One of the many brilliant things that Google indexing has created is something known as the Web 1T 5-gram corpus made available for scholars via the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania.

Very roughly stated, as I understand it, n-grams have to do with the frequency with which one unit in a language is followed by another unit — e.g. how many times in a given body of text is the word “love” followed by the word “fifteen,” and what, then, is the predictability of this 2-gram occuring when “love” occurs. You can see how Google would . . . [more]

A cohort of law commissions or a covey? We’re not militarily inclined, but we are associates, so cohort kind of works. We are, alas, a small group, but would run of the risk of being thought of as “grouse” if we used “covey” – and this might be a misleading or incomplete connotation, since we are “constructive grousers”. I’ve decided on “cohort”.

From March 8th to 10th, the British Columbia Law Institute hosted a meeting of the Federation of Law Reform Agencies of Canada in Victoria (yes, it snowed there). FOLRAC is a loose cohort of law reform agencies . . . [more]

Music producers are finally fighting piracy the right way – through convenience.

The new free iPhone app, Shazam, recognizes songs and tells you where you can buy it from. It also provides information about the artists and the album, directs users to reviews, and gives you song lyrics.

The advantage with this is that it allows users to pick the song off television, radio, or movies, puts them directly in touch with valuable services, and seeks to commercialize off of it.

If these services prove to be more convenient than users having to search the web for all of . . . [more]

Slaw’s inability to count—it’s always two short of the number of daily posts—simply confirms for me every morning the need for us to avoid putting more eggs than we absolutely have to in the electronic basket. If one can’t trust Slaw to count, what folly it would be to trust any computer to do anything reliably. I shall hang on to my books until they are pried from my cold, dead hands. . . . [more]

In light of Ted Tjaden’s post about choosing between a netbook and a laptop, I thought readers might be interested in the “pocket yoga” from Lenovo. It came out of their Beijing (and New Zealand) design studios two years ago (!) but never made it into production. Today, someone published a host of photos of the nifty thing on Flickr, so a spokesperson from Lenovo talked with Design Matters about the project. Oh yeah: it’s a tablet, too.

This, I would buy:

. . . [more]

The Vendor Liaison Committee (VLC) of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (a committee of which I am a member), continues to put together practical information and useful tools. It is worth having a look at the full VLC page, but a couple of tools that law libraries may find useful:

• Librarian-Vendor Relation – Best Practices
  This is essentially a checklist for libraries to work through when they have a complaint with regard to a publisher or vendor. The focus is on staying factual and professional to maintain a good relationship with your vendors. It also addresses unresolved issues,

I need to go to the Supreme Court website from time to time, and although I’m sure I’ve bookmarked it somewhere, it’s a tad tedious to first find the bookmark and then activate it, or to use Google when the bookmarks on your laptop aren’t the same as those on your desktop machine. What would be right, would be if the court had the URL http://www.supremecourt.ca or some such, but in our peculiar capitalist way, that URL has been snatched by someone and is being camped on, as are all sensible variants. And in our peculiar bureaucratic way, the actual . . . [more]

About 82% of Canadians were already happy with Obama in February, but this week I suspect he converted a few of the holdouts with his call for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making. All was subsequently peaceful and happy in the U.S. of A., leading to M&A rapprochement between Roche and Genentech and to Gilead Sciences riding to CV Therapeutics’ rescue. 

M&A developments were not so peaceful and happy in Canada, where the Special Committee formed by Patheon’s Board called a takeover bid by JLL Partners “substantially undervalued, opportunistic and structurally coercive.” Merck and Schering-Plough did . . . [more]

A recent show on the British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC Click, investigated cybercrimes and how compromised computers could be used to send spam.

But the program didn’t just provide information on current criminal practices, they created their own botnet and accessed 22,000 computers in the U.K. The show informed users they had infected about the vulnerability, and about ways to better protect themselves.

Despite the informative value of the exercise, some critics like Graham Cluley are wondering if they are in violation of the Computer Misuse Act 1990, which states,

Computer misuse offences

1 Unauthorised access to computer material

I’ve just noticed the CBC story concerning the Quebec couple who paid a woman $20,000 to be surrogate mother, received the baby, and were refused an adoption by the court when they applied and revealed all of the details concerning the genesis of the child. The takeaway line from the judgment is the peculiar statement that “Cette enfant n’a pas droit à une filiation maternelle à tout prix,” [“This child has no right to a declaration of maternity in spite of everything.” — my weak translation] which the news has picked up as meaning the child has no legal mother. . . . [more]

By now most newspaper readers will know of a momentous event at 1:59:26 one numerical representation of the date and time, 3.1415926, aligned with pi out to seven decimal places. This afternoon the digital clock in North America turned to show 3.1415926. PI Day was March 14.

At 1.59pm at the San Francisco Exploratorium a parade of people processed approximately 3.14 times around a shrine to Pi — and then ate pie.

Curiously it was also Talk Like a Physicist day, and Albert Einstein’s 130th anniversary.

So a significant day for physicists, mathematicians and obsessives of various . . . [more]

Th WCC-TFC is on a western Canadian Tour. Details are hard to track down, but here are their destinations, and some dates.

• UBC, March 9
• UVic, March 11
• UAlberta
• U Calg, March 13
• U Sask.
• U Man. March 19

As a rock group they are pretty unplugged, but as an educational experience, they… rock! Slaw has already covered their launch week in 2008, and explained the project, which is to re-write important SCC equality decisions from a more ‘context-aware’, if I may paraphrase, perspective.

It was interesting to hear about how the process of writing these decisions . . . [more]