Open Medicine, the Canadian, open-access, peer-reviewed medical journal that launched two years ago as a consequence of some concerns about the independence of medical publishing, has pushed the boundaries yet again. They’ve placed a published article on a wiki and have invited readers to edit the piece in order to improve it. As their blog says simply:

This project explores the use of a wiki as an online collaborative tool for improving and updating peer-reviewed systematic reviews.

The article in question is “Asynchronous telehealth: a scoping review of analytic studies,” by Amol Deshpande, Shariq Khoja, Julio Lorca, Ann McKibbon, Carlos . . . [more]

There’s much practical advice in the British Computing Society and the Information Security Awareness Forum’s new publication Personal Data Guardianship Code released today.

If you don’t think there’s a need, a recent 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report from IT provider Verizon Business suggested that 285 million records were compromised in 2008.

Of course, the lawyers got to it: “This code is not intended to be legal advice and where the reader is unsure about any aspect of the Data Protection Act or other Acts and regulations they should seek legal advice or visit the Information Commissioner’s web site.”

The . . . [more]

Maybe it’s because of the Spring weather, but love was in the air this week. Even regulators were in sync.

The week started off with a study showing that married couples have more immunological diversity than random pairs, suggesting that opposites really do attract.

The Canadian government showed some love for tech companies this week too, with BDC committing $75 million to a new VC fund: the Tandem Expansion Fund, headed up by Charles Sirois and Brent Belzberg.

A love triangle with India’s Shantha Biotech at the centre turned to a more traditional M&A romance this week . . . [more]

Auto manufacturer General Motors has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New York this morning. It is expected the U.S. government will take 60% ownership and the Canadian government will take 12.5%. 17.5% will be owned by the UAW and bond holders will hold 10%.

By filing for bankruptcy protection, GM automatically loses its spot on the Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index. It is unclear yet whether Canadian plants will be closed.

According to Kent Kresa, GM Chairman:

Today marks a new beginning for General Motors. A court-supervised process and transfer of assets will enable a New

Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, went live last night. I haven’t had a chance to run any tests comparing it to Google, but a simple search or two suggests that it will likely produce comparable results.

I’m certainly pleased that it knows that a search for “slaw” should cause our site to rise to the top of the results pack:

If you hover your cursor over a search result, a graphic appears to the right, and hovering over that brings up a popup with text from a (recent? latest indexed?) sample page — but not necessarily, it would seem, . . . [more]

E-discovery can and often does raise important privacy questions for counsel and clients. The Sedona Canada Principles Addressing Electronic Discovery [PDF] identify privacy as one of the non-monetary costs that should be considered in applying the concept of proportionality (Principle 2). The Sedona Canada Principles also suggest that parties should agree to or seek court direction to protect privacy during e-discovery (Principle 9).

In light of a number of recent court decisions on e-discovery, counsel and clients must consider, inter alia, the scope of what should be produced in discovery (e.g. whether entire hard drives or other devices need . . . [more]

Liu Guijin, China’s special envoy to Darfur, is currently in Doha meeting with representatives from Britain, France, Russia, United States and the European Union in a 5-day conference on how to deal with the situation in western Sudan.

U.N. backed negotiations between the rebels and the government are also continuing in Doha, and the rebels have released government prisoners in a gesture of good faith. Meanwhile, the government is making advances in Darfur, capturing several towns.

But the key to these recent gains are that the main rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), indicated that they withdrew to . . . [more]

The Slaw Scavenger Hunt challenge Scavenger Hunt is complete – our prominent lawyer from Toronto has won, but a brand new contestant got the last 2 items.

The last two items were . . . [more]

A friend pointed me to what I think may be The Next Great Thing that may actually enable the dream of networked collaboration and communication. It’s Google Wave and it hasn’t left the labs yet. But if the video is any indication, it’s amazing:

It’s a long video (an hour and a quarter), but worth the watch.

We hear all the time about technology-enabled collaboration, but it seems more theory than reality. Until now (or whenever Wave is launched), it usually requires closed systems, hosted applications, hefty license fees or incompatible software. The Wave model puts e-mail, IM, editing, document . . . [more]

The Slaw Scavenger Hunt challenge Scavenger Hunt is down to a handful of items – our prominent lawyer from Toronto has an insuperable lead, but let’s see whether the last 2 items can be guessed.

I’ve amplified the big fat hairy hints we gave last week. The works are not so obscure that we couldn’t find lots of references to them. By the way, you can get there by skillful use of the Google search tools, and the resources of Canlii and its kin across the world. No need to spend money on the commercial databases on this project.

The . . . [more]

The desire of publicly-listed corporations to use current communications in fulfilling their duty to disclose material information about their activities can run into the technical limits of (some of) the new media.

There’s an article [PDF] by an American law firm on the topic – 8 pages in all.

An amusing example from the article: a corporate blogger was tweeting from a corporate phone conference, and was recalled to order about the limits to discussions of corporate earnings etc. So the next time it happened, he sent out FOUR separate tweets with disclaimers applicable to the same message! (One asks . . . [more]

The Law Library of Congress in Washington has put together a list of resources on Sonia Sotomayor, U.S. President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court.

The list is broken down into:

• articles/books by Sotomayor
• her U.S. Senate confirmation hearings at the lower levels of the U.S. federal bench (1992 and 1998)
• links to her jugdments
• profiles and analyses from other websites