Leaving aside the difference between sensitivity and specificity: if people know the machine is sometimes wrong, it’s not so bad.  Things get scary when the machine is 99% or 99.9% accurate, and you’re caught on the wrong end of a presumption. I’ve often wondered, for example, how many people get picked up on warrants for […]

I find that, particularly with geek stuff, I get hung up on tiny little details.  For example, I did a deep dive with Javascript and CSS the other week, trying to find out why I couldn’t get an input field to select all the text inside when I clicked on it.  This ties back to […]

For (I think) the first time on this blog, I’ve made a post password-protected.  I don’t really want to make that a regular habit, but the subject matter is sufficiently nuanced and potentially controversial that I wanted to let a few trusted folks review it before I made my position globally visible. Fundamentally, this issue […]

You’ve probably seen something like this in a book at one point or another.  This seemingly contradictory statement is there for a good reason: it’s there to prove that the printing process worked, and that the customer isn’t getting a botched print job. Books are composed of signatures: one large sheet folded to compose several […]

More and more, lawyers are going to have to deal with digital data. I have three text dumps to deal with at the moment: two from Android devices, and one from a Windows phone. I have five figures worth of messages and wound up with four figures of responsive messages to be provided to opposing […]

I think it’s basically a trope that lawyers have some of their own language.  There’s a tendency toward double negatives- “I don’t disagree with you” and the like- but there are some ways in which the general language would benefit from upgrades. Vernacular Lawyer My bad. Mea Culpa. You’re a pain. You’re quarrelsome. This sucks. […]

I’ve long been critical of the Affordable Care Act as well as proposals from the GOP.  They simply do very little to address the fundamental reasons for high cost.  However, Karl Denninger has made a nice stab of something close to what I could agree with.  I’ve long held that part of any solution is […]

Practice management is like doing taxes: it’s not something most people take any particular enjoyment in, but you have to stay organized and on top of things. I have high, but I think reasonable, expectations for services. They are: 0. Honesty. 1. Don’t lose data. 2. Make it easy for me to save my own […]

Respect the audience.  Treat them like adults.  This means, among other things, assuming they know how to take appropriate notes and that they don’t need a “guiding voice” in order to figure out your message. Make your message comprehensible.  This means having a central thesis and giving presenters useful guidance. Do not try to induce […]