Teaching UbiComp with Sense

Modern computer science education has to take account of the recent changes towards smart ubiquitous computing devices. In addition, existing programming languages are needlessly difficult for novice programmers to learn concepts. We have developed Sense, an extension to the graphical programming language Scratch, and an associated sensor/actuator board. Together, these will allow novice undergraduate students to quickly develop their own smart devices while learning the fundamentals of programming. Students will first study with Sense in 2011 but developmental feedback has been positive

Summer of Code: Assisting Distance-Learning Students with Open-Ended Programming Tasks

A significant difficulty in teaching programming lies in the transition from novice to intermediate programmer, characterised by the assimilation and use of schemas of standard programming approaches. A significant factor assisting this transition is practice with tasks which develop this schema use. We describe the Summer of Code, a two-week activity for part-time, distance-learning students which gave them some additional programming practice. We analysed their submissions, forum postings, and results of a terminal survey. We found learners were keen to share and discuss their solutions and persevered with individual problems and the challenge overall. 93% respondents rated the activity 3 or better on a 5-point Likert scale (n=58). However, a quarter of participants, mainly those who described themselves as average or poor programmers, felt less confident in their abilities after the activity, though half of these students liked the activity overall. 54% of all participants said the greatest challenge was developing a general approach to the problems, such as selecting appropriate data structures. This is corroborated by forum comments, where students greatly appreciated “think aloud” presentations by faculty tackling the problems. These results strongly suggest that students would benefit from more open-ended practice, where they have to select and design their own solutions to a range of problems

Why Data Privacy Law Is (Mostly) Constitutional

Laws regulating the collection, use, and disclosure of personal data are (mostly) constitutional, and critics who suggest otherwise are wrong. Since the New Deal, American law has rested on the wise judgment that, by and large, commercial regulation should be made on the basis of economic and social policy, rather than blunt constitutional rules. This has become one of the basic principles of American constitutional law. Although some observers have suggested that the United States Supreme Court’s recent decision in Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc. changes this state of affairs, such readings are incorrect. Sorrell involved a challenge to a poorly drafted Vermont law that discriminated on the basis of both content and viewpoint. Such a law would have been unconstitutional if it had regulated even unprotected speech. As the Sorrell Court made clear, the real problem with the Vermont law at issue was that it did not regulate enough, unlike the “more coherent policy” of the undoubtedly constitutional federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. Data privacy law should thus rarely be thought of as implicating serious constitutional difficulties, and this is a good thing. As we move into the digital age, in which more and more of our society is affected or constituted by data flows, we face a similar threat. If “data” were somehow “speech,” virtually every economic law would become clouded by constitutional doubt. Economic or commercial policy affecting data flows—which is to say all economic or social policy—would become almost impossible. This might be a valid policy choice, but it is not one that the First Amendment commands. Any radical suggestions to the contrary are unsupported by our constitutional law. In a democratic society, the basic contours of information policy must ultimately be up to the people and their policy-making representatives, and not to unelected judges. We should decide policy on that basis, rather than on odd readings of the First Amendment

The Supreme Court Justice and Boring Cases

This is a short essay discussing the phenomenon of boring cases at the Supreme Court. It examines two letters written by Supreme Court Justices to sick colleagues–a 1903 letter from Chief Justice E.D. White to William Day, and a 1941 letter from William O. Douglas to Hugo Black. The essay argues that one true and underappreciated measure of the worth of a Supreme Court Justice is not merely their ability to be (or at least appear to be) brilliant in the once-a-decade blockbuster cases. Instead, in selecting Supreme Court Justices, we should look just as much at their ability to work diligently on the vast majority of the cases which make up the Supreme Court\u27s docket–including boring ones

Reconciling Data Privacy and the First Amendment

This article challenges the First Amendment critique of data privacy regulation–the claim that data privacy rules restrict the dissemination of truthful information and thus violate the First Amendment. The critique, which is ascendant in privacy discourse, warps legislative and judicial processes by constitutionalizing information policy. Rejection of the First Amendment critique is justified on three grounds. First, the critique mistakenly equates privacy regulation with speech regulation. Building on scholarship examining the boundaries of First Amendment protection, this article suggests that speech restrictions in a wide variety of commercial contexts have never been thought to trigger heightened First Amendment scrutiny, refuting the claim that all information flow regulations fall within the First Amendment. Second, this article divides regulations of information flows into four analytic categories, and demonstrates how, in each category, ordinary doctrinal tools can be used to uphold the constitutionality of consumer privacy rules. Third, relying on recent intellectual histories of American constitutional law, this article argues that fundamental jurisprudential reasons counsel against acceptance of the First Amendment critique. From the perspective of privacy law, there are striking parallels between the critique\u27s freedom of information and the discredited freedom of contract regime of Lochner. More importantly, from the perspective of First Amendment law, the critique threatens the obliteration of the distinction between economic and political rights at the core of post-New Deal constitutionalism. Rejection of the First Amendment critique thus has real advantages. At the level of policy, it preserves the ability of legislatures to develop information policy in a nuanced way. And at the level of theory, it preserves the basic dualism upon which the modern edifice of rights jurisprudence is built

