Early this year, the Department of Justice released, seemingly for the first time, a report titled "Costs of Crime in Canada, 2008" by Ting Zhang [PDF version]. Given the impending omnibus bill on crime and the likely large increase in the costs to the provinces from their associated responsibility for corrections, this report might be of some interest.

It consists, essentially, of a series of "appendices" that set out cost tables for, respectively, the criminal justice system, the victims of crime, third parties, and finally intangible costs (pain and suffering, value of loss of life) associated with crime. The overall costs are conservatively estimated as follows:

In 2008, the total (tangible) social and economic costs of Criminal Code offences in Canada were approximately $31.4 billion.1 This amounted to a per capita cost of $943 per year. . .

In the present study, it is estimated that the total intangible costs were about $68.2 billion in 2008, which increased the total costs of crime to $99.6 billion.

I've been meaning for a while now to do a fillip on Issuu, the online magazine creation tool; and when I saw yesterday that CanLII had done up its strategic plan using Issuu, that gave me the push I needed.

As I said, Issuu is a digital publishing platform that lets you create a glossy online magazine, brochure, or report that can be read on pretty much any digital device. All of which is cool if you're into self publishing. I'm pointing it out to you, though, as a source of a lot of fancy and free content — it is Friday, after all, and consumption, not creation, is the proper "c" word at week's end, is it not?

So what's available once you've read the CanLII report? Start on the main Publications page. From here you can drill down by facets such as popularity or "recency." Or you can browse through one of the 15 named categories (none of which is "law" by the way). You'll see that there's a lot of corporate and marketing dross, but here and there a nugget shines.

For example, I found Spenser, a new bimonthly food and drink magazine that looks as though I could waste half an hour or so flipping through. (Don't forget to use full screen mode; much more enjoyable.) Or for something more tried and true in the food realm, there's Jamie Oliver's magazine. Here are some other finds that might appeal (though hunting on your own could be half the fun):

• Little White Lies – "a bi-monthly, independent movie magazine that features cutting edge writing, illustration and photography"
• "Design by Nature: Using Universal Forms and Principles in Design" (sample chapter)
• Cyprus, 10000 years of history and civilization
• On Snow Magazine
• Electronic Beats – "Electronic Beats Magazine delivers features and interviews with artists from the music and other creative industries…" (Deutsche Telekom)

And if you can't be bothered to hunt and peck for yourself, simply let Issuu parade its "featured" magazines down there at the bottom of the home page.

The state of Indiana may soon become the 23rd state in the US to adopt right-to-work legislation. With the Senate Committee having already passed the Bill, it will go to the full Senate. If there are no amendments, the governor of Indiana could be signing the Bill as early as tomorrow (see a news article here).

Back-to-work legislation prohibits contracts between employers and unions which require all employees to pay union dues as a condition of employment. As such, this type of legislation gives the non-member employee the option of paying union dues (or not). Supporters of this type of legislation believe that it makes the market more competitive and brings greater investment into the state. Those against right-to-work legislation see it as the government's attempt to "bust" unions and will lead to lower wages.

In Canada, we have the Rand formula which forces all employees, whether members of the union in place or not, to pay union dues, as it is considered that all employees benefit from the negotiated terms and conditions of employment. The Supreme Court of Canada has already decided that the forced payment of dues does not constitute a violation of the freedom of expression and that if there were a violation of the freedom of association, it was saved by section 1 of the Canadian Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. In a day and age where the role of the trade union is questioned, would or should right-to-work legislation have a place in Canadian labour law?

How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

from the Jan 21, 2012 online New York Times

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

….

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

I guess that's because so many chose the easier path and became lawyers, right (g, d & r)

It's not just Apple, of course.

Another few more tidbits on the next screen

‘I Want a Glass Screen’

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.

For over two years, the company had been working on a project — code-named Purple 2 — that presented the same questions at every turn: how do you completely reimagine the cellphone? And how do you design it at the highest quality — with an unscratchable screen, for instance — while also ensuring that millions can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively enough to earn a significant profit?

The answers, almost every time, were found outside the United States.

And this – for those of you who need something when an American acquaintance says something about Canada subsidizing Canadian companies competing with US companies in the US

For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.

Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

The Chinese plant got the job.

Ouch. I expect the answers are (and will be) much the same here, for RIM.

3D keeps coming (and going). It's here now in the movies and threatens to poke itself (John-Candy-like) out of our TVs. It was there for a while about sixty years ago also at the movies and in the glories of Viewmaster. And just before the turn of the century before this one, stereographs or stereograms were popular, those almost double photographs that were viewed through a device that look rather like a small library card catalogue drawer.

Well stereographs have been brought back, this time by the New York Public Library, and thanks to the "miracles of modern science" you're able to see them with their pairs of pics nearly conjoined in pretty much 3D splendour. Stereogranimator lets you create animated GIFs (pronounced "jifs") or anaglyphs from the library's stock of old stereograph images.

The trick is to align the two photographs such that the animation flicks back and forth between them so rapidly that you lose a sense of motion and instead see three dimensions. You can find the latest efforts from the rest of the world on the site, observing that most people do a lousy job of it: the results flicker like jumping jack flash in a truly annoying way. An anaglyph would be easier on the eye, but then you'd have to have a pair of 3D glasses at the ready—which you might. (Instructions here on how to make your own 3D glasses, if you'd like to turn this into a winter weekend project with the kids.)

I've tried my hand at making depth, using the waterfall picture that you see below (click on the image to enlarge). And I've tucked the animated GIF result away below the fold so that Slaw's front page doesn't strobe like a broken neon sign.

Click on image to enlarge.

Now, prepare to be amazed . . . in a mild and gentle way:

GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

Last year I told you about the plan to release a voluntary national standard for mentally healthy workplaces. The standard aims to help Canadian employers support the psychological health and safety of their employees by providing them with the necessary guidelines and tools to achieve measurable improvements in psychological health and safety in the workplace. A draft of the standard was released on November 1, 2011 without much coverage and a consultation period followed which ended January 6, 2012. The final Standard is expected to be published in late summer 2012.

Unfortunately, since the consultation period is over, the draft of the standard is no longer available online. You can still obtain a copy by calling the CSA Standards or any of their partners championing the development of the Standard.

Luckily, Cheryl A. Edwards and Shane Todd from Heenan Blaikie LLP have prepared a very in-depth analysis of the proposed Standard and you can view it here.

According to the Mental Health Commission of Canada, mental illnesses and mental health issues are the leading cause of short- and long- term disability in the country. The cost of dealing with these issues is in the range of $51 billion per year, with almost $20 billion of that amount coming from workplace losses.

Thus, it will be interesting to see how the government, advocacy groups, associations like the CSA, mental health agencies and private sector will assist employers with solutions, resources and tools to deal with this important issue.

Adding to David Canton's post this week, updating us on privacy and data protection developments, here is a release from our friend, Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner, Dr. Ann Cavoukian. And an interview with Steve Paikin at TVO.

It's NOT "just a number!" Commissioner Cavoukian warns of the ease of data linkages in an increasingly online world

TORONTO, Jan. 25, 2012 /CNW/ – Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner, Dr. Ann Cavoukian, says that people's perceptions of their privacy and anonymity online fall far short of reality. In fact, technology has evolved to the point that the seemingly unrelated pieces of information that people share about themselves online, may now be linked together, to create a detailed profile of an individual.

"We have reached a point where information – not only strongly-identifiable Social Insurance Numbers, but also IP addresses, licence plate numbers, and mobile devices – serve as pointers to personally-identifiable information, through an ever-expanding web of data linkages. This bears little resemblance to anonymous information," the Commissioner said.

New analytic tools and algorithms now make it possible – not only to link numbers to names – but to also combine information from multiple sources, ultimately creating an accurate profile of a personally-identifiable individual – and in the process, to reveal their online activities.

"Imagine a scenario where your 'anonymous' comments on a newspaper website or in an online chat forum, could be tracked back to you personally, simply by linking your IP address and browser data across multiple platforms," the Commissioner said.

The Commissioner's advice to consumers: As people share more and more personal information about themselves in new ways (such as personal blogs and social networking sites), they need to consider the nature of the information they share, and how their personal information might be used.

