Some good news for a change

[eyeresist]

I was recently at an e-discovery conference and was astounded by how much faith people have in technology and how certain they are that e-discovery software will be the panacea against rising litigation costs. It isn't. The old adage still holds true: "garbage in - garbage out". You still have to tell the computer what to look for. If you are too broad or too narrow you either get a lot of extraneous crap or you miss what you're really looking for. As I said, I've been doing quality control, and the amount of garbage that comes out of some of these computerized searches is quite astounding. Maybe this will improve, but you still need humans to spot the errors. Secondly, a computer will only search for what you asked it to search for. A human can spot new issues that you hadn't thought of in the beginning.

I work in a medical library, and we've seen a drop-off in business due to people thinking they can find what they need on Google. Here's some news - they can't! They also don't have the experience to get the most out of the specialist databases, or the time to do a thorough search. it's kind of worrying that these are health professionals I'm talking about.

The new mortgage-backed securities became a hot investment property after both the Clinton administration and Republican Phil Gramm successfully pushed to deregulate derivatives, again with risk passed on through the GSEs and AIG.

And WHO was lobbying for this deregulation?....