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That’s how much the ride costs in NYC on New Years Eve as a result of Uber’s dynamic pricing. People, who are used to fixed prices, are pissed.

On New Year’s Eve, Dan Whaley, a tech entrepreneur in San Francisco, got into a black Town Car and was driven one mile to a holiday party. The ride cost him $27. At the end of the night out, Mr. Whaley took a Town Car home from the party. This time, the exact same ride cost $135.

Mr. Whaley was using Uber, a service that allows people to order livery cabs through a smartphone application. On New Year’s Eve, Uber, a start-up in the city, adopted a feature it called “surge pricing,” which increases the price of rides as more people request them.

Although New Year’s Eve was very profitable for Uber, customers were not happy. Many felt the pricing was exorbitant and they took to Twitter and the Web to complain. Some people said that at certain times in the evening, rides had spiked to as high as seven times the usual price, and they called it highway robbery. Uber’s goal is to make the experience as simple as possible, so customers are not shown their fare until the end of the ride, when it is automatically charged to their credit card.

Economists call this “dynamic pricing.” It is deployed by only a small number of businesses, like hotels, airlines and car rental companies, which raise prices on weekends and holidays when demand surges.

I like dynamic pricing. It is supply and demand in reality, and helps keep prices down under regular circumstances.

“If you’re a pure economist and following the laws of supply and demand, the argument is that if someone is willing to pay a price, then it is not excessive,” said Liran Einav, an associate economics professor at Stanford. “But that all depends on the type of long-term relationship you want to build with your customers.”

why can’t law students use laptops in class?

In a basement lab at NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan last month, students in scrubs and surgical gloves hovered over cadavers on gurneys, preparing, as would-be doctors have for centuries, to separate rib cages and examine organs. But the dead are imperfect stand-ins for the living. Death — and embalming fluid — take a toll.

So, in an adjacent classroom, a group of students wearing 3-D glasses made by Nvidia, a graphics processing firm, dissected a virtual cadaver projected on a screen. Using a computer to control the stereoscopic view, they swooped through the virtual body, its sections as brightly colored as living tissue. First, the students scrutinized layers of sinewy pink muscles layered over ivory bones. Then, with the click of a mouse, they examined a close-up of the heart, watching as deep blue veins and bright red arteries made the heart pump.

Compared with the real cadavers in the lab next door, the virtual one seemed as dynamic as Imax.

“It’s like a living digital textbook,” said John J. Qualter, a research assistant professor of educational informatics at the medical school who helped design the 3-D installation.

The virtual human body is the creation of BioDigital Systems, a medical visualization firm in Manhattan that Mr. Qualter helped to found. It develops animations of the anatomy for drug makers like Novartis, medical device makers like Medtronic, television shows like “Mystery Diagnosis” and medical schools.

The virtual body, introduced last month at N.Y.U., represents an unusual collaboration between industry and academia. The companies, which originally paid BioDigital to develop medical animations of certain body parts for commercial purposes, agreed to let the design firm freely use the digital models for educational purposes. In recognition of N.Y.U.’s involvement, the company has pledged a small share of future revenue to the medical school.

Not everyone is convinced:

But her colleague, Susanna Jeurling, a first-year medical student from Washington, disagreed. Dissecting a real cadaver, she said, gives students a unique, tactile understanding of the body.

“I don’t think this will ever replace cadavers,” said Ms. Jeurling, 24. “There’s something about being able to hold it and turn it in your hand.”

Administrators at the medical school say they have no plans to phase out dissection, an educational method that dates back to the Ptolemaic era. The 3-D digital human body is merely a complementary teaching method, said Dr. Marc M. Triola, associate dean for educational informatics.

“It’s an amazing blend of one of the oldest medical education techniques and the absolute newest,” Dr. Triola said.

I had to dissect some animals in the 9th grade–I seem to recall dissecting a worm and a frog. I hated it. I absolutely hated it. It seemed so stupid and so gross. I actually remember searching on the web (mind you this was circa 1998 or so, I don’t think we had google) for some kind of virtual simulation. There was one. Alas, I was stuck slicing apart a frog, and putting Nicotine (or some stimulant) on its heart to get it beating (why I have no idea).

Adam Liptak reviews a Brennan Center study that shows that contrary to what we may think, the Roberts Court is not pro-free speech. In short, the Court is considering fewer free speech cases each term, and in fewer cases the First Amendment claim wins. Liptak took the (unusual?) step of having Lee Epstein and Jeff Segal review the Brennan Center Study.

Ms. Youn’s study was posted on the blog of the American Constitution Society, a liberal legal group. At the request of The New York Times, two scholars — Lee Epstein, who teaches law and political science at the University of Southern California, and Jeffrey A. Segal, a political scientist at Stony Brook University — examined the data Ms. Youn relied on and confirmed the essence of her empirical conclusions. Professors Epstein and Segal also added several refinements.

What I found interesting was the opposition of some scholars to characterize SCOTUS cases empirically.

Floyd Abrams, the prominent First Amendment lawyer, said he was unimpressed by the new findings. “Statistics cannot tell the story of the willingness of a court to defend free expression,” he said. “Cases do. It is unpopular speech, distasteful speech, that most requires First Amendment protection, and on that score, no prior Supreme Court has been as protective as this.” . . .

