On behalf of trees everywhere I have made an initial inquiry with the powers that be asking why the weekly paper part of the Ontario Reports is not distributed only in digital format.

Although this issue may of less interest to those outside of Ontario, it does raise questions that are regularly discussed on SLAW.

Background: Members of the Law Society of Upper Canada receive a weekly paper part of the Ontario Reports as part of their membership fees. It contains (in this order): a Table of Contents with brief details of typically 5 to 7 cases per weekly . . . [more]

The Australian Communications and Media Authority plays a role somewhat similar to our Canadian Radio and Television Commission. Recently there’s been a kerfuffle over a list on Wikileaks purporting to be the ACMA website blacklist. The ACMA says that under Australian legislation it is required:

to take action if as a result of an investigation it locates content that is prohibited content or potential prohibited content. In the case of content that is hosted in or provided from Australia, ACMA must issue a take-down notice to the person hosting the content. ACMA has no power to direct the removal of

The Quebec Government yesterday introduced Bill 18 in the National Assembly.

Officially known as An Act respecting the Compilation of Québec Laws and Regulations, one of its effects would be to give official status to electronic versions of Quebec statutes.

Section 17 of the Bill reads:

“17. The laws published by the Québec Official Publisher on its website, including the Civil Code and the Act respecting the implementation of the Civil Code, are the laws of the compilation and have official status as of (insert the date of coming into force of this Act).”

“Within 24 months following that

The 7th edition of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (AKA The McGill Guide) will soon be coming out.

The editors of the Guide at the McGill Law Journal are asking for reader input about any changes to make the famous legal citation bible more user friendly.

They ask that people not forget to press “SUBMIT” at the end of the survey. . . . [more]

Just a quick note to say that I’ve tweaked the Pipes filtering that produces Canadian law-related stories for LawTop.

I found a way around the problem that many city newspapers used the city name, with the result that a simple filter couldn’t distinguish between stories about Winnipeg and stories that were simply reported in the Winnipeg Free Press. As well, a number of news sources use the dateline “Canada” when reporting about foreign event, which meant that too many stories from abroad were passing through the filter. The trick turned out to be regular expressions, that peculiar code that . . . [more]

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]

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]

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,

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]

The folks over at CERN, the home of the World Wide Web, are celebrating today. It was 20 years ago that Tim Berners-Lee came up with the idea. From info.cern.ch:

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is where it all began in March 1989. A physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, wrote a proposal for information management showing how information could be transferred easily over the Internet by using hypertext, the now familiar point-and-click system of navigating through information. The following year, Robert Cailliau, a systems engineer, joined in and soon became its number one advocate.

The idea was to connect

A tip of the hat to Gerry Blackwell at Canadian Lawyer magazine for his writings on technology. More specifically, in this month’s issue (unfortunately not available through a link) he discusses the progress that colleague Elizabeth Ellis has made at her firm with SharePoint 2007. Last month, he also managed to take my rambling comments and convert them into an article on knowledge-sharing.

I enjoy Gerry’s writing and he was very interested and approachable in discussing technology issues. To his credit, he balanced my comments on the use of technology with the importance of the “people” factor in knowedge sharing, . . . [more]

I have spent the last week deciding between whether to buy a netbook or a laptop.

A netbook was tempting for both the low price ($300 to $400 range) and as an experiment with Linux and OpenOffice (for some netbooks). However, a large number of online reviews pointed out the limitations of netbooks: smaller keyboard, not much memory, and sluggishness, especially those using Windows XP or Vista.

Ultimately, the advice from a colleague helped me decide in favour of a laptop. His advice? Is it for travel or is it for work? Since I wanted to use it for work, . . . [more]