Like many people with a yen for systematizing, I like diagrams. When I think a problem out I doodle and draw lines to boxes, circle words, do double underscores and the like. When I assemble something from, well, you know where, I look at the pictures and almost never read the instructions.

So I’m mightily impressed when someone can represent a complex situation with a clear picture. My hero in this regard is Edward Tufte, whose three last books — 1983: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (pictures of numbers). ISBN 096139210X; 1990: Envisioning Information (pictures of nouns). ISBN . . . [more]

Just stumbled on a wonderful blog on legal translation, at the same time as Deborah Cao at Griffith has published a major monograph on Translating Law. . . . [more]

Some may be interested in quite an active discussion about “eBooks – What’s Holding You Back?” which has been happening on Slashdot today: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/10/1555203&from=rss . . . [more]

Please welcome our newest occasional contributor, Professor John Davis, from Osgoode Hall Law School. John, as most all of you will know, has been law librarian at the University of Victoria and at Osgoode. It’s a great pleasure to have John with us and I look forward to his contributions, occasional though they may be.

In fact, I think I see one coming up in a matter of moments. . . . [more]

I have observed a lot of frustration lately from various quarters regarding legal seminar providers. While my comments below are directed primarily at commercial seminar providers, these comments may prove useful to other organizations who put on legal seminars. These are changes I, and many others, would like to see:

• Customer service, customer service, customer service! That means answering your phones, returning calls, and responding to email in a timely fashion. Customer service staff should be knowledgable about the seminars you hold, past and upcoming, and the products you sell. I know seminars are always in great demand, but alienating

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Alice Andrew, ten years of age, found a used Tim Horton's coffee cup in a garbage can on her school playground.

Blogs have been abuzz for the last few weeks with one of the worse kept secrets in the technology business — the new Microsoft Origami mini-note computer. Launched at CeBIT Technology Conference in Germany, March 9th, this sub notebook computer creates a newly named category of computers — Ultra-Mobile Personal Computers (UMPCs). [See the Microsoft site for official details] By the way, didn’t anyone tell them this doesn’t conform to the need for a Three Letter Acronym or TLA?

Anyway, heres the skinny on this new device. eWeek reports that:

“The new devices are expected to weigh in at

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Take a look at CultureLibre, a blog en ce qui concerne “Le droit d’auteur, Internet et les bibliothèques par Olivier Charbonneau.” Steve Matthews might consider adding it to his list of Canadian law blogs, though it straddles categories. . . . [more]

The application we used to collaboratively put together the Rothstein Pages, Writely, has now been acquired by Google. Am I disappointed? Sure–is there any web-based application I use that Google doesn’t wind up purchasing? Am I surprised? No, not really. While Writely isn’t (yet) perfect, it is a fabulous tool and I have been using it for a wide range of projects, both individually and collaboratively.

Now, all I need is to develop a great little app that Google will quickly snap up…. . . . [more]

On March 6, the Society of Computers & Law (UK) hosted an event at the Royal Society in London to hear a lecture by Professor Richard Suskind on the way in w hich legal services will develop over the next 10 years. Susskind is an independent advisor to government and the private sector on IT, lectures internationally, is a columnist for the Times and has written and edited several books on It and the Law.

To extract from the SCL email, he posited a world changed by exponential increase in processing power and where commoditisation is an inescapable part of . . . [more]

A colleague alerted me to the March 2006 “Canadian Policy Brief” of ARMA International entitled “New Supreme Court Judge Could Have Big IP Impact” that comments on recent speeches made by Justice Rothstein on intellectual property. . . . [more]

Today’s law students have keener eyesight than fogies, but I had to wonder about an experiment being conducted at the University of Melbourne. Students are using hand-held computers in a trial to evaluate the effect of mobile technologies on student learning.

Today’s students, the article claims, “combine work with study, they have competing demands on their time, they are multi-tasking by nature, and they have been dealing with technology since they were born – they shop on-line, research on-line, date online and expect to study on-line.”

“As part of a trial of mobile learning technologies, the students were given

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