At one point, many years ago now, my parents moved to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, a town distinguished by, among other things, being: the home of Mirro Aluminum; the western terminus of the Lake Michigan ferry; roughly equidistant from the Sheboygan Bratwurst Festival and the Green Bay Packers stadium; — and the landing place of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik IV, or a piece thereof, on September 6, 1962. Fortunately, the 20-pound piece of metal hit the middle of 8th Street, which happened to be unoccupied at the time. (See the graphic. Circle marks the spot.) Sensibly, the locals have built an . . . [more]

Pitch is important in music. Maybe that’s why the sound of the orchestra tuning up was George III’s favourite part of the concert. And while it’s fairly easy for musicians to come together over the oboe’s A, singers can’t “set it and forget it.” Vocal intonation is a version of eye-hand coordination, although in this case it’s the ear-larynx combo that’s key. Of course, there are those who have absolute (or “perfect”) pitch and can simply know which note is being played or sung with the same ease that you exhibit when you know without thought that you’re looking at . . . [more]

A short follow-up to a previous Slaw post on e- passports and privacy. Although there is no exact date, the Canadian government has announced that they will finally begin issuing the long awaited ePassports by the end of 2012.

The e-passport will now be valid for a period of 10 years and contain a data chip inside it that can be read electronically to provide border officials with the bearer’s information, holographic images and a hidden photo of the bearer that can only be viewed under ultraviolet light. Public ePassport readers will be installed in Passport Canada’s 34 . . . [more]

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal: more and more employers are using some form of pre-hiring assessment, such as personality tests. This is done in the hopes of better pinpointing candidates who will fit into the company’s culture. This article also clarifies that many companies do not rely solely on these tests; the test results can simply add another layer when evaluating a candidate with whom the employer has already met.

As this article states, honesty is the best policy when doing these assessments. Both the prospective employee and the employer will eventually lose out if the . . . [more]

This weekend I stopped by the Vegetarian Food Festival in Toronto to try out some new food products. The last thing I expected to see was a lawyer group. But there, prominently situated between food sample tables and advocacy groups was the Lawyers for Animal Welfare  booth.

University of Toronto law student Camille Labchuk and lawyer Nick Wright were staffing the booth, making members of the public aware of the group and a number of law-related animal welfare issues. I learned that Lawyers for Animal Welfare (LAW) is a registered charity dedicated to advancing public knowledge of animal practices and . . . [more]

I usually have an opinion on almost everything. Ten years ago I was working in an American military veteran hospital in Detroit, MI, and instantly saw a lot of things change.

But I’m keeping it to myself today to remember all of the lives, civilian and military, from September 11, 2011 and the military and social actions that followed it, such as:

• the 2,996 lives on September 11, 2011, including 24 Canadians
• an estimated 48, 644 lives in Afghanistan
• an estimated 1, 690, 903 lives in Iraq
• an estimated 3,000 people extraordinarily renditioned, including the Canadian Maher Arar
• an unknown

I remember when I was a kid there were a couple of things (at least) that could take me to the dizzying edge of imagination, where I’d stall in frustration and wonder.

One was lying in bed at night doing the expanding address thing: Simon Fodden, Walton Drive, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, the world, the universe… and? What was on the other side of the universe, beyond it? Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine.

The other was found in the barbershop — you remember those, don’t you? the smell of bay rum, the combs in the jar of blue . . . [more]

Symantec, the makers of Norton antivirus and anti-spyware software, released a report today containing a plethora of statistics on cybercrime.

As with any report containing statistics and poll results, we should take some of it with a grain of salt, but the stats make interesting reading. The report is set out in infographic style, so its easy to skim through it. It points out the types of online behaviour that tends to be the riskiest.

The most common – and most preventable – type of cybercrime is computer viruses.

After that comes online scams and phishing.

What is surprising is . . . [more]

As we often do here on Slaw, we’re drawing your attention to the current Google Doodle, in this case an animation to honour Queen’s marvelous Freddie Mercury (1946-1991), whose birthday is Monday, September 5. The screenshot below shows only one moment of a longish Flash movie that accompanies Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.”

Google tells us that it won’t be seen in the US until a day later, September 6, because of Labour Day. (Er… Canada too.) But that indignity to Freddie is no impediment: Check it out on the UK Google site for the next few hours at least: . . . [more]

For the last few days this video of two robots having a conversation has been making the rounds. It is fascinating, and hilarious. The Cornell Creative Machines Lab also has other fascinating videos of robots at work. There has not been much in the way of interesting comment on the video, but Kevin Kelly actually called the grad students involved to find out a little more. It is a pretty good take on the Turing Test. . . . [more]

As the great Oscar once wrote, “I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.” So here I am, passing upon advice, admittedly not quite the same thing. And let me say at the outset that since advice is something lawyers give, or, rather, sell, I find it good.

Of course, lawyers aren’t the only ones charging for advice (which, curiously, is rooted in the Latin for “seeing” — as in “the way in which a matter is looked at.” [OED]). Lucy famously charged a . . . [more]

Profiling the behaviour of air travellers to help identify potential terrorists has been news in the United States for several years now, but there has been little public discussion of the practice in Canada. Indeed, airport authorities haven’t included profiling among their security tools here, until last year when the federal government began developing a pilot “passenger-behaviour observation program” for Canadian Air Transport Security Authority officers.

Now that the pilot program has ended, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is making her position known. Jennifer Stoddart says she’s not convinced the technique will actually help . . . [more]