At the same time, she urges organizations that collect and use this data to offer consumers a clear, easy-to-use mechanism to opt out of the collection and use of their personal information. Better still – make privacy the default setting.

The latest Statistics Canada job figures have made headlines again in Québec, with the numbers showing that about 3 people are unemployed for every available job (reported the Montreal Gazette today). Some say the numbers are a "blip" others say that they are very "serious debacle". The next quarter's stats will tell us more. While there is much dispute as to the source of these problems, it is clear they are resulting in a very tense labour situation.

Indeed, the new year has brought much high-profile labour strife in Canada, particularly in Québec in Ontario. Those labour disputes have even made international headlines. The Wall Street Journal reported on the situation on January 2:

Labor strife has been on the rise in Canada as unions push back against corporate cost-cutting drives and governments strive to reduce wage and pension costs. "Unions are under the gun; they really are on the defensive and companies, instinctively, are feeling aggressive," said Laurel Sefton MacDowell, a University of Toronto labor-relations expert and historian.

Unions wield immense power in certain industries in Canada and even more in Québec given its "particular" labour laws. Québec is alone among the largest four provinces to have a Labour Code which provides both for "card-check" access to unionization (making it easier to unionize – reflected in Québec's higher unionization rate) and strict anti-scab provisions (making it harded for employers to hold-out during a strike).

In tough economic times, are "defensive" unions helping or hurting the economy? Should companies be entitled to seek concessions at the table? Do Québec's laws make sense when compared with the other provinces?

The Caging of America

Why do we lock up so many people?

An excerpt, with some once (perhaps once again) Canadian content

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

. . .

. . . Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

Is this what you want for Canada?

"phantosmia" means smelling bacon when there's no one cooking breakfast.

That's my definition. But don't trust me. Take a look at wordnik, where, as the about page explains, you'll find a better definition of this or any word, examples of its use, lists of (somewhat) related words, brief discussions of the phenom, and more. Indeed, I only came across "phantosmia" because I hit the random word button.

Now that site alone could lead to hours of harmless amusement, but this is your lucky day. I'm piling on. Here are three more word-ish sites that belong on your reference list, if only for the times you defend your world champion status at Scrabble. ("phantosmia" is not a valid Scrabble word, apparently. Huh.) Herewith, then, the promised trio:

• The Virtual Academic is "a random sentence generator" from the University of Chicago Writing Program. Why play with just one word when a clot of them is readily available? For example:
  

  The fundamental principle of humanist organicism is often found in juxtaposition with, if not in direct opposition to, the legitimation of the enigmatic.

  To which proposition by Pootwattle, Smedley, the Virtual Critic, responds:

  Pootwattle's ironic reference to the relationship between the fundamental principle of humanist organicism and the legitimation of the enigmatic revives the often neglected field of poststructuralist semantics.

  Can't you just see tweets like this?

• Word Spy offers a neologism a day, pretty much. You know, those cant phrases you hate but wind up using a year after you've first heard them. Ones that seem immediately useful to me are "ineptocracy", "fat-finger problem", and "hopium" (for which what-are-you-smoking coinage there are actually tweets).
• More Words is the last word today. It's a search tool that lets you use wild cards for that elusive word and then lists all results by length, for that stubborn crossword. So, for instance, you could search for a three-letter word ending in "r" [--r], words containing the sequence "sswo" anywhere within them [*sswo*], or words starting with "ab" that don't contain an "e" or an "o" [ab* ^eo]—just the sort of quasi-Boolean stuff to get your heart racing.

  As the help page says, More Words draws from the Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon's supply of 173,528 words, which, as it happens, you can download as a simple list in very long text file.

  Sadly, perhaps, "phantosmia" is not in the list.

Apple may have done it yet again.

The iBooks system launched today puts a powerful but easy-to-use authoring system into the hands of anyone who wants it, presaging the publication of dynamic ebooks by the millions—texts that will, of course, range in quality from the wretched to the superb—and, I should add, from the free to the expensive. Apple, being Apple, has tied this software in pretty tightly to its own iPad: books made by iBooks Author are made to be viewed on an iPad and may only be sold on Apple's iTunes Store. (There is also an ability to export a book from Author into PDF or TXT format, though how much functionality survives the transition to PDF I haven't yet discovered.)

Apple's video ad for this system—"Apple in Education," because the system is aimed ostensibly at writers of textbooks — gives you a decent sense of what's possible, once you get past the somewhat saccharine and trite testimonials about teaching.

At first glance, which is all I've given it, iBook Author seems to offer a great deal of promise. It looks about as easy to use as Keynote or PowerPoint, though I imagine some of the more dynamic elements will take a bit of getting used to; and the business of designing for touch instead of mouse clicks will require practice.

I see a big future here for the use of iBook Author in law firms as a creator of teaching / reference tools, and, indeed, to make promotional and explanatory material for clients. Of course, everyone will need to have an iPad. Which is the plan.

This is a small part of a stretch of ocean that's being talked about a lot lately in connection with the Northern Gateway pipeline and the possibility of using Prince Rupert as an alternative western terminus. But this isn't a fillip about pipelines, oil, or even oceans. It's about those little coloured shapes that look like old-fashioned pen nibs — and even more about a website that tracks them. Some thousands of them all around the globe.

MarineTraffic.com gets data about ships' positions and movement from AIS (automatic identification system) transponders on board vessels via VHF signals, the kind we use for some radio and TV transmission, and a network of volunteer relayers. A computer then coordinates the data and plots the positions of the ships on a Google map. The image below shows the regions around the world that are actively "covered" by this process, and the numbers in the green regions tell you how many vessels are in that region. Zooming in gives you the sort of graphic detail you see in this image of the traffic in a part of the East China Sea.

Click on image to enlarge.

All this is simply voyeuristic, of course, for a person who isn't near an ocean, which is to say most of us. Yet there's something fascinating about being able to see a tiny model of one of these great behemoths and know that its location on the sea is less than an hour old. You can find vessels by name (track your family on that cruise); distinguish passenger ships from tankers and yachts, etc.; or focus on the port of your choice (such as Halifax or Vancouver) for details as to what's in, arriving, or departing. And if ships are your thing, there's a gallery where you can find thousands of photographs of them and the harbours they ply between.

Oh, and for the two of you out there who are at full anorak, train-spotting level, there's even an iPhone app version of the site.

As Connie mentioned, the annual Consumer Electronics Show is now underway in Las Vegas. The tech press is full of commentary on the latest and greatest things at the show. One trend is that everything is becoming more intelligent and more connected, ranging from TV's to appliances.

That results in many great features and new capabilities. At the same time, a Washington Post article entitled Privacy rights activists worry about potential abuse of high-tech devices featured at CES event points out that we can't forget about the privacy issues that comes along with this technology.

The article starts off by saying:

The thousands of devices debuting Tuesday at the Consumer Electronics Show here demonstrate how tech companies are poised to gather unprecedented insights into consumers’ lives — how much they eat, whether they exercise, when they are home and who they count as friends.

Silicon Valley is in a gold rush for information, highlighted by Google’s announcement Tuesday that it would incorporate data posted by users on its social networking service into the results of its main search engine.

Many of the companies providing this technology are certainly cognizant of the privacy issues, and will do the right things regarding use, disclosure and consent. But we can't forget that we don't all have the same sensibilities or thresholds for privacy issues. Some of us may indeed care about who our washing machine tells that our laundry is done, or who knows what the temperature is in our house.

This is an issue that we can't just brush aside.

and not help one's expert witness consulting practice

One bit of advice young lawyers are given - much easier to follow in the brave new world of reasons for judgment online and so easily searched – is to look for cases in which judges have commented on the expert's objectivity. The words in square brackets are my interpolations for clarity.

From a trial decision not too long ago, about a witness who testified for the side that ultimately won at trial but lost on appeal.

