headline of the day
Chinese female condoms too small for South Africans
Unlike Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Minority Report” or the film inspired by the novel, the program relies on algorithms, and not mutants to predict the likelihood of something happening
The police department in Santa Cruz has employed predictive algorithms to reduce burglaries and car break-ins.
The heart of the program is the belief that criminals often commit a second or third crime in the same location and the same time as a first successful crime. For example, if a burglar is successful breaking into a home at 2 p.m. in a certain neighborhood because no one is home, the criminal will use that experience to do it again to another house in the same neighborhood around the same time.
In the case of Santa Cruz, on California’s central coast and home to a University of California campus, that would be about four days later.
The algorithm knows this because Mohler has fed eight years of data on crimes in Santa Cruz into the algorithm.
Now you know, and I guess, so do the criminals.
He could have set the Guinness World Record for people who wanted to kill him
The story of Edgar Valdez, aka La Barbie, an American citizen who rose to the top of one of Mexico’s prominent drug cartels.
Like many Texans, Barbie grew up right across the border from Mexico, in the city of Laredo. The place feels like something from a Mexican postcard, with cobblestone plazas and picturesque waterfalls – except for the massive, multilane bridge to Mexico that cuts straight through town. Until the drug war, everyone in Laredo saw the two sides of the border as one; many families, after all, had blood ties in both Mexico and the States. As a kid, Barbie loved to visit Nuevo Laredo, a border town bustling with donkeys, food carts, girls in little embroidered dresses, shoeshine boys and the smell of roasting corn. It was like stepping into another world, and all you had to do was cross the bridge.
In high school, Barbie was in the popular crowd, horsing around in the breezeways outside of class and waging egg wars after school. On weekends, he went to keggers on ranches, played elaborate scavenger games and hung out with his steady sweetheart, Virginia Perez, a bubbly, blue-eyed blonde. He grew up in a middle-class development on the outskirts of Laredo, a kind of no man’s land where Burger Kings didn’t begin to sprout up until the Nineties. Even the people of Laredo considered it “Indian territory,” an area rife with dope and illegal immigrants. Barbie’s parents raised him and his five siblings in a tidy, orange-trimmed home with palm trees in the front. “They’re regular Ozzie and Harriets,” says Jose Baeza, a spokesman for the Laredo police department. “They’re business owners, PTA, morning-jog people.”
Here’s a link to the printer friendly version.
(via the browser)
Know Your Rights: Photographers
The ACLU has put together a guide of your current rights as a photographer. I say current, because some of the concepts are in flux, and some states have odd differentiations between photography and videography (in the latter, regulating the audio portion under statutes for wiretapping).
Previously, on clusterflock: It feels like someone posted something on photographers’ rights, or lack there of, recently. If that rings a bell, let me know in comments, and I’ll make the link.
coming out of sleep
Arrested for farting.
tweet of the day
headline of the day
Man Arrested for Having Sex With Inflatable Raft
‘more than 75 percent of DNA exonerations involved cases of eyewitness misidentification’
Stuart Rabner, the Chief Justice for the New Jersey Supreme Court, wrote an opinion suggesting the legal standards for admissibility of eyewitness evidence should be modified.
It may seem shocking just how unreliable your eyes can be. The ruling cites studies that showed eyewitnesses picking the wrong person out of a lineup as often as they picked the right one, along with another study showing that even when witnesses are told the person might not be in the lineup, they’ll choose an innocent person about a third of the time. The reason is that our memories may seem vivid, they’re often not as accurate as we think they are. While lineups are constructed of similar looking individuals precisely to force the witness to think strongly about what they remember, this may result in witnesses unconsciously conforming their memory to the available choices.
The most complex part of eyewitness misidentification, though, is the fact that people who wrongly identify someone are often really confident they’ve made the right choice — and that confidence is persuasive in court.
headline of the day, III
Jury rules in favor of doctor who cut off part of Kentucky man’s penis
quote out of context
The basis for rejection is flawed. Many high-profile structures would fit within the strangely contrived rule against invoking the imagery of phallus shaped buildings. One element of the mark that apparently offended the PTO was “the circular design at the base of the design and the shape of the design at the top. None of these elements are present in a traditional design of a tower or obelisk.” (Office Action at 2). One can only infer from the rejection that it is meant to imply that the “circular design at the base” represents testicles and the “shape of the design at the top” to represent the “dome” of the penis. It is important for the Examiner to keep in mind the aforementioned teachings of famed psychoanalysts – simply because a structure is phallic in nature, does not mean it is a penis. One may invoke the symbol of strength, the phallus, without it being a literal tallywhacker.
via Popehat
Dear ‘The Situation’, the situation is…
Abercrombie says a connection to The Situation goes against the “aspirational nature” of its brand and may be “distressing” to customers. The Ohio-based retailer says it has offered a “substantial payment” to Sorrentino and producers of the MTV show so he’ll wear something else.
