians next? Even the guy with the "Who Dat" trademark thinks it's bogus. From the article: "They're not just protecting their marks; that's an attempt to make an example of a small business owner. And the irony of it all is that the NFL doesn't own Who Dat or the fleur de lis — neither one!... Sure, a fleur de lis can belong to the Saints, but in very specific usage, and everybody knows what that is," Monistere explained. "If you go back to 1967, to date, they have registered and used the fleur de lis in a very specific way. They put it on the Saints helmet and on the Saints shield. Its colors are very specific — they're old gold and black. But for the NFL to expand that definition and say that no matter what color and what style of fleur de lis, if you put it on an item, it means Saints, it is, as many believe, is just not correct. The fleur de lis belongs to everyone including the people of New Orleans."
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Video gamers make for better killers

Submitted by oxide7
oxide7 writes: Research has found that video games can help adults process information much faster and improve their abilities to reason and solve problems in novel contexts, The US Office of Naval finds. This results in combat fighters that more capable at taking on the enemy than non-gamers. Early indications suggest that cognitive improvements from video games can last up to two and half years, Perez said, but he admitted that so far the results have been relegated to observations and measurements in a controlled laboratory environment.
Science

Submission + - Laser Fusion Passes Major Hurdle (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by chill
chill writes: The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has performed their first controlled fusion experiments using all 192 lasers. While still not ramped up to full power, the first experiments proved very fruitful. The lasers create a lot of plasma in the target container and it was worried that the plasma would interfere with the ability of the target to absorb enough energy to ignite. These experiments show that not only does enough energy make it through, the plasma can be manipulated to increase the uniformity of compression. Ramping up of power is due to start in May.
United States

Submission + - Nurse Defeat IRS Paves Way For Education Deduction (yahoo.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: A Maryland nurse accomplished two rare feats in her battle with the Internal Revenue Service: She defended herself against the agency's lawyers and won, and she got a ruling that could help tens of thousands of students deduct the cost of an M.B.A. degree on their taxes.

The U.S. Tax Court handed Lori Singleton-Clarke her victory last month, saying the 47-year-old Bryantown, Md., woman had properly deducted nearly $15,000 in business school tuition. The Tax Court ruling should make it easier for many other professionals to deduct the expense of a Master in Business Administration degree.

The IRS's rules on deducting work-related tuition are complicated and onerous, ultimately preventing most students from deducting their tuition. But this case clarifies the rules and will likely lead to more taxpayers taking the deduction, tax experts say.

Few taxpayers decide to go toe to toe with the IRS as Ms. Singleton-Clarke did, arguing her case without a lawyer. For good reason: In 2009, individuals won only about 10% of about 300 such cases, according to data from Tax Analysts. Ms. Singleton-Clarke fought her case in Tax Court, a venue where taxpayers don't have to pay the contested tax before going to trial.

Yahoo Finance : http://finance.yahoo.com/taxes/article/108550/nurse-outduels-irs-over-mba-tuition?mod=taxes-advice_strategy
Microsoft

Submission + - What to Expect From Windows 7 SP1 (infoworld.com)

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: The first inklings of a public Windows 7 SP1 beta program are beginning to emerge, with hidden registry keys and a leaked list of post-RTM build numbers surfacing on the Web. 'Beyond the obvious bug fixes and security patches, we'll no doubt see support for the new USB 3.0 standard. Likewise, enhancements to the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi stacks will be slipstreamed in, allowing Windows 7 to retain its mantle as the most easily configured version ever,' writes InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy. 'But perhaps the most significant "update" to come out of Service Pack 1 will be the fact that it exists at all, and that by delivering it to market Microsoft will be signaling that it is now OK for IT shops to pull the trigger on their Windows 7 deployments.'
Portables (Apple)

Thieves Clear Out NJ Apple Store In 31 Seconds 459

Posted by timothy from the you're-soooo-specific dept.
theodp writes "An amazing surveillance tape of a burglary in progress at a New Jersey Apple Store shows five perps in masks smashing the plate-glass doors at 2:05 a.m., signaling to the security guard that they had a gun, and clearing off the display tables with the efficiency of a Indy 500 pit crew. The take: 23 MacBook Pros, 14 iPhones and 9 iPod touches in 31 seconds flat. Estimated value, based on average selling price: $46,345. No word yet on whether Microsoft's Laptop Hunters have alibis."
Networking