•  Dr. S. called by the Plaintiffs, was qualified as an expert to give opinion evidence in the following areas:
• Dr. S. has the following formal educational background …. [DC: a bunch of degrees including 2 bachelor of science degrees, an LLB, LLM and SJD. I pointed out the last two degrees to a colleague who has them, too, from the same source. ]
• Dr. S struggled to find anything …. [that certain defendants] did that would be complimentary to them….
•  I thought it peculiar that, despite curbing his areas of expertise during the qualification process, he insisted on returning to the forbidden areas ..
• He further said, “It’s the personal responsibility of everybody, everybody is engaged in doing health and safety and they know how to think about risks and figure out what the reasonable thing to do is in the circumstances.”
•  Dr. S had duties so extensive for each person in the chain, from the CEO down to the workers, that there was little likelihood of any time remaining for production … .
• Dr. S was obsessed with the … X Report … which the Court did not have the benefit of and which on the face of the evidence was a generic model with little or no practical application … [DC to the defendant about whose conduct the expert was testifying] as Dr. S held little knowledge of the mining industry [DC: the industry of the defendant]
• [DC: The experts suggestion as to what might have been done to alleviate some of the problems that led to the incident that resulted in the injuries] … is not even a ripple in a windstorm but rather a theory divorced from reality …
• As I listened to Dr. ’s evidence and latterly studied his report, I was driven to focusing on his lack of objectivity and practicality …
• In the result, Dr. S's evidence was a collection of anachronisms and clichés; an academic approach with little or no application to [the defendant] at the relevant time, directed solely to criticism of [the defendant's] operation, all of which demonstrated little value and assistance to the Court because of its utopian viewpoint.

Ouch.

Other than that, the trial judge had no issues with the expert's evidence.

Bear in mind that this is only one judge's view about the witnesses evidence in this case. But, if the trial judge was right, and if we're to assume the problems with the witnesses evidence were that blatent that they ought to have been known before the trial, then why did the very competent plaintiffs' lawyers call that wtiness?

He might have been all they had on the issue. Sometimes you have to go with the person you take to the dance.

The case is easily found by those of you who know how to look. There is no purpose served by posting the citation.

Now that Christmas and New Year's are safely tucked away, we can move on to things less ritual, less structured. But before we do, I'm going to take one last kick at the cans—because that's the nature of the ghosts of Christmas past and auld lang syne, is it not? to linger nostalgically for a bit.

Click on image to enlarge

I seem to recall that as an adolescent I used to get a lot of shirts from Santa. Imagine my delight. And then one year my parents (yes, I knew by then: I was always sharp as a tack) gave me an LP with the cover you see to your left. I remember to this day my extreme puzzlement at this. What made them think that these old and, frankly, not very attractive penguins could make music that would interest me in the least? By the end of Christmas Day I had, Alice-like, fallen down the rabbit hole into the wonder of folk music, as she was then known. And labour songs. And protest music. And, indeed, protest.

If, by any chance, you've never heard (or heard of) the Weavers, here's a not very good clip of one of their more popular songs: This Land is Your Land.

Which leads me to New Year's. Because the writer of that song was Woody Guthrie, the very model of the American folk-singing, pro-labour protester; and I've just come across his "New Years Rulin's" (sic) from 1942, which recommend themselves to me more than most of the resolutions that get batted about. For one thing, as you'll see below (click on it to expand), there are some 33 of them, which gives you lots of room for successes. And for another, they're an affecting mix of light-hearted and serious, ranging from "Drink very scant if any" to "Wake up and fight."

Click on image to enlarge.

You'll find this and the lyrics to all of Woody's dozens and dozens of songs on the official site.

#26. Dance Better.

The new year starts with a lot of news about wages.

As reported in various newspapers, including the Globe and Mail and La Presse, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has published a report entitled "Canada's CEO elite: the 0.01%" (available here) regarding the annual compensation of Canada's highest paid 100 executives in 2010. The titles of the newspaper articles alone reveal that these salaries are not insignificant.

Of interest is also the fact that Gildan Activewear Inc.'s Board of Directors will offer shareholders an advisory vote during the 2012 annual shareholders' meeting on the corporation's approach to executive compensation, as disclosed in its 2011 Management Proxy Circular.

For other Canadian workers, the news seems a bit more grim, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Payroll taxes – most notable employment insurance and Canadian Pension Plan rates - increased on January 1, 2012. Various provinces will see other taxes increase.

right? right?

Members of the legal fraternity could start with the second right.

On the other hand, as reported on the Globe and Mail's web site

The Harper government is preparing to carve out a new role for Canada as a champion of religious rights abroad …

Early in 2012, the Tories will finally flesh out a campaign promise to install the Office of Religious Freedom within the secular confines of the Department of Foreign Affairs …

The article adds

The new Conservative office – which will publicly criticize regimes that mistreat religious minorities – is in part a workaround to avoid the pushback the Tories previously encountered from the Foreign Affairs bureaucracy. Conservatives privately complain that civil servants in some instances resisted their efforts to raise concern about religious persecution.

The article writer sought Michael Ignatief's views.

Former Liberal leader Michael Ignatief, for one, offers qualified support for the new office.

The article doesn't mentioned who else the reported asked, so we don't know who the for 2, 3, 4 etc., might be, if they exist. As for Mr. Ignatief's view, the article adds

But he says it can’t be a tool for pressure groups the Conservatives hope to appease in Canada.

“It’s a good thing provided it defends all cases of religious persecution, not just those that are bothering domestic constituencies at home, and that it doesn’t ignore other human-rights violations, which usually accompany religious persecution, like limits on freedom of the press, denial of democratic rights and persecution.”

Who'd ever think of accusing the current regime of pandering?

Or limiting freedom of the press, denying democratic rights etc. … well, the Parliamentary Gallery might; and some scholars of constitutional law; and some people who have this unusual belief that the current majority has as much of an obligation to obey laws passed by the past Parliament (until the laws are repealed or declared unconstitutional (oops)) as a former Tory Cabinet minister accused of things we can't speak of (because we don't know and were never told).

Pandering is some sort of unusual activity involving lobbyists and lobbying, best not carried out in lobbies, right?

I'm feeling lazy this Friday — something to do with too much holiday merriment, I'm certain. So today's fillip is pretty much a do-it-yourself flip to the week's end. All I'll do is point you to a site that gathers sites, some of which in turn gather sites. . . .

My target website is Open Culture, and, as you might suspect from the name, it's a place where you can find free access to a lot of interesting stuff. As Dan Colman, site founder (and incidentally Director & Associate Dean of Stanford's Continuing Studies Program), says:

Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. . . . Our whole mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it.

But don't let the "high quality" thing put you off. And as for the "learning," there's no exam. There are, however, links to: hundreds of audio books, 450 free movies, hundreds of ebooks, language lessons, college courses, and more.

That's enough to keep you occupied for a while, I trust. Oh, and happy new year!

My parenting partner and our progeny were creative with their gifts this holiday season. I thought I would share some photos of their labour. Since many Slaw readers are library folk, you might enjoy seeing "The Coffee Book Table".

The Coffee Book Table is a storage cabinet with a drawer. The Mireaus have been brainstorming on titles to add to the books. So far we have come up with:

• A Table of Two Cities
• Aesop's Tables
• A Tall Table
• Tables from the Crypt

Any other title ideas?

Much of the time when I enter WolfamAlpha I feel the way archeologists must have felt confronting Egyptian hieroglyphics before the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone or—to cast things the other way and into the future—the way the scientists in 2001, A Space Odyssey felt in the presence of the monolith. I know it's magnificent but I don't know how to work it—not properly, at least.

The latest instance of my admiring frustration has been caused by WolframTones, which, as the tagline has it, is "an experiment in a new kind of music." It's a sonic working out of the principle that wonderfully complex objects can be created from the interplay of a few remarkably simple mathematical rules. (Shades of chaos theory, Mandelbrot fractals, and, I suppose too, natural selection.)

The music appears visually as rectangles containing a pattern of coloured squares, looking rather like an embroidery or knitting pattern. Clicking on it causes music to result. But this isn't just a matter of passive appreciation: you can create and manipulate the rules that govern the patterns. To help innumerates like me, WolframTones offers you 15 basic styles – classical, hip-hop, world, etc., along with controls that let you choose timing, scales from hundreds of possible mappings, and the "instruments" from among dozens and dozens of midi possibilities. The possible combinations and permutations are astronomical. You can then download a link to your particular composition—which can be played online at the WolframTones website or emailed as a midi attachment. Here, for example, is my utterly unremarkable, maundering bit of "ambient" music and, following the sound file, the visual pattern that "generated" it.

fodden-wolfram

If you're interested in the hows and wherefores of this, there's a fair bit of explanation available, a portion of which follows:

How does one take a pattern generated by a cellular automaton, and render it as music? The key idea of WolframTones is to take a swath through the pattern:

and tip it on its side, and treat it as a musical score:

And for the truly curious, at the bottom of the "Generate a composition" screen there's a modest link offering "information about controls," which will go into some detail about the mathematical rules and structures.

