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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."
The Solar Sail was lost due to no wind in space?
I heard it was transmitting this:
4 8 15 16 23 42
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.
It was just on a three-hour tour...
(There's gotta be a better Gilligan joke in all of this, I just can't think of it now.)
Was deemed Carnival Cruise Line's least effective tag line of last year's ad campaign.
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.
Being able to plot the home locations of sex offenders on a map, as if they were tire-fitting chains or restaurants, is one step too far for me. I can see the logical extension from the things the Chicago Crime maps were achieving, but its really data that shouldn't be made accessible in such a contextless and simple manner. There could be people on the list for any number of reasons (not just the most serious offences..) who suffer greatly due to a 'Find your local sex offender' site.
I wouldn't be surprised if google maps chose to pull their data from being used by this site in such a way, it certainly wouldn't look good if anything unsavoury occurred. I'm all for cool and nifty uses of google maps, but this just doesn't seem tasteful.
Business Voyeur
Haven't the sex offenders already "served their time"? Or is their set of rights smaller than your or mine...
The culture wars may turn literal.
Imagine this:
People from conservative websites search liberal websites for anyone admitting that they have smoked pot. They compile a database of who said they smoked pot, linking the person's name, the person's address, and the comment(s) where the person admitted to smoking pot.
Now liberals respond. To take revenge, they categorize the different types of beliefs held by conservatives, and begin compiling a database of people, evidence, addresses.
Hostilities rise. If you live in a tower, a grid of condos, anywhere where there are a lot of people- stories start to spread, and people take sides.
The "sex offender" b.s. is a very, very bad thing.
I remember reading last year sometime about a guy in Aurora, CO (It was in westword) was having sex with a woman that told her she was over 18. A while later, he was busted because the woman was 16 or so. The guy got nailed by the courts and his life is now ruined.
The general "Sex Offender" term is just wrong. I can see why it's a bad thing to have your normal raper out on the loose, but to have your life ruined because of some stupid chick? Come' on people.
In Soviet America, Sex Offenders map YOU!
The idiot mapper.
So far only 1 idiot is listed there, but it is the biggest idiot on this planet.
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.
...
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.
What happens when a teenage boy gets convicted of Statutory rape because his girlfriends's dad walked in on them making hanky panky? Is he just another blip on the map- presumably a target for vigilantes or a scapegoat for community demagogues?
What happens when two consenting homosexual adults get railroaded by some backwater anti-sodomy laws? Now the ignorant have a map to the house for vandalism and hate crime intimidation?
Without context these maps have huge potential to inflict harm upon innocent people. These are just two of the examples that come off the top of my head.
i was looking around on the sex offender map and i found something interesting...
I had no idea...
But what even if all the guesses are correct there's still some ethical issues. Granted most of the issues involve even publishing the list of names to begin with. I mean wouldn't it be easy for someone to get the list and go around all vigilante style on the people on the list? Certainly it might be satisfying to attack a creep (even a reformed creep) but that's not justice. That's vengence.
Which brings me back around to the real point. Sex offenders are apparantly still dangerous to society following their release from prison. Shouldn't the solution to continue to segregate them from society rather than to just let 'em go and tell people, "Sorry, there's a dangerous new person in your neighborhood, watch your kids/wife/backside." We could put them in a concrete building with bars over the windows and locks on the doors.. a lot like.. more prison! If it's been shown that these people are a danger to society following their terms and that they are incapable of reform*, then it is obvious, at least to me, that the terms are not long enough to protect society from them and them from society.
*statistical incapability** is indistinguishable from real incapability if you cannot say for certain if they've been reformed until they die having not regressed.
**within a socially acceptable error margin. (is 3 standard deviations enough (~99.7% confidence)? 30 (100-(.98e-195) percent confidence)? I don't claim to have the answer)
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
http://www.freep.com/news/metro/dicker20_20031020. htm
g ister.html
This mentions people on the michigan sex offender list, without names.. but states a woman is there for public urination, and some guys are there for consensual sex with underage girlfriends.
Both are examples given by the grandparent.
Have a look here to:
http://www.geocities.com/eadvocate/issues/harm-re
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Things that can get you on a registered sexual offender list:
public urination, exhibitionism, nudism, streaking, flashing, mooning, outdoor consensual sex, lewd behaviour.
Dont believe me?
utah law book says:
(d) "Sex offender" means any person convicted by this state or who enters a plea in abeyance for violating Section 76-7-102, 76-9-702.5, 76-5a-3, 76-10-1306, or 76-5-301.1
and all of those are for lewd behaviour that specifically includes public urination, streaking, and mooning.
LAW LINK
"The study found that people charged with crimes such as public urination, flashing, consensual sex between teenagers, possession of child pornography and adult prostitution are all classified as sex offenders in some states."
Link to source
"Plaistow Deputy Chief Kathleen Jones also said that not every person on the sex offender list has necessarily committed an egregious crime such as rape or molestation because a conviction of indecent exposure, even in cases such as public urination, can land someone on the list."
Link
"According to Michigan State Police Sgt. Troy Fellows, urinating in public is classified as indecent exposure, and requires sex offender registration after three convictions...[And] Judges [can] to order registration after any number of convictions..."
Link
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.