Paul M. Jones

The New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has released an Android application allowing mobile-phone users to easily capture police patdowns on video, which is then automatically uploaded to the rights group’s servers.

The “Stop & Frisk Watch” application, which is soon coming to the iPhone, is in response to the New York Police Department having stopped, frisked and interrogated people at least 685,724 times last year alone. About 87 percent of those stopped were black or Latino, and 90 percent of those stopped were neither ticketed nor arrested.

The app is programmed to work only in New York City, and has three functions:

The “record” section allows easy video recording, which stops when the phone is shaken or when a button is pressed. The video is not stored on the phone, and instead is immediately uploaded to the New York ACLU. The app can also program your phone to automatically lock when recording is finished.

Once the video is uploaded, the app asks for information about where the images were taken, officers involved and other details of the incident. This “report” function also works without video being taken.

The app’s “listen” function provides real-time mapping of where others are using the app to record police.

via ACLU Phone App Lets You Shoot the Cops | Threat Level | Wired.com.

“But, Dave,” you cry, “Walt Whitman tells me I’m my own version of perfection! Epictetus tells me I have the spark of Zeus!” And I don’t disagree. So that makes 6.8 billion examples of perfection, 6.8 billion sparks of Zeus. You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless. In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another–which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality -- we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point -- and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole. No longer is it how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you win or lose, or learn or grow, or enjoy yourself doing it... Now it’s “So what does this get me?” As a consequence, we cheapen worthy endeavors, and building a Guatemalan medical clinic becomes more about the application to Bowdoin than the well-being of Guatemalans. It’s an epidemic -- and in its way, not even dear old Wellesley High is immune... one of the best of the 37,000 nationwide, Wellesley High School... where good is no longer good enough, where a B is the new C, and the midlevel curriculum is called Advanced College Placement. And I hope you caught me when I said “one of the best.” I said “one of the best” so we can feel better about ourselves, so we can bask in a little easy distinction, however vague and unverifiable, and count ourselves among the elite, whoever they might be, and enjoy a perceived leg up on the perceived competition. But the phrase defies logic. By definition there can be only one best. You’re it or you’re not.

via You’re Not Special - BostonHerald.com.

Chris Hartjes has a nice writeup on dependency injection containers versus service locators. Here's a short way to tell which one you're using:

"If your class has a dependency on a container, you're using Service Locator, not Dependency Injection."

If you have a DI container and you pass it into a class so that class can get its own dependencies from that container, you are *still* doing Service Locator. It doesn't matter that the locator is called a DI container. The key is that the object is pulling in its dependencies, instead of something outside of the object pushing the dependencies into it.

In reporting this news of George Zimmerman's return to jail, more than a few media outlets showed the dangerously deceptive image of Trayvon as 11-year-old cherub.

...

According to the autopsy report, Trayvon was 5'11" tall and weighed 158 pounds, the "ideal healthy weight" at that height being 160 pounds.  He was not the skinny little boy with the Skittles that half of America still believes him to be.  He was at least three inches taller than Zimmerman and only about 20 pounds lighter.

...

In the past year or so, his social media sites showed a growing interest in drugs, in mixed martial arts-style street fighting, in a profoundly vulgar exploitation of "bitches."  

Trayvon posed for one photo with raised middle fingers, another with wads of cash held in an out-stretched arm.  One YouTube video shows him refereeing a fight club-style street fight.  A cousin had recently tweeted him, "Yu ain't tell me yu swung on a bus driver," meaning, if true, that Trayvon had punched out a bus driver.

Zimmerman never saw the cute little boy that the TV audience did.  He saw a full-grown man, a druggy, a wannabe street fighter, the tattooed, gold-grilled, self-dubbed "No_Limit_Nigga."  

The article includes a timeline of events that you may find shocking; doubly so, when you realize the major media outlets have not reported it. Via Articles: What the Media Choose Not to Know about Trayvon.

If engineers were no more honest than the typical politician, all of the bridges would fall down.

If accountants were no more honest than the typical politician, every firm would go bankrupt.

If merchants were no more honest than the typical politician, Paris would not get fed; nor would any other city.

If preachers were no more honest than the typical politician, everyone who took their sermons to heart would go straight to hell.

If physicians were no more honest than the typical politician, all of the patients would die.

If carpenters were no more honest than the typical politician, every house would collapse.

If spouses were no more honest than the typical politician, every marriage would be on the rocks.

If used car dealers were no more honest than the typical politician, no one would risk buying a used car.

If electricians were no more honest than the typical politician, we would all be electrocuted.

If soldiers were no more honest than the typical politician, both sides would lose every battle.

Why believe them? Via If Politicians’ Honesty Set the Standard for Others | The Beacon.

1. Buy experiences instead of things

2. Help others instead of yourself

3. Buy many small pleasures instead of few big ones

4. Buy less insurance

5. Pay now and consume later

6. Think about what you're not thinking about

7. Beware of comparison shopping

8. Follow the herd instead of your head

Number 8 is especially interesting. Via Coding Horror: Buying Happiness.

