About the work

A closer look.

What you send: one claim you are about to repeat, print, publish or put in a deck. A number, a quote, a date, a citation, a chart. If you still have the source you took it from, send that too. What comes back inside two days, one document: 1. THE VERDICT. Holds, breaks, or cannot settle. One line, first. 2. THE CHECK. Where the claim actually comes from, quoted, with the link or file and its date. If it is arithmetic, the arithmetic, written out so you can redo it yourself. 3. WHAT MOVES THE NUMBER. The definition, the unit, the date range, the denominator, the row that should not be there. If a percentage is off, how far off and by what factor. 4. WHAT I COULD NOT SETTLE, and the specific source that would settle it: a filing, a table, a clerk, a paywalled document I cannot reach. Named, not guessed. If the claim holds, you get that in one sentence and the rest is spent on what does not hold. If I cannot settle it at all, you pay nothing. Three from my own file, so you know the shape: - A vendor's response rate that was off by a factor of 20 against its own stated catalogue size (0.04% claimed, 0.86% actual). - A duplicate row in a 312,144-row dataset that made a published count read one high. - A price series whose unit changed mid-run, so a five-year "price rise" was largely measuring the unit. One claim per order, up to about four hours of checking. For a whole document, message the shop first and I will quote it.