Some light remarks on methodology of law & technology

Legal scholarship has a (partly deserved) reputation for being boring. Legal articles and treatises, especially in long-established fields like contract, admin, or tax, seldom spark interest outside the narrow circles of experts. As we’re among ourselves, lawyers, let’s admit it: when we write, in our Twitter or LinkedIn bios, that we’re “passionate” about the regulation of certain specific markets, we don’t really mean it. We just signal that we’re experts and not (yet) burned out. And if you ever went on a Tinder date and opened with “for work I read and write about the role of formal mistakes in contract formation,” chances are high that you never had a chance to get into the details on the second date. Now, law & technology is different. Who isn’t excited or concerned about the platforms? Facebook & Google spy on us, influence our preferences through targeted ads, and possibly play a part in ruining the democracy. And “privacy!” Whether the amount of data stored about you by the platforms scares you or not, few people find the subject uninteresting. So, if you open by “you know how we met on Tinder? They have data about all your swipes, know your preferences, use it to show you ads and maybe even sell it to some shady companies; I study the law that makes it happen and the ways to render it less creepy,” you’ve got your date’s attention. Personally, I still usually ruin in (being a nerd after all – come on, we’re among ourselves, scholars) but you get my point. More seriously, though – law & technology is exciting not only subject-wise but also methodology- and theory-wise. It’s a largely uncharted territory not only because the rules are new or non-existent, not only because few people have written about these topics, but also because we don’t really know how exactly to write about it. We’re learning law & technology by doing it. This circumstance makes the field thrilling, innovative & potent; but it also makes it much harder to navigate. Traditionally, legal scholars have not been thinking along the lines we currently do – we lack libraries filled with classic tomes of exemplary work to learn from. This short essay contains some preliminary reflections on methodology in the field of law & technology. First, I discuss what I believe law & tech scholars should not be doing, for legitimacy reasons – namely to present the regulatory goals, in nature political, as necessary consequences of what the legal system is now. Second, I survey the various functions that, I believe, law & tech scholars, are well suited to fulfill. Two caveats: first, these are very preliminary thoughts – it’s more an expression of my intuitions rather than a systematic account of a long-lasting research project. For this reason, I’d ask the Reader to be critical – I might not be right; I highlight the areas I believe are important. Second, I have deliberately written this in a provocative style. My purpose is spark thinking and pushback – both to advance my own arguments, and to contribute to the overall reflection

Search for supersymmetry in events with large missing transverse momentum, jets, and at least one tau lepton in 20 fb−1^{-1} of s=8\sqrt{s}=8 TeV proton-proton collision data with the ATLAS detector

A search for supersymmetry (SUSY) in events with large missing transverse momentum, jets, at least one hadronically decaying tau lepton and zero or one additional light leptons (electron/muon), has been performed using 20.3fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collision data at $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. No excess above the Standard Model background expectation is observed in the various signal regions and 95% confidence level upper limits on the visible cross section for new phenomena are set. The results of the analysis are interpreted in several SUSY scenarios, significantly extending previous limits obtained in the same final states. In the framework of minimal gauge-mediated SUSY breaking models, values of the SUSY breaking scale $\Lambda$ below 63 TeV are excluded, independently of tan $\beta$. Exclusion limits are also derived for an mSUGRA/CMSSM model, in both the R-parity-conserving and R-parity-violating case. A further interpretation is presented in a framework of natural gauge mediation, in which the gluino is assumed to be the only light coloured sparticle and gluino masses below 1090 GeV are excluded

Harmed while anonymous : beyond the personal/non-personal distinction in data governance

Data law and policy assume that harms to individuals can result only from personal data processing. Conversely, generation and use of non-personal data supposedly create new value while presenting no risk to individual interests or fundamental rights. Consequently, the law treats these two categories differently, constraining generation, use, and sharing of the former while incentivizing the latter. This article challenges this assumption. It proposes to divide data-related harms into two high-level categories: unwanted disclosure and detrimental use. It demonstrates how personal/non-personal data distinction prevents unwanted disclosure but fails to capture, and unintendedly enables, detrimental use of data. As a remedy, the article proposes a new concept – data about humans – and illustrates how it could advance data law and policy

Data Management Law for the 2020s: The Lost Origins and the New Needs

In the data analytics society, each individual’s disclosure of personal information imposes costs on others. This disclosure enables companies, deploying novel forms of data analytics, to infer new knowledge about other people and to use this knowledge to engage in potentially harmful activities. These harms go beyond privacy and include difficult to detect price discrimination, preference manipulation, and even social exclusion. Currently existing, individual-focused, data protection regimes leave law unable to account for these social costs or to manage them. This Article suggests a way out, by proposing to re-conceptualize the problem of social costs of data analytics through the new frame of “data management law.” It offers a critical comparison of the two existing models of data governance: the American “notice and choice” approach and the European “personal data protection” regime (currently expressed in the General Data Protection Regulation). Tracing their origin to a single report issued in 1973, the Article demonstrates how they developed differently under the influence of different ideologies (market-centered liberalism, and human rights, respectively). It also shows how both ultimately failed at addressing the challenges outlined already forty-five years ago. To tackle these challenges, this Article argues for three normative shifts. First, it proposes to go beyond “privacy” and towards “social costs of data management” as the framework for conceptualizing and mitigating negative effects of corporations’ data usage. Second, it argues to go beyond the individual interests, to account for collective ones, and to replace contracts with regulation as the means of creating norms governing data management. Third, it argues that the nature of the decisions about these norms is political, and so political means, in place of technocratic solutions, need to be employed

Scrum in video games development – Literature review

The video game industry is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. In consequence, projects of video game development get progressively bigger and more complex. Scrum is the most commonly used methodology in software development; therefore it is often used in video games development as games are essentially combination of software, art and sometimes science. The aim of this re-view is to provide overlook on Scrum as a methodology used in Software devel-opment, describe in short what characteristics the video games development has and how well Scrum fits into the current state of video games development. It also presents advantages and disadvantages noticed by previous researchers with using Scrum inside and outside of video games industry. The information contained in this article may be useful for people that already work with Scrum outside of video games industry, as well as people working in video games industry not working with Scrum. Both groups may get familiarized with challenges and benefits of using Scrum in context of video games industry and with review of articles based on real life examples contents of this article contains tips valuable to people struggling with Scrum implementation in their video games development projects and how to enhance this meth-odology with other methodologies to achieve most beneficial outcome

THE EFFECT OF COOLING METHOD ON SURFACE ROUGHNESS IN DEEP HOLE DRILLING OF ALUMINIUM ALLOYS

This paper presents the results of an experimental study investigating the effect of usage of different cooling methods in drilling of aluminum alloys with different surface roughness properties of these materials. Two alloys were tested: EN AW2024 and AlSi10Mg with a high silicon content. A comparison was made between surface roughness parameters obtained as a result of the usage of different cooling and lubrication methods such as emulsion cooling, MQL and compressed air cooling. In the experiment, holes with the depth range from 5xD to 15xD were machined using different hole machining strategies