David L. Hudson Jr., a scholar at the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, said the studies lacked nuance by, for instance, treating every decision as equally important. His criticism illuminated a gap between the two disciplines used to assess the Supreme Court: political science codes and counts, while law weighs and analyzes.

And the gap between coding and analysis is one I hope to bridge. Teaching computers to understand jurisprudence, rather than simply coding cases, is the key to crunching the law.

Update: Serious pwnage from Mark Savignac. It aint even close.

The study asserts that the difference is statistically significant (as does this more detailed report on the study), and so it might tell us something interesting if the study were comparing comparable things. But it is not; the study’s comparisons are invalid. It can provide no hint of how the Roberts Court would have dealt with the Warren Court’s cases, or vice versa; nor does it show which Court was more pro-speech for its day, relative to the contemporary median American. The problem is that the assertion that the numbers show a “statistically significant” shortfall in support for free speech by the Roberts Court relies on an implicit assumption that the Roberts Court and the other Courts are deciding comparable cases–either the exact same cases under the same conditions (as in standardized testing), or else comparable distributions of cases drawn from the same pool. Yet that assumption is obviously false.

Supreme Courts do not decide a randomly selected distribution of free speech cases, nor do different Courts decide the same or analogous cases or even pick and decide their cases under similar circumstances. The differences are tremendous, and I see no way of controlling for them (though this study didn’t try). The primary factors are the Court’s ability to pick and choose which cases it will hear, the effect of pre-existing precedents on the cases that come before a given Court, and the effect of the lower courts on the cases that end up being decided by the Supreme Court.

I’m sure Vinny knows the deal about Citizens United, unlike Patty Schwartz, failed-nominee to the Third Circuit, whom Senator Menendez thinks doesn’t know strict scrutiny from rational basis, or something like that.

In his statement, Mr. Menendez said that in his interview with Judge Shwartz, she did not “adequately demonstrate the breadth of knowledge of constitutional law and pivotal Supreme Court decisions, such as Citizens United,” the 2010 ruling that struck down many restrictions against corporate spending to influence federal elections.

“In my opinion, she misapplied the application of strict scrutiny versus rational basis review to the questions at hand,” his statement said, referring to two kinds of tests that courts apply when weighing government policies. “She did not express substantive knowledge as to the scope of the rights of corporations under the Constitution or jurisprudence on the constitutional limits of executive branch powers.”

You heard it here first. Vinny for CA3. And I know how he’d vote on the Snooki Tax!

I just downloaded Jeff Rosin and Ben Wittes’ cool new book, Constitution 3.0, that discusses how our laws should adopt to evolving technologies. Rosen’s chapter, The Deciders: Facebook, Google, and the Future of Privacy and Free Speech, has some overlap with my work.

Facebook decides to post live feeds from public and private surveillance cameras so they can be searched online. After Facebook grants the request, anyone in the world can log onto the Internet, select a particular street view on Facebook, and zoom in on a particular individual. The user can then back-click to retrace that person’s steps since she left the house in the morning or forward-click to see where she is headed. With facial recognition technology, a user can click on an image of a stranger, plug the image into a Facebook or Google database to identify her by name, and then follow her movements from door to door. Imagine that this ubiquitous surveillance is challenged as a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures of our “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” Under existing doctrine, the Fourth Amendment may not be construed to regulate Facebook, a private corporation, and even if there were enough places.

. . .

As mobile camera technology becomes ubiquitous, the Court might hold that the government is entitled to have access to the same linked camera system that ordinary members of the public have become accustomed to browsing. Moreover, the Court has said that we have no expectation of privacy in data that we voluntarily surrender to third parties.’ In cases in which digital images are captured on cameras owned by third parties and stored in the digital cloud-that is, on distributed third-party servers-we have less privacy than citizens took for granted at the time of the American founding. . . .

Because prolonged surveillance on Open Planet potentially reveals far more about each of us than round-the-clock GPS tracking does, providing real-time images of all our actions rather than simply tracking the movements of our cars, it could also be struck down as an unreasonable search of our persons.

. . .

If the past is any guide, the answer may depend on whether citizens, in 2025, view round-the-clock surveillance as invasive and unreasonable or, instead, have become so used to it, on and off the web, in virtual space and real space, that they demand Open Planet rather than protesting against it. In the age of Google and Facebook, technologies that thoughtfully balance privacy with free expression and other values have tended to be adopted only when companies see their markets as demanding some kind of privacy protection or when engaged constituencies have mobilized in protest against poorly designed architectures and demanded better ones, helping to create a social consensus that the invasive designs are unreasonable.

This reminds me of something I wrote in 2007:

As distinguished from previous forms of public monitoring, this new form of surveillance will be omnipresent, as it can record vast areas of space over a very small period of time. It provides the users of this system with omniscience to know everything happening in a specific location at a specific time. Furthermore, this information will be indefinitely retained, and easily accessible. When future versions of this technology is properly implemented, it will be possible to enter a time, date, and location, and witness what happened at that moment as if you were there. It is a virtual time machine. In addition, using facial recognition technology, it will even be possible to search for a particular person’s location at any given recorded moment. . . . No place would be safe from the unblinking eye of omniveillance.

Ubiquitous surveillance? Omniveillance?