We’ve discussed e-book readers and electronic paper several times on this blog. Amazon.com announced today the release of Kindle, its own e-book reader, or wireless portable reading device, as it calls it. It retails for US $399 and thus far ships only in the US and is not available on amazon.ca or amazon.co.uk. It is a standalone product, in that content does not need to be loaded via a computer or other external device; a purchased book is delivered wirelessly to the reader in about a minute, according to Amazon. It is said to hold 200 titles and weigh about . . . [more]

Lately there’s been a lot of talk on the internet (a circulating “meme,” as some would have it) that email is doomed if not already dead. As Mark Twain said after reading his own obituary, the report of this death has been greatly exaggerated. Ask any lawyer or librarian contemplating the Outlook inbox. A gentle exploration of the issue in Slate (“The death of e-mail” by Chad Lore) points to some important facts that we have raised many times here on Slaw, though never with the narrow conclusion that email is fatally ill.

Essentially, the article looks . . . [more]

David Maister is one of the top business experts, specializing in professional service firms (including law firms). He is known for his bestselling books including Managing the Professional Service Firm, his blog and his podcasts.

So, it was exciting when he showed up last month at PodCamp Boston to talk about his career and answer questions from the group of podcasters and other new media types who crammed into a small room to see him.

Mitch Joel, President of Montreal-based marketing firm Twist Image, took the opportunity to interview David Maister. He shared that interview in . . . [more]

Time is at a premium. The pressures of the billable hour and the stress of meeting client needs and expectations are reaching an all time high. With all the developments in communication technology the boundaries between our home and work environments have eroded. We can now be reached by cell phone and email anywhere in the world and at anytime. Setting and respecting our boundaries is more difficult then ever. No is today’s biggest challenge.

So what’s a legal professional to do?

Look no further for your answer than The Power of a Positive No by William Ury. Ury is . . . [more]

I came across a story, “London’s most wanted” by Ed Gottsman, posted yesterday on ZDNet‘s Between the Lines, one of the blogs I follow. It had to do with a report detailing the ineffectiveness of London’s 10,000 official CCTV cameras in solving crimes. I thought that this might interest some Slaw readers, but that it wasn’t so squarely up our alley (can that be right?) that it merited an entry, so I was simply going to post a link in the Slaw Linkblog to the report that gave rise to this article .

The ZDNet piece . . . [more]

Manitoba lawyer Donna Seale has been blogging since the end of August but somehow we missed that fact. But now we’re on it: her blog is Human Rights in the Workplace. Says Seale, a former Manager of Investigation & Mediation at the Manitoba Human Rights Commission who now has her own consulting business:

My intention in starting this blog is to use my knowledge and experience to help employers, employees, managers, supervisors, human resource specialists and union representatives understand the ins and outs of Canadian human rights law as it relates to the workplace.

Of course, there is an . . . [more]

This is not hard research or hard law, but it touches on each and it is interesting. It is Democracy 250. In short, a site intended to commemorate 250 years of Parliamentary Democracy in Nova Scotia.

One of the more interesting parts of the site is the Historical Timeline and Learning Resources which include digital copies of original acts, treaties etc drawn from archival collections. Such as the 1758 Act, Relating to the Duties of Import on Rum and other Distilled Liquors. In the timeline one can pick a year and see the documents associated with it.

….in . . . [more]

A Slaw Six – Tech⁶

1. Machinist – Salon’s tech blog. Tagline “Inside tech: Gizmos, people and big ideas” RSS.

2. “Earth-rise” – video of the Earth rising above the moon’s horizon, an astonishing film taken by JAXA‘s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s) moon explorer KAGUYA. More HD shots of the moon and the distant home planet.

3. Strange and Sci-Fi Sounds – from thefreesoundproject. I’m partial to Sirens of Amygdala.wav.

4. typographical music video– a video titled “The Child” that shows a virtual world created only with animated typographics.

5. Start – . . . [more]

This Ottawa Citizen article on the appointment of Kevin Whitaker to review the Ontario ban on unionization of part-time College workers went out on the CAUT Contract Academic Staff wire today.

The past decade has seen great strides in unionization of part-time (aka Sessional or Contract Academic Staff) university teachers. While some full-time faculty associations have acquired rights for these additional units, many are organized by national unions such as CUPE (which tend to hold rights for Teaching Assistant units as well). The article indicates that the “newly formed Organization of Part-time and Sessional Employees of the Colleges of Applied . . . [more]

An article today in the Times Online provides quite a library friendly overview of many book digitisation projects underway. It also makes me realise I’ve been here too long, because I can understand why we have such a reader un-friendly non- lending rule here – only at the Bodleian libraries, not the majority of Oxford libraries, I hasten to add. The idea was/is that you can come from anywhere at any time, and the book you want should be available for consultation somehwere on the premises. It’s possibly a result of not allowing books to be borrowed that there is . . . [more]

Public Security Minister Stockwell Day told the federal Parliament today that he is ordering a review relating to the use of Tasers, weapons that paralyze subjects by administering shocks of 50,000 volts.

Day’s announcement came after eyewitness video was released that shows police at Vancouver International Airport using a Taser stun gun more than once last month against Robert Dziekanski, an unarmed Polish immigrant.

Dziekanski, who had never been on an airplane before and who didn’t understand a word of English, had flown to Canada to live with his mother in Kamloops, British Columbia. He had spent more than 10 . . . [more]

This from CBC News:

A publisher in Michigan has halted plans to release a Harry Potter encyclopedia after author J.K. Rowling launched a lawsuit.

Roger Rapoport of RDR Books, located in Muskegon, Mich., said he has stopped publication of the guide to Potter lexicon until a judge in New York City rules whether the work is a violation of Rowling’s intellectual property rights.

The suit was evidently filed some weeks ago. The book is an outgrowth of a prior blog, The Harry Potter Lexicon, which appears to have been running unmolested for some seven years. Plaintiffs are quoted . . . [more]