If you do whip up a cantata over the holidays, send us the link by way of a comment.

Language debates fascinate me. My local hockey team gets me going, whether winning or losing. Now both interests are combined.

You may not have heard, but the appointment of new Habs coach Randy Cunneyworth is creating quite the stir in Quebec. So much so that it has become a question of politics. In his editorial, Henry Aubin, journalist for the Montreal Gazette, writes strong words to this effect:

The club’s federalist ownership is inadvertently blowing fresh oxygen on the cooling embers of sovereignist fervour. Defence of the language is what powered sovereignty in the 1970s, and Molson’s Canadiens could be on their way to replacing Eaton’s – whose salespeople spoke only English, legend has it – as the iconic symbol of anglo insensitivity.

Apart from all the cultural, political and social issues raised by Mr. Cunneyworth's hiring, what about the legal aspects of all this? If someone has the talent/necessary skills/qualifications to lead a team to the Stanley Cup (one of the most important tasks in a head coach job description), does/should language mean as much? Or can it be said to be a job requirement? Is there an element of discrimination in all of this? My colleague, Gabriel Granatstein, wrote an interesting piece on the issue of the French language and hockey players in a different blog posting last year. 

I certainly look forward to seeing the outcome of this debate.

I just attended the 30th annual Christmas Bureau Breakfast. This local charity has been providing festive meals to Edmonton families in need since 1940. The breakfast, hosted by Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP, and sponsored by The Westin Edmonton, Sobeys and IGA was a wonderful event this year.

Field Law has been supporting the Christmas Bureau since the war years and we have participated in the Breakfast since its beginning. I am proud that our firm supports this worthy organization with an annual Craft auction as well as cash donations from lawyers and staff.

Many lawyers and law firms and the individuals that make up legal organizations have a tradition of giving back to their communities. What is your tradition?

If you don't yet have a tradition, or you are inspired to think about a charitable giving program for your self, your firm, or your family, have a look at the Canadian Charitable Gift Matrix. This resource encourages strategic thought to the giving process and is provided by Community Foundations of Canada. If you are looking for a list of charities in Canada, the Canada Revenue Agency keeps a list.

What does the Byzantine musical symbol kai apothes look like? Unicode knows. Because we human beings do love to "scribble, scribble, scribble" that computer industry standard boasts "more than 109,000 characters covering 93 scripts," according to the Wikipedia entry. Fear not, however: I'm not about to regale you with tens of thousands of squiggles. No, I'm going to let you do it yourself.

Actually, I'm pointing you to Shapecatcher, a modest little website that invites you to draw any shape you like and promises to find you the unicode character nearest in outline. So, for example, I gave Shapecatcher the drawing you see below:

(Yes, I know. Other people have told me the same.)

This most closely matched the kai apothes I referred to above — — which is a kind of neat lightning bolt thingy. (I have to use a graphic to show it to you because your average computers/browsers/websites will only make a limited selection of the unicode trove available to you, and it doesn't include Byzantine material for some reason.)

Does this have any utility? I should hope not. It does, I hope, give you a chance to waste a little time and to be gently surprised by the wealth of characters that are out there, even in Shapecatcher's very limited collection of 10,000 or so elements. I'm particularly taken with the various Tai Xuan Jing tetragrams I discovered this way. There's one for "contrariety", one for "ease", another for "bold resolution", etc. Draw a rectangle with maybe another line or two inside and see what happens.

Scribble, scribble, scribble.

Ann Cavoukian – the Ontario Privacy Commissioner – has written an excellent op-ed in the Financial Post entitled Beware of 'Surveillance by Design'. 

It starts off with:

I feel the need to raise a growing concern regarding the lack of understanding of a key privacy issue – the ease of data linkages in an ever-increasing online world.

In this day and age of 24/7 online expanded connectivity and immediate access to digitized information, new analytic tools and algorithms now make it possible, not only to link a number with a name, but also to combine information from multiple sources, ultimately creating an accurate profile of a personally identifiable individual.

The Commissioner weighs in on the controversial Alberta Leon's case that decided license plates are not personal information – which differs from other provinces.

She also expresses her concerns about the pending federal "lawful access" laws, saying that:

In my view, this represents a looming system of “surveillance by design,” that should concern us all in a free and democratic society.

Remember the "new math"? Everything you knew and the way you knew it were wrong. You had to be able to calculate in base 3 or base 7. You either couldn't do your homework or couldn't help your kids with theirs.

Well, this isn't that.

New Math is a website where Craig Damrauer makes language sub for numbers and comes up with some wry products. For instance:

Or, to pick something likely even closer to our hearts:

More of a hmmm than a haha. But there are funny equations, true equations, and truly odd equations, and because

you should go and see for yourself. And if you get inspired, share your equations in a comment.

The Globe & Mail recently reported on the decision of a senior manager at a Service Canada to ban all forms of visual holiday cheer from all outlets across Québec. While Québec has become an increasingly secular society, this manager's decision prompted a public (and Twitter!) outcry and was quickly reversed.

In short order, the Government was accused of ruining Christmas:

“Why do the Conservatives want to steal the magic of Christmas from employees of Service Canada?” said NDP MP Alexandre Boulerice.

In an effort save Christmas for all Québeckers (and Canadians) and return the "magic", Minister Diane Finley issued a communiqué clarifying that Service Canada employees should feel free to decorate for the holidays.

Who was right? Who was wrong? Should religious decorations have a place in a government office?

The Attorney General for England and Wales, Dominic Grieve gave a very interesting speech on December 1 entitled 'Contempt – A Balancing Act: balancing the freedom of the press with the fair administration of justice' to journalism students where he commented on his approach to contempt of court.

'Citizen journalists' should not think they are immune to the law of contempt, that there is a certain belief that so long as something is published in cyberspace there is no need to respect the laws of contempt or libel. While he accepts the danger posed to the administration of Justice by many bloggers is minimal, he say that we should not underestimate the potential for a blog or tweet to go viral.

We have seen in recent years not only the rise of social media but also the blog and the citizen journalist. Unlike major news organisations, which on the whole act in a responsible and measured manner, the inhabitants of the internet often feel themselves to be unconstrained by the laws of the land. There is a certain belief that so long as something is published in cyberspace there is no need to respect the laws of contempt or libel. This is mistaken.

Whilst I accept the danger posed to the administration of Justice by many bloggers is minimal, we should not underestimate the potential for a blog or tweet to go viral. As incautious city bankers and brides to be have discovered to their cost, comments on the web can soon be published far beyond their original, limited audience. And I use the word published advisedly, as publication is of course the phrase used within the Contempt of Court Act – an online article which breaches the strict liability rule runs the risk of running afoul of the law of contempt.

……………………..

The last case which I would like to mention involves something with which I suspect many of you are very familiar – Facebook.

A defendant in a trial had been acquitted of the charges she faced but the jury continued to consider their verdicts regarding her co-defendants. The night of her acquittal, one of the jury decided to go online and chat on Facebook.

Unfortunately she chose to track down the acquitted defendant on Facebook and proceeded to let her know her thoughts on the trial and the ongoing debate in the jury room. Knowledge of jury discussions is forbidden to all outside the jury. It is an offence under the Contempt of Court Act 1981 to 'obtain, disclose or solicit any particulars of statements made, opinions expressed, arguments advanced or votes cast by members of a jury in the course of their deliberations in any legal proceedings'

In this case the juror and the former defendant engaged in a Facebook chat about what was happening in the jury room. Their conduct came to the attention of the Judge and eventually to me. Again, in my Public Guardian role, proceedings for this type of contempt of court cannot be instituted save by or with my consent or on the motion of a court having jurisdiction to deal with it. I concluded a contempt had been committed.

