Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Summer, Sail, Sex Offenders
A new definition for optimism. Rei writes "According to a weblog entry from the Planetary Society, it appears that Cosmos 1 - the world's first controlled solar-sail spacecraft - has been found. The data is still tentative, but they have detected evidence of the spacecraft's signal in multiple tracking stations. There is a chance that it is in the wrong orbit, but it appears to be up there. This is after it was reported that the Volna rocket that launched it lost an engine after 83 seconds, and many had assumed that the craft was lost."
The power of the tag can only grow with time. An Anonymous reader writes "Saw your coverage of YubNub - I've been playing with a similar tool for a while that might interest your readers. It's called Ambedo and works in a way that you can tag search engines or bookmarks with a bookmarklet (you can also enter them manually if you want to). These are then added to you own tag directory. You then access these tags by typing them in a search box -- but all the matching is done client-side in javascript. It also has nice features like matching IP addresses, domain names, FedEx packages, calculator in the search box and so on."
If you like it so much, why don'tcha marry it? Mad Merlin writes "Groklaw has an interview with Chris DiBona of Google with regards to their Summer of Code program (as previously covered here). When asked why Google is doing the SoC program, Chris responds, 'It is simple: We love open source. A great number of Googlers have and are donating their 20% time to the open source efforts that we're doing.'"
Just kidding! scotty777 writes "Japan plans to give up its bid to have the world's first nuclear fusion reactor built in Aomori Prefecture. Japan Today reports the government decision, which means that the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) site decision can be made. Japan Times reports that the government announced the decision by saying 'it plans to back down [from the Aomori site proposal] if the European Union stands firm on bringing the project to Cadarache, in southern France.'"
Surely this won't cause any controversy. davenaffis writes "Here's a little site I developed that uses Google Maps to map sex offenders. Only Washington, D.C. data is available right now, but I'll be adding more states soon."
Solar sail - if we launched it, and it's transmitting a signal, and it's in orbit, and we still can't find it, what are the chances that we'd discover an asteroid headed our way? Put more funding into astronoomy please.
Ambedo - the first thing I did was view source. It's not a good sign when its own website makes basic HTML and Javascript errors.
Sex offenders - this list contains people who have done nothing more than urinate in public. This kind of map only encourages vigilantes and hysteria.
For a while now, I've been crawling the Michigan Sex Offender Registry, and plotting the locations on my own little mapping site.
For an example, look here.
The biggest suprise I've had is the ammount of incorrect data in the database. Only about 25% of the entries geocode on the first pass. I've had to do "best matching" to correct misspelled street names, I've seen birth years with obviously transposed digits, and some quite amusing obvious test entries.
In addition to the sex offender data, I also map the locations of domains with dns-loc location records, sites registered with geourl.org, or my own Geographic Crawler experiment, sites on or considered for the Superfund NPL list, and any other data I can force into a format I can plot.
Haven't the sex offenders already "served their time"? Or is their set of rights smaller than your or mine...
This is a nifty hack, but I wonder what your thoughts are on the ethics of it. If the database is inaccurate to the point where you have to make guesses about what the correct data really is, it's also likely that it points to a fair number of entirely innocent people. By making it easy for folks to find entries near them, you're aiding a process with the potential to do a lot of harm, for better or worse.
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This is the kind of project I can easily imagine myself starting -- but around the time I was making guesses about misspelled street names, I think I'd can it and move on to something with less potential to ruin lives. With no negative judgment implied, why didn't you?
On a separate note, at a first glance I see a surprising number of pairs of dots very near to each other. Is this some kind of bug in the data or the mapping process? Am I just inventing patterns where there aren't any? Or perhaps there's some strange tendency for sex offenders to settle in pairs
Thanks for the interesting link.