William Pittsburgh

Scholarship in 2010

2011-02-22T21:18:00.000-08:00

Rebuilding Babel: Copyright and the Future of Machine Translation Online, by Erik Ketzan.

Published in Tulane Journal of Technology & Intellectual Property, Spring 2007.

Awarded 2006 Faculty Award for Excellence in Legal Scholarship, University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Presented at Meeting of the Open Linguistic Data Working Group, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, March 20-21, Boston, Massachusetts, 2010.

Presented at LREC 2010, 7th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Valletta, Malta, May 17, 2010.

Presented at D-SPIN / Clarin, 2010 Workshop, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria.

LREC 2010

2011-02-16T11:50:00.000-08:00

presentation at LREC 2010 in Malta: Erik Ketzan on machine translation and copyright implications

2011-02-16T11:48:00.000-08:00

blast from the past: trumpet playing days

Avvo

2011-02-11T06:39:00.001-08:00

Erik Ketzan at Avvo

Linked in

2011-02-07T21:39:00.001-08:00

Erik Ketzan at Linked In - trying to keep this one updated with all my info

LREC 2010

2010-05-20T07:52:00.001-07:00

Erik Ketzan attended LREC 2010 in Malta.

Linked in

2010-03-15T03:18:00.001-07:00

finally creating a Linked in page: Erik Ketzan's Linked-In page

A Little Fable

2009-10-11T16:06:00.000-07:00

An adaptation of Kafka's one-paragraph short story, "A Little Fable," in comic book form by the artist Vincent Stall:

Some positive responses to Rebuilding Babel throughout the net

2009-08-10T23:43:00.000-07:00

The paper is starting to reach machine translation professionals, software info sites, legal scholars, and even the Twittersphere!

Rebuilding Babel: Copyright and the Future of Machine Translation Online, by Erik Ketzan

Rebuilding Babel

2009-01-30T20:58:00.000-08:00

Erik Ketzan, Rebuilding Babel: Copyright and the Future of Machine Translation, 9 Tulane J. Tech. & Intell. Prop. 205 (2007). Early draft available at SSRN. So far cited in: a University of Manchester doctoral thesis by
Federico Gaspari ("The reflections offered by Ketzan (2007) are interesting and stimulating, especially because they deal directly with a set of issues that have been discussed for years but still represent grey areas surrounding the use of MT on the Internet") and some law reviews articles. Generously supported by The Samuelson/Glushko Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

idea for a nonprofit

2006-05-22T17:17:00.000-07:00

49 can't be wrong

A nonprofit dedicated to promoting uniformity of law throughout the 50 states. There are numerous examples where ONE state differs from the other 49 in some minor point of law (for instance, there's one state that requires 3 witnesses to a will instead of 2). 49cantbewrong.org would lobby each random state to change their idiotic ways.

Law topic ideas

2006-05-01T16:34:00.000-07:00

Gotta post these somewhere, so:

1) Wiki version of 3L epiphany's Taxonomy of Law Blogs. The wiki could allow people to add/delete their own blogs from the list-- even students, who are not listed because there are too many and their blogs are often 20% law, 80% something else-- and even debate restructuring the taxonomy.

2) Has there been any attempt to create a free, nonprofit alternative to Westlaw and Lexis? Cornell hosts Supreme Court cases online, but without pagination, are useless for purposes of citation. Wiki Law may be trying to tackle too many things at once, although it has potential. What is needed may be a simple Wiki site that lists judicial opinions with pagination of their respective reporter. The common law wiki?

In defense of Joyce and Pynchon

2005-08-27T18:32:00.000-07:00

A response to Dale Peck's Hatchet Jobs

Thoughts on Apple switching to Intel

2005-06-05T20:26:00.000-07:00

1) Cost. Although more fully featured, Macs are more expensive than PCs. Running on Intel will keep costs down.

2) Heat. G4s and G5 are hot as hell. I can barely keep my iBook G4 800 on my lap without worrying about sperm count.

3) Compatibility. Some people hesitate to buy a Mac because they may need that one Windows app, use Windows at work, or want to play games. Perhaps you could install Windows on the new Intel Macs?

4) But then, why buy Intel Macs when you can buy a Dell and install OSX?

5) If Apple plays too hard, Microsoft may stop selling Office for Mac. You could always boot into Windows on your Intel Mac to run Office, but then you’re back on Windows.

6) Chips are getting fast, but Windows doesn’t take all that much to run. As chips get faster, emulation may eliminate the need to dual boot.

7) Even if Apple loses Mac hardware sales, it could more than gain the difference in OSX sales, iTunes sales, and software sales.

Counterforce

2005-06-03T20:57:00.000-07:00

I'm an avid reader of the Becker-Posner Blog, and someone has just launched an Anti-Becker-Posner Blog. "Dialectically, sooner or later, some counterforce would have had to arise" - Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 536.

MFoQL Project

2005-06-03T20:45:00.000-07:00

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana Annotation Project is a project I started to create a set of online annotations to Umberto Eco's latest novel. Two weeks and 150 edits later, it's progressing nicely: I'm 110 pages in with hundreds of annotation entries, mostly by me, but also some by two anonymous contributors, who by their IP addresses I can tell are from Australia and Brazil. Hopefully as the project picks up and more people read Eco's novel, the contributions will snowball.

Jurist icons

2005-06-01T13:37:00.000-07:00

these are the current drafts of some icons I made for Jurist-- could still use some work...

What Happens on Each Page of Gravity's Rainbow

2005-06-01T12:57:00.001-07:00

Zak Smith’s Illustrations For Each Page of Gravity’s Rainbow – The Modern Word hosts a staggering 755 illustrations by New York based artist, Zak Smith, depicting the events and imagery of Pynchon’s magnum opus. It was exhibited at the Whiteny Biennial last year, taking up an entire wall, and is now completely viewable online. I wrote an introduction to the work and co-created the website, personally coding over 400 pages of HTML and giving myself the worst neck pain of my life!

It was worth it, though - we got mentioned on Kottke.org, Metafilter, Screenhead, and Yahoo! Picks-- each one creating a spike of over 1,000 unique hits per day. Funny to think that once per minute, someone new is checking out a website featuring experimental illustrations of an absurdly difficult novel.

What I do

2005-05-21T11:22:00.000-07:00

I'm toying with the idea of bringing everything I do together on this single blog. who knows if this will work?