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These people rock, I heard a story about them a while back on NPR on This American Life http://207.70.82.73/pages/descriptions/05/286.html

My favorite part is when Ira Glass asks "whose side are you on?"

The link: http://207.70.82.73/pages/descriptions/03/242.html Enemy Camp

7/18/03

Episode 242

The parent poster beat me to it. I highly recommend episodes of T.A.L. Depending on what OS you run, there are many options for transcoding these to MP3.

Here are some of my favorite episodes:

Telephone - Dad suspects that his child is using drugs. He secretly taps his son's phone line and is amazed at what he hears.

The Middle of Nowhere - The chronicle of a T.A.L. producer's fight with MCI to get a $950 overcharge reversed. Plus, the tiny island nation of Nauru and it's nefarious global reach.

Teenage Embed, Part 1 and Teenage Embed, Part 2. A Californian teenager of Afghan heritage travels to Afghanistan with his dad, who works for President Hamid Karzai. Fascinating.

Somewhere in the Arabian Sea - A week aboard the US aircraft carrier, USS John C. Stennis, during Operation Enduring Freedom.

The First Day - Itenerant pot-scrubber, "Dishwasher Pete", takes a job aboard an offshore drilling platform and prepares for the worst.

Backed Into a Corner - Quizno's employee runs store for a month after the owners vanish. Also, a great story about a truck driver who cannot read.

The parent poster beat me to it. I highly recommend episodes of T.A.L. Depending on what OS you run, there are many options for transcoding these to MP3.

Here are some of my favorite episodes:

Telephone - Dad suspects that his child is using drugs. He secretly taps his son's phone line and is amazed at what he hears.

The Middle of Nowhere - The chronicle of a T.A.L. producer's fight with MCI to get a $950 overcharge reversed. Plus, the tiny island nation of Nauru and it's nefarious global reach.

Teenage Embed, Part 1 and Teenage Embed, Part 2. A Californian teenager of Afghan heritage travels to Afghanistan with his dad, who works for President Hamid Karzai. Fascinating.

Somewhere in the Arabian Sea - A week aboard the US aircraft carrier, USS John C. Stennis, during Operation Enduring Freedom.

The First Day - Itenerant pot-scrubber, "Dishwasher Pete", takes a job aboard an offshore drilling platform and prepares for the worst.

Backed Into a Corner - Quizno's employee runs store for a month after the owners vanish. Also, a great story about a truck driver who cannot read.

The parent poster beat me to it. I highly recommend episodes of T.A.L. Depending on what OS you run, there are many options for transcoding these to MP3.

Here are some of my favorite episodes:

Telephone - Dad suspects that his child is using drugs. He secretly taps his son's phone line and is amazed at what he hears.

The Middle of Nowhere - The chronicle of a T.A.L. producer's fight with MCI to get a $950 overcharge reversed. Plus, the tiny island nation of Nauru and it's nefarious global reach.

Teenage Embed, Part 1 and Teenage Embed, Part 2. A Californian teenager of Afghan heritage travels to Afghanistan with his dad, who works for President Hamid Karzai. Fascinating.

Somewhere in the Arabian Sea - A week aboard the US aircraft carrier, USS John C. Stennis, during Operation Enduring Freedom.

The First Day - Itenerant pot-scrubber, "Dishwasher Pete", takes a job aboard an offshore drilling platform and prepares for the worst.

Backed Into a Corner - Quizno's employee runs store for a month after the owners vanish. Also, a great story about a truck driver who cannot read.

The parent poster beat me to it. I highly recommend episodes of T.A.L. Depending on what OS you run, there are many options for transcoding these to MP3.

Here are some of my favorite episodes:

Telephone - Dad suspects that his child is using drugs. He secretly taps his son's phone line and is amazed at what he hears.

The Middle of Nowhere - The chronicle of a T.A.L. producer's fight with MCI to get a $950 overcharge reversed. Plus, the tiny island nation of Nauru and it's nefarious global reach.

Teenage Embed, Part 1 and Teenage Embed, Part 2. A Californian teenager of Afghan heritage travels to Afghanistan with his dad, who works for President Hamid Karzai. Fascinating.

Somewhere in the Arabian Sea - A week aboard the US aircraft carrier, USS John C. Stennis, during Operation Enduring Freedom.

The First Day - Itenerant pot-scrubber, "Dishwasher Pete", takes a job aboard an offshore drilling platform and prepares for the worst.

Backed Into a Corner - Quizno's employee runs store for a month after the owners vanish. Also, a great story about a truck driver who cannot read.

The parent poster beat me to it. I highly recommend episodes of T.A.L. Depending on what OS you run, there are many options for transcoding these to MP3.

Here are some of my favorite episodes:

Telephone - Dad suspects that his child is using drugs. He secretly taps his son's phone line and is amazed at what he hears.

The Middle of Nowhere - The chronicle of a T.A.L. producer's fight with MCI to get a $950 overcharge reversed. Plus, the tiny island nation of Nauru and it's nefarious global reach.

Teenage Embed, Part 1 and Teenage Embed, Part 2. A Californian teenager of Afghan heritage travels to Afghanistan with his dad, who works for President Hamid Karzai. Fascinating.

Somewhere in the Arabian Sea - A week aboard the US aircraft carrier, USS John C. Stennis, during Operation Enduring Freedom.

The First Day - Itenerant pot-scrubber, "Dishwasher Pete", takes a job aboard an offshore drilling platform and prepares for the worst.

