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Between 2009 and 2020, Josh published more than 10,000 blog posts. Here, you can access his blog archives.

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911 Operator: “I can’t tell you that you can that [shoot a home-intruder] but you do what you have to do to protect your baby.”

January 4th, 2012

A single-mother, home alone with her baby, calls 9-11 to ask if she can shoot a home intruder.

McKinley told ABC News Oklahoma City affiliate KOCO that she quickly got her 12 gauge, went into her bedroom and got a pistol, put the bottle in the baby’s mouth and called 911.

“I’ve got two guns in my hand — is it okay to shoot him if he comes in this door?” the young mother asked the 911 dispatcher. “I’m here by myself with my infant baby, can I please get a dispatcher out here immediately?”

The 911 dispatcher confirmed with McKinley that the doors to her home were locked as she asked again if it was okay to shoot the intruder if he were to come through her door.

“I can’t tell you that you can do that but you do what you have to do to protect your baby,” the dispatcher told her. McKinley was on the phone with 911 for a total of 21 minutes.

When Martin kicked in the door and came after her with the knife, the teen mom shot and killed the 24-year-old. Police are calling the shooting justified.

“You’re allowed to shoot an unauthorized person that is in your home. The law provides you the remedy, and sanctions the use of deadly force,” Det. Dan Huff of the Blanchard police said.

Stewart soon turned himself in to police.

When seconds count, the police are minutes away.

If this happened in New York or Washington, the mother would be prosecuted as a murderer in possession of a firearm.

Vinny Talks About Going to Law School

January 4th, 2012

Go to 2:41

So Doctors operating on patients should not multitask

January 4th, 2012

I’m a big fan of multitasking. Really I am. But doctors administering drugs and operating on patients should not be checking text messages. Nope, nope nope.

From Bits:

That’s the harrowing conclusion of a recent case study published last month by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a federal agency, and written by the chief information officer at Harvard Medical School. It’s a nearly deadly example of “distracted doctoring,” an issue we wrote about last month. Here, in brief, is a tale of medical multitasking gone wrong:

Before the feeding-tube procedure, the doctors increased the patient’s dose of anticoagulation medicine to reduce his risk of stroke. After the procedure, the doctors held a meeting about the case. They decided the patient needed an echocardiogram, a heart image, to determine whether to continue the blood-thinning medication.

During the meeting, the attending doctor instructed the medical resident (a junior doctor) to order the anticoagulation treatment temporarily stopped. The resident began to enter that order into her phone using a computerized doctor order entry system. These are increasingly common systems that can be used on phones or tablets.

Before the resident could finish the order, her phone beeped with an incoming text. It was from a friend. She got lost in the text and failed to finish the order. The patient continued to get the blood thinner at the elevated dose he was getting before the feeding-tube procedure.

On the patient’s fourth day in the hospital, his heart raced and he was gulping for air. He was rushed into emergency open-heart surgery. Blood had filled the sack around the heart. He’d received too much blood thinner, but he survived.

Tabulaw

January 4th, 2012

Robert Ambrogi writes about a new legal research tool, Tabulaw.

From within the Tabulaw site, you can search for a court opinion. (It uses Google Scholar to find cases.) Once you find a case, as you read through it, you can highlight passages. The text you highlight is automatically saved, complete with its citation. The passages are saved in Quote Bundles to which you can assign names and descriptions.

Once you have done your research and you are ready to start writing, you can do that from within Tabulaw also. You can create and edit a new document in Tabulaw, upload one from your computer, or import one from Google Docs. It appears that Tabulaw uses Google Docs as its document-editing base.

As you write, your quotes are displayed in a panel to the right of the document. Simply click any quote to insert it in your document, complete with its full citation (including page citation). You can also click a button to return to the case and see the quote in context. Any documents you create in Tabulaw can be downloaded to Microsoft Word.

Tabulaw has fairly rudimentary collaboration features at this point. You can share your Quote Bundles with other Tabulaw users or send them by email. You cannot share documents directly from within Tabulaw, as far as I could see.

The TSA and Lox and Cream Cheese

January 3rd, 2012

This makes sense, right? You can bring a bagel with lox and cream cheese through security, but cream cheese by itself is banned. From Freakonomics:

My niece was back home in Milwaukee visiting family and stocked up on bagels, lox, and cream cheese to take home to Kentucky (forget for our purposes the madness of thinking that Milwaukee has a clue about bagels etc. – she is right – at least they have heard of them in contrast to KY).  Anyways, the wonderful folk at TSA said she could take the bagels on board and the lox, but the cream cheese was out! But being proud civil servants – an oxymoron if ever there was one — they agreed that it would be okay, and she could bring it on board, if the cream cheese was spread on the bagels. Please write this down for future reference.

Useful to know if I want to bring lox and cream cheese to Kentucky.