REWinn

Thursday, December 01, 2022

December 2022 Free CLE

Colleagues: here's your monthly calendar of free Continuing Legal Education webinars. Please share freely, and let me know if you learn of other free programs to share!

Saturday, November 26, 2022

Holiday Season Help for Our New Neighbors!

In this holiday season, take a moment to imagine you and your family must flee a war-torn country, such as Syria, Ukraine or Afghanistan. What happens next?

(tl;dr: provide help now!)

When you apply for asylum, that is a process that begins at the UN level. You go through an extensive application and screening process, then the UN finds a country to host your famly. If the US agrees to take you, there is further screening and extreme vetting which includes bio-metric and health scans, interviews by various US intelligence and security agencies, background checks and cross checks, more interviews, and then, possibly after a process of 18 – 24 months, you are told if you are accepted to come to the US or not.

To travel to the US, an agency contracted with the US government purchases airline tickets for your family on the basis that the money will be repaid to that agency – you sign a promissory note for whatever the cost of the tickets is. A family of 6 – 8 people whose tickets were about $1200 – $1400 each, saddles your family with a debt immediately upon arrival in the US.

The agency rents an apartment and may provide some assistance for about 3 months, then the families are expected to make it on their own. The adults are expected to find work right away, and the children begin attending school.

Most likely you will have arrived with only the contents of a suitcase, and must find everything else you and your family need to live. This is difficult.

My friends at SCM help to pick up where the resettlement agencies have left off, providing practical resources, some financial assistance, and activities. We have provided English lessons for the adults and Arabic grammar and writing for the children, information on navigating in the community, how to do things like ride public transportation, pay bills, and just get everyday things done that are different than what they did at home.

You and I and all of us can do something practical to help these, our newest neighbors, feel welcome in our community.

We set up Amazon Wish Lists of things they need that will be shipped directly to them, no middleman involved. Currently, all the families we are helping are in Spokane and have arrived within the last 2 months. Below are the links to the wish lists for each family. Why not go see if there are a few practical items you can have sent to them and show that we are a kind and welcoming people!

Wednesday, November 02, 2022

November 2022 Free CLE

Here is the Free CLE Calendar for November 2022, and spilling into December. Share this information freely, and let me know if you know of other free CLE so I can share it at http://4freeCLE.blogspot.com

November Free CLE

December Free CLE

December 1:
* Key Developments-Genomics in Mesothelioma Cases. By Perrin.
December 2:
* Bankruptcy Filings: Industries And Patterns. By LexisNexis.
December 6:
* Leveraging Technology to Prepare Briefs with Greater Efficiency and Accuracy. By LexisNexis.
December 7:
* Trends To Watch In Antitrust Law. By LexisNexis.
December 9:
* Technology And The Legal Practitioner: Ethical Concerns & Best Practices. By LexisNexis.
December 15:
* Expect the Unexpected: Disaster Planning and Recovery for Your Law Firm. By Smokeball.
December 16:
* M&A Year In Review: Utilizing Research Tools To Identify Trends In The Deal Market. By LexisNexis.
December 21:
* Washington County Law Library Monthly CLE. By WCLL.

Feel free to share this widely!

Wednesday, June 29, 2022

Paths and Reading The Manual

The complaint was raised on a Facebook Toastmasters group about a new member who was having trouble writing a icebreaker speech because they hadn't picked a path or read the icebreaker project information. Many or most commentators sympathized with the poster, but my response was - I think - a bit more thoughtful:

It seems to me that this conversation surfaced two issues.

One is the issue of picking a path before doing an icebreaker. To some people, including myself, this means making a commitment to something big without having had a sample taste, which to us is irrational.

I appreciate that there's a tool which is supposed to help you pick a path, but investing effort into the thoughtful use of the tool and confidence in the result requires confidence in the overall process, a confidence which for some people requires having a sample first.

Not everyone feels this way, but many do. It is an attitude towards life which is often based upon experience.

In contrast, the old CC manual promised basic competency in public speaking. You do not have to make a choice, you simply execute the program, during which you develop confidence in the competence of the Toastmasters method. At that point you are in a position to make a thoughful long-term commitment by picking another manual.

The second issue is that of reading the directions.

There are people in life who enjoy reading the whole manual before starting their car, and people in life who just want to go for a drive. Both attitudes have their advantages, and people with one such attitude drive the other crazy.

As I understand the attitude of people who believe in reading the manual, if you start on page first and go to page last, you will absorb all the information you need to tell you how to execute the project. You just have to have confidence that it is worth investing your time and doing all that reading, and retain all that information in your head at the end.

As I understand the people who just want to drive the car, investing all that time is a waste. Indexes and Tables of Contents exist for a reason: you can skip ahead to the important parts, and save the extraneous persiflage for later. Rather than memorize a lot of sentences in paragraphs that were written by someone else, you build up a structure of meaning in your brain based upon your understanding of the minimum content of the manual that you need to execute the project.

I have never succeeded in changing one kind of person to the other. It is probably not a good idea to try.

It might be helpful to understand one's own orientation in this regard, and develop a method for coaching a person with another orientation. One method might be to walk through the table of contents with the person that you are coaching, and help them to understand how to use the manual (or online educational resource, if you prefer) to achieve their goal.

Of course, first you have to understand their goal (not everyone wants to be world champion of public speaking or even to add letters after their name!) but that is another topic (well, maybe not; presumably their goal is related to their choice of path, but that takes us back to the first problem.)

Monday, June 20, 2022

Responding to a Creationist complaint about criticism

On Facebook, I wrote a brief response to an article by Dembski that promised to demolish a criticism of the book. I might need to reuse this content, so here it is:

Well, I read the article that this article links to, and it is pretty funny. Apparently, Mr. Dembski's Theory relies upon improbability and what he calls "specification".

Since he is talking in theoretical terms only at this point, and not with reference to the data, we can only interpret what he means by in probability in terms of the arguments from improbability commonly made by creationists or, as he calls it, believers in intelligent design. These arguments generally fail due to a number of fallacies. The most fundamental such fallacy is the assumption that because a particular thing that happens is highly improbable, it could not have happened by chance. For example, if you deal out 52 cards into four Bridge hands, that particular configuration of cards in that particular order in those particular for hands is improbable. And yet, somehow, people manage to play bridge. The fallacy is obvious.

His specification argument is basically an example of the lakebed fallacy. It will be observed that the water in every lake exactly matches the shape of the lake bed. Every lake!!! How could this be? It could not have happened by chance! Clearly lakes are intelligently designed!!!

Finally, this article is a good example of the snooze fallacy. The author evidently thinks that he throws enough words on a page, we will fall asleep and accept the validity of his argument. This frees him from having to actually make the argument; he can simply promise to make the argument at some point in the future if we can stay awake long enough for that future to occur.

This may enable him to sell a few more books or even draw salary from a creationist institution, so I applaud him for having a business model. It's got to be easier than doing stand-up comedy.

Sunday, June 19, 2022

Parking Strip Poppy

I did not expect much from planting the scrap of parking strip to the left of my drive, but once Brian and Melody converted their part to a nice garden, I felt inspired to follow suit ... in my own way.

I covered the grass in many layers of cardboard held down by the tree root Izzy had severed to put in the drive ... I figured it belonged in there somewhere ... and put down all the dirt I had. I put in a few random plants and a lot of leftover flower seed. Some of the plants did well, some poorly - I'm guessing maybe the sunflowers are pickier about their roots ... but these poppies are delightful!