“If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.”
Dave Barry

There is something lovely about opening a package and finding a new book. To my surprise, this feeling also occurs when you get an email saying that your eBook purchase from the “I want to buy this as soon as it is published” list receipt comes by email. Another remarkable new book thrill appear in my inbox today in a note about the newly revamped OED website.

Oxford is proud to unveil a dramatically new OED Online: a redesigned, reengineered site that offers

. . . [more]

The relative size of library collections was once a source of pride for institutions, a tangible means of measuring their scholarly worthiness. In the 1990’s this gradually started to change, as the growth of collections continued well beyond the ability of the libraries to house all their books, either on open or rolling stacks. Libraries started to plan off site storage for the lesser used collections, and often collaborated via consortia arrangements to afford the construction and ongoing maintenance costs of the storage facilities. In some instances ‘last copy only’ schemes were devised to avoid duplication, and the methods of . . . [more]

This week, we’ve continued to outline the biotech industry trends we’ve been following on the Cross-Border Biotech Blog and noting some recent developments and directions for 2011:

Transgenic plants and animalscontinue to generate some of the most fascinating new science and technology and continue to generate considerable controversy. Canadian expertise contributed to the AcquaVantage salmon and the Enviropig; but the regulatory and legal environment lags behind the science in this area, and things in the U.S. are getting worse instead of better.

Biosimilars are also growing in importance, with FDA guidance pending and even biotech stalwarts Amgen and . . . [more]

Slaw has always had an interest in publishing and in technology, so I’m using this track record as an excuse for telling you about Bibliotype, even though it has nothing whatever to do with law. My deeper reason is that we’re all in this together, and anything that might help improve the experience of reading materials online should interest lawyers. So much for the prolegomenon.

Bibliotype is the work of the niftily-named Craig Mod, a writer and book designer. I came across it because of Mod’s article in the online web designer’s publication, A List Apart. There he . . . [more]

Setting and achieving goals are a necessary skill today. Effective goals and internalized, nurturing, specific, planned, in your control, reviewed regularly, are energizing and are recorded in writing.

Are you interested in finding out what’s going on in our courts… in terms of technology? If so, you can help the Canadian Centre for Court Technology (CCCT) developing an online clearinghouse on topic with just a few minutes of your time.

You can provide your input by filling this brief questionnaire:

http://ccct-cctj.ca/launch-of-the-clearinghouse-questionnaire/

On behalf of the CCCT… Thank you! . . . [more]

We’re proud to announce that Slaw is launching a new, sister site: SlawTips. You can find it at — you guessed it: tips.slaw.ca. (If you guessed slawtips.ca, no worries: that URL will get you to our tips as well.)

The notion is simplicity itself — which is kind of the idea. On SlawTips you’ll find brief, clear, useful nuggets of advice at the easy-going rate of one a day. In fact, it’s even simpler than that. You’ll get a tip about technology every Tuesday, a tip about research each Wednesday, and a tip about practice on Thursdays. That’s . . . [more]

Introduction

Some call it flirting. Others call it harmless fun. When minors are involved, however, the police and district attorneys have had another word for it – child pornography. If you haven’t guessed it, we’re talking about sexting. Sexting is defined as the sending or receiving of sexually-explicit or sexually-suggestive images or video via a cell phone or the Internet. Most commonly, the term has been used to describe incidents where individuals take nude or semi-nude images of themselves and then send those pictures to others. Yet, despite the widespread and often breathlessly erotic media coverage of teenage sexting stories, . . . [more]

New details about the Stuxnet worm that spread through tens of thousands of computer systems in mid-2010 provide an in-depth look behind the most successful cyber weapon we’ve seen to date.

Widely believed to be designed by the US and Isreali governments, the main targets of the Stuxnet worm were industrial controllers made by Siemens. While used in thousands of factories for legitimate manufacturing processes, the Siemens controllers targeted by Stuxnet were also used to enrich uranium at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. To ensure Stuxnet did not cause any collateral damage, the worm’s programmers were careful to ensure only the . . . [more]

Many Ontario lawyers have visited Osgoode Hall and are used to seeing it as an island in the middle of busy streets and tall skyscapers. Here’s how it would have looked to our 19th century colleagues, courtesy of this 360 degree panoramic photo of Toronto taken from a roof around the corner of York & Adelaide.

Click on the link to see the entire panorama and scroll to the left to see Osgoode Hall. . . . [more]

We have talked a number of times on Slaw about projects funded by the Law Foundation of Ontario. Even here at Slaw our re-development over the past several months has been assisted by a grant from the LFO. What impresses me with the LFO is that they put funding into projects that are of the interest of the public. One such effort is the Connecting Legal Interpretation Network.

Based on the June 2010 Access to Sign-Language Interpretation in Community Legal Settings: Report to the Law Foundation of Ontario [pdf] (“Sign Language Report”) and the earlier Connecting Report . . . [more]

And by Nkasi Adams

[Here at the University of Saskatchewan I have the pleasure of supervising graduate students working in the areas of Canadian Aboriginal law and international Indigenous rights. Last year Nkasi Adams, the first Indigenous woman to graduate from law school in Guyana, joined us at the University of Saskatchewan to pursue an LL.M. focussing on the tensions between Indigenous peoples’ rights and international measures to deal with climate change. I’m happy to have her provide most of the ideas and information for this month’s column. It’s something we don’t know enough about here in the north. . . . [more]