David Cheifetz and I consider that it would be a major contribution to both the English language and the profession if we had a collective noun for any or all of the groups that I have mentioned or, indeed, for any other group within the profession: a parade of judges, a snarl of litigators perhaps.
David and I (assisted by an impartial arbiter in the event of a tie) will choose the winning entries and offer the winners some unimaginably fabulous prizes.
There is a site, http://www.rinkworks.com/words/collective.shtml, where there is a longer (and more dubious) collection of collective nouns than . . . [more]

Statistics Canada has released a new Canadian Social Trends report: “Keeping up with the times: Canadians and their news media diet,” by Leslie-Anne Keown. Among those who “consume” news frequently, TV is the main source. (If you click on the images of the charts, you’ll see full-size versions.)

The money quote that will get picked up on has to do with the association of getting your news mainly from TV and political inactivity.

The level of political engagement Canadians report is also influenced by their frequency of news consumption and the choices they make from the media sources

This invitation comes from Erica Anderson, Research Librarian at the Legislative Library, Ontario. Readers and writers of Slaw are invited:

Since the launch of the newly designed Legislative Assembly of Ontario website, the design team has been receiving useful feedback about how the law librarian community (and others) use the Assembly’s content. The Team would like to invite Toronto Association of Law Libraries, the Special Libraries Association and other interested parties from the legal community to a user research session on the new Legislative Assembly of Ontario website.

Please come and tell us about how you use Assembly information, bills,

As the Web 2.0 thing plays itself out, spreading into all available niches much like Darwin’s finches, mindmapping online is getting the biz. I’m a confirmed FreeMind user — that free, cross-platform Java-based mind map that does pretty much all that I need when I want to construct a mostly hierarchical model of something, that I’ve talked about before — but there’s no harm in checking out the online competition.

Web Worker Daily has done a review of all four of the newbies, three of them (bubbl.us, Mindomo, MindMeister) together and then Kayuda by itself. . . . [more]

McGill Law School’s consistently interesting mind, former Dean Rod Macdonald was this morning honoured with the Canada’s Council’s richest award.

He has won a $100,000 Killam Prize, designed to honour distinguished Canadian scholars actively engaged in research in Canada in universities, hospitals, research or scientific institutes, or other similar institutions. These awards are designed to encourage continuing contributions to scholarly research in Canada.

He’s the first legal scholar to win since Harry Arthurs five years ago.

As the founding President of the Law Commission of Canada, he’s been known for his strong commitment to innovative legal research.

. . . [more]

The Legislative Assembly of Ontario (LAO) website design team is still taking in feedback about their redesigned website, as per the post here on Slaw from March 9, 2007.

Erica Anderson, President of the Toronto Association of Law Libraries and Research Librarian at the Legislative Library, Ontario, says: “The LAO web design team is interested in specific comments about how people use the LAO website for their work, specific reasons for wanting to change or add something is appreciated.”

Questions or comments about the web site can be addressed to assembly@ontla.ola.org.

The website is at this address: http://www.ontla.on.ca/web/home.do?locale=en. . . . [more]

lo-fi librarian in the U.K. reports that:

Parliament.uk now offers RSS feeds for a number of their pages, but they are strangely hidden. If you sign up for the email alerts that are offered on various sections of the site, e.g. Forthcoming business, then the first email you receive will be a confirmation that also offers the RSS option. You can add this to your chosen reader and then cancel the tiresome email alerts. Convenient and convoluted all at the same time.

…catches me on the hop today. So, something simple, something done automagically for me.

We deal in meaning, all of us Slawyers. So it’s sometimes just the thing to banish it from our lives, which is what The Eater of Meaning does. You feed it your website URL, tell it how much it may consume and wearing what sort of bib (so to speak), and out comes the kind of website that is perfectly suited to a Friday afternoon.

I fed it Slaw a while back and in the first go told it to eat whole words. The second time . . . [more]

This is hardly about law but I’m sure we can make a connection; however, it does have something to do with research and libraries:
George W. Bush’s Presidential Library: A Room of His Own – (2007) 382:8520 The Economist 58. Apparently Southern Methodist University has been selected as the site for George W. Bush’s Presidential Library; with some misgivings.

The process as detailed in Wikipedia: George W. Bush Presidential Library selection.

…. so many places I could take this… but I’m going to restrain myself. However, I wonder who can come up with the best crack in the . . . [more]

Michael Geist reports that MIT Libraries has cancelled a subscription to a product that required them to download and apply a DRM program. One professor pointed out that the publisher was adamant about protecting ‘its’ IP, but in fact the content of the database, like many in the legal world, consists of research produced at universities and handed over for free. . . . [more]

I had missed last week’s BBC Magazine which starts a Blog column based upon hand-drawn diagrams like this:

It’s described (somewhat pedestrianly) as

a neat analysis of modern life, all incorporated into that underused medium of index cards, the type of which one would have found in the pre-computer school library.

The original site is well worth finding.

Here is another image:

Whimsy for a Friday, even if it’s not the Fillip . . . [more]

Stanford University has started an interdisciplinary research program, Clean Slate Design for the Internet, that asks the beguilingly simple questions: “With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?”, and “How should the Internet look in 15 years?”

The whitpaper for the project [PDF] makes this statement in its introductory overview:

We believe that the current Internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure. Further, we believe the Internet’s shortcomings will not be resolved by