The Puzzle of Brandeis, Privacy, and Speech

Most courts and scholarship assume that privacy and free speech are always in conflict, even though each of these traditions can be traced back to writings by Louis D. Brandeis – his 1890 Harvard Law Review article “The Right to Privacy” and his 1927 concurrence in Whitney v. California. How can modern notions of privacy and speech be so fundamentally opposed if Brandeis played a major role in crafting both? And how, if at all, did Brandeis recognize or address these tensions? These questions have been neglected by scholars of First Amendment law, privacy, and Brandeis. In this paper, I argue that the puzzle of Brandeis’s views on privacy and speech can be resolved in a surprising and useful way. My basic claim is that Brandeis came to largely abandon the tort theory of privacy he expounded in “The Right to Privacy.” As a young lawyer, Brandeis conceived of privacy as a tort action protecting emotional injury from newspaper stories that revealed private facts. But Brandeis’s ideas evolved over his life. He soon came to believe strongly in a contrary idea he called “the duty of publicity.” This is the notion that disclosure of most kinds of fraud and wrongdoing are in the public interest; that as he famously put it, “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” When Brandeis came to think through First Amendment issues after the First World War, tort privacy could no longer consistently fit into his influential theories of civil liberty. But while Brandeis changed his mind about tort privacy, what he replaced it with is even more interesting. In his Olmstead dissent and free speech writings, Brandeis identified a second conception of privacy that I call “intellectual privacy.” Brandeis reminds us that the generation of new ideas requires a certain measure of privacy to succeed, and that in this way intellectual privacy and free speech are mutually supportive. I conclude by suggesting some contemporary implications of Brandeis’s rejection of tort privacy and his linkage of intellectual privacy with free speech

Foreword: The Rehnquist Court and the First Amendment

This paper introduces the question -- what will be the legacy of the Rehnquist Court? Although it is too early to say with certainty, it is safe to hazard a guess that it will be remembered as a relatively conservative Court, particularly interested in policing the lines between federal and state power in areas such as the federal commerce power, state sovereign immunity, and criminal procedure. Indeed, it is in these areas that the “Rehnquist Court” is most aptly named, for William Rehnquist was a leader of the Court’s doctrinal evolution in these areas in a number of ways. Despite the Court’s emphasis on federalism and constitutional criminal law, issues of First Amendment law remained consistently at the top of the docket in terms of importance. Over its two decades, the Rehnquist Court grappled with a host of fundamental First Amendment issues, involving a panoply of questions basic to any free society. Among many others, it addressed questions of flag burning, hate speech, sexually-explicit speech, speech in the digital environment, free speech versus the right to privacy, free speech and the regulation of intellectual property, the scope of the rights of expressive association and religious free exercise,9 and the prohibition on the establishment of religion

The Limits of Tort Privacy

The conception of tort privacy developed by Warren, Brandeis and Prosser sits at the heart of American understandings of privacy law. Rooted in protection of private information against unwanted collection, use, and disclosure, tort privacy protects against emotional injury, and was directed by design against disclosures of true, embarrassing facts by the media. In this essay, I argue that as conceived by Warren and Brandeis and interpreted by Prosser, tort privacy is a poor vehicle for grappling with problems of privacy and reputation in the digital age. Tort privacy, especially the disclosure tort, has from its inception been in conflict with First Amendment values. And when First Amendment values and tort privacy conflict, First Amendment values should prevail virtually all of the time. The disclosure tort will retain limited utility in the electronic environment, but privacy in the age of information and social media requires new strategies and new legal tools. Some of these strategies might include tort privacy as presently understood, but others require new approaches. These approaches can take either a broader look at tort privacy, including new torts and new theories of injury beyond emotional harm, or they can include new conceptions of privacy altogether, such as confidentiality law

The Internet Grows Up?

Danielle Citron’s Hate Crimes in Cyberspace is one of the most important publications to date in the emerging fields of privacy and cyberlaw. In her thoughtful and insightful book, Citron explains the uneven playing field and frequently shocking acts of abuse that women face online, and demonstrates practical steps that we can take to remedy the problem of online hate through law, education, and the development of better, more inclusive norms. Other contributors to this Symposium have examined these contributions in great detail, pointing out important nuances of Citron’s argument, urging her in at least one case to be even bolder in her prescriptions. I agree with much of what has been said, but as the Symposium draws to a close, I would like to take a slightly different tack. I’d like to take a step back from the problems of revenge porn and cyber-harassment, or the extent to which Citron’s remedies comport with what the First Amendment does (or should) provide. When we do that, we see Citron’s efforts (which are far broader than merely this wonderful book) as part of the maturation of digital life. Specifically, Citron’s work is a small but essential part of the larger project of translating our hard-won civil and political rights into the digital sphere—the project, if you will, of helping the Internet grow up