Status-Q

Quote of the day:

"A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street."

-- Doug Linder

It was only after marrying a lawyer that I realised something which had never before occurred to me: practising law can be very similar to programming computers.  

In both cases, you are trying to create a framework in which something can be achieved, while thinking of all the edge cases: all the ways it could go wrong; all the ways humans or other systems might be unpredictable, malicious or foolish, and catering for those situations as well as the ones you would normally expect to happen.

A good lawyer, like a good programmer, is someone who can expect the unexpected, and prepare for it.  A really good one can also make their plan both brief and readable.

And to any other software professionals who occasionally have to read tedious legal documents, I recommend thinking of them (and their creators) in this way, and you'll probably find them rather more interesting!

Here is a very nicely-constructed essay by Jane Bambauer, a Professor of Law at the University of Arizona.

"This essay", she says, "does the unthinkable -- it defends the police use of facial recognition technology to identify suspects in crime footage or to locate individuals with outstanding warrants."

It's a well-thought-out and very readable piece, and some of her key arguments are along the following lines:

• We currently have very harsh punishments for relatively minor crimes (especially in the USA). This high level of incarceration is not the best way to deal with the problems, especially since the success rates for rehabilitation are so low.

• We do this at present, though, because the crime detection rates are so low that it's important that the penalties are very high if they're to act as a disincentive.

• A much better and more progressive route is to detect much more crime and punish it less severely. This has been shown to be a much better disincentive, too. But technology is key to achieving any significant improvement in detection rates.

• Facial recognition technology is an important tool here and, though it has been shown to have problems with bias etc, it may actually be less biased than other forms of surveillance.

You may or may not agree with the above, but if you're interested, it's well worth reading the 9-page article before jumping to conclusions. (Many thanks to Charles Arthur for the link.)

So here's a related question: would our roads be safer if everyone was fined a small amount every time they broke the speed limit, rather than receiving a severe penalty on the rare occasions when they were caught? I think the answer is clearly 'yes'. Would you be willing to put up with having your speed monitored all the time in order for this to happen -- as long as everybody else had to do the same, of course?

We all know the courtroom drama, where the suspense is tangible as we wait for the jury's verdict. But should such things actually happen, asks Richard Dawkins in a New Statesman article?

Extract:

You cannot have it both ways. Either the verdict is beyond reasonable doubt, in which case there should be no suspense while the jury is out. Or there is real, nail-biting suspense, in which case you cannot claim that the case has been proved ""beyond reasonable doubt"".