Writings
Essays, technical papers, and public writeups on systems, data, security tooling, technology, and the human institutions around them.
This collection gathers work that benefits from a readable public home: short essays, technical papers, project writeups, and research notes. Some pieces began as coursework or editorial drafts; others will be written directly for this site. The shared aim is practical clarity: explain the idea, show the reasoning, cite the useful sources, and make the work easier to revisit later.
012 essays
Causal reasoning
What would have happened otherwise? Potential outcomes applied to measuring the importance of historical events, and to how much any president really moves the economy.
Measuring the History That Did Not Happen
Written May 28, 2026 · 5 min readA thought experiment about using potential outcomes to measure historical importance.
Causal reasoningHow much does the U.S. President really affect the economy? It's complicated.
Written April 29, 2026 · 6 min readWhy complex economic outcomes resist simple presidential credit-and-blame narratives.
022 essays
Civic technology and governance
Why machine learning in public service must leave authority with human operators, and a builder's view of the EU AI Act: ethics, regulatory risk and provenance.
AI in Government: Keep the Human in the Loop
Written March 20, 2026 · 3 min readWhy public-sector machine learning must keep authority within the purview of human operators.
Civic technology and governanceAn American Entrepreneur on The EU AI Act
Written January 7, 2026 · 4 min readA builder's perspective on professional ethics, regulatory risk, provenance, and moral responsibility.
032 essays
Care, labor, and institutions
Home-care robotics as an alternative to the nursing home, and the surveillance and digital ageism that threaten older people's right to age at home.
Care Robots and the End of the Nursing-Home Era
Written March 11, 2026 · 6 min readA case for home healthcare robotics as a force for safer care and renewed multigenerational homes.
Care, labor, and institutionsData Violence, Digital Ageism, and the Right to Age at Home
Written January 27, 2026 · 3 min readOn digital marginalization, surveillance, elder dignity, and restoring respect for senior Americans.
041 essay
Trust and autonomy
How dispositional, situational and learned trust shape whether people take up intelligent systems at all.
052 papers
Technical papers
The research behind Calamum Observer: a detection framework that screens harmful online activity from structural metadata alone, without keeping message text, and an ethical analysis of how research like it should be conducted when the environment under study is itself sensitive or dangerous.
Privacy-Preserving Malicious Activity Detection
Published April 15, 2026A privacy-preserving detection framework that screens harmful online activity from structural metadata alone, without retaining message text.
Technical paperBlind ML: An Ethical Analysis of Privacy-Preserving Threat Research
Published April 15, 2026An ethical analysis of how privacy-preserving threat research should be conducted when the environment under study contains sensitive or operationally dangerous activity.