a thaumaturgical compendium

So you may have noted that Mattel is getting a little bit of guff over their Dom Barbie, to add on to the general problem of the doll’s body mold. On the other hand, Barbie is breaking gender stereotypes with the “I can be” career series. Who knew women could be baby doctors or art teachers?

But where is Big Law Barbie? Mattel says that kids don’t care about their mothers’ legal careers, but I find that hard to believe. So, I introduce to you “Big Law Barbie,” who can defend against mass torts while baking massive tortes.

Big Law Barbie comes with a briefcase (wound up being too big for the box), that when squeezed, says “Ouch! That glass ceiling really hurts.” There’s a video up on flickr, along with various shots. Below is the back of the box, for more details.

I have known for some time about the A2K conference, being held at Yale from April 21 to 23, and was hoping to drop in on it. I had even considered sending my Media Law students. But at $250 a pop, that’s pretty unlikely. (Besides, I’m going to a play—several, actually—that Saturday.)

Conferences cost money—there’s no way around that. And the conference is encouraging open access to the materials on their wiki. I’m particularly interested in the panel on search engines, and so I’ll keep tabs on that page, but I’m not too hopeful for how much will show up there. Given how easy it is now to set down an MP3 recorder (many phones will do this now), I wish we could get some form of record of the panels. Is that too much to ask for in a conference about access to knowledge?

This looks like a fun conference: Graphic and Visual Representations of Evidence and Inference in Legal Settings. For reasons that shouldn’t be all that hard to figure out, over the last couple of years I have been increasingly interested in the way lawyers assemble and understand information. Especially with complex litigation, the amount of information that needs to be organized and sorted is enormous, and often is coordinated with large numbers of people, with little overlap of experience or knowledge, being paid a great deal more than the average wage. It is, in short, the ideal environment for effective knowledge management tools. And of course, there are a number of companies that provide support for them, but there are also enormous opportunities for helping lawyers come to terms with large amounts of data quickly, and be able to transmit this information to a jury and others.

I actually interviewed with a company that consults in this area, and was surprised by the shallowness of their thinking in the area. Attorneys are willing to go to experts, but it seems that a fair number of the people who consult in these areas (jury consulting, graphic communication & visualization, and supporting evidence collection and organization), while certainly providing a service, could be doing so much more.

That’s not really what this conference is about, but I’m interested to see what is happening on the research side of things. Luckily this conference, on the 28th and 29th of January, is free to the public here in New York at Cardozo Law School.

(I’m sure someone deserves a hat tip here, but I don’t remember how I found it!)