I have seen the future of search – and this demo of Wolfram|Alpha is so mindboggling in conception and ambition that when the site launches I want to experiment at length, when it launches on Monday. It’s essentially about fusing an analytical engine on top of search, drawing data from the web and then crunching it in a myriad of different ways. “Wolfram Alpha is like a cross between a research library, a graphing calculator, and a search engine.” “Wolfram Alpha can generate and compute vast amounts of data and present it using visual charts, spreadsheets and . . . [more]

The Florence Agreement of 1950 attempts to stem restrictions on the circulation of knowledge via books. In the Philippines, the government has recently given to the world a new understanding of the scope of the agreement, based on a more critical reading of the text. According to the Customs Undersecretary, the Agreement only applies to educational books, and, no surprise here, Customs is the body best able to make that determination. Perhaps they are well versed in the field. There seems to have been some interesting work done ((Such as HARSKAMP, E. and SUHRE, C. (1992). ‘Psychometrische kwaliteiten van meetinstrumenten . . . [more]

Legal researchers, what has your bar association done for you lately? What should it be doing? Are you content to join the substantive sections dealing with legal issues you research, or would you prefer to have a special section dedicated to legal research generally? I know that legal research sections have been established in British Columbia, Alberta (North and South), Manitoba and Quebec. Are there any others? In provinces where there is no separate legal research section, why is that? Is there any movement to create legal research sections in those jurisdictions? What about a national . . . [more]

I can’t do more than point to some links, but Google’s pre-emptive response to Wolfram|Alpha appears to be about to launch.

It is discussed by the BBC, ZDNet , SearchEngineWatch and Inquisitr . The Beeb says

It takes information from the web and displays it in a spreadsheet in “split seconds”, something Ms Mayer said would normally take someone half a day to do.

During the demonstration, a query for “small dog” was typed into the search box. Seconds later a table popped up showing photographs of various dogs, their origin, weight and height in a clear and simple

Google today launched a set of new options for filtering and presenting its search results. Now when you do a search, you’ll see a link in the upper left corner of the results page offering to “show options”:

This opens a menu down the right-hand side of the window displaying a dozen filters, as shown in the image to the left. The videos option displays thumbnails of videos, mostly from YouTube, whose titles contain your search terms. The forum option (somehow) manages to find in your results the hits from forums. Reviews seems to select journals and book reviews. The . . . [more]

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has published on the web a set of “Legal Tools” for use by members of the public:

They equip users with legal information, commentaries and an application to work more effectively with core international crimes cases (involving war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide). The Tools serve as an electronic library on international criminal law and justice. They comprise at present over 40,000 documents in several databases (the “Legal Tools Database”), together with four legal research and reference tools developed by lawyers with expertise in international criminal law and justice: the Case Matrix,

The media are slowly picking up on the number of court cases that are requiring disclosure of Facebook and other social network pages in litigation. SunMedia has a story today — see, e.g. “Social networking plays out in court” in the North Bay Nugget, and yesterday there was a story on Canoe Technology, “Facebook content showing up in lawsuits.” [See also “An Obligation to Discuss Facebook During Discovery,” from a couple of months ago on Slaw.]

Ian Kerr of U of Ottawa is quoted in the Sun Media story as saying this:

“The courts

As we said in launching the Slaw Scavenger Hunt contest, we always knew that the List that the two Simons had assembled was going to be partial, and we’ve been gob-struck at how we could have put a list together and missed dates as significant as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen from 1789, which led to so many other developments. Duh!

But we’ve been overwhelmed by the variety and the erudition of what our readers have suggested should go on the list. So here is the list that our reader contestants have put together: . . . [more]

Okay – here are all of the dates that have been successfully identified by the contestants in the Slaw Scavenger Hunt, designed to see if we could supplement the entries in the World Digital Library. We listed fifty dates, and in two days our readers have spotted over half. . . . [more]

Did you ever do these visual word puzzles in school? Well, here’s the style over substance edition of This Week’s Biotech Highlights:

Style:

• The Globe & Mail revealed a preference for Doom & Gloom over good news, giving Page 1 treatment to a southbound scientist, but short shrift to new Ontario genomics funding.
• In light of increasing evidence that this round of Human Swine Influenza is not that bad, interest has turned to deciding what to call it. Pork producers don’t like “swine flu,” Mexico is not a fan of “Mexico Flu” and “H1N1” is just plain

The European Journalism Centre has put together a Custom Google Search engine that will search all of the pages of Europa, the portal for the European Union. Search Europa lets you refine your search to pages related to law, to blogs, and to documents in PDF or Word. . . . [more]

There is an article available through SSRN that discusses link rot in court decisions by Tina Ching (Reference Librarian, Seattle Univ. Law Library) in The Next Generation of Legal Citations: A Survey of Internet Citations in the Opinions of the Washington Supreme Court and Washington Appellate Courts, 1999-2005 [SSRN], 9 J. App. Prac. & Process 387 (2007).

As more legal research is conducted online, it is reasonable to conclude that there will be a corresponding increase in citations to the Internet by judges in their opinions. With the widespread public use of the Internet to access information along with the