Crime in America

A few crime stories caught my eye on the weekend:

*  Anchorage, Alaska, with a population of about 300,000, has had 25 homicides this year, with 9 of them unsolved.  The unsolved ones seem to mostly be in parks and trails around the city.  

The article says that 25 was the total number of murders they had there in 2015, although going back to 1995, they had 29 in a year. 

Doesn't that seem high for a city of 300,000?    Looking at a story about Australia murder rates, yes it is:

According to the latest AIC figures, the homicide rate for the NT was 5.5 per 100,000 people. This is five times the national rate and almost four times the second highest state, Western Australia, which had a homicide rate of 1.4 per 100,000.

News.com.au examined 10 years of data from the institute’s National Homicide Monitoring Program and found the NT consistently had a higher rate for murder and manslaughter than anywhere else in Australia. In 2001-02, the NT’s rate was almost six times higher than the national average, 11.5 compared to 1.9. By 2011-12 it had improved significantly to 5.5, but was still higher than the rest of the country.

According to Matthew Willis, research officer from the AIC, the number of actual murders and manslaughters in the Northern Territory is far lower than bigger states such as NSW or Victoria, which both have larger populations. But when those numbers are calculated per (100,000) head of population, the statistics are staggering. Even when compared to smaller states such as Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia, the NT is high. All those states sit around the 1 to 1.4 rate.

 So, even compared to recent figures in the Northern Territory, the Anchorage rate is high.   I wonder if they have alcohol problems, too?

 *  The Washington Post ran a lengthy article looking at the only known black lynching that took place on a military base in World War 2.   Never solved, it appears clear that people closed ranks, and it once again paints a picture of a black man killed for being too assertive (or perhaps, too friendly to white women.)   A depressing story, but worth remember the legacy that current black America carries in living memory.  

*  Vox's long article about the issue of whether "black culture" is responsible for violent crime in America is very good - and really, it covers more than just that theory - it looks at the whole matter of the uncertainty as to why violent crime has actually dropped dramatically over the last few decades. 

Good to hear

JTB, Panasonic, Yamato to test new ‘hands-free travel’ service for visitors to Japan ‹ Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

I mentioned in my posts about Japan a couple of months ago how the country has a fantastic luggage courier service.  Good to see they are trying making it more accessible to the non Japanese speaking tourist.

More on DNA and data storage

I don't recall posting much about this before, but reading about DNA and its great potential for data storage does make you wonder if there is anyone trying to decode human DNA just to make sure that an alien Creator class has not left us a message.   Perhaps a contact address for warranty claims?

Here are three relevant articles:

If You Were a Secret Message, Where in the Human Genome Would You Hide? (I see this was published on 1 April 2015, but I don't think its a joke - although I haven't read it carefully.)

An Alien Code May Be Hidden Inside Our DNA!

Quest For The Hidden Alien Message Embedded In Human DNA Continues (OK, it's a flaky looking website, but this article seems OK.)

End this now

Calls for restrictions on Medicare access to IVF subsidies for older women: A decade after the IVF industry defeated the federal government's attempt to restrict Medicare access to older women, the president of its peak body has says there is little taxpayer value in subsidising the treatment after a woman turns 45.

Statistics on fertility treatment outcomes released on Friday show that 73,598 women started IVF cycles in 2014, the most recent year for which statistics are available, and one in five of them (19.8 per cent) delivered a live baby.

This represented a 10 per cent improvement in the live birth rate
over five years, which has been attributed to better freezing
technology.

But the success rate dwindled to 6 per cent for women aged 40 to 44, and less than 1 per cent for women aged over 45.

If our current Coalition government cannot push this saving measure through now, they're good for nothing.

Sometimes it pays not to be an early adopter

Samsung Electronics is expected to announce a global recall of the large-screen smartphone Galaxy Note 7 because of faulty batteries that catch fire, South Korea's largest news agency reports, citing an unidentified company official.
The world's largest smartphone maker will announce the results of an investigation and a plan to deal with the issue as soon as this weekend, according to news agency Yonhap.

Link here.

As with Apple and its bend-y phone, I'm not sure it is ever a good idea to be in the first rush to get a new model phone.

