Novojustice

Settlementapp.com:

“Collections in the cloud. In a matter of minutes,
collection agencies and law firms can offer flexible settlement options.

High Conversion Rates

Speed up the collection process by providing effective payment options

Accept Payments

Process payments online using Credit/Debit Cards and ACH

No Setup Fees

Only pay when successful transactions take place

Safe & Secure

All of your data is protected, confidential and secured by our 256 bit SSL encryption process”

Very interesting… definitely an elegant way to handle this.

Kathleen Parker, Washington Post:

“Like so many things, civility is in the perception of the beholder, but we at least can agree on a definition. Civility is courtesy in behavior and speech, otherwise known as manners. In the context of the public square, civility is manners for democracy.

Unquestionably, our manners have deteriorated since Washington’s time, increasingly so in recent years. Manners have become quaint, while behaviors once associated with rougher segments of society have become mainstream.

During my own childhood, even private cursing was rare, and the third finger was something only the crudest people used to express themselves. No one I knew ever dropped the F-bomb. The worst children heard was an occasional “hell” or “damn,” usually following an incident involving a badly aimed hammer.

Given that manners have faded in our interpersonal relations, it shouldn’t be surprising that bad habits would bleed into the public square. Add to the equation our social media, Internet access and other avenues of instant and, importantly, anonymous, communication, and the bad habits of the few become the social pathology of the many. As we further balkanize ourselves, finding comfort in virtual salons of ideological conformity, it becomes easier to dehumanize “the other” and treat them accordingly.

Whom to blame and how to fix it? It is tempting to blame “the media,” especially television, for the degradation of civility. Obviously the food-fight formula that attracts viewers to cable TV isn’t helpful, but we may protest too much. We can always change the channel, but people arguing passionately are more entertaining than solemn folks speaking in measured tones about Very Important Issues. Conflict and spectacle sell (see WWE and its distant ancestor, the Colosseum). The attraction is tied to our sporting spirit and the lure of the contest.

The clearest solution would be unacceptable to most of us. That is, the tamping down of speech. Better that incivility be revealed in the light of day than that it be forced underground, there to fester and the underlying sentiments to grow. Change — if we really want it — has to come from within, each according to his own conscience.

The most that media can do, meanwhile, is strive to be honest, accurate and fair, and reward the coarsest among us with scant attention. The greatest threat to civility isn’t the random “You lie!” outburst. More threatening to our firmament is the pandering to ignorance, the elevation of nonsense and the distribution of false information.

In the main, the Golden Rule works pretty well. Best taught in the home, it could use some burnishing.”

Relevant: UMass-Boston Forum on Political Civility and “What Happened to Civility?”

Judge Monty Ahalt, ODR pioneer, on Mediate.com:

“Advances in technology will make ODR a more viable solution for the parties and neutrals alike. Technology has reached a level of general acceptance and will gain widespread recognition as an aide to make dispute resolution faster, cheaper and more widely available. Not that everyone will race online to settle to an entire resolution process, but widespread adoption of parts of the process will continue to increase. This is largely because:

• Improvements in web-conferencing technology, such as Skype, IOCOM’s Visimeet and Apple’s FaceTime, will enable better online video communications.
• Improved online case management services will enable files to be stored online in a more secure and confidential way.
• Neutral Listing serviceswill enable neutrals to market themselves.
• PaaS and SaaS will see an expansion with existing and new online providers.
• Institutional Control will be readily recognized as unfair and biased, if, for no other reason, because they appear to control the outcome.”

I agree, the time is now.  Check the article out:
http://www.mediate.com/articles/AhaltA1.cfm

Nick Weinstein, PandoDaily:

“The company soon plans to launch BillGuard Resolution Center, a lightweight platform that largely removes the bank from the dispute process, placing the bewildered card holder directly in touch with merchants for a first attempt to resolve charge queries. If the merchant doesn’t give the cardholder satisfaction, the cardholder can still turn to her bank to adjudicate a dispute, but BillGuard claims, convincingly, that in the great majority of cases queries should be settled far more efficiently by directly linking merchant and cardholder.

The bank can therefore rid itself of much of the painful and expensive middleman role without ceding ultimate control over the transaction. Upstanding merchants should also love it, since they’re currently charged even for banks’ complaint investigations and suffer heavy fees for breaching a certain threshold of chargebacks (usually 1%).  BillGuard Resolution Center, applied at scale, should drastically lower all chargebacks.”