Hulu Munging HTML With JS To Protect Content 281

Posted by CmdrTaco from the escalating-arms-race dept.
N!NJA writes "Hulu has started encoding the html that they send to people's browsers, and then decoding it using javascript before rendering it. [...] They then run the character stream through a series of javascript functions to convert it back into plain text before pushing it into your browser using DHTML. That's quite a lot of effort just for fun, so I assume that is to stop screen scrapers from parsing content." I really can't understand all this effort. Boxee displayed the Hulu advertising perfectly. I suspect Alec Baldwin is to blame.
United States

Obamas Give Queen Elizabeth an iPod 649

Posted by samzenpus from the obama-save-the-queen dept.
Ponca City, We love you writes "What did the Obamas give Queen Elizabeth II on Wednesday when they arrived at Buckingham Palace? An Obama aide reported the queen was given an iPod loaded with video and photos of her 2007 trip to the United States, as well as songs and accessories. She also received a rare songbook signed by the composer Richard Rodgers. The gift issue had come up after Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited the White House last month. Mr. Brown gave Mr. Obama a pen holder carved from the timber of an anti-slave ship, receiving in return a DVD box set of American movies, igniting a torrent of criticism in the British press. According to news reports, the queen gave the Obamas a silver-framed signed photograph — a gift she gives to all visiting dignitaries."
Security

New Legislation Would Federalize Cybersecurity 194

Posted by samzenpus from the big-brother-security dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia J. Snowe are pushing to dramatically escalate US defenses against cyberattacks, crafting proposals in Senate legislation that could be introduced as early as today, that would empower the government to set and enforce security standards for private industry for the first time. The legislation would broaden the focus of the government's cybersecurity efforts to include not only military networks but also private systems that control essentials such as electricity and water distribution. 'People say this is a military or intelligence concern, but it's a lot more than that,' says Rockefeller, a former intelligence committee chairman. 'It suddenly gets into the realm of traffic lights and rail networks and water and electricity.' The bill, containing many of the recommendations of the landmark study 'Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency' (PDF) by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, would create the Office of the National Cybersecurity Adviser, whose leader would report directly to the president and would coordinate defense efforts across government agencies. The legislation calls for the appointment of a White House cybersecurity 'czar' with unprecedented authority to shut down computer networks, including private ones, if a cyberattack is underway. It would require the National Institute of Standards and Technology to establish 'measurable and auditable cybersecurity standards' that would apply to private companies as well as the government. The legislation also would require licensing and certification of cybersecurity professionals."

Submission + - Google AJAX Libraries API (sourceforge.net)

Submitted by SF:robertob
SF:robertob writes: We are happy to start using AJAX technology in our software. We are starting to use Google AJAX Libraries API to access to Dojo toolkit functionality.
Communications

Submission + - Unpaid bills? Good luck starting future laptops (ap.org)

Submitted by astrojetsonjr
astrojetsonjr writes: AP Technology has a story by Peter Svensson titled Unpaid bills? Good luck starting future laptops

NEW YORK (AP) — As wireless carriers begin to subsidize computers that come with wireless Internet access, they're faced with a quandary: What do they do if the buyer stops paying his bills?

The company can cut off the computer's wireless access, but the carrier would still be out a couple of hundred dollars. The buyer would be left with a computer that's fully usable except for cellular broadband.

LM Ericsson AB, the Swedish company that makes many of the modems that go into laptops, announced Tuesday that its new modem will deal with this issue by including a feature that's virtually a wireless repo man. If the carrier has the stomach to do so, it can send a signal that completely disables the computer, making it impossible to turn on.

"We call it a `kill pill,'" said Mats Norin, Ericsson's vice president of mobile broadband modules.

Laptop makers that use Ericsson modules include LG Electronics Inc., Dell Inc., Toshiba Corp. and Lenovo.

There are positive benefits, like being able to turn off stolen laptops, but the ability for the black hats to extort owners is far higher. Thanks Ericsson, something else to worry about.
United States

Submission + - SPAM: Convert Ost to Pst

Submitted by
Convert Ost to Pst
Convert Ost to Pst writes: "Exchange OST File Recovery Software designed to convert OST to PST files. Exchange OST recovery software convert unusable Microsoft Exchange Offline Storage Files (.OST) file to a Personal Storage File (.PST) file that can be used with Microsoft Outlook."
Link to Original Source

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