Telling it like it is

Billionaire GOP Donor Wants Trump's Head Checked | Mother Jones: "As a Republican who has contributed millions of dollars to the party's causes, I ask: Why has our party not sought a psychological evaluation of its nominee?" Fernandez writes in an op-ed published in the Miami Herald on Thursday.

Under the headline "I'm a Republican and I'm With Hillary Clinton," Fernandez attacks Trump as responsible for "a neverending spiral of vulgarity, intellectual dishonesty, invective, abuse, misogyny, racism, intolerance, bullying, ignorance and downright cruelty." Fernandez says he takes particular issue with the way Trump has implied that if he loses, it will be because Clinton cheated.

"This is insanity and dictatorial machinations at best," Fernandez writes.

GMO fanboys, take note

How GMOs Cut The Use Of Pesticides — And Perhaps Boosted It Again : The Salt : NPR: One of the study's conclusions is straightforward and difficult to dispute. Genetically modified, insect-protected corn has allowed farmers to reduce their use of insecticides to fight the corn rootworm and the European corn borer. There is, however, concern that this effect won't last. Corn rootworms have evolved resistance to one of the genes that has been deployed against them.

When it comes to weedkillers, though, the picture gets more murky. For one thing, the effect of GMOs has been different in corn than in soybeans. Farmers who switched to glyphosate-tolerant corn also switched herbicides, and used less total herbicide than farmers did on conventional corn — for a while. In the years since 2007, however, glyphosate-tolerant corn got sprayed with more weedkillers, as measured in kilograms per acre, than corn without that GMO trait.

Farmers who are growing genetically modified, glyphosate-tolerant soybeans, meanwhile, have been using more weedkillers than their non-GMO neighbors. In fact, that gap has been widening in recent years.

Edward Perry of Kansas State University, a co-author of the new study, which appears in the journal Science Advances, says farmers may be using more herbicides on glyphosate-tolerant crops in recent years because they have to fight off an increasing number of weeds that have evolved to become resistant to glyphosate.

 Disclosure:  I think organic farming is a crock.  I also think that common sense always suggested that GMO for foodstuff resistance to herbicides was always doomed for failure, and was mainly about a company making lots of money in the process of eventually making a biological problem worse.

A detailed look at white voter demographics

Everyone Gets It Wrong About Donald Trump and White Voters - Rolling Stone

Interesting stuff.

More generally, Trump's non pivot on immigration this week presumably means he has killed off any hope of an increase in his Hispanic vote once and for all; and as for the black vote - isn't he supposed to be turning up in some black neighbourhoods soon?  That'll be a laugh. 

The basic argument, that there just aren't enough angry, white, poorly educated Southerners to compensate for everyone else thinking he's an offensive dope seems as strong as ever. 

DNA storage

Interesting feature article at Nature about the potential for DNA data storage.  How's this, for this example:

That is one reason why permanent archives of rarely accessed data currently rely on old-fashioned magnetic tapes. This medium packs in information much more densely than silicon can, but is much slower to read. Yet even that approach is becoming unsustainable, says David Markowitz, a computational neuroscientist at the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) in Washington DC. It is possible to imagine a data centre holding an exabyte (one billion gigabytes) on tape drives, he says. But such a centre would require US$1 billion over 10 years to build and maintain, as well as hundreds of megawatts of power. “Molecular data storage has the potential to reduce all of those requirements by up to three orders of magnitude,” says Markowitz. If information could be packaged as densely as it is in the genes of the bacterium Escherichia coli, the world's storage needs could be met by about a kilogram of DNA (see 'Storage limits').

It also features this graphic:

Some amusing psychology for the day

What your choice of smartphone says about you: Miss Shaw and her fellow researchers conducted two studies of personality differences between iPhone and Android smartphone users. Lancaster University was also involved in the study.

In the first study the researchers asked 240 participants to complete a questionnaire about characteristics they associate with users of each smartphone brand.

In the second study they tested these stereotypes against actual personality traits of 530 Android and iPhone smartphone users.

The results from the first study showed that Android users are perceived to have greater levels of honesty and humility, agreeableness and openness personality traits but are seen as less extroverted than iPhone users.

The results from the second study showed that most of the personality stereotypes did not occur in reality, as only honesty and humility was found in greater amounts within Android users.

