Good news for the weekend: I’m delighted to be able to say that Cecilia Tellis is joining Slaw as an occasional contributor. Cecilia is a law librarian at the University of Ottawa’s Brian Dickson Law Library where she is primarily involved in the coordination of the legal research programme. She received her MLIS degree from McGill University in 2004, and a B.A. in French Language and Literature from the University of Toronto in 1999. Cecilia previously worked as a Liaison Librarian at McGill’s Nahum Gelber Law Library. She was also a sessional lecturer at McGill’s Graduate School of Library and . . . [more]

This week’s fillip is about malware — and the tip comes from Mr. Bonware himself, Michael Lines.

Malwarez is a project of Alex Dragulescu and takes what is wretched and makes it fascinating, if not beautiful. The idea is — Wait, it’s Friday for heaven’s sake: I’ll let Alex tell you about it and save my breath for the snow-shovelling that is the new normal here in Snowronto:

Malwarez is a series of visualization of worms, viruses, trojans and spyware code. For each piece of disassembled code, API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density

The following article from the NY Times takes an interesting look at the respective websites of Candidate Clinton and Candidate Obama: Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC?

There are subtle and not-so-subtle differences between the two sites; but what message do the sites send? Are those messages intentional? Read the Article and then judge for yourself.

Clinton Website

Obama Website

Once that little comparative exercise has been completed, have a bit more fun by comparing them to the website of the Republican nominee and then try to figure out what McCain might be:

McCain Website . . . [more]

From Library Stuff, we learn that Zotero has outperformed all other citation software tested at Citefest 2008, sponsored by Northwestern University Library and Academic Technologies. They tested CiteULike, Connotea, EndNote, NoodleBib, RefWorks, and Zotero. Now we just need a Canadian legal citation style. . . . [more]

Statistics Canada’s February 2008 Health Reports has a study “Getting a second opinion: Health information and the Internet” that explores Canadian adults’ use of the Internet to find health information. Using data from the 2005 Canadian Internet Use Survey, the study found:

• more than one-third of Canadian adults, over half of them women, used the Internet to find health information
• about 38% reported that they had discussed their findings with a doctor or other health care professional
• of the estimated 15 million Canadians who used the Internet from home in 2005, 58% went online at some point to

Google has quietly introduced a search feature it calls “teleportation.” They’d cottoned on to the fact that increasingly people don’t bother learning and using a site’s URL, but rather put the site’s name into Google and use the result at or near the top to get to their destination. But often people who do that don’t just want the front page of a site but need to find something on an inside page. So for some big-name sites Google has introduced a search box in the results that will let you search within that site. Here’s a graphic of that . . . [more]

CCH Canada was kind enough to let me write a column in their monthly e-newsletter for Canadian law students. I had not realized though that it was possible to get a free archive of these (and other CCH newsletters) online and to register to receive them. The articles (not mine!) are quite good and I assume (or hope) that students can benefit from the newsletters.

My column last month was entitled “Managing Legal Knowledge: KM Demystified.” Although most of my columns focused on legal research, I thought it important to introduce students to formal law-related KM since . . . [more]

When you go to the CanLII splash page — http://www.canlii.org — you have to choose between the French and the English version of the site. I noticed today that there is now a tick-box that will cause your browser to remember your choice. This feature may have been there for a while, but I don’t think so, since I’ve been relying on CanLII pretty heavily in recent weeks for judgments for my teaching materials. At any event, this is a small but welcome change, and shows that the great folks behind CanLII are bent on continuous improvement of the service. . . . [more]

The Women’s Court of Canada launches this week. (See the story in the Ottawa Citizen.) The WCC is a group of women academics and practitioners who combined to rewrite six Supreme Court of Canada decisions to take a full and proper account of women’s equality. The affected decisions are:

• Symes v. Canada, [1993] 4 S.C.R. 695
  deduction — child care expenses — women — taxpayer — income
• Native Women’s Association of Canada v. Canada, [1994] 3 S.C.R. 627 ((The citation is misprinted in the Majury article referred to below.))
  funding — freedom of expression — women —

The Supreme Court of Canada has published a special edition of its Bulletin of Proceedings that contains a statistical overview of its work for the period 1997-2007.

Tables include:

• number of complete applications for leave to appeal and notices of appeal as of right filed by litigants with the Court’s Registry each year;
• number of leave applications granted and the percentage granted of the total submitted;
• number of appeals heard each year and the number of hearing days over the year;
• information with respect to the number of judgments rendered each year;
• time lines in the life of a

Would you be willing to donate your intellectual property to the public domain upon your death, so it does not need to wait the 50 or 70 years to be released by law?

The idea (with action video!) resides on the website of experimental designers fi5e and max azare at ni9e.com.

An honourable idea, but it makes me wonder how valid will signing a sticker really be under the law?

Hat tip to Will Spaetzel for the link. . . . [more]

Here’s a note about a new bibliography of published sources of English medieval legal documents. The announcement is on several lists.

In a long-term labor of love, Hazel Lord, Senior Law Librarian at the University of Southern California School of Law has been tirelessly working on a bibliography of published sources of English medieval legal documents (covering the years 600-1532). What she had thought originally would only be a few hundred sources, has blossomed into a list of close to 1,000 sources!

Because of the nature of the project, Hazel decided that it might be most useful as a wiki.