This week in biotech focused on cost effectiveness, as everyone from Ontario to Florida and from VCs to pharma companies continue to look for ways to squeeze the most out of every dollar.

In Florida, a report assessing the state’s progress in attracting high value life science jobs showed that in the first six years of its efforts, legislators have spent about $1.4 million for each of the 1,100 jobs created. In the year we’ve been tracking similar data, this is the highest per-job spending we’ve seen.

The Florida report recommended more spending to assist with early-stage capital, . . . [more]

Here is the link to the story – no references to Canada.

And the Wall Street Journal and the ABA Journal are following the same developments. . . . [more]

Richard Susskind of the Times Online has a piece this week on how the College of Law‘s Legal Practice Course is delivered with video, slides, and audio – which can all be paused and started at a student’s leisure in their own home.

He also mentions the online initiatives at the BPP Law School and the University of Strathclyde. The latter actually has students role-playing as solicitors dealing with a real problem in a virtual law firm.

Susskind closes saying,

Sceptics protest. They say that a law lecture should be a communal event at which students are professionally

From Volume III, Issue II of Amicus Curiae, Western Law’s Student Paper

Canada was a different place before Trudeaumania swept the nation, and the man we know as Ivan Rand, founding Dean of this law school and former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, was a product of his times. It would be easy to dismiss Dean Rand as an intolerant bigot, but as William Kaplan explained to an audience at Western Law on Nov. 11, [2009,] Rand was complicated character.

“Canadian judicial biography has been, with a few exceptions, mostly uncritical and largely celebratory, written by . . . [more]

When Dominic Jaar became the CEO of the Canadian Centre for Court Technology, he immediately set out to constitute several “IntellAction” working groups. One of these groups had the mandate to promote the modernization of court web sites in Canada by way of producing guidelines on topic.

Dominic knew this was an area of strong interest to me, so he asked me to lead the group. We built the membership last September to include fair representation from the judiciary, lawyers in private and public sector practice, the Courts Administration Service, a few other areas and a journalist to represent . . . [more]

In legal documents it’s the job of print to deliver the message smoothly and then get out of the way as fast as possible. Lots of things go into making this possible, as any book or magazine publisher will tell you, including the choice of typeface, point size, space between lines (leading) and colour of paper. Yet, when it comes to the preparation of legal documents the profession seems to be willfully ignorant about what makes for persuasive print, favouring remnants of the typewriter age combined with bad aspects of word processing technology.

I want to focus now on only . . . [more]

This might have been better as a comment responding to Omar’s post just prior to this one, in which he lamented the lack of a Canadian Citer, but since it involves Javascript, I was afraid it might not survive intact as a comment.

I know it’s not quite what Omar wanted — that’s way beyond my ability — but faute de mieux I’ve refreshed a tool I put together a couple of years ago: Javascript bookmarklets that search CanLII. As I’m sure most of you know, the idea behind a bookmarklet is to make these little patches of . . . [more]

Michael Lines previously mentioned Jureeka, the web browser extension that links to legal material online, which can only be used with Firefox and Chrome.

Cornell law has launched a similar extension called Citer, but allows integration with IE, Safari, and Opera as well.

Bonnie Shucha explains how it works,

With Citer, you select an area of text on a web site that contains the cite you would like to look up, click a button in the browser bookmark linkbar, and Citer will attempt to transfer you to a page containing the content.

Jureeka is a

And who wouldn’t — get it, that is — with Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and AI prof Nigel Shadbolt advising? Data.gov.uk is HMGovernment’s open access data site, containing three thousand data sets. The public is invited to take the data, manipulate and mix it how they please, and let data.gov.uk know if they develop an interesting application as a result.

As they say on the front page:

We’re very aware that there are more people like you outside of government who have the skills and abilities to make wonderful things out of public data. These are our first steps in

The United Nations’s Dag Hammarskjöld Library in New York has developed a new page with links to information on Haiti. It includes reports, statistics and other resources about the country.

As well, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and ReliefWeb continue to issue updated information on the Haiti Earthquake disaster.

The CBC site has information on how to help. . . . [more]

In updating a list of Internet search engines, I realize how so many have “dropped off”, presumably given the dominance of Google.

I checked Wikipedia’s entry for web search engines and like their chronological listing of search engines from 1993 to current (the history of web browsers is also good).

Mosaic and Magellan anyone?

I was fortunate to be in information studies at the University of Toronto between 1995 and 1997 when web browsing was just starting to take off (and yes, prior to that I gophered on a ‘486 computer on an extremely slow telephone modem).

However, given the . . . [more]

♫ A moment of despair
That forces you to say that life’s unfair
It makes you scared of what tomorrow may bring
But don’t go giving into fear ..♫

Lyrics and music by: Stone, Greenberg, Daniel Pierre, recorded by Joss Stone.

You may wonder what human rights has to do with Internet Explorer. Prior to the earthquake in Haiti, the news was filled with the cyber-attacks on Google. The latest attacks on Google’s network appear to have originated in China, reported ComputerWorld in a post dated Jan 12, 2010 and were directed at the Google accounts of human . . . [more]