However, they did find that women were twice more likely to own an iPhone than an Android Phone. When measuring the characteristic 'avoidance of similarity' which describes whether people like having the same products as others, Android Users avoided similarity more than iPhone users. Finally, iPhone users thought it was more important to have a high status phone than Android users.

Based on what my daughter tells me (she really, really notices iPhones when walking down the street), yes it is true that they are very big with girls/women.   I think it's because men are more likely to want to tinker with things, and there's a hell of lot of tinkering that can be done with an Android phone.

Yay for contraception - perhaps

The Pill, the Condom, and the American Dream - The Atlantic

I would prefer that teenagers not be having sex at all; or at least, not without foresight and preparation for the possibility of having a child as a result of it.  To put it another way - I'm all for sexually active teenagers using contraception, but I'd prefer that they not be sexually active at all if they can't cope with the prospect that, despite their best effort to avoid a pregnancy, no contraception is foolproof and making babies is kinda what it's really all about, as far as bodies (if not brains) are concerned.

New York at the local level

I very much enjoyed the episode last night (on SBS) of Michael Portillo's Great American Railroad Journeys, (episode 3, I see - dang it, I have missed the first two!) as it wasn't about any lengthy trip at all, but all about the very local rail of New York and (in particular) Long Island.
Here on the other side of the world, we read a bit about Brooklyn and Long Island as areas where a lot of people who work on Manhattan live, and the Hamptons as a place where the uber rich buy mansions and party (I believe even Spielberg has a house there), but any tourist type TV show rarely goes out of its way to show these places. 
Well, Portillo's show did, and it was very good to finally see them, and get some of their historical background. 
It'll be on SBS on demand for a while, and it seems some people are putting up slabs of the series on Youtube, too.

The "bad passenger" problem

BBC - Autos - Driverless taxis' human problem

So yeah, they are starting to think about how to stop driverless taxis being used for things you don't want passengers using them for:

The presence of a taxi driver also dissuades a variety of illicit
passenger behavior, including vandalism, drug use, and, of course,
self-expression of a sexual nature. During NuTonomy's Singapore taxi
test, says the company, an engineer will ride along "to observe system
performance and assume control if needed to ensure passenger comfort and
safety." Eventually, though, it will be just car and passenger. Are the
cars ready for responsibility?

"None of these problems require
particularly high-tech solutions", says Dr Richard Alan Peters, a
professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Vanderbilt
University in the US. Peters, who serves as the chief technical officer
for the artificial intelligence software company Universal Robotics,
suggests that driverless taxicabs could use features like automatic
door closers and cabin sensors to ensure seatbelt use or tattle on
smokers who light up in the car. And some tasks formerly undertaken by a
human driver — discovering a forgotten parcel or a pool of vomitus, for
instance — could fall to customers, "who would then alert the car",
says Peters. The question, therefore, may not be whether the cars are
ready for the responsibility, but whether passengers are ready for it.

How do Queensland's top judges come up with such decisions?

High court reinstates Gerard Baden-Clay's murder conviction | Australia news | The Guardian

I didn't post about it at the time, as I wanted to:  the Queensland Court of Appeal's decision on the Baden-Clay murder conviction just didn't make any sense to me.   It seemed that if you took its view, you could virtually never get a murder (as opposed to a manslaughter) conviction in cases where there was no witness to the death, especially if the defendant gave evidence that it was an accident.  But it seemed particularly risible in a case where the accused himself had given evidence that there had been no fight of any kind, the jury had clearly rejected it as being untruthful, but then the defence argued effectively on appeal "so he lied, but you still can't find anything more than if he did cause her death, it might have been an accident".

The report of the High Court decision indicates that my instincts on this were right:

It noted that Baden-Clay at trial denied fighting with his wife, killing
her and then dumping her body, which was found under a bridge at Kholo
creek 11 days after she went missing.

“His evidence, being the evidence of the only person who could give
evidence on the issue, was inconsistent with that hypothesis [of
manslaughter].

“Further, the jury were entitled to regard the whole of the evidence
as satisfying them beyond reasonable doubt that the respondent acted
with intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm when he killed his
wife.”

