Slaw Linkblog

Is anything about legal research pleasurable?

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:54 GMT

Jason Wilson wonders about design and brand.

Canadian Privacy Law Blog: Privacy Commissioner of Canada releases annual report on public sector privacy law

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:05 GMT

Why Supermom is leaving the firm - The Globe and Mail

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:03 GMT

Many female lawyers have been leaving big law firms to seek jobs with mid-size firms, in-house legal departments or government agencies, seeking less punishing hours and more flexible workplaces. Others have been leaving the practice of law all together. It’s a problem the profession has been struggling with for years.

State of Air

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 12:08 GMT

[Image: Via China Digital Times].

China's leaders are "largely insulated" from the everyday air breathed in the country's notoriously polluted urban environments. "As it turns out," the New York Times reports, "the homes and offices of many top leaders are filtered by high-end devices, at least according to a Chinese company, the Broad Group, which has been promoting its air-purifying machines in advertisements that highlight their ubiquity in places where many officials work and live."

"Creating clean, healthy air for our national leaders is a blessing to the people," the Broad Group claims.

[Image: Via China Digital Times].

While it's neither shocking nor even particularly interesting to note that those who can afford it will install air purifiers in their homes and offices, the implication that the Chinese government—who are probably "purposely obscuring the extent of the nation’s air pollution," the Times suggests, and who already eat from their own separate, organic food supply—is in the process of atmospherically seceding from the rest of the nation is extraordinary.

I'm reminded of NBA star Gilbert Arenas, who, as reported here on a billion years ago, once "hired a company to reduce the oxygen content in his house" so that he could "train under high-altitude conditions similar to those in Colorado." The creation of a special atmosphere breathed only by Chinese officials could just as easily be achieved by way of architecture, framing all politburo meetings, all official residences, and all fortified state vehicles with plane-like airlocks and breathing masks. In what could be thought of as the architecturalization of Piney from Sons of Anarchy, a government-run space would always be known for its ornamental breathing apparatus—a prosthetic atmosphere—as if scuba-diving through the murk of everyday life around them.

[Image: An artificial meteorology hovers over China; via China Digital Times].

In a specifically spatial sense—that is, not political or ideological—it would seem that architects like Philippe Rahm are the future of Chinese architecture: designing for the control and manipulation of internal atmospheres, and evaluating the success or failure of a given space through such criteria as air pressure, humidity, and the thermal movement of air.

Or, to bring politics back into the argument, as historian David Gissen wrote several years ago in the Journal of Architectural Education, "Powerful spatial relationships emerge with the heating, cooling, and ventilation of space that connect urban spaces and other social aggregates in a complex social, political, and economic network. Understanding the complexity of these relationships requires reinterpreting the literature on environmental technological systems with literature drawn from urban geography and urban environmental studies."

Here, though, we clearly see the value of also adding literature on the politics of this atmospheric phenomenon—the spatial politics of governmentally regulated and maintained spaces of filtered air—as if, again, we might someday recognize a space of Chinese state sovereignty not through such things as armed security teams or surveillance cameras, but through the quality of the air being breathed there. In fact, the spatial relationship between governmentality and the atmosphere only becomes more extraordinary when we put this in the context of Chinese attempts at weather control during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Perhaps the future of state sovereignty, then, is no longer about the terrestrial control of territory—i.e. land—but about, in a very literal sense, who controls the air. The notion of air power takes on a whole new meaning here.In any case, I was also intrigued to learn this morning that you can follow Beijing's air on Twitter.

(Thanks to Nicola Twilley for the tip!)

Justice minister dismisses lawyers' sentencing resolution - Canada - CBC News

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 13:39 GMT

Canada's justice minister has shot down a resolution by the Canadian Bar Association on mandatory minimum sentencing.

GOP darling Newt Gingrich accused of Twitter fraud • The Register

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 07:40 GMT

How to get 1.3 million followers: buy them

Vancouver Sun - Feds muzzle scientist over salmon study

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 20:30 GMT

Science Library Pad: Borders closed to bits: no online Tour de France in Canada

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 10:07 GMT

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." -- Clay Shirky

World War II in Photos - Alan Taylor - In Focus - The Atlantic

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 07:24 GMT

This series of entries will last from June 19 until October 30, 2011, running every Sunday morning for 20 weeks. In these photo essays, I hope to explore the events of the war, the people involved at the front and back home, and the effects the war had on everyday lives.

Mind Control & the Internet by Sue Halpern | The New York Review of Books

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 09:26 GMT

"Among the many insidious consequences of this individualization is that by tailoring the information you receive to the algorithm’s perception of who you are, a perception that it constructs out of fifty-seven variables, Google directs you to material that is most likely to reinforce your own worldview, ideology, and assumptions."