Backed Into a Corner - Quizno's employee runs store for a month after the owners vanish. Also, a great story about a truck driver who cannot read.

The parent poster beat me to it. I highly recommend episodes of T.A.L. Depending on what OS you run, there are many options for transcoding these to MP3.

Here are some of my favorite episodes:

Telephone - Dad suspects that his child is using drugs. He secretly taps his son's phone line and is amazed at what he hears.

The Middle of Nowhere - The chronicle of a T.A.L. producer's fight with MCI to get a $950 overcharge reversed. Plus, the tiny island nation of Nauru and it's nefarious global reach.

Teenage Embed, Part 1 and Teenage Embed, Part 2. A Californian teenager of Afghan heritage travels to Afghanistan with his dad, who works for President Hamid Karzai. Fascinating.

Somewhere in the Arabian Sea - A week aboard the US aircraft carrier, USS John C. Stennis, during Operation Enduring Freedom.

The First Day - Itenerant pot-scrubber, "Dishwasher Pete", takes a job aboard an offshore drilling platform and prepares for the worst.

Backed Into a Corner - Quizno's employee runs store for a month after the owners vanish. Also, a great story about a truck driver who cannot read.

This is *my* government in action?

For the full investigative report check out this american life's real audio coverage. It's astounding. http://207.70.82.73/pages/descriptions/00/168.html

Ira Glass is the man... NPR show on superheroes

The routines available for play were collecting dust, with jokes so obsolete they were sometimes offensive. This segment is worth a listen just to hear the narrator crash and burn as he kills his routine.

To follow you off topic, I think This American Life's take on the matter is amazing (I think that's the right episode.)

Long 'n short--pimp tests a prospective 'ho recruit by saying "buy me a drink." Not all of them comply, but many do. The ones that do are of an emotional state that they are are liable to being turned out. Fascinating.

This reminds me of This American Life episode 265, from May of this year, entitled Fake Science, which includes, in Act Four, "Fake science can be fun. Fake science can make people happy," which I think would make an excellent t-shirt iron-on. In Act One of the show, a reporter gets into a delightfully heated exchange with a Bush Administration wonk who defends the appointment of a highly dubious lead industry shill to a prominent position on a federal commission on lead safety, while genuine experts get passed over. You can almost hear the vein throbbing on the guy's forehead when the reporter catches him a flagrant lie about the appointee's ties to the lead industry. Have a listen... it's free.

So, umh, this would be cool for zooming in on puppies and stuff. Yeah.

We're not too far from it ... really!

Find out more about this channel (it's actually quite interesting) here (NPR's This American Life).

Legislators don't always have time to read every bill that comes before them. They might read a summary of it if it's not something that's of particular interest to them, and when a bill deals with something they're not really an expert on they often vote along with their party's official stance, determined at meetings with the purpose of determining these stances and strategies.

In this radio program, in Act Two (unfortunately I think you have to listen to the program on RA or something) some of this is discussed. Now the PATRIOT Act seems like a pretty big and important bill, and one that should have had more attention paid to it. Hindsight is 20/20, and obviously the people that passed it didn't realize what a problem it would become.

I wonder what kind of ultrasonic scream the squirrel mentioned here (Squirrel Cop) made.

Yeah, most people hate telemarketing calls, but I've made a decision not to take it out on the person calling me. Be calm and nice, it won't kill you. Lot's of people have to fall back on Plan B (or C, D, E...) and I am one of them. I'm not a telemarketer, but I could be, and if that's what I had to do to pay the rent, I wouldn't hesitate. So when the telemarketers call, I say I'm not interested, tell them to have a nice day, and hang up. A whole fifteen seconds out of my life... and the telemarketer who I'm sure hates her/his job doesn't get crapped on by yet another person.

Contrary to popular perceptions, then, wrongful criminal convictions are a normal, everyday feature of the criminal justice system - the system doesn't just sometimes get it wrong, it gets it wrong everyday, of every week, of every month of every year. With the result that thousands of innocent people experience a whole variety of harmful consequences that wrongful criminal convictions engender.

Actually it's a Public Radio Interational program: This American Life but a lot of their programs are carried on NPR. It's a good show.

On the radio show This American Life, a segment described how police used the case summary of an FBI profiler as a template for a forced confession. Under pressure to find the killer(s), police used intimidation and duress to coax a suspect to sign a false confession, the conviction since overturned by DNA evidence. The suspect, unaware of case particulars, was given a confession to sign lifted verbatim from an FBI profiler's report. The police used a best guess of how the crime occurred based on the evidence to frame a patsy.

In the not distant future with Total Information Awareness, it will be trivial to find a patsy for any crime. The person murdered attended the same university and you shared a class or two (enrollment database). You enjoy violence and murder (video store database). The murder occured a mile away and within 30 minutes of when you filled up your car at the gas station (credit card database). We have established relationship, motif, and opportunity.

My point is that extremely causal data will be used to make relationships where none exist and to support conclusions which no hard data supports. It will become trivial to gather a group of suspects for any crime, none of which have anything to do with it.

The databases will be used to get tough on crime, which was a euphemism in the 80's for put pressure on police and courts to find a patsy and put them away to make us politically significant. The wave of released prisoners based on evaluation of DNA evidence in recent years is proof of this.

Are you a terrorist? I bet if we look at the proper data points we can make anyone look like one...