[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

South Dakota is about to vote on a constitutional amendment permitting jury nullification. This means that juries could vote not guilty on the grounds that the relevant law was unfair or otherwise misguided. The supporters have a site, and the South Dakota State Bar has this to say.

The actual amendment would rewrite Article VI, Section 7 of the South Dakota Constitution as follows. The changes are marked in italics.

In all criminal prosecutions the accused shall have the right to defend in person and by counsel; to demand the nature and the cause of the accusation against him; to have a copy thereof; to meet the witnesses against him face to face; to have compulsory process served for obtaining witnesses in his behalf; and to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury of the county and district in which the offense is alleged to have been committed; and to argue the merits, validity, and applicability of the law, including the sentencing laws.

The supporters don't actually do a very good job addressing the arguments against jury nullification; there is, in fact, an existing mechanism for allowing citizens input into the law, and it is reasonable to ask whether or not 12 jurors selected at random should have the ability to override a majority vote of the entire populace. I think the answer may be yes, but I dislike the arrogance of claiming that the question is irrelevant. "Common sense isn't."

And the lawyers of South Dakota are not universally evil people who rely on scare tactics. Claiming that "they are insulting your intelligence" is the worst kind of populist rhetoric. Sigh.

So the impression I get is that South Dakotans in favor of jury nullification are not in fact capable of constructing or analyzing legal arguments, or logical arguments of any kind. This does not convince me that it's a good idea to let South Dakotan juries decide cases based on their opinions of the laws involved. Sorry, guys; if you can't move beyond populist rhetoric, you shouldn't be trusted with more complex decisions on a jury.

[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

Kevin Kelly (one of the guys behind Long Bets) wrote a really good book, entitled Out of Control, and made it available online. I bumped into it via a link to Chapter 2: Hive Mind. Super cool stuff. The rest of his site looks interesting too.

[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

The new Google News service kind of bugs me. The FAQ says this:

The headlines on the Google News homepage are selected entirely by a computer algorithm, based on many factors including how often and on what sites a story appears elsewhere on the web. This is very much in the tradition of Google's web search, which relies heavily on the collective judgment of web publishers to determine which sites offer the most valuable and relevant information. Google News relies in a similar fashion on the editorial judgment of online news organizations to determine which stories are most deserving of inclusion and prominence on the Google News page.

Huh. So the most reported stories show up on Google News, which causes people to report the stories more, and so on. In engineering, they call this positive feedback. It is not always a good thing.

Mind you, Google's always used algorithms like this for their search. Daypop, the popular (and currently dead) weblog search service, creates a similar effect with their Top Forty listing of popular links from the world's weblogs. So this is nothing new, per se.

Still. I have a penchant for the unexplored, the new, and the underreported. It seems to me that Google is encouraging the homogenization of the Web, here. The algorithm is problematic when applied to news, and it has the same problems when applied to web search.

Discussing this is, alas, met with scorn from the weblogging community. Daniel Brandt is a bit of a loon, admittedly, and his personal stake in these arguments is well documented. But there's some truth at the core of his complaints. Besides, you'd kind of expect Doc Searls to stand up for Google. He's one of the guys who benefits from PageRank.

When Doc Searls says "Why is this bad? Because PageRank doesn't give a fair shake to stuff nobody points to? What user would want that?" I am forced to reply, "Users who want to find stuff outside the beaten path." PageRank is great for building up an initial concept of the Web; if you're starting from scratch, you get an accurate picture of which sites are important. But from that point on, you make it harder for completely new sites to break into the rankings. New clusters of link relationships won't be ranked as highly as the old clusters.

So that's why Google News kind of bugs me.

Disclaimer: I used to work for AltaVista.