The connection to our usual subject matter is tenuous, but in honour of the biggest day in this year’s US primary schedule, I thought I’d post a few links about the ongoing love-hate relationship the US has with electronic voting machines.

For now, I’ll avoid the conspiracy theories linking machine-maker Diebold to various groups and politicians. But there are many concerns about the technology. Here’s a few to look over while you wait for the results to start rolling in:

• Technology Review writes that the biggest concern is not security but useability – people aren’t sure whether their vote is

Statistics Canada’s annual report, Legal Aid in Canada: Resource and Caseload Statistics, 2006/2007, is now available online [PDF]. There’s a summary available on The Daily, too.

For those of you interested in the bottom line, the takeaway quote is:

Canada’s legal aid plans spent $659 million on delivering legal aid services in 2006/2007, or the equivalent of $20 for every Canadian.

This seems quite modest to me, given the sorts of amounts we spend on health and education.

Just over 11,000 lawyers, from both the private sector and legal aid plans, provided legal aid assistance in 2006/2007, a 9%

The snow and cold here means it’s holiday season in the great white north. For some of us, that means leaving our regular life behind. For others, that means keeping tabs on your everyday life – both work-related and domestic – from a distance. For those unfortunate ones in the second category, here’s a list of some of the online tools you can use to stay in touch.

Online Tools for Working Abroad

One fantastic idea on that list that I hadn’t seen before is called Earth Class Mail. For $10 a month you can have all your snail . . . [more]

If anyone not at LegalTech 2008 currently taking place in New York City is interested, Boston-based lawyer Doug Cornelius is blogging some of the sessions over in his KM Space blog.

For more LegalTech NYC 2008 blog posts, have a look at Legal Blog Watch. . . . [more]

Take a look at the fledgling blog law.librarians. Lacking an “about” page, it’s not entirely clear where it’s headed, but it would seem to be a legal librarian linkblog with some pretty familiar names as members. . . . [more]

This UN Environmental Program website links into the Maps and Graphics Library, and also into numerous other environment-related activities, reports, and other stuff. A highlight of the Library is Globalis, “An interactive world atlas with country statistics related to sustainable development.” Some maps detail specific problems, such as this one of Radioactive Waste in Taboshar, or the increased water levels in the Liard River:

. . . [more]

The American Bar Association’s Law Practice Management magazine, January/February 2008 issue focuses on marketing technology trends. Heavy emphasis on social networking tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook and podcasting. This is a selection from the full roster of articles:

Marketing Technology Trends
Today’s marketing arsenal features a vast array of tools—as well as technology practices that range from the truly cutting-edge to the archaic. Where does your firm fall on the scale? Here’s a look at some technologies that can really boost your business development efforts.
By John D. Bowers

Tracking Law Firm Marketing Technology
What are the technology needs of

Last week, the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Licensing and Accreditation task force delivered its Interim Report To Convocation [PDF] on the province’s bar admission scheme. I think it’s a groundbreaking report, brimming with indisputable facts and uncomfortable choices about the state of the current system and the urgent need to reform it. Other reports have come and gone, but I think this one will leave its mark.

The main report is 44 pages long, followed by an additional 152 pages spread out over 10 appendices. This is what the report, to summarize briefly, says:

1. The task force recommends

This morning I attended the town hall meeting for Toronto Tech Week. This event–or series of events–will be held September 22-26, 2008 this year, and will be based at the Toronto Metro Convention Centre. Last year was the first year for this event (it was held in May) and had 3,000 people in the technology industry attending over 20 events. This year the goal is to have about 48 events and attract at least 4,000 people. To read about more details regarding Toronto Tech Week and the town hall meeting, see the full discussion over at my blog here. . . . [more]

Thinking that the resource might be of some interest to our readers, I followed a link from an email list that promised the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Women’s Studies Section–Women’s History Sites [http://libraries.mit.edu/humanities/WomensStudies/history.html], with a section on Canada.

• That actually leads to an error message on MIT’s website, one annoying feature of which is that it wipes out the erring URL and replaces it with the totally unhelpful 404 URL. This means that as you attempt to reform the original URL, moving higher up the nested directories looking for a substantive hit, you have to paste the wrong

The Center for Media Research has released a study reporting that:

“User Generated Video (UGV) scored 22.4 billion views in 2007, up 70% over 2006.”

And are forecasting that number to rise another 52% in 2008:

“The market is forecast to grow at 52% in 2008, and reach 34 billion views, as indicated by straight line linear regression analysis of current market data.”

Hat tip to David Weinberger, who quips ‘That’s a lot of video‘. . . . [more]

My relationship with information technology has gone through at least three phases: 1) the PPP, or Poo-poo phase, 2) the OPP, or Obnoxious and pretentious phase, and 3) the GOWIP, or Getting on with it phase. In phase one, for example, I disparaged the then novel “word processors” by wondering whether we wouldn’t be facing “language spreaders” next. In phase two — which is the reason I mention all of this — I would say to those unfortunates who were in their own phase one that, yes indeedy, the old ways were the best and I’d be right along with . . . [more]