The ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security hosted a panel on Comparative Approaches to National Security moderated by Professor Harvey Rishikof, with Brigadier-General Blaise Cathcart from JAG, and Eneken Tikk of NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia. The panel looked at how different states have tried to resolve the tension of security and liberty in a variety of national security contexts, a topic recently covered by The Star.

Cathcart spoke on the virtue of the whole government approach of obtaining information, and Tikk recounted the challenge of the 2007 cyber attacks in . . . [more]

As a follow up to my post on J. E. McEneaney’s Web 3.0, Litbots, and TPWSGWTAU, here is an interesting and brief piece in Nature on what’s lacking in search engines. Turns out the author, a computer scientist at the U of Wash., thinks it is a machine capable of reading our sentences for meaning, not keywords.

There is a good summary of the article on the NYT blog.

As a side note, the fact that his academic homepage is in Comic Sans has new implications for me, after having read this epic defense in McSweeney’s. . . . [more]

One-term searches in Google will no longer offer a link to Google’s dictionary website. It’s been shut down.

The preferred behaviour is now to have users:

1. Conduct a single-term search;
2. Click on More search tools in the left-sidebar;
3. Click on Dictionary in the left-sidebar.

Or perhaps mildly quicker, include the word ‘definition‘ next to one’s search. The results returned will include a short dictionary entry, along with links to various online dictionary websites.

Some of the responses to this change can be found via the Google search forums. . . . [more]

A couple of years back, I took you to a place in Germany where they were making penguins fly. Today I’d like to take you back there again, because this time they’ve managed to make a herring gull fly. Big whoop, you say. Yes, except that the herring gull is a construct of foam and carbon fibre — and it flies by flapping its wings, something no other human construct has been able to do reliably.

The place is the Festo firm, and the gull is SmartBird:

This bionic technology-bearer, which is inspired by the herring gull, can start,

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/elephant-in-the-room.html

Reece v. Edmonton (City), 2011 ABCA 238

Substitute child for animal in the Alberta legislation involved (the Animal Protection Act, R.S.A. 2000, c. A-41) , call it the Child Protection Act, and assume everything else is effectively the same.

Would the majority have made the same decision and on the same grounds? If not, their analysis is wrong.

If they didn’t see that, they should have.

If they would have made the same decision, imagine the public screaming.

Given that, do you think the decision would still have been the same or would the majority have found . . . [more]

This is a reflection on the technologies we use to read and cite “the news”. For me, that involves both old news and breaking news. In any given week, I’m likely to read this “news” on websites (both open and closed), on newsprint, and on microfilm. I’ll listen to it on the radio and watch it on tv too. Yes, that’s all of the above. For reasons I’ll discuss below, I can’t predict that this complex, multimedia aspect of my reading life will be simplified anytime soon. I’m not advocating any such simplification either, though of course there are things . . . [more]

This is a post in a series to appear occasionally, setting out some articles that contributors at Slaw are reading and that you might find interesting. These tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom recently had to decide if a private commercial arbitration agreement could specify the religion of the arbitrator. The lower courts had gone in different directions. The trial court said that was not a problem. The Court of Appeal held that such a provision violated equality laws in the UK by requiring discrimination on the basis of religion.

In Jivraj v Hashwani [2011] UKSC 40, the Supreme Court said that arbitrators were not employees and the parties could properly (and enforceably) agree to prescribe their religion, nationality or other characteristics that would normally be . . . [more]

Let the speculation begin.

According to an article in The Hill Times, the process to choose the replacements for Supreme Court of Canada Justices Louise Charron and Justice Ian Binnie starts today.

Earlier this year, Charron and Binnie, both from Ontario, announced they were resigning from the Supreme Court.

As The Hill Times article explains:

MPs and human rights lawyers say they expect Prime Minister Stephen Harper will attempt to swing the pendulum of Supreme Court of Canada rulings toward the prevailing views of Conservative Party supporters as he fills the court’s two vacancies in a secretive and high-stakes

The US grants citizenship to anyone born within its jurisdiction, (as do Canada, Mexico and most South American countries). Recently, however, there’s been a growing debate about whether this practice is supported by the constitution and whether in any event it should be changed. A panel of immigration and constitutional law experts explored these issues this morning at the ABA meeting in Toronto. . . . [more]

[With special contribution by Jim Eckler]

In this article, I follow up on the statement made in my last column in which I said “I’d seek to bust the myth that what’s good for a vendor must be bad for a customer and vice versa.” In writing those words, what I had in mind was to explore a newly developing genre of outsourcing known as “Vested Outsourcing”^fn. To help with this undertaking, I’ve turned to the colleague who first introduced me to this outsourcing model – Jim Eckler, President of Eckler Associates and a leading expert in outsourcing . . . [more]

One of the first sessions at the ABA meeting had Tom Mighell and Nerino Petro, two legal tech experts, talking about using tablet computers in the practice of law. Essentially they took us through the competitors and their comparative advantages. 

(I must say one thing at the start: there was no wifi; there is no wifi at all at the ABA meeting. This is almost impossible to believe and very hard to understand today.)

Here’s how I understood what I heard.

Apple’s iPad is clearly in the lead. For one thing, Apple has an 18-month head start on the others, . . . [more]