Too fast, too slow, too big, too small, too quiet — most of what there is lies beyond our senses, which is intriguing, if also more than a little humbling. So ever since Galileo spotted the moons of Jupiter and van Leeuwenhoek watched his animalcules wriggle around, the rest of us have been fascinated by this invisible world made present for us by clever scientists and engineers.

Photography has played a huge role in gratifying our appetite for the imperceptible. There’s the obvious but now taken-for-granted ability to see aspects of the otherwise lost, invisible past, of course. And shots . . . [more]

Are we getting closer to machines in the practice of law? In his blog post “Meet your new lawyer, IBM Watson,” Ron Friedmann describes a meeting between IBM senior management and top-tier law firm CIOs at last week’s ILTA conference. He says:

It sounds like IBM intends Legal Watson to replace junior associates or at least perform much of their work (see also , American Lawyer, Aug 2014). Legal Watson’s success depends on the answers to three questions:

1. What information – and how much – does Watson need to ingest and, to the extent necessary, who will tune or

You have to wonder whether Stephen Wolfram was thinking of top dog when he named his . . . what shall we call it? . . . marvelous machine Wolfram|Alpha. After all, the man is not noted for his humility, though I have to say that when you look at his biography you might conclude that any immodesty on his part is merited.

I’m sure that most of you have at one time or another visited the “answer machine” that is Wolfram|Alpha. If you haven’t been there in a while, I encourage you to go again now and tour . . . [more]

Each Thursday we present a significant excerpt from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site’s contact form.

FINDING AND MANAGING LEGAL INFORMATION ON THE INTERNET, 2nd Ed
David Whelan
Toronto: Canada Law Book, 2012
[© 2012 Thomson Reuters Canada Limited. Reproduced by permission of Carswell, a division of Thomson Reuters Canada Limited.]

Excerpt: pp. 64-67

General Search

The primacy of Google and Bing has not stopped other search engines from entering . . . [more]

Mark Twain wrote in Mark Twain, “Chapters from My Autobiography”, 598 North American Review (Sept. 7, 1906):

I wrote the rest of “The Innocents Abroad” in sixty days, and I could have added a fortnight’s labor with the pen and gotten along without the letters altogether. I was very young in those days, exceedingly young, marvellously young, younger than I am now, younger than I shall ever be again, by hundreds of years. I worked every night from eleven or twelve until broad day in the morning, and as I did two hundred thousand words in the sixty days,

Chances are really good that a few of you among the thousands (yes, thousands) reading this are celebrating a birthday today. It can’t be a dead cert, of course, because there’s no law of nature that requires that anyone in our readership be born on a ninth of November. There is, though, a law (or maybe a regulation) of nature that seems to dictate that approximately the same number of people get born every day. And that being the case, I should be able to estimate the chances that some of you will indeed be blowing out candles today.

Trouble . . . [more]

A number of months ago I pointed you to a site that let you track shipping worldwide. And although lots of people take cruises, orders of magnitude more move about the globe in the air. So today we’re going up, up and away — not, alas, with Superman, but instead with the thousands of planes that ply the sky at every moment of the day.

Two sites (at least) offer you the full picture: Plane Finder and FlightRadar24. In each case, the website receives live data emitted by the aircraft and control towers and uses them to plot . . . [more]

[7] Recovery in negligence presupposes a relationship between the plaintiff and defendant based on the existence of a duty of care — a defendant who is at fault and a plaintiff who has been injured by that fault. If the defendant breaches this duty and thereby causes injury to the plaintiff, the law “corrects” the deficiency in the relationship by requiring the defendant to compensate the plaintiff for the injury suffered. This basis for recovery, sometimes referred to as “corrective justice”, assigns liability when the plaintiff and defendant are linked in a correlative relationship of doer and sufferer of the

An almost overwhelming amount of information is generated and stored in disparate places in our digital world. Email, documents, tweets, posts, status updates, reports, and other data flow through our computers, tablets and smartphones. Cataloging and retrieving this information is a challenge. Fortunately there are a variety of tools that make simultaneously searching through these data mines a little easier.

At Your Command

Operating system search tools, including MS Window 7 and Apple’s OS X Lion Spotlight, allow users to search files and emails locally and on external drives. They both can also be extended to search Web sources, . . . [more]

This is a post in a series appearing each Friday, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

I remember when I was a kid there were a couple of things (at least) that could take me to the dizzying edge of imagination, where I’d stall in frustration and wonder.

One was lying in bed at night doing the expanding address thing: Simon Fodden, Walton Drive, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, the world, the universe… and? What was on the other side of the universe, beyond it? Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine.

The other was found in the barbershop — you remember those, don’t you? the smell of bay rum, the combs in the jar of blue . . . [more]

When Watson trumped several Jeopardy champions, Simon Chester wondered what the implications would be for lawyers. The New York Times appears to have answered that question, at least in part, in a story this weekend by John Markoff, Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software.

Markoff points to the California litigation support companies Blackstone Discovery, who can analyze 1.5 million documents for under US$100,000, and Clearwell, who assisted DLA Piper meet a one-week court deadline by searching 570,000 court documents for specific concepts, rather than key words.

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means