Nicholas Negroponte’s plan to equip children in the the third world with cheap laptops is back in the news. The New York Times has a piece explaining a bit more about the equipment than we knew before: it’ll cost $150 now, not $100; it has no hard drive, uses flash memory, and so consumes very little energy; it lets you use only one program at a time; and it’s made in Taiwan. Critics are saying that the plan is naive or, worse, misguided, because it is unlikely that the children it is aimed at will in fact be able to . . . [more]

Precydent is the web page (URL typed in full at the bottom of the message) for a beta-site for what the developers claim is a better search engine algorithm.

There’s a study posted on the page in which the developers set out the results of tests comparing their engine to Westlaw and Lexis. According to their tests, their engine has a better “recall” value – recall expressing the number of previously identified and tagged significant decisions in the database which the various search engines produce when processing the same question.

The developers claim they’re bringing the ranking procedures that web . . . [more]

As part of a special issue on books, Forbes has an article on building custom libraries – not the buildings, but the collections. An interesting, if very light, little read. . . . [more]

Here’s your award Simon! [Robert, many of us at Slaw are big fans of Legaline. Hopefully you’ll see the humour in this :-) … ]

. . . [more]

It’s been raining cats, dogs and manatees here in Toronto, and it seems that much of the country is being visited by water in one form or another. Which gets me half way to this week’s Fillip. The other half is the grey that November (the Thursday of months) can and does for us here, at least, provide. So it’s time for something completely frivolous, plashy — and grey.

The game of battleship meets all these requirements. And there’s a wonderful site on the web, Battleships, General Quarters, replete with nifty sound effects and pics of desperately handsome sailors . . . [more]

Robert Ambrogi says the votes are in, and Slaw is the number one voted law blog!

Many thanks to everyone who participated. Those are some mighty fine comments!

And yes, we did ‘beat the bushes’, but this was the extent of our beating. Plus, the fact that this site gets 60k unique visitors a month from all over the world, might have helped too. :-) . . . [more]

FYI I wanted to draw your attention to a N.B. case where a blogger was arrested and charged with obstructing justice while taking pictures of a protest that occurred last summer in Saint John, N.B. Last week the Judge in the case acquitted the blogger saying that he was “plying his trade” as a journalist at the time of the arrest. Link to story. It does not appear that the case has been made available through the various sources as of yet. Link to Blog in question.

On a different Blog matter, the following link is to a Blog (originally . . . [more]

Today is World AIDS Day. In Canada we mark World AIDS Day by making a donation to CANFAR and wearing the red ribbon symbolizing the fight against the spread of HIV and AIDS.

CANFAR donation page.

From the World AIDS Day Message by the World Health Organization’s Acting Director-General Dr Anders Nordström:

In August this year, at the XVI International AIDS Conference, 30 000 of us came together in Toronto in reply to the Conference’s call to action. That action, we agreed, must reflect a balanced mix of prevention, treatment and care. This year’s World AIDS Day theme

A project I’m working on has led me to three rather different websites in Africa.

The first is a blog from a law prof at the University of Western Cape. Pierre de Vos teaches constitutional law and blogs about it on constitutionally speaking, naturally enough. South Africa has a supreme Constitutional Court, created in 1994, that has the final word on matters relating to that country’s constitution. (You can see decisions from that court here, and the constitution itself, which dates from 1996, here. There’s a very helpful site that explains the South African court setup.) As . . . [more]

The N.Y.U. Journal of International Law and Politics is very pleased to announce the publication of the 1st edition of of its Guide to Foreign and International Legal Citation (296 pages, PDF).

With a nod to Sabrina Pacifici at beSpacific.

Since I posted this, I see that Michel-Adrien Sheppard has also posted about this on his Library Boy Blog and he has provided some comments. . . . [more]

LibWorm is a search engine that allows you to search the RSS feeds of over 1,000 library related blogs. It collects updates from the feeds, the contents of these feeds are then available for you to search, and your search results can themselves be output as an RSS feed that you can subscribe to either in your favorite aggregator or in LibWorm’s built-in aggregator. It also allows you to browse feeds by feed category (each feed searched by LibWorm is assigned a category) or by subject (pre-built searches for common subjects relevant to libraries). To submit your own feed to . . . [more]

The Federation of American Scientists has made available on its website a report by the Congressional Research Service entitled Televising Supreme Court and Other Federal Court Proceedings: Legislation and Issues (updated November 8, 2006).

“The Supreme Court has never allowed live electronic media coverage of its proceedings, but the Court posts opinions and transcripts of oral arguments on its website. The public has access to audiotapes of the oral arguments and opinions that the Court gives to the National Archives and Records Administration. Currently, Rule 53 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure prohibits the photographing or broadcasting of judicial