An article in the recent Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), “Got data?: a guide to data preservation in the information age,” makes the case for urgent investment in data cyberinfrastructure — whatever is required to store, manage, catalog and access data.

(Note: that link won’t give you much joy unless you happen to subscribe to the ACM portal. Fortunately, the author, Francine Berman, who is Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, has put up on her website a version of the piece in PDF, “Surviving the Data Deluge.” Such is the . . . [more]

Twitter users have been abuzz over the Shorty Awards, The best producers of short (140 characters or less) content in 2008.

After a little bit of pestering there is now a law category.

There are some heavyweight “Tweeters” among Slaw readers and contributors, so I figured this would be of some interest. . . . [more]

for Counter-feiting, fa la la la la, la la la la. Interestingly enough there are not many catchy carols about the counterfeiting season. But as I was about the other day, I saw a sign at a particular business to mark the season, the sign was to the effect that the business would no longer be accepting 100 dollar bills. Which got me to thinking, can they do that? So I headed straight for the Currency Act, R.S.C. 1985, c.C-52 in order to figure it out. And what to my wondering eyes did appear? …. well, not the answer to . . . [more]

Shortcuts, those little things that make our tech-life easier, have been making headlines this week.

Here at Slaw, Dan Pinnington posted about his excellent article on essential technology skills. David Canton followed up with more shortcuts and some pet peeves that came to mind. Technolawyer offered up some iPhone shortcuts (Blackberry users can look here) and the Legal Writing Prof Blog mentiond Dan’s tips. My colleagues in the Field Law library learned and shared some useful shortcuts for our Microsoft Access database: Contrl ‘ (moves to the line above) and Control ; (pastes todays date).

I find . . . [more]

If you’re ever in danger of thinking that you’re a gadget freak who’s gone a phone too far, console and correct yourself by looking closely at Stephen Fry. This renaissance eccentric, one of my faves, is so deeply into the tech of it all that you’ll wonder how he finds any time at all for his acting, writing and film-making. His latest blog post, Gee, One Bold Storm coming up…, is a long, long lovely ramble about the stuff he’s taken with him to New York (it’s his desk you see above), where he is for the next few . . . [more]

Technology has become an essential part of practising law and working in a law office (or any office for that matter). My TechTips column from the Summer 2008 issue of LAWPRO Magazine summarizes what I think are the 10 essential technology skills and practices that every lawyer and law office staff person should be familiar with.

Do you know what Alt+Tab does? How about a right-click on your mouse? Do you know how to use Cut, Copy and Paste? How about Paste Special. The text format shortcuts will save you tons of time next time you have to type up . . . [more]

Forty years ago today, yes December 9, 1968, the first prototype mouse was unveiled in a presentation by Stanford Research Institute engineer Douglas Engelbart. Made of wood with only one button. The mouse is likely older than many of Slaw’s readers.

Here is a BBC clip telling the story, and a Wired tribute.

Another time entirely. This was life before long-distance direct telephone dialling, before the photocopier, and while Colin Tapper at Magdalen was talking about computers and the law, it was all considered data-processing or cybernetics.

Law School was much as it would have been fifty years earlier. . . . [more]

So far we at the LCO are being pretty basic about the technology we’re using. A standard (I guess now “traditional”) website that is okay as far as it goes, making RSS available, posting everything we write. But we need to do more. I’m planning to issue our family law project options “paper” in other than traditional form (shamed into it by Simon C. at a lunch with KM folks), maybe as a wiki.

I listened to a webcast (pretty basic in format, too, actually) of how to connect with the new media to get the organization’s message out there, . . . [more]

Last night I wrote about RSS and whether we need to do something simpler over on my Crosby Group business blog, Connection. It seems to have struck a nerve with a number of people since there is now a good discussion going on in the comments. An excerpt: . . . [more]

Amazing that our friends at Mozilla have released a beta version of Firefox in Esperanto. This on top of offering it in Occitan.

And since they’ve got Telegu, can Kannada be far behind? . . . [more]

Chilling reading about the threats to the integrity of global communications that President Elect Obama will shortly face.

It comes from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency. Its mandate was to develop recommendations for a comprehensive strategy to improve cybersecurity in federal systems and in critical infrastructure.

The report was released on December 8, 2008 on Capitol Hill. . . . [more]

The Canadian Bar Association recently published Guidelines for Practicing Ethically with New Information Technologies (the “Guidelines”) as a supplement to its Code of Professional Conduct.

While the Guidelines provide a considerable amount of information concerning the use of technology in a legal practice (even referring to certain software in its annexes), some lawyers may find themselves at a loss as to how to actually implement the guidelines in their practice. This essay identifies certain aspects of the Guidelines that are worthy of additional commentary and refers readers to (mostly free) tools which will prove useful in following the Guidelines. . . . [more]