I’ve posted here in the past about the way the Internet looks from South India. But that’s mainly been from the centres of Chennai, Coimbatore and Kottayam, which are fast catching up to Bangalore and Hyderabad,as hubs of high-tech. There is another, older India and the most interesting IT news out of India this weekend is how a rural portal may soon reach deep into India’s villages, — where almost 70 per cent of India lives — largely untouched by the IT and outsourcing booms.

Saksham, a public-private initiative is aimed at creating a self-sustaining kiosk modelA kiosk in . . . [more]

The Globe and Mail Technology pages have a story this morning on holographic data storage, which uses lasers to record vast amounts of data in a 3-D hologram. How vast?

1. Canada Revenue Agency: All about your tax return
2. Canada Revenue Agency: income tax myths
3. Canada Revenue Agency: Tax return filing due dates in 2006
4. Techtree (Mumbai): Google Gets Voice Search Patent
5. U.S. Patent Office: new Google patent
6. EFY Times: Speak Loud, If You Want To Search On Google!
7. Google Labs: Voice Search
8. Law-Dictionary.com: formedon in the remainder
9. Ameico
10. Junro
11. Cool Tools
12. Google Calendar
13. Matt Cutts: Review: Google Calendar
14. Google Calendar: keyboard shortcuts
15. The Canadian Forum on Civil Justice
16. CFCJ: Conference: Into the Future: the agenda for civil justice reform
17. W. Mills, “The Shape of the Universe: The Impact of Unpublish

. . . [more]

Ah, Spring! This weekend my thoughts turn to Easter chocolate, crocuses, and……

income tax!

Unlike our colleagues in the U.S., many of us have today and possibly even Monday free from the office. What better time to sort out all those papers, gather up the receipts, and file that claim?

And yet, still so many women continue to put their heads in the sand and claim that completing a simple income tax form is “too complicated”. They recruit fathers, husbands, brothers to help or even fill out their forms for them. They may think they are saving themselves a headache . . . [more]

Techtree in Mumbai is reporting today on a new Google patent for a voice interface for search engines.

This essentially means if and when the product is built, users will be able to phone an internet search query or say it aloud instead of typing it inAccording to Swapnil Bhartiya of EFY News Network, “You can have a demo of Google Voice Search on Google Labs, Google’s pre-beta-test site, for well over a year. Google Voice Search, still up on Google Labs, lets people call into Google by phone”.
Or in Patent Speak:

A system provides search results from

. . . [more]

The Friday Fillip arrives a little early today, but it’s a holiday weekend and there may not be much posting to cap. (This weekend is Easter, Passover, Baisakhi, and only one week off Mawlid al-Nabi, Mohammed’s birthday, and three weeks off the birthday of the Buddha.)

So all of this calendaring, lunar and solar, got me thinking of time.

Charlotte van der Waals has designed a marvelously simple 12-sided clock. The concept is brilliant: no numerals on the face; turn one facet uppermost depending on what city/locale you want to know the time in; the top is noon and midnight, . . . [more]

With all the buzz about Google Calendar, I skipped my coffee break to give it a spin not expecting to find it very useful given that I rely heavily on my Outlook calendar in conjunction with the rest of Outlook. Still, my only out-of-office access to my Outlook Calendar is through my PDA. I don’t yet know if Google Calendar will sync with my PDA.

What particularly appeals to me about Google Calendar even without testing it is the ability to share calendars in a collaborative way. Very 2.0.

I found Matt Cutts review of Google Calendar very helpful . . . [more]

The Canadian Forum on Civil Justice presents Into the Future: the agenda for civil justice reform, a conference to be held in Montreal April 30-May 2.

Thirteen expert sessions presented over 3 days will bring together the legal profession, the public and the most influential and respected leaders of Canadian civil justice reform!

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
Judges, lawyers, corporate counsel, litigants, court administrators, policy makers, mediators, academics, and the public.

WHAT WILL BE DISCUSSED?
-Civil justice system challenges and innovative solutions.
-Keynote speakers from Canada and abroad will provide expert advice on ways and means to make our civil . . . [more]

I spent some time up at the law school today and learned a new acronym — one new to me, at least: Snails.

It stand for “Students not actually in law school” and means to describe those insignificant others who hang about the halls and cafeterias drinking proto-lawyer coffee and generally scuffing up the court-like slate. Evidently Snails are allowed in the law library and will sometimes bother librarians with reference questions.

Nothing quite like a lawyer wannabe, is there? . . . [more]

Law.com has just reported that the U.S. Supreme Court “adopted a historic rule change that will allow lawyers to cite so-called unpublished opinions in federal courts starting next year”. Apparently, unpublished opinions represent 80 percent of cases decided in the federal appeals courts.

It seems to me that recent rulings of the courts (Canadian and American) may be the start of a re-evaluation of the legal research process. The Ontario Court decision discussed in the April 10 post “Computers Have All the Answers”.- looks as though it will be impetus for some lively debates amongst practicing lawyers (I think the . . . [more]

Cl1p.net — that’s a numeral 1 — is a means of transfering text or files (2 MB limit) between computers. To do that, you go to cl1p.net/anydirectorynameyoulike and follow your nose. So, for example, I entered http://www.cl1p.net/slaw and when the entry page came up I put in some text that you’ll find when you go there; you can copy it with a click of the “copy” button.

What I’m not clear about at the moment, because I don’t have another computer handy, is what the password I’ve entered will do. I imagine that despite the password you can still see . . . [more]

Windows Live Academic Search is available in beta. For us — and for most people — it will be “academic” (in the poorest sense of that word) for a while yet, because it’s only drawing on content in computer science, physics, electrical engineering, and “related subject areas.”

I gave it a try with “topic mapping” (not the phrase) and got 5,670 hits. (For some reason “legal research” produced 63 hits, most of which had no apparent relation to the announced subject areas.) When you hover over a hit, an abstract appears in a right-hand panel, though you can choose at . . . [more]