Students from the University of Ottawa have just launched a labour and employment law blawg. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this new project develops – congratulations to the Employment and Labour Law Student’s Society Blog.

Hat tip to Michael Fitzgibbon at Thoughts from a Management Lawyer . . . [more]

Google Labs has created GAUDI, Google Audio Indexing, a technology that “uses speech technology to find spoken words inside videos and lets the user jump to the right portion of the video.” At this stage it seems that they’re only indexing speeches by politicians, but the interesting thing is that Canadian politicians are among the bunch (no separation of Birch and States?) as you can see from this graphic of Jack Layton talking of “health.”

Try running a search for “harper” and enjoy the results.

Given that law is a verbal profession, this technology has the capacity to be . . . [more]

I’m always amazed at what people don’t eat — or do eat. It’s fun to introduce your kids’ friends to artichokes, and mango — and even in one case lamb! It’s even more fun to find a food that’s new to you, something that can happen a fair bit if you live in a big city in this great immigrant country of ours.

Here’s a list of 100 eatables that “everyone should sample” — the Omnivore’s Hundred, according to Jill and Andrew of Very Good Taste — and the task is to tick off all of the items you’ve . . . [more]

A jury in the UK has decided that the threat of global warming justifies breaking the law.

Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a “lawful excuse” to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of “lawful excuse” under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire.

This interesting tibit came across my screen from Russ Brown’s post on the University of . . . [more]

♫ If you’ve got a plan
If you’ve got a master plan
Got to vote for you
Hey hey, got to vote for you
‘Cause you’re the man… ♫

Words and music by: Marvin Gaye and Kenneth Stover.

The fall election – in both Canada and the USA – is taking place at a particularly interesting time. Courtesy of blogs, the public are making their voices heard to a degree that has not been possible in the past. Access to the media was not particularly easy in the past, but by virtue of the Internet, that no longer matters . . . [more]

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has nominated Nova Scotia Court of Appeal judge Thomas Cromwell to sit on the Supreme Court of Canada.

If appointed, he will fill the seat left vacant when Michel Bastarache retired earlier this year.

Justice Cromwell has worked at the Court before. He was the executive legal officer to former Supreme Court chief justice Antonio Lamer.

And I have heard that he loves law libraries. . . . [more]

Got the time? Who’s got time anymore. Time was… My best time ever.

Oh, and billable time.

Slaves to the clock and the watch (and now the cell phone), we need to know the time. So this week’s fillip is a Slaw Six, offering up half a dozen somewhat amusing ways to know when your time is coming… now… up… and gone.

1. The broad strokes first: you’ve got to know what day it is before that fact that it’s twenty to nine can have any real impact. To help you out in that regard let’s make use of the “

It’s probably just serendipity, but there seems to be quite a lot of recent writing on the future of journalism in a Web 2.0 world. Christie Blatchford’s August 21 Globe article was the first in a series of “whence journalism”-ish reading I’ve stumbled upon lately.

Sarah Kellogg writes in the September issue of DC Bar that the mainstream media is reducing its coverage of court proceedings, seemingly surrendering the field to non-professionals. The article, Legal Journalism at a Crossroads is thought-provoking, and I encourage you to have a look. I don’t agree with her that blawgers are less qualified to . . . [more]

In one of those ostensibly annoying but secretly pleasing pyramid thingies that spread throughout the web, I’ve been tagged by Jordan Furlong, editor, blogger and sometime Slawyer, to post (under the title “5 Blogs & 5 Blawgers”) about five non-law blogs I like and then ponzi up five blawgers and tag them. Here we go:

1. things magazine
   “…an online journal about objects and meanings” from England, and for me a constant source of amazement. For one thing, there might be as many as 50 links in a post, sometimes clustered around an idea, but often simply sparking off

The Google Chrome browser release has generated a lot of media attention, specificlly about the end user licence agreement, here and here and here and here on SLAW.

This article from the Register is interesting. The most interesting part is that in our Beta world, negative comments on usually stable things like license agreements are changeable, as changeable as a beta release of a new browser.

Good job Google for responding to criticism quickly. . . . [more]

In Canada we celebrate Labour Day on the first Monday of September. Most of us treat it as the last long weekend of the summer, before the kids go back to school. We tend to forget the origins of this day. According to Wikipedia:

The origins of Labour Day in Canada can be traced back to April 14, 1872 when a parade was staged in support of the Toronto Typographical Union’s strike for a 58-hour work-week.[2] The Toronto Trades Assembly (TTA) called its 27 unions to demonstrate in support of the Typographical Union who had been on strike since

Labour Day Weekend. See you Tuesday. photo: unfurled / flickr . . . [more]