The juror admitted her contempt and was committed to prison for 8 months. The former defendant denied wrongdoing but, after a brief trial, was found also to be in contempt – she too was committed for 2 months, although in her case the order was suspended for 2 years as she had been on remand for some months before the trial of the original matter.

The case highlighted important principles and again that the internet does not provide some form of immunity from prosecution. Jurors must feel able to openly express their views and opinions to their fellow jurors without fear that they will be subjected to public exposure and possible ridicule or disgust. This prevents juries from being inhibited as they discuss the merits of the evidence which they have heard. It is essential that the sanctity of the jury room is preserved.

The revolution in methods of communication cannot change what the Lord Chief Justice has termed 'essential principles' and that is why contempt proceedings will be brought by me when required.

Here is the Evening Standard's take, the Guardian, and the Daily Telegraph.

This isn't just about speech making. Last week, he applied to the High Court for permission to bring contempt proceedings against Theodora Dallas, a juror in a trial at Luton Crown Court. Ms Dallas was told by the trial judge not to conduct research on the internet. The case she was trying, which involved three defendants charged with causing grievous bodily harm, was discharged and a retrial ordered. Apparently, she deliberately looked up information about one of the defendants, a court was told last week.

As the Telegraph reports, Louis Mably, counsel for the Attorney-General, said: “Next day, when the jury retired, she informed other members of the jury. Her conduct was reported to the court and the judge discharged Ms Dallas and the remaining jurors.”

The Telegraph also reports on an interview which is behind the Times' firewall:

In an interview with The Times Mr Grieve admitted the internet did present challenges but it was only a “lawless territory” to the extent that it made enforcing contempt laws more difficult if “people post things on the net abroad”.

He also dismissed “tittle-tattle on Twitter” as necessarily posing a problem to enforcing the contempt laws.

“Ultimately, no one thought that the contempt of court rules, even before 1981, would prevent dinner party tittle-tattle and nor should we necessarily get too exercised about that,” he said.

He added, however, that if comments went “viral” and were “reached by thousands or millions of people accessing a particular site or blog then of course we are going to be exercised about it”.

Mr Grieve said: “Judges have been given directions to jurors for a long time not to discuss cases with those who are outside the jury room. We know that long before the internet some failed in their duty occasionally and were punished for it.”

I am unaware of any of the Canadian Law Officers of the Crown having spent this much time thinking about these issues.

I suspect a few of you will be wondering the malls over the next few weeks looking for a gift for the special lawyer in your life. To save you from buying yet another bad tie (it’s the thought that counts!), here are four great online gift guides that should help you find a gift that will be welcomed and used by your favourite someone.

My good friend Reid Trautz just released his 7th Annual Holiday Gift Guide for Lawyers. Reid works on this all year and he always has some interesting suggestions. This morning, AttorneyAtWork released a slightly tweaked version of Reid’s guide featuring suggestions from some other Practice Management Advisors (including me).

On the Lifehacker site, you can find a great collection of gifts in the Show Your Coworkers You Care with These Awesome Under-$20 Gifts post. Look on the right-hand nav bar for other recent Lifehacker posts listing collections of gifts.

The Lifehacker post featured a great gadget I really want – and haven’t seen anywhere else – the TiltPod. The Tiltpod is a fantastic way to set-up a point-and-shoot camera or miniature camcorder to record a shot on any surface. The Tiltpod is a small disk (looks to be slightly larger than a toonie) that can easily be carried in a spare pocket in your backpack, camera bag or even on a keychain. When you're ready to use it, just screw the rounded magnetic screw into the base of the camera. The rounded head of the screw sits in a little round hole on the disk. This lets you tilt and aim the camera just where you want. Sweet! No more looking for little stones or twigs to balance or angle your camera. A really useful gift for just $15.

The New York Times has a huge Holiday Gift Guide that features gifts in numerous different categories. You will find something to your liking here.

And lastly, if you need help sorting out what electronics you should hit your local newstand to pick up a copy of the December 2011 issue of Consumer Reports magazine (Some online info is public and some is for subscribers only). All sorts of features and rating information on tablet computers, e-book readers, smartphones, TVs, laptops and desktops, cameras and camcorders, printers, Blu-ray players, headphones and home-theater systems. They give you repair histories and even tell you where to shop as they rate various walk-in retailers and online stores.

Happy shopping everyone!

I was at my monthly book club meeting the other night. As is our wont, after a solid discussion about the book (Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy) we moved along to other topics of import. The question about women in law firms came up, not surprisingly since I am a law librarian and another member of the group is a lawyer. The rest of the group were surprised to learn that, despite law school students being at least half female, the percentage of female partners in firms still falls significantly short of the 50% mark.

We speculated on various reasons for this discrepancy. I was therefore interested to learn that The Globe and Mail also recently explored this question on November 8, 2011 in the article: Why is Supermom leaving the firm?. The article explains the problem:

According to Law Society of Upper Canada statistics, women are much more likely to leave their law firms than men. Most leave after spending about five to seven years as a lawyer, before they make partner. The disparity is stark: Despite now making up 39 per cent of the profession in Ontario, and 31 per cent of lawyers in private practice, women account for only 21 per cent of law firm partners. These statistics are mirrored across North America.

I also had a note from the Women's Law Association of Ontario about tomorrow night's dinner, that they will be tackling this very topic. If you are in Toronto I hope you will consider joining them:

Please come out in support of women lawyers and join us at our Annual Festive Dinner:

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Le Royal Meridien, King Edward Hotel, Toronto

5:45pm reception and 6:30pm dinner

Our keynote speaker will be Deborah Gillis, Senior Vice President, Membership and Global Operations at Catalyst. Deborah will be speaking on "Advancing Talented Women: Securing Sponsors and Other Strategies to Get Ahead."

Please consider buying a table – we have many young women law students who would be most grateful to be sponsored at your table.

For more information and registration details please visit our website www.wlao.on.ca. The program is open to all.

John Ruskin, the "leading English art critic of the Victorian era," didn't simply opine and judge; he drew and painted as well. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has put online his collection of drawings meant to help students of art learn to draw according to his principles. The drawings, often coloured with water colours, are made available in a way that lets you zoom in to investigate and appreciate the details of his technique.

But I thought that rather than this somewhat passive involvement with Ruskin, you might prefer some classes on how to draw, using Ruskin's drawings. The Ashmolean has made available eight video lessons by Stephen Farthing, a former Ruskin Master of Drawing at Oxford: 1. Tip of the pencil; 2. The edge of the pencil; 3. Toned paper; 4. Drawing with a brush; 5. Measured drawing; 6. With colour; 7. Field notes; and 8. Creativity.

The lessons are brief: they won't turn you from dauber to da Vinci all by themselves. But they might help you see things that wouldn't otherwise be noticed. And, I find, it's always intriguing to watch experts and specialists do their thing, even in areas I'm ignorant about.

The Honourable Rob Nicholson responded to critics of the current crime bill who said that crime is declining and the vast majority of Canadians feel safe, “We don’t govern on the basis of statistics."

The Statistics Canada publication Juristat has published an article about Canadians' perceptions of personal safety and crime, 2009.

Among the highlights:

• In 2009, the vast majority (93%) of Canadians aged 15 years and older living in the provinces said they felt satisfied with their personal safety from crime. This proportion was similar to 2004, the last time this survey was conducted
• Despite higher rates of victimization, younger Canadians were more satisfied with their personal safety from crime than older Canadians. In 2009, 94% of Canadians aged 15 to 24 years said they felt very or somewhat satisfied, compared with 90% of Canadians aged 65 years and older
• Most Canadians said they felt safe at night. About 83% of Canadians said that they were not at all worried when home alone in the evening. Of those who walked alone in their neighbourhood at night, 90% said they felt safe doing so
• About 39% of Canadians reported having used a crime prevention method to protect themselves from becoming a victim of crime in the 12 months preceding the survey. The use of crime prevention measures was more common among Canadians who had been previously victimized (57%) than those who had not (32%)
• The most common crime prevention method, reported by 27% of Canadians, was to change their routine or avoid certain people or places. About 13% said they had installed new locks or security bars and 10% had installed a burglar alarm or motion detector lights
• Canadians living in the eastern part of the country, where rates of both self-reported victimization and police-reported crime are generally lower, reported being more satisfied with their personal safety from crime than those in the west. In 2009, residents of Prince Edward Island were among those with the highest levels of satisfaction (97%) while residents in British Columbia were among those with the lowest (89%).