Small-company edition:

When pressured on the business by employees, CEO always starts with, "I need you to stay focused on..."

You have more than one MBA on the team.

You have a Chief Strategy Officer.

Your CTO just came out of a Phd program.

Your CEO sells instead of listens.

You have a launch party, and no customers attend.

Customers hate the product and vision, so the sales guy is fired.

You are not told the terms of the last funding round (5x liquidation preference?)

You never hear how much cash you have in the bank or see board meeting notes.

You complain about how the customers "just don't get it" and aren't "visionary."

Your CEO says revenue is coming in in two weeks, just after he gets a meeting with the buyer, negotiates price, gets it approved, agrees on terms, writes up up contracts, negotiates them, signs them, and invoices the customer on net 30 terms.

You add features because board members want them.

Your CEO calls himself a "visionary" in his bio.

The CEO keeps everything secret because, "that is how Apple does it."

The CEO approves all of the design decisions because, "that is how Apple does it."

You are selling a platform.

Co-founder agrees to bring in experienced execs but thinks they will report to him.

You are selling to schools, hospitals, or non-profits.

You are commercializing a technology.

Your value proposition is that you help workers break down organizational barriers and work cross-functionally.

Your business model assume you will become one of the 7 websites that the average user visits every day.

Your site is going to be ad-supported, and you have 1500 users.

CEO avoids eye contact.

It gets really quiet.

You get free lunch but have no customers.

Your free lunch is taken away.

You get asked, "how much do you really need to live on?"

You get a pay cut. Your co-worker disappears.

Your CEO still doesn't make eye contact.

You get laid off and become a creditor to the company because they didn't reimburse your last 5 expense reports.

The company declines to buy your unvested shares back.

The liquidation yields 5 Aeron chairs and an espresso machine, and Ashton Kutcher's stock is senior to yours.

via What are telltale signs that you're working at a "sinking ship" company? - Quora.

The Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, a gay and lesbian think tank, released a study in April 2011 estimating based on its research that just 1.7 percent of Americans between 18 and 44 identify as gay or lesbian, while another 1.8 percent -- predominantly women -- identify as bisexual. Far from underestimating the ranks of gay people because of homophobia, these figures included a substantial number of people who remained deeply closeted, such as a quarter of the bisexuals. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of women between 22 and 44 that questioned more than 13,500 respondents between 2006 and 2008 found very similar numbers: Only 1 percent of the women identified themselves as gay, while 4 percent identified as bisexual.

Higher numbers can be obtained when asking about lifetime sexual experiences, rather than identity. The Williams Institute found that, overall, an estimated 8.2 percent of the population had engaged in some form same-sex sexual activity. Put another way, 4.7 percent of the population had wandered across the line without coming to think of themselves as either gay or bisexual. Other studies suggest those individuals are, like the bisexuals, mainly women: The same CDC study that found only 1 percent of women identify as lesbian, for example, found that 13 percent of women reported a history of some form of sexual contact with other women.

"Estimates of those who report any lifetime same-sex sexual behavior and any same-sex sexual attraction are substantially higher than estimates of those who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual," the Williams Institute's Gary J. Gates concluded.

...

Of course, gays aren't the only minority population that has an outsized place in the public imagination. Americans also "vastly overestimate the percentage of fellow residents who are foreign-born, by more than a factor of two, and the percentage who are in the country illegally, by a factor of six or seven," according to a 2012 Wall Street Journal report on the social science of estimating minority groups. In 1993, a group of political scientists reported in Public Opinion Quarterly that "The extent to which minority populations are perceived as a kind of threat is ... related to perceived proportions, though the direction of causality cannot be determined." Correcting the misimpressions about the size of a minority group hasn't been proved to have much impact on beliefs about them in the short-term, but that doesn't mean that they might never.

One thing's for sure: it's hard to imagine the fact that so many think the country is more than a quarter gay or lesbian has no impact on our public policy.

via Politics - Garance Franke-Ruta - Americans Have No Idea How Few Gay People There Are - The Atlantic.

One of the first things that stands out is anti-foreign bias. When they contemplate economic interaction with foreigners, the general public gets unreasonably negative...

A second major pattern in the public's economic illiteracy is make-work bias...In the long-run, blaming technology for unemployment is just silly. As the mechanization of agriculture beautifully illustrates, when machines replace people in one line of work, they switch to another...

a blanket anti-market bias...In the minds of public, prices apparently go up when businesses suddenly start to feel greedier. Economists, in contrast, expect businesses to be greedy year-in, year-out; but depending on market conditions, greed may call for prices to go up, go down, or stay the same...

A final catch-all category of economic illiteracy may be called pessimistic bias. Conventional wisdom has it that conditions are going from bad to worse. Most Americans think that real income has been falling for decades, most new jobs are low-paying, and doubt whether the next generation will have a higher standard of living. Economists think that this conventional wisdom is dead wrong.

via Economic Illiteracy, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

... if D-Day had failed, Stