Susan Perry, reporting at MinnPost.com on a study led by psychologist Julia Shaw of the University of Bedminstershire and published in the journal Psychological Science:

The results were stunning (so stunning that the researchers stopped the study after interviewing 60 rather than the 70 students they had originally thought they would need to test their hypothesis): Of the 30 students who were falsely told they had committed a crime as a teenager, 21 (70 percent) came to believe it, including 11 of the 20 who were told that the crime was an assault.

But those 21 students didn’t simply believe they had committed the crime. By the end of the three interviews, they were also providing elaborate details about the crime — including details of their interactions with police.

That’s a concerning result for a legal system substantially based on eyewitness testimony. Many of the depositions I’ve encountered as a judicial law clerk refer to events several years old. A quick search on Google Scholar reveals the questionable-at-best nature of eyewitness testimony. This is a line of research anyone involved in the legal system, including but not limited to civil and criminal attorneys and judges, social workers and expert witnesses should keep an eye on.

I’m trying to post fewer links, which means I’ve been posting less frequently in general. I’m working on some articles, but until they’re ready to publish I’ll still share the occasional link.

This one is a great article from the American Bar Association’s Law Technology Today blog about getting the most out of Google Scholar. Legal research platforms are usually very expensive, so Google’s free alternative is a great way to peruse this stuff.

As a law clerk, I have access to LexisNexis for legal research. But I find Google Scholar is a much easier and faster way to begin a research project. Lexis uses some proprietary search syntax, which I learned in law school but despise having to use.

If you have access to Lexis Advance or Westlaw Next, those products bring simpler search syntax to the paid-research world. But if not, use Google Scholar to get a good sense of the landscape and then head to a paid service to make sure the law is still good, and to follow research leads that may not present themselves in Google Scholar.

Aviva Rutkin, reporting in New Scientist:

A team of researchers, led by Adam Kramer at Facebook in Menlo Park, California, was curious to see if this phenomenon [of contagious emotion] would occur online. To find out, they manipulated which posts showed up on the news feeds of more than 600,000 Facebook users. For one week, some users saw fewer posts with negative emotional words than usual, while others saw fewer posts with positive ones.

Forget about the filter bubble, Facebook is (and has been since at least 2009) a Petri dish.

Click through to find out the results.

Related: Even the Editor of Facebook’s Mood Study Thought It Was Creepy

This article by Daniela Hernandez at Wired is well-done and fascinating. However, this bit most caught my eye:

Half of the $100 million in federal funding allotted to this program will come from Darpa — more than the amount coming from the National Institutes of Health — and the Defense Department’s research arm hopes the project will “inspire new information processing architectures or new computing approaches.”

Make no mistake: the US military wants intelligent killing machines.

Professor Greg Lastowka of Rutgers-Camden Law School, in a press release earlier this week about his current research:

User-generated content can make a game very valuable, but developers have a legal obligation to look out for copyright infringement. I’m interested to hear from developers how concerns about copyright infringement affect the kind of games they create.

I’m interested, too, and glad someone is looking into it. I look forward to reading about his findings.