The numbers were drawn from the 2009 General Social Survey on Victimization, a self-reported survey conducted every five years on Canadians aged 15 years and older living in the 10 provinces.

Canada's national statistical agency has published many studies and reports over the years about crime and victimization.

The Clawbies website design is now updated, and the season opening post is up. Yes, it's time for the (6th!) Canadian Law Blog Awards!

Whether you're a blogger or blog reader, the month of December has become the time to shine a light on your favourite Canadian law blogs and bloggers. And if you're new to the Clawbies tradition, please make careful note of 'the humble Canadian rule' — don't toot your own horn! Your blog gets automatically nominated when you nominate and link to other bloggers! Yes, it's a wink-wink, nudge-nudge concept, but take a look around at the nomination posts from prior years for examples. Or search for 'Clawbies 2010' or 'Clawbies 2009'; you'll get a clearer picture — our goal is to have fun with it!

Once again, I am honoured to have colleague Jordan Furlong on the Clawbies judging panel. I am also extremely pleased to announce that Slaw's Simon Fodden has also agreed to lend a helping hand in deciding the (virtual) hardware.

So please consider taking part: explore lawblogs.ca; see the Clawbies winners from prior years; and read the great legal content from bloggers who work and write about the law in Canada. Write a blog post with your nominations (or tweet with the #clawbies2011 hashtag) by December 28th, and we'll announce the winners on New Year's Eve!

To call a smart-phone a phone is really a misnomer. We need to think of them as computers with internet connections that we carry around in our pockets. 

Why is this an important distinction? From a legal perspective, that changes the perspective tremendously. Consider Connie Crosby's Slaw post "Digital Wallets on Their Way" , and the comment on the post musing about privacy and the warrant-less search of cellphones that is being debated in various jurisdictions.

The privacy aspects of a phone that just makes phone calls without retaining any information, and the consideration of whether law enforcement needs a warrant to look at it – are much different than for the devices we have now. Legislators and courts need to consider that looking at a person's phone may be the equivalent of walking into their house and looking at their bank statements, credit card bills, reading material, photo albums, and mail, and while they are there, nosing around on their computer to see all the files, email and whatever else is there including the sites they visit.

Considerering just the phone aspect for the moment, they track and save data on not only what calls you made, to who, and for how long – but also where you were when you made the call.

Other information that might reside on our cell phones include personal and confidential information such as banking information, health information, where we have been and when, and records of communications on various platforms that are meant to be private. Also consider that for many it is not only personal use, but also business use that will contain personal and confidential information of others.

And while you can make phone calls on smartphones, consider the other devices that they replace, and other things that they do:

Digital wallet, GPS, map, tracking device, camera, video camera, email client, social media client, phone directory, calendar, note pad, to do list, grocery list, book reader, magazine reader, newspaper reader, web browser, clock, alarm clock, file storage, dictation device, music player, video player, video game player, radio, video-phone, TV, dictionary, encyclopedia, research assistant, comparison shopper, calculator, wi-fi hot spot, bar code scanner, ephemeris, music composer, video / music editor, cookbook, translator, metronome, flashlight, level, … and the list goes on.

I'm by no means an expert in banking, but seems to me things are heating up in the world of alternative payments. Last week Benjamin Ensor from Forresters posted a nice overview of the rise of the digital wallet (also known as mobile wallet) in his article The Battle of the Digital Wallet. He says this is going to be a game-changer for the retail market:

A mobile digital wallet is more than just a mobile payment system because it combines:

• Mobile payment. Digital wallets are likely combine several different payments systems into a single service, including mobile contactless payments, online (i.e. web) payments, and over-the-network mobile payments, making it easy for customers to make a variety of different types of payment from a mobile device.
• Barcode scanning. Scanning barcodes or QR codes will let customers get more information about products, and let them pay for items on their phones before showing an on-screen receipt to leave the store.
• Loyalty rewards. Instead of carrying (and sometimes forgetting) a separate loyalty card, digital wallets will track customers’ spending and offer merchant-funded rewards, either on the phone or at the point of sale.
• Coupons and offers. Digital wallets are likely to offer customers coupons and location-based offers.

Potential providers

He goes on to outline the various potential providers that are gearing up to compete in this space:

• Banks and other credit issuers teaming up with credit card networks such as Visa and MasterCard
• Mobile operators working in consortia
• "Disruptors" including PayPal, Google and Apple

Back in November 2007 (four years ago!) I reported on my own blog that one of the Canadian banks was already testing mobile payments back then.

Starbucks making a leap

Not a company to wait around for others to do it for them, last January Starbucks launched their own iPhone app in the U.S. to allow for payment from phones. This app was just made available in Canada earlier this month according to the Financial Post. The FP says that the iPhone app "allows people to add credit to their account via the phone and earns points towards the coffee chain’s loyalty program. It also gives food and beverage nutrition information and information about getting a job at Starbucks." There are some nice screen shots of the app on the company's website.

I saw this payment method in action last week as a customer and SBUX clerk who were both new at it gave it a try. It requires one to have a Starbucks card, and then money is electronically loaded onto that card. The card is then connected to the iPhone app. It then involved the customer making a specific screen on her iPhone available from the app (the screen with the barcode) so that the clerk could scan it with her barcode scanner.

I'm guessing that future iterations of mobile payments will be somehow more elegant, but it's certainly a start. Once this is sorted out it won't be long before we see the effects with things like digital payments for photocopies and vending machines.

What other examples have you seen of mobile payments?

Every so often there's nothing for it but to resort to words. I know these are our stock in trade and as such can overstay their welcome. It's for that reason that the Friday Fillip usually paints you pretty pictures or invites you into some silly but entertaining time-waster of a game—the equivalent of the "Ohne Wörte" [without words] caption that gets put at the bottom of cartoons in Germany that, well, have no words (apparently so that you don't blow your entire day hunting for the explanatory text). But, as you'll likely have guessed, I'm veering into the word zone today. To make it interesting, however, I'm taking you out of your comfort zone and into foreign languages.

It'd be too easy (for you, I mean) if I simply went straight to Mandarin or Dutch, for instance. So I'm going to unusual words, words that foreigners have that English doesn't possess—because I know that Slawyers are a skeptical lot (thank goodness) and will likely have some fun challenging this assertion.

My starting place is the article 15 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent in Mental Floss (tagline: "Where Knowledge Junkies Get Their Fix"—so some of you are bound to wander away from the tour at this point.). We learn here, for example, that the Turkish word "Gumusservi" means "means moonlight shining on water" and that "Vybafnout" in Czech means to "jump out and say boo." There's a baker's dozen more of such words.

I took a crack at decoding Gummusservi using Google search and Google Translate. The first problem is to put it into Turkish script. I think that it's gümüş servi — two words, note—which Google Translate tells me means "silver cypress" and which happens to be the title of a poem, unsurprisingly. Hmm.

The Mental Floss list comes from a book by Adam Jacot de Boinod (for which, one is tempted to say, there is no word in English) titled The Meaning of Tingo. Thanks to Amazon's "Look Inside" feature, we can roam around a little within this source. Here I became distracted for a while. Eventually I searched for Gumusservi (have to log in to do a search) and found exactly what Mental Floss had promised. But I was now in the "weather" section of the book, where I learned that serein in French means "fine rain falling from a cloudless sky." My battered old print dictionary tells me, though, that serein can mean either "calm" (sky) or "evening dew".

By then, however, I'd discovered that my search within The Meaning of Tingo had landed me just above the Meteorological Metaphors section, so because "aven solon har fläckar" as the Swedes say—"even the sun has got spots" meaning that no one is perfect—I wandered off course myself. You will have noticed, I suspect.

If you have ten minutes to spare head on over to Google's British Page, where you'll find (to quote The Guardian)

A spiky-haired, bespectacled animation of the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem, as the search engine marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of his first book, The Astronauts.