The Somerton Beach Mystery (or the enigma of the “Unknown Man”)
Let’s start by sketching out the little that is known for certain. At 7 o’clock on the warm evening of Tuesday, November 30, 1948, jeweler John Bain Lyons and his wife went for a stroll on Somerton Beach, a seaside resort a few miles south of Adelaide. As they walked toward Glenelg, they noticed a smartly dressed man lying on the sand, his head propped against a sea wall. He was lolling about 20 yards from them, legs outstretched, feet crossed. As the couple watched, the man extended his right arm upward, then let it fall back to the ground. Lyons thought he might be making a drunken attempt to smoke a cigarette.
Half an hour later, another couple noticed the same man lying in the same position. Looking on him from above, the woman could see that he was immaculately dressed in a suit, with smart new shoes polished to a mirror shine—odd clothing for the beach. He was motionless, his left arm splayed out on the sand. The couple decided that he was simply asleep, his face surrounded by mosquitoes. “He must be dead to the world not to notice them,” the boyfriend joked.
The journalistic equivalent of The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World.
(via the browser)
tweet of the day
Ask a law librarian
Do y’all have The Hobbit?
more on the D.B. Cooper hijacking case
Since I posted the latest speculation in the D.B. Cooper hijacking case, a mother and daughter have come forward with what they say, and the FBI believes, is credible information about who Cooper really was.
Marla Cooper recently came forward to the FBI with evidence that she believes proves that her uncle Lynn Doyle Cooper is the famed D.B. Cooper, the man hijacked and threatened to blow up a commercial plane flying to Seattle in 1971, then parachuted to the ground with $200,000 in hand.
Her mother, Grace Hailey, told ABC News that she doesn’t remember much about that Thanksgiving in 1971 where her brother-in-law returned to the house in Sisters, Oregon, but she believes he could be the hijacker. Hailey’s statements are one reason why the FBI thinks the tip from Marla Cooper is credible.
“I’ve always had a gut feeling it was L.D.,” Hailey told ABC News. “I think it was more what I didn’t know is what made me suspicious than what I did know, because whenever the topic came up it immediately got cut off again.”
Update: Amanda posted on the case a year ago.
headline of the day, II
Swedish man caught trying to split atoms at home
headline of the day
Idaho police tell man to stop wearing bunny suit
quote out of context
The reason for Caan’s departure from the show is unconfirmed but it may have something to do with his attempt to buy a Pakistani flood victim’s baby for £725 while making a charity film.
Ask a law librarian
Homely old black woman, very drunk and very crazy: “Listen very carefully. I am on a secret mission for President Obama. I have a patent that will save the U.S. economy. I need to fax it to the Treasury Department. Can you give me a dollar to do that?”
Ask a law librarian
Man: “When you file for divorce do they check I.D?”
Librarian: “I don’t think the district clerk requires your driver’s license number on the petition, if that’s what you mean.”
Man: “Can somebody file for somebody else?”
Librarian: “Do you mean can you take the petitioner’s completed forms to the district clerk for them?”
Man: “No — I wanna file for my brother because I don’t like his wife.”
It Gets Even Worse
From a recent NYT editorial:
If you thought the do-it-yourself anti-immigrant schemes couldn’t get any more repellent, you were wrong. New laws in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina are following — and in some ways outdoing — Arizona’s attempt to engineer the mass expulsion of the undocumented, no matter the damage to the Constitution, public safety, local economies and immigrant families.
The laws vary in their details but share a common strategy: to make it impossible for people without papers to live without fear.
Who knew?
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday overturned a California law that would have fined retailers for selling violent video games to minors, and in the process said video games have the same protections under the First Amendment as books, movies and other forms of entertainment.
8-bit tribute out of context
Why You Should Watch Filth
I know I’m like a cheerleader for John Waters here on clusterflock, but I really do love the man and I love the way his mind works and what he says. This is one of a series.
I always wanted a brother, and I wish John Waters had been my big brother.
(Thanks to Juanito for tipping me to this.)
where to survive the apocalypse
Property values in a small French village are skyrocketing due to a belief it is the only place that will survive the 2012 apocalypse.
Bugarach, with a population of just 200, has long been considered magical, partly due to what locals claim is an “upside-down mountain” where the top layers of rock are older than the lower ones.
The Internet is awash with myths about the place — that the mountain is surrounded by a magnetic force, that it is the site of a concealed alien base, or even that it contains an underground access to another world.
And now many have seized on it as the ultimate refuge with Doomsday rapidly approaching.
