Hello Folks!
Our lovely government is at it again apparently.
The current victim? The Maher Arar Commission website.
It’s nowhere to be found! It used to be here: http://www.ararcommission.ca but alas, in attempting to answer a reference question this morning, I find the website is gone. At least we still have: http://www.maherarar.ca, but can we say with certainty that all of the previous website’s contents are available there? I’d like to know whether the Commission’s contents have been captured by the National Library. Isn’t it legally obligated to be there? I certainly hope so. I wonder to whom we . . . [more]

Slaw readers may have seen the article in the Tuesday Globe and Mail pointing out that Toronto art dealer Lynda M. Shearer holds a trade mark in the phrases “painters eleven” and “painters 11” set to be registered today. The phrase, however spelled, has been used to describe the group of artists that included Harold Town and Jack Bush ever since it was formed in 1954. (The first Globe and Mail reference I could find was on February 13, 1954: “Abstract art claims major attention in the Toronto art scene this weekend, and a new group of abstractionists called Painters . . . [more]

Just a quick note to say that I’ve tweaked the Pipes filtering that produces Canadian law-related stories for LawTop.

I found a way around the problem that many city newspapers used the city name, with the result that a simple filter couldn’t distinguish between stories about Winnipeg and stories that were simply reported in the Winnipeg Free Press. As well, a number of news sources use the dateline “Canada” when reporting about foreign event, which meant that too many stories from abroad were passing through the filter. The trick turned out to be regular expressions, that peculiar code that . . . [more]

I wasn’t surprised to learn that the American Association of Publishers had sent a letter [PDF ] to then President-elect Obama in December opposing the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy, which requires any NIH-funded researchers to deposit a copy of what they have discovered and published in a publicly accessible archive. The AAP publishers association holds that the NIH Policy infringes on their business rights, insofar as it grants the public a right to this publicly funded work, and in support of their objections, Rep. John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, has reintroduced into Congress the questionably entitled . . . [more]

The big tech news yesterday was Apple’s preview of the new iPhone 3.0 software that is available now for developers, and this summer as a free upgrade for iPhone users.

The Apple mystique and reality distortion field continue despite Steve Jobs’ absence from the podium. There is no question that the iPhone sets the bar for smartphones, even though many of the new features announced yesterday are already available on other phones.

Details can be found on almost any tech site – but given Slaw’s audience, take a look at iPhone J.D.’s article entitled Why lawyers will love iPhone Software . . . [more]

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
may the rains fall soft upon your fields
and until we meet again,
may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

– traditional Gaelic blessing

Photo: by Connie Crosby, Kerry County, Ireland, September 2006 walk. . . . [more]

One of the many brilliant things that Google indexing has created is something known as the Web 1T 5-gram corpus made available for scholars via the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania.

Very roughly stated, as I understand it, n-grams have to do with the frequency with which one unit in a language is followed by another unit — e.g. how many times in a given body of text is the word “love” followed by the word “fifteen,” and what, then, is the predictability of this 2-gram occuring when “love” occurs. You can see how Google would . . . [more]

A cohort of law commissions or a covey? We’re not militarily inclined, but we are associates, so cohort kind of works. We are, alas, a small group, but would run of the risk of being thought of as “grouse” if we used “covey” – and this might be a misleading or incomplete connotation, since we are “constructive grousers”. I’ve decided on “cohort”.

From March 8th to 10th, the British Columbia Law Institute hosted a meeting of the Federation of Law Reform Agencies of Canada in Victoria (yes, it snowed there). FOLRAC is a loose cohort of law reform agencies . . . [more]

Music producers are finally fighting piracy the right way – through convenience.

The new free iPhone app, Shazam, recognizes songs and tells you where you can buy it from. It also provides information about the artists and the album, directs users to reviews, and gives you song lyrics.

The advantage with this is that it allows users to pick the song off television, radio, or movies, puts them directly in touch with valuable services, and seeks to commercialize off of it.

If these services prove to be more convenient than users having to search the web for all of . . . [more]

Slaw’s inability to count—it’s always two short of the number of daily posts—simply confirms for me every morning the need for us to avoid putting more eggs than we absolutely have to in the electronic basket. If one can’t trust Slaw to count, what folly it would be to trust any computer to do anything reliably. I shall hang on to my books until they are pried from my cold, dead hands. . . . [more]

In light of Ted Tjaden’s post about choosing between a netbook and a laptop, I thought readers might be interested in the “pocket yoga” from Lenovo. It came out of their Beijing (and New Zealand) design studios two years ago (!) but never made it into production. Today, someone published a host of photos of the nifty thing on Flickr, so a spokesperson from Lenovo talked with Design Matters about the project. Oh yeah: it’s a tablet, too.

This, I would buy:

. . . [more]

The Vendor Liaison Committee (VLC) of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (a committee of which I am a member), continues to put together practical information and useful tools. It is worth having a look at the full VLC page, but a couple of tools that law libraries may find useful:

• Librarian-Vendor Relation – Best Practices
  This is essentially a checklist for libraries to work through when they have a complaint with regard to a publisher or vendor. The focus is on staying factual and professional to maintain a good relationship with your vendors. It also addresses unresolved issues,