The trend to more invasive surveillance and control by North American governments (indeed, by many countries that we consider civilized democracies), or their granting of too much control to others is disturbing. Too many things are making creeping (and sometimes creepy) inroads into privacy rights, along with the usual specious "if you've got nothing to hide… " argument. Too many things are tending towards shoot first, ask questions later. And governments are too eager to look to ISP's and others who run the internet pipes to control what flows through.

Some examples:

The proposed US SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) that is being loudly opposed. It has been characterised as net censorship, an attempt to regulate the internet, and breaking the internet as we know it. It could result in entire web sites being taken down based merely on an allegation that one post or comment infringes copyright.

The proposed Canadian Lawful Access legislation that would allow much more invasive internet information to be given to authorities without warrants. This resulted in a lengthy letter by the Privacy Commissioner to the Ministers responsible.

The increasing use of license plate cameras by police, such as in the Washington DC area. In its simplest, most privacy friendly form, car mounted or fixed cameras read car license plates and flag any that are contained in a database of stolen or suspect vehicles. No record is kept of any plates other than those of interest. But it has come to light that some of the systems store the details of every single plate that they capture, and retain that for long periods of time.

Last week, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrinch made a comment during an appearance at the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Business that was picked up by the media: “child laws […] are truly stupid”. Speaking about poverty and inequality in American society, Mr. Gingrich explained that he favoured easing labour laws that prevented teens from working.

Requiring children to go to school until a certain age, limiting the number of hours they can work each day and the age at which they can start working are generally believed to be valuable from a social and moral standpoint. It may be easy to dismiss Mr. Gingrich’s comments, but no one country is perfect: it is certainly interesting to note that Canada has not escaped criticism regarding its own child labour laws. For example, author Joel Bakan wrote a commentary in the Globe and Mail this past fall entitled “B.C.’s child labour laws are the most neglectful in the world”. In some provinces, children as young as 12 years old are permitted to work with parental authorization. 

While Mr. Gingrich focuses on the value he sees in allowing teens to work, let’s not forget that countless other issues arise when children are permitted to work at a young age: higher risks of workplace injuries, young employees who do not know their legal rights, the challenge of balancing school and work. Maybe child labour laws aren’t all that stupid.

Congratulations to Ted Tjaden who is featured in the Autumn 2011 issue of University of Toronto Faculty of Information alumni magazine Informed article "Alumni to Watch." He also graces the cover.

The article traces Ted's career from practicing lawyer in B.C. to library student at the Faculty of Information (now known as the iSchool) at the University of Toronto, to law librarian at the Bora Laskin Law Library at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law and adjunct professor for the Faculty of Information, and finally to his current position as National Director of Knowledge Management at McMillan LLP.

From the article:

While law librarianship is considered to be one of the most ‘stressful’ branches of librarianship, Ted refers to it instead as “challenging and ever changing.”

While the article does mention Ted's teaching and books The Law of Independent Legal Advice and Legal Research and Writing, what perhaps does not come out is the influence Ted has had on Canadian legal research, law librarianship and law firm knowledge management, how he has acted as teacher and guide to so many of us who work in this area over the last 15 years. He also currently sits as Treasurer on the Executive Board of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD).

Again, congrats to my fellow law librarian and Slaw contributor for the well-deserved recognition!

There's a new source of stimulating sound this month: Audiofile.es. "Great radio," says part of its tagline, and they want you to be a programmer as well as a listener.

The idea is simple crowdsourcing: If you come across an interesting audio file while you're browsing the web, tweet the link with the tag #audiofiles and Audiofil.es will automatically add it to their database. Not only can you feed your finds into the mix, but you can also easily create playlists for yourself when you're on the Audiofil.es site.

What sort of things are already there? The topmost "producer pick" today is "The hidden world of girls," a two hour special hosted by Tina Fey; then there's "Charles Darwin and the Racing Asparagus" from NPR, "Listening to The Doors," or "Have you heard about B flat?".

Go have a look and a listen. It's early days yet for Audiofil.es, but I've got you in at the start; now you can add to the mix.

I am attending the Dig2011 conference today. Several hundred people will be at the London Convention Centre today and tomorrow to hear about topics in 2 different streams – the digital game industry, and the web industry. (Harrison Pensa is a sponsor.)

The second day includes a mini-MBA for budding game development companies, and a high school stream with panels on the path and options leading to a successful game development career.

There are good employment opportunities in this sector. Companies in the game and software development business are having difficulty finding qualified employees. But just because one likes to play video games, or can create a spreadsheet doesn't mean you can create a game or software. 

The conference also features an exhibitor area, and a place to play the latest Canadian made games. And don't think that "Canadian made games" connotes few or inferior products. Canada actually has a significant concentration of game developers, which create some of the most popular games.

How are hockey, poutine, and philosophy related?

The answer to this and all manner of other "connect the dots" sorts of questions is provided by xefer's cunning use of Wikipedia. On the xefer-Wikipedia site, you simply enter one or more words or phrases, and provided that they're Wikipedia article titles, xefer finds the paths in Wikipedia that will link up the concepts. The result is a map of logically related nodes each of which is an article title, making the whole look rather like a way finder for a subway system.

If you're stumped for notions—and it's surprising how empty the mind goes when you've got to come up with a few crazy unrelated things—you can hit the random button. (If your map is still evident, the randomizer will simply add its own terms to those you've already put in, which is how I learned how to marry hockey, poutine, philosophy and Kyrgyzstan national futsal team.

As with any transit system, some trips are more worth taking than others. And to get from one point to another when they're widely separated, you have to pass through some fairly bland abstractions (or, to switch metaphors somewhat, some very dense railyards), particularly because all roads must lead to Philosophy in the end.

Once you're tired of this game, you can turn to others of xefer's projects, among which you'll find the Maze Generator, Twitter Charts, and Conway's Game of Life (which I talked about here hundreds of fillips ago).

Hockey and poutine and philosophy? Click here to see the map—and notice that the main "switch point" is Life—and that there's no shortcut through Canada.

Drafting proper trade-mark use descriptions when registering a trade-mark is important to get the right protection. Drafting uses can sometimes be a challenge when the wares or services the mark is used for is new and changing technology. The use description must accurately describe the wares and services the mark is used for, must stand the test of time, and must satisfy CIPO's (Canadian Intellectual Property Office) rules on use descriptions.

Software is a good example of how things can rapidly change. If a business is selling software in the traditional manner where the user installs it on his/her computer, then from a trade-mark perspective, the software is a ware. It might be described, for example, as "Computer software for [describe function]".

But if that software is being provided as an online service, then from a trade-mark perspective it is not a ware, it is a service. It might be described, for example, as "Online service providing [describe function]".

Then we get to the smartphone world. If it is an app installed on a phone, it would be software. If it is coded in html5 and used through the phone's browser, then it is a service.

Since wares and services are considered to be different things, you can get into the position where, for example, software brand X might be considered confusing with software brand X1 - but not be considered confusing with service brand X1 that provides the same function to the user.

As a professional working in both official languages day in and day out, I found a recent study conducted by the Institut de recherche en économie contemporaine and the Institut de recherche sur le français en Amérique particularly interesting: nearly 14% of employees in Quebec’s education, health and public sectors predominantly use English as a language of work and this, with Anglophones only representing 9% of Quebec’s population (the study was based on the 2006 census). Moreover, less than half of these jobs are held by individuals who described themselves as Anglophones.

When compared to the reverse situation in Canada (i.e. French as a language of work in predominantly Anglophone communities), the public sector’s use of the French language did not exceed the population deemed to be Francophone. For example, in New Brunswick, while Francophones represent approximately 33% of that province’s population, 32% of public sector employees used French as a language of work. In Ontario, the numbers were extremely close: 4.9% of public sector employees predominantly use French with 4.4% of the population considering themselves to be Francophone.

When the sectors considered are directly financed by the federal, provincial and municipal governments, this study concludes that it is not enough to blame globalization and international commerce as the only reason why French is endangered. It is no secret that Quebec has and continues to invest in the protection of the French language, whether it be by passing legislation (think of the Charter of the French Language (Bill 101)) or by investing in campaigns that promote the use of French. This study in some ways seems to question whether the provincial government’s francization efforts are sufficient and leads a reader to wonder what this could mean in the long-term for the French language in Quebec.

