03/04 Is Two Different Dates: Parsing Ambiguity You Cannot See
An invoice date came through in a spreadsheet as 03/04/2026. That is March 4th, or April 3rd, and the value itself will never tell you which. Guess wrong and a payment looks a month early, or a month overdue, with no error anywhere.
Show People Clean Names, but Send Other Systems the Exact Values
Your contact form says "Referral". The CRM it feeds only accepts "Refferal", typo and all. Your visitors should never see that, and your form must still send it back letter for letter.
When the Catalog’s Own Labels Lie: Classify by the Title, Not the Shelf
A vendor filed a physics course under "Artificial Intelligence." Trust that label and your classifier inherits their filing decision instead of reading the actual subject.
The Deferred-Category Reserve: A Taxonomy That Grows With Your Catalog
Most taxonomies force a bad choice — include everything and bloat, or prune and lose subjects. A reserve is the third way: park a node, keep it whole, promote it when it's earned.
The Lean Category Tree: Why a Catalog Shouldn’t Mirror Academia
A browse tree is navigation, not an academic map. The nodes that earn a place are the ones where courses actually cluster — everything else is a dead end.