My wife is currently the Dean for Academic Affairs at California Western School of Law, but she will be returning to her first love, being a law professor, in the not-too-distant future. She says they pay her to grade exams--the teaching she does for free. You can imagine her excitement when I told her about software being tested now that reads and grades essay exams successfully scoring the exams within two percentage points of what the professor would have scored the exam (see Discover Online, June 2003)
She is also impressed by this more recent news: software can do a lot of her basic research on her behalf. Text mining uses computers to read large volumes of unstructured data in order to find wisdom and useful insight. See this article in the October 16 issue of the New York Times for more details: Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom.