I bet there’s a PayPal person over there.  The naming is too much of a coincidence.

James McWilliams, the Atlantic:

“As more and more "conscientious carnivores" do what their designation dictates and, as did our chef, move closer to confronting the ethics of slaughter, they’ll be similarly jarred into recognizing the gravity of killing a live animal. They’ll witness firsthand the fact that the animal does not want to die. And in so doing, they will either have to acknowledge the easy way out of the carnivore’s dilemma (choosing not to kill animals for food) or they will have to, a la the chef, desensitize themselves to the slaughter, thereby undermining the conscientious part of "conscientious carnivore."

All these problems with conscientious carnivorism—the killing of an animal despite acknowledging its moral worth, the economics of efficient production, and the desensitization required to deal with the slaughter—end up collectively supporting the very foundation of factory farming. As long as we’re willing to commodify a living creature that has intrinsic worth, directly link its lifespan to consumer demand, and numb ourselves to the painful essence of the slaughter, we’re doing nothing more than reaffirming the core values of factory farming. It might feel good to call ourselves "conscientious carnivores," but at some point we’ll have to recognize that the only conscientious carnivore is, alas, an herbivore.”

Brad Tuttle, Time Moneyland:

“Bing Liu, a University of Illinois at Chicago computer-science professor, has made a habit of calling attention to fake online reviews. He is one of several experts trying to develop sophisticated detection software to rid the Web of “opinion spam,” as he calls it, which includes fake reviews, fake comments and fake blogs. Liu has estimated that for some products, it’s a safe bet that 30% of the reviews are fake. As things now stand, it’s easy to see why businesses are interested in pumping up online ratings, even if they have to resort to fraud. Liu told the Times:

“More people are depending on reviews for what to buy and where to go, so the incentives for faking are getting bigger,” said Mr. Liu. “It’s a very cheap way of marketing.”

A group of Cornell researchers is also working on algorithms that would out fake reviews. In their study, “Finding Deceptive Opinion Spam by Any Stretch of the Imagination,” researchers used their software to sift through a pool of hotel reviews — 400 fake, 400 real. The software detected the fakes 90% of the time, while a group of humans challenged with naming the fakes was correct only slightly more than half the time.

One of the report’s authors, Myle Ott, spoke with me last week and explained that the software takes note of subtle signs that most people overlook. “Truthful reviews tend to have more punctuation, such as dollar signs, which indicate a specific that’d only be known to someone who has been there,” he said. “There are also more specific details, like the hotel location or that the room was small or large.”

Fake reviews, by contrast, tended to have more superlatives and adverbs in the writing (makes sense) and more details that were “external to the hotel,” such as whom the reviewer was traveling with. The fakes were also filled with pronouns, rather than proper names — because someone who had never been to a hotel wouldn’t know the name of the bellman or the woman at the front desk.

While no major websites are using Cornell’s software, anyone who is interested can give it a try at ReviewSkeptic.com. It’s still marked Beta, but you can cut and paste any online review and the software will instantly do an assessment and state whether the review is truthful or fake. The site notes that it “works best on English hotels” and that it’s “currently offered for entertainment purposes only.”

The Cornell team’s latest research, which Ott wasn’t fully at liberty to discuss, expands well beyond online hotel reviews. It was prompted in part by its discovery that fake online reviews are being solicited by doctors.

“That was really disturbing,” said Ott. “The worst thing that could happen because of some fake reviews at a hotel site is that you spend the night in a bad hotel. But doctors? We’re talking really high stakes.”

At least, according to Ott’s research, doctors’ reviews don’t have the highest prevalence of deception online. That ignominious distinction belongs to sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, which allow anyone to post a review, without requiring proof that the reviewer has actually done business with the hotel or restaurant being rated. (Some sites, includingHotels.com and Priceline, only accept reviews from customers who have booked rooms.) Ott says that at the sites with the highest rate of deception, around 10% of the reviews are flagged as fake by the software.

TripAdvisor, which, interestingly enough, changed the slogan in its online reviews section from “Reviews you can trust” to “Reviews from our community” last fall, responded to the Cornell team’s findings by pointing to a survey it commissioned showing that 98% of respondents said that TripAdvisor hotel reviews were accurate to their experience. TripAdvisor also told me that “attempts to manipulate TripAdvisor are extremely rare,” and that “we have a zero-tolerance approach to all fraudulent activity and we have measures to penalize businesses for attempts to game the system, including affecting their popularity rating on the site and posting public warning notices on properties that have made attempts to manipulate their rating.”

Lots of people out there thinking about this problem.  Interesting that Cornell is now looking at doctors…

James Hall, The Telegraph:

“Following a four month investigation, the Advertising Standards Authority found that it was possible for “non-genuine content” to appear on Tripadvisor, which is designed to allow holidaymakers to share tips and opinions on places they have visited.

The advertising watchdog said that because reviews can be posted on the site without any form of verification, Tripadvisor must no longer claim that all of its reviews are honest, or even from real people.

In a strongly-worded ruling, the ASA told Tripadvisor “not to claim or imply that all the reviews that appeared on the website were from real travellers, or were honest, real or trusted”.

The ASA’s ruling, which applies only to Tripadvisor’s UK site, follows a complaint last year from two unnamed hoteliers and a website called Kwikchex, which helps companies manage their online reputations.”

Interesting that no one has used the BBB NAD process to try this in the US…

Somini Sengupta, NYT:

‘IN the United States, federal legislation on online privacy has languished, as lawmakers weigh the interests of consumers and companies in the battle for personal information.

Part of the difficulty in regulating online privacy is the speed of technological innovation. Just as it becomes remarkably easy for us to share our information with others, it also becomes cheaper and easier to crunch and analyze that information — and store it forever, if necessary.

Stewart A. Baker, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, is among those who see enormous benefits for private companies and government agencies alike. To fight it on privacy grounds, he argued, would be largely futile. “You can’t really have a property interest in data,” he argued. “It’s going to get cheaper to reproduce it. It’s going to get reproduced and stored. It’s going to get copied.”

Privacy advocates worry about the consequences. Most people may not have much to hide. For a few, not sharing personal information may be vital. They’re the ones who need the protection of the law, argued Rebecca MacKinnon, a fellow at the New America Foundation and author of “Consent of the Networked,” a book about digital freedom.

“It may be victims of domestic abuse who don’t want to be stalked or tracked, or it could be dissidents in Syria, or someone who has weird opinions and could mistakenly end up on a watch list when they don’t deserve it,” said Ms. MacKinnon. “If you have a democratic society, the point is not to say whatever is good for the majority is all we need.”’

I think there needs to be a central privacy complaint process where anyone who feels their privacy has been violated can come and get justice.  I think Truste would be the perfect place to host it.

Mitch Lipka, Reuters:

‘Heather Peters’ win in a Los Angeles small claims court against Honda Motor Co has all the makings of a David vs. Goliath battle, but some experts are sceptical it will spur angry consumers nationwide to do what she did: abandon complaint lines, class-action suits and lawyers, and just go it alone through the legal system.

Peters won a $9,867 judgement against the automaker after she complained that her 2006 hybrid only got 30 miles to the gallon, not the 50 she said Honda (7267.T) led her to expect.

To file the suit, she opted out of a class action that included some 200,000 consumers and that is proposing a settlement that would amount to a fraction of her judgment amount.

"The wonderful news here is consumers can fight back. The headline is: ‘Consumers win this round,’" says John Mattes, a San Diego-based consumer attorney who runs his own practice. "She opened the door for consumers all over the country. The consumer army marching into small claims court is a very powerful force."’

This is what Modria is aiming to do.  Much more efficient than going through a multi-year class action process.

By Dina ElBoghdady, Washington Post, Published: January 28

“Fuming about a billing dispute with his dentist, Robert Allen Lee posted his complaints on two consumer review Web sites, triggering a legal battle over a technique designed to snuff out negative online commentary.

In late August, a day after Lee posted his comments on Yelp and DoctorBase, he received a letter from the dental practice threatening to sue him for at least $100,000 for “defamation, slander and libel.” The letter reminded him that he’d signed an agreement with his dentist that barred him from publishing a critique of her or her office.

While extreme, such do-not-talk contracts underscore the struggle between consumers that are eager to share their thoughts online and companies that are looking for ways to protect their reputations in an environment in which social media helps shape opinions on just about everything.”

I suspect this particular technique for blocking patient reviews is on its last legs.