According to Victims of Violence the number of incidents of reported elder abuse increased by 14% since 2004. A third of these are committed by family members. Over 13% of the Canadian population is over 65, meaning elder abuse will be a growing concern.

One incident of alleged elder abuse that we will not have to worry about any more are the allegations against Brian Corrin, who was charged in February of this year on the accusations that an incident of family violence resulted in injuries to the Winnipeg Justice's 89 year-old mother.

Based on contradictory testimony and the lack of forensic evidence the prosecutor, brought in from Ontario, withdrew the charges,

"Based on available evidence, there is not a reasonable likelihood of conviction," Paul McDermott told the court. McDermott formally entered a stay of proceedings, which allows for charges to be reinstated within one year should circumstances change.

♫ You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world …♫

Lyrics and music by Lennon/McCartney, recorded by The Beatles.

Occupy Vancouver Protest (Vancouver Province Photo)

CTV.ca has released the complete text of the demands of the Occupy Vancouver protestors. A number of their demands are in the legal area, so I thought I would highlight a few of them from their total list of 60:

12. We demand that corporate person-hood is repealed.

I am not quite sure what they mean…the elimination of corporations as legal entities?

27. We demand – as Bertrand Russell suggested – there be two police forces – one to prove your guilt and another to prove your innocence. We demand lawyers be required to work in pairs so that a lack of resources won't be a factor in deciding a case. (Alternative: We demand increased funding for legal aid.)

Interesting thought about lawyers working in pairs…but exactly how do we pay for the inevitable doubling of costs? Just, speedy and inexpensive seems to run contrary to this…not to mention the cost of carrying two police forces. But I do agree with them about increasing funding for Legal Aid!

32. We demand the repeal of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. All synthetic drugs and hard drugs (including cocaine and heroin) must be distributed by prescription through a pharmacist.

I can just imagine the implications of repealing the CD&S Act!

34. We demand that all harmless people be protected in the constitution. If a new law is written and a new set of people are to be criminalized, the burden of proof will now be on the government to provide evidence that this new group of criminals is inherently harmful to others. This will end scapegoating.

I thought the purpose of the constitution was to protect people – including harmless ones.

41. We demand the release of all non-violent prisoners.

Does that mean there would be no penal consequences for committing serious, but non-violent crimes?

and just one more:

53. We demand the removal of all the red tape around the growing of industrial hemp.

We all want to change the world; I guess some of us differ on our choice of methods. At least they didn't follow Shakespeare's advice and say the first thing to do, is let's kill all the lawyers…

Which is not the same thing as "beer me"—it's too early on a Friday for any of that, though both have to do, perhaps, with a kind of adjustment.

I'm a typophile—which is very like being a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, as the Bard once put it, because nothing could be triflingly smaller than a single letterform or, indeed, the space between letters; and as for "unconsidered," the job of type is to appear and yet to disappear at the same time so that the message comes through as clearly and as beautifully as possible. So what of kerning? What is a "kern" when it's at home, anyway? From French carne ‘projecting angle, nib of a quill pen’, in turn from Latin cardinem hinge, a kern was originally the bit of a letter that hung out past the body, as the curl of the letter "f" might, for instance. To "kern" became to adjust the distance between letters so as to make the spaces more visually pleasing despite, as it were, the peculiarities of each letter such as the overhanging bits or a letter's fatness or thinness.

Back in the typewriter days, this sort of precision wasn't possible for the average person, because typefaces were used that accorded each letter the same amount of space on the page—"monospaced" fonts. And even now on the web, it's something of a struggle to manage letter spacing. But kerning is something you can nevertheless come to appreciate even though you might not be able to use it in your everyday writing: look at signs, logos, book type with an eye to judging how well the printer has ordered his minions. Does this letter need to be tucked under the "kern" of that one? Shouldn't the plump "o" be nestled closer to its neighbour than the skinny "i"?

To help you with this form of verbal microscopy, I offer you this kerning game. You adjust the spacing of the internal letters until they're right—as you see it. Then you let the website show you how the experts would space it. And before you know it you'll be on the slippery slope to typophilia, which, though it's not in the DSM IV (or V), can lead to slow computers, as they struggle to mount thousands of typefaces…

This actually seems to be more of a marketing campaign for Dell and Intel than a movement, but Happy IT Day to Information Technology professionals anyway. 

It's time to celebrate and recognize the efforts of all IT professionals across Canada. Let's thank our IT heroes for the hard work and long hours they put in everyday. Show your appreciation by saying "thank you" in your own way!

Perhaps the hotel industry will need the services of some IT professionals soon in light of this New York Times article entitled IPads Change Economics, and Speed, of Hotel Wi-Fi that says that the demand on hotel Wi-Fi has increased dramatically over the last year and a half because of guests with iPads. In addition to investing in the hardware to meet the demand, hotels struggle with how to pay for it. Most guests expect it for free – or at least not at daily rates of around $13.00 per night that sone charge.

What are you doing at 6:00 PM (ET) on Monday, November 14, 2011? If you're in Toronto, consider coming to Fraser Milner Cagrain at 77 King Street West to hear Human Rights Adjudication in the 21st Century, a talk by Timothy Endicott, Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Legal Philosophy (for Lawyers and Non-Lawyers alike)

The timetable is 6pm Wine and Cheese Reception, 6.45pm Talk and Discussion. $20 at the door but please let us know if you're on the fence so we know how many to cater for. Here is the log-in.

Timothy Endicott is a Canadian lawyer who has been (the first) Dean of the Faculty of Law at Oxford since October 2007. He is a Fellow in Law at Balliol College, and has been a Professor of Legal Philosophy since 2006. Professor Endicott writes on Jurisprudence and Constitutional and Administrative Law, with special interests in law and language and interpretation.

He is the author of Vagueness in Law (OUP 2000), and Administrative Law (OUP 2009). After graduating with the AB in Classics and English, summa cum laude, from Harvard, he completed the MPhil in Comparative Philology in Oxford, studied Law at the University of Toronto, and practised as a litigation lawyer with Oslers in Toronto.

Twenty bucks will get you the reception and Timothy's talk. Register here. While initially aimed at Oxford and Cambridge graduates, others

The issue he'll be discussing is very hot in England. Are human rights ultimately a matter of domestic law or community law? And are they a matter for Parliament or European judges?

Those who've been following the recent legal news will have seen the remarkable disagreement between Dominic Grieve the Attorney General and the Home Secretary Theresa May on the role of the Strasbourg Court, with reference to a tabloid created fictitious story about a refugee claimant who established a claim by having a cat in the family. Grieve will be arguing before the full court in the Italian prisoners' voting case. He gave a remarkable (and by North American standards nuanced and articulate) speech at LIncoln's Inn. Ed Bates has a good blog commentary here.

The primary responsibility for guaranteeing and protecting human rights within a country rests with that country's own institutions – its government, its legislature and its courts.

That is a long-accepted principle of human rights law. When the European court decides that a state has denied rights to individuals within its jurisdiction, the state itself is responsible for deciding how to repair the breach.

Subsidiarity was the theme of a lecture delivered at Lincoln's Inn on Monday night by the attorney general, Dominic Grieve. As he explained the term, it means that the primary responsibility for guaranteeing and protecting human rights within a country rests with that country's own institutions – its government, its legislature and its courts.

It is also at work in the "margin of appreciation", which is the latitude – or room for manoeuvre – that governments are given when securing human rights. As the European judges often say, they are less well placed than a country's own authorities to evaluate its needs.

This week, though, the British government has subtly extended the meaning of subsidiarity. If the new definition is accepted, the term will no longer mean the latitude given by the court to a government. It will mean the lack of latitude given by the government to the court. Some cases will never get to the Strasbourg court at all.

The second disagreement is even more remarkable. The lord chief justice Lord Judge has said that UK courts are not bound by rulings of Strasbourg-based court of human rights, while the President of the Supreme Court has admitted that his court is not always "supreme" because it has to follow the lead of the European court of human rights in Strasbourg, whose rulings are sometimes too narrow in scope. Lord Judge was giving evidence to the Lords Constitutional Committee, when he said that the UK need only “take account” of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights but not necessarily follow it.

Tim will be talking about an issue whose time has clearly come.