A cool job I have never heard of before

I recently met someone who has a cool job I'd never heard of before: he's a Mitigation Specialist. As he explained it, his job is to take detailed life history of a criminal in preparation for a criminal proceeding -- specifically which I didn't remember, so I Googled it. As it turns out, it's for capital cases; mitigation specialists come into play during the penalty phase of a capital trial.

One famous - or infamous - example where the role of mitigation specialist was critical was in the trial of  Zacarias Moussaoui.

The mitigation specialist is an investigator and historian rolled into one: he/she digs deep to uncover all the details, however unpleasant or disturbing, in the person's life that will be presented as mitigating evidence.

Whether or not one agrees with the idea, it's the law in the United States of America:

 

US Code Title 18 / Part II / Chapter 228 / § 3592

§ 3592. Mitigating and aggravating factors to be considered in determining whether a sentence of death is justified

(a) Mitigating Factors.— In determining whether a sentence of death is to be imposed on a defendant, the finder of fact shall consider any mitigating factor [...]*

 

I can only imagine how intense a job this must be, and I thoroughly appreciate the folks who do this for a living (thus my attributing the job as "cool"). But no, I am not contemplating a career change.

 

*brackets mine

Oakland's City Council Is Up To No Good -- YET AGAIN

The Oakland Animal Services shelter is one of the only "no questions asked" shelters in my area -- they take everyone, including owner surrenders.

As someone who's helping a friend re-home a cat, I can tell you that it's incredibly hard -- if not impossible -- to find any place that will take an owner surrender of an animal with a less-than-stellar temperament (uh - not uncommon in cats, by the way).

Because no one will take these unwanted pets is one of the contributing factors to the stray and abused animal population. And this is one of many reasons why having an Oakland Animal Services is critical for all of us -- bipedal and quadrupedal alike.

A friend of mine is a volunteer at OAS and the stories she tells about the work they do is incredible. Ever watch any of the "Animal Cops" shows? Yeah: it's like that, only in real life.

And now they want to outsource (in essence, privatize) the City shelter -- HUH?

For those of you who are locals, please read and write, email, or otherwise speak up about this and help Save Oakland's Shelter.

Agile-ity Training: Dog Training as an Iterative Process (Part Four)

Then the team does it all over again...

So I've now shown how training my dog not to jump meant that I first performed a little bit of requirements gathering and then I had to do a little bit of design, coding and testing along the way:

I did this by initially starting in very small increments of time (given my dog's short attention span) and then  mark and reward in order to encourage even longer stays (increased increments of time). As the stays became longer, I also added other actions, i.e., door knocking, rattling the door knob, etc.. Finally, I tested (or "proofed,") the sit/stay, first by using her favorite person inside the house and then moving the entire process to outdoor areas (dog parks, hiking trails, etc.), ever increasing both time and distance.

As I've mentioned, my dog has about a 98% success rate of not jumping on her favorite people. Actually, this number is probably statistically higher -- we'll say 99%.  Liffey jumping on her favorite folks is entirely random -- I haven't quite figured out what makes her "lose her mind for a minute" and forget her training.

Is it because the favorite people are accompanied by her favorite (dog) friends? Is it because x number of days have passed since we've seen these people? And, since she doesn't do this every time she sees her favorites - be they dog or human - then it's much more difficult to pin down a solution. Is it something I'm doing or not doing that's triggering her jump mechanism?

Thus, the requirement for this second iteration has slightly changed from the first to: no jumping; specifically, no jumping on anyone, ever.  

The difference in this new requirement is that her behavior is sporadic and has no particular pattern that's apparent to me. Or, as a QA tester might put it, "this bug isn't perfectly reproducible."  My response to this is:  but it isn't perfectly irreproducible, either; until we confirm one way or the other, it's still a valid, OPEN defect.

For now, I'll just consider this feature to be still in the re-design phase...