Yes:  if a jury considers a defendant is lying through his teeth, they are under no obligation to then give him or her the "benefit of the doubt" as to the next most innocent explanation, at least (or especially) where there is clear evidence of motive for intentional killing. 

Ever since the Pauline Hanson conviction was overturned by the High Court Court of Appeal, I have wondered how it is that Queensland's judges manage to make such wrong decisions.  (I'm pretty sure that in that case, the appeals court  was again unanimous that the trial judge were just obviously wrong.)

How do we manage to get judges here that seem so capable of poor decisions? 

Hi Tech car thieves

Savvy car thieves harnessing new technology ‹ Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

I've wondered sometimes about whether, with the right electronics, modern cars can still be stolen.  Seems the answer is "yes":

Even models that utilize electronic keys can be stolen by use of a
so-called key programmer, which can be easily made by modifying easily
available materials.

Earlier this year, police in Ibaraki Prefecture arrested a gang of
car thieves using such a device, which is small enough to fit in the
palm of one’s hand.

“A modified key programmer is used to enter the car’s internal
computer, and then rewrite the program, making it possible to start the
engine,” a police investigator was quoted as saying. “In the past this
required 30 minutes or longer to accomplish, but the newer types can do
it in about 10 minutes. The thieves are able to obtain key programmers
made in China for around 100,000 yen.”

The modified key programmers are unable to open a car’s door, and up
to now the thieves had to break a window to get access to the vehicle’s
interior. More recently, however, new techniques for popping open care
doors have become widespread.

“Using the technique of ‘dempa-jack’ (electronic hijacking), they can
release the door locks from a distance,” a staff member of Protector, a
firm that specializes in car security, tells the tabloid. “They do this
by intercepting electronic signals emitted by the car and copying them,
then transmitting them back. This method is common overseas and
recently has started to be used in Japan.”

Dealing with the plebiscite

John Quiggin - An offer he can’t accept

JQ's suggestion as to how Shorten could best deal with the attempted wedge on Labor about the plebiscite (really, by a reverse wedge - but one which makes sense) sounds like a good political move to me.  I wonder if Shorten will take it up?

Interesting despite one glaring error

The Multiverse Idea Is Rotting Culture - The Atlantic

Well, I suppose magazine editors don't have to know much about science, but I'm still surprised that this article was let through with a paragraph that talks about a laser shooting electrons.

Nonetheless, it's worth a read. 

[I'm not saying it's particularly well written, by the way, but it eventually raises some interesting issues.  It's getting a drubbing in comments, where I am also surprised to not yet see anyone grinding their teeth on the laser/electron thing.]

Seem like good questions to me

Some questions for those who are cheering Gawker's demise / Boing Boing

All at sea - The Conspiracy

I strongly recommend this recently published account in Popular Mechanics of a reporter (and her photographer) going on a cruise with a bunch of conspiracy nutters.  It turns into a real problem when they become the victims of paranoia.

Most surprisingly - Andrew Wakefield (he of the discredited autism/vaccine link) was one of the speakers, and while he is only a bit player in the article, he really does not come out looking good.

Reading this reminded me of something I perhaps didn't say here before - the absolute worst aspect of the new series of X Files was its incorporation of a secret government vaccine conspiracy (not Scully's unflattering hairstyle.)   Yes, even worse that its having a conspiracy broadcaster who actually was onto something, I reckon it's a disgrace to give any encouragement at all, even in fiction, to any dimwit watching  (and they are out there) to the belief that vaccines are evil and to be avoided.

"What - me worry?" Ridley

The prominent lukewarmer Matt Ridley is given a run in The Australian today (reprinting an article from The Times) in which he argues that a completely melted Arctic ice cap each summer wouldn't matter much anyway.  Quite benign, in fact.

The article quotes some research I haven't read about, so I'll wait for actual scientists to address that.  But clearly, the article relies heavily on reasoning that goes over well with the silly and gullible:  that a large climatic change like (relatively?) ice free summers in the Arctic in previous millennia were not bad for the wildlife (and humanity) then, so why would it be so bad for them now?    I feel the flaws in such reasoning are so obvious, it is hardly worthwhile putting them down on paper.   But someone will, I have no doubt, and I'll link to them instead when I notice it...