Love.Law.Robots. June 2020
Hi ,
Rounding up the posts in June 2020
To the little victories
It’s election time in Singapore. It’s easy to forget the big news was COVID-19 in May.
COVID-19 is not all gloom and despair, though. I am grateful for its opportunities. In particular, I decided to attend the Bucerius Legal Technology Essentials. It’s free, remote and very fascinating, especially since I am not aware of anything like this in Singapore. Moreover, at the unearthly hour of 1 AM Singapore, I could never go through it if I was not working from home.
Here’s to your little victory.
So what’s wrong with TraceTogether?
Despite its importance, TraceTogether has not reached its lofty goals. I argued in “So, what’s wrong with TraceTogether?” that data protection or privacy is not to blame. Distributing an app and asking a user to commit to it is not as simple as publishing it on an app store.
The news that the TraceTogether token version will be distributed to people who do not or prefer not to use a mobile phone vindicates my views as much.
Did the government think that being privacy-focused was a mistake for TraceTogether? We will have to find out soon, but some hackers with access to the token have found it to be purposefully limited
Little Projects
Another month of working from home also gave me a few extra hours to experiment and try out a few new tech things.
In Mining PDFs to obtain better text from Decisions, I show off the new method I used to extract text from long-form documents like PDPC Decisions. Better text means better data for modelling, and hopefully, I now have the dataset I wanted to do natural language processing.
In Get your daily dose of Sudoku with a little bit of Python, I talk about a small side project to send sudoku puzzles to my home printer was also fun to implement. Maybe you should try automating something at home too!
Other Posts
- In Celebrate 200 years of Singapore law with pretty graphs, I ogle at the data visualisations in a new journal article featuring a history of Singapore law.
- Rashomon strikes in the Court of Appeal discusses the acquittal of a doctor for a rape which allegedly occurred in his clinic. What should happen when the facts do not gel with a convincing witness?
- I took a quick look at E-Wills in Who wants to do an E-Will? and wonder whether there is any future for it.
That’s it!
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