Last week, the Pew Research foundation released a survey results including this graph describing Americans’ changing opinions on gun control/gun rights.

Pew: "Fair and Balanced" is too much detail and not enough advocacy.

While the graph is certainly accurate and offers much data to the user, There are some things I just don’t like about it:

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Last week, the Federal Circuit left  the “25% rule of thumb ” for calculating infringement damages lying on the kitchen table when it declared this oft used, but little substantiated, theory to be “fundamentally flawed” and “inadmissible.” The ruling also places further restrictions on admissibility of  the entire market value of a product without a clear showing that the accused feature creates the basis for demand. This should come as a great relief to many defendants.

Here’s the full ruling from CAFC: Uniloc_v_MS

We received so many comments on our card this year, I thought we’d post it for your amusement:

COVER: Robe. Snuggie. What's the difference?

INSIDE: "I'd like to see counsel in my chambers."

For the record, that’s not a Snuggie. He is actually wearing a Slanket.

This rather unattractive and somewhat confusing graph was produced by the Senate Finance Committee during hearings held on January 11, 2011 and published in an article in The Atlantic that same day. According to the author of the article, the main idea of the graph was the flattening of the tax bracket structure:

Observation 1: The Flattening of the Tax Code. The individual income tax code has flattened out considerably in the last few decades. After the Reagan tax reforms ended in the late 1980s, President George H. W. Bush and President Clinton raised taxes in the Omnibus bills of 1991 and 1993 to fight back a possible deficit crisis. Twenty years later, we still have the lowest tax rates in modern history for middle and upper-middle class families making between $50,000 and $200,000.

BEFORE: This graph has several problems that need to be corrected.

Though the data shown do illustrate the flattening trend, in my opinion, the graph is too busy to effectively communicate this fundamental message. The effect of so many dashed lines is pure confusion. Before we fix this disaster, here is a brief list of criticisms:

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To create a well-designed PowerPoint presentation, you must begin with a good foundation – the background. PowerPoint 2011 for the Mac features no less than 57 design templates. A search on google.com for “powerpoint slide background” returns a kaleidoscopic 1,710,000 images. Are any of these backgrounds useful in designing a presentation to be used at trial before a judge and/or jury? The short answer is “no.” In the first ten pages of images returned in the search, I didn’t find one that I could recommend for use in trial. Nor can I recommend any of the built in templates supplied by Microsoft. Though better than previous releases, they are designed for use in other venues and for presentations with other goals.

1.7 million slide backgrounds and not one of them is right.

So, if none of these are right, what is right? What does a good template for court look like?

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Another video about change blindness, and how motion affects perception:

(Via The Awl)

“At first, the ring of dots is motionless and it’s easy to tell that the dots are changing color. When the ring begins to rotate, however, the dots suddenly appear to stop changing. The faster the ring moves, the less the colours appear to change. But in reality, they were changing the whole time, at the same rate. As the video shows, the illusion also works for brightness, shape and size.”

The Lesson: Move or change only one thing at a time on your slides or between any slide in a series of slides.

A jury in Austin, Texas, has awarded Richard Garriott $28 million in damages in his suit against his former company, NCsoft. Congratulations to Mr. Garriott and his attorneys at Fish & Richardson. Barnes & Roberts provided graphics and helped present the case in Judge Sparks’s courtroom in Austin.

Here is a piece by author Jonah Lehrer talking about how machines that seem less like machines and more like beings endears them to us.

These mistaken perceptions of agency can dramatically change our response to the machine. When we see the device as having a few human attributes, we start treating it like a human, and not like a tool. So here’s my advice for designers of mediocre gadgets: Give them voices. Give us an excuse to endow them with agency. Because once we see them as humanesque, and not just as another thing, we’re more likely to develop a fondness for their failings.

This is reminiscent of Jason’s argument in his ASTC article last year, where he suggests looking for ways to anthropomorphize in our presentations so that jurors will be drawn into what are sometimes very cold technical presentations. Which is not to say that we need an animated paperclip, or a talking grasshopper, to guide the jury through claim 15 of the patent. However, when appropriate, adding a subtle touch of humanness to our presentation can connect with the audience in a way that a simple diagram may not.

Errol Morris has the first part of an article up on the New York Times Opinionator page discussing “unknown unknowns,” beginning with the story of a bank robber who was too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber.

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight.  What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise.  The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest.  There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money.  Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving.  “But I wore the juice,” he said.  Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

More than just a hapless criminal story, Cornell professor David Dunning saw this as a tale of the limits of human intelligence and imagination, and began studying what became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, how our incompetence masks our ability to see our incompetence.

At the beginning of trial, the jury is full of known unknowns. Educating them about the law and our case is our first task. But what about the unknown unknowns, the backgrounds and preconceived ideas the jurors bring that will color the way they hear our arguments and reach their verdict? What about our own assumptions and ignorance?

(Via The Awl.)

Over on the Atlantic website, James Fallows points to a good use of Google Earth to help visualize the surface area of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Using this utility, you can map the spill onto any city to see how far reaching it is (The utility requires the Google Earth plugin). Here is the spill mapped to Dallas:

Fallows notes “the surprising power that different visual renderings of reality can have, in changing our ability to understand, or at least begin to envision, what is going on around us.”

Used properly, Google Earth can be an effective tool in litigation graphics— not only for capturing still images, but also for live presentations during trials. The ability to pan, tilt, rotate and zoom Google’s satellite maps makes presentations lively and engaging. In the right situation, Google Earth can go beyond what a traditional, static map might offer.