A nice story in today’s Australian by a philosopher, Cordelia Fine, on starts with how librarians can predict academic success.

Every year, with near-perfect accuracy, a librarian working in a university library would predict which third-year undergraduates would be awarded first-class degrees.

She didn’t know how their essays were rated, what grades they had under their belts, or how they scored on IQ tests. (All information many would say was essential to forecasting final results.)

All she knew was how often she had seen students in the department library: reading course notes, photocopying journals, borrowing books. And the

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Earlier in the year I wrote about my EV-DO PC card – which I still use as a way to stay in touch with the office and the world when traveling across Canada. I have not used it extensively in the US given current roaming rates — but I have used it in a pinch when I could not find a good WI-FI connection or anything else.

More recently, though, we had the opportunity to check out an EV-DO router companion product to the card. Picture this, you put your EV DO PC card into the router and create an . . . [more]

A major study released from Ottawa this morning surveys how Canadians’ use of the Internet is affecting the rest of their lives. It’s by Ben Veenhof who is with the Science, Innovation and Electronic Information Division at Statistics Canada.

One paper says that it has dispelled an urban myth which implied that internet users are normal people.

Among the findings:

Although the Internet potentially displaces time spent on traditional sources of information and entertainment, Internet users were avid consumers of other media.

In fact, heavy Internet users spent essentially the same time watching television as non-users and both heavy and

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Nancy Soonpaa writes:

According to the May 2006 issue of The Bar Examiner, the National Conference of Bar Examiners is looking at the need for and feasibility of testing legal research skills and “is at the first stage in allowing the idea of such an evaluation to germinate . . . our inquiry is expected to last through the next year.”

The article indicates that the NCBE folks are working with academic law librarians to investigate the possibilities.

Found at the Legal Writing Prof Blog.

How do Canadian and American bar exams compare in their testing of legal . . . [more]

The good people over at Free Government Information consulted members on the govdoc-l listserv on what they thought were the best government document titles they had come across. Many of the selections come with cover photos (the photos are from the Web2.0 application Flickr)

Among the picks:

• Everything you always wanted to know about shipping high-level nuclear wastes
• Index of blank forms
• Know your 8-inch Howitzer
• National Money Laundering Strategy
• A winning combination: wild horses and prison inmates

The list includes a Canadian document entitled “Who Are the Zombie Masters and What Do They Want?” (a document about health user . . . [more]

This may be too prosaic a question for slaw, and perhaps replying to me privately would be better (mlines@law.ualberta.ca)… but can anyone recommend a good hosting service? I know there are some exceptional offers out there… . . . [more]

On 15 May 2006 the General Council decided to make public all official documents issued under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Many of these documents did not exist electronically, and have been scanned to create a digital archive. This is a work in progress — cataloguing is not completed, and refinements to structure and help files will be added at a later date.

A few thoughts as the month clicks over and we start counting down to September and the return of our students – something I’m looking forward to even though it doesn’t look likely that I will finish everything I had intended to do over the summer.

Simon Chester posted recently about the use of laptop computers in class and the ongoing debate over that, with some professors not allowing it. I think that’s a transitional thing and its inevitable that such attempts to hold back the tide will be overwhelmed before long. Nearly every student at this law school (Osgoode . . . [more]

I’ve just come across TechEssenceNote the dot info suffix, in case you try to recall the address and dot com doesn’t do it for you, Roy Tennant‘s cooperative weblog on library technology. It may be that everyone but me knows about it, but because we haven’t mentioned it on Slaw, I thought I’d post about it.

It seems to be the right place for librarians to go for a straightforward understandable discussion of a whole range of technologies from Ajax through RSS, and FRBR (whatever that is), all the way to Unicode. And there are good posts as . . . [more]

One of our lawyers alerted us to www.zoominfo.com – it describes itself modestly:

“the premier summarization search engine, delivers fresh, comprehensive information on over 31 million business professionals and 2 million companies across virtually every industry”.

Try checking out a few names – the results are quite amazing. Before you rely on the information, however, review the information retrieved for people you know well. When I decided to take a few minutes (rather than a few seconds) to review the results, I was still amazed, but also concerned. Information showed up on my search that seemed very questionable and probably . . . [more]

L’information date d’il y a quelques semaines déjà, mais le 06 juillet, a eut lieu, à New York, une réunion spéciale relative à la Convention des Nations Unies sur l’utilisation de communications électroniques dans les contrats internationaux (pour avoir le texte en anglais, ::cliquez ici::). Je me permets d’y revenir malgré tout car ce me semble être l’aboutissement (ou presque) d’une démarche qui a commencé aux alentours de … 1985. Si mes informations sont bonnes, John Gregory, nouveau slawer, est l’un des représentants canadiens à cette grande « messe » du droit du commerce électronique.

Le 06 juillet . . . [more]

This week’s fillip may be a little too much like work. If so, I apologize. I’ll spend the weekend working on being frivolous to see if I can improve things for next time.

The deal is that Which Canadian Supreme Court Justice Are You gives you opinion snippets for 10 SCC Charter decisions. Elect the snippet for each judgment that most closely matches your view of what’s correct or right, and Matthew Skala‘s device comes up with the name of the judge whose views most nearly mirror your own. As he himself acknowledges, the site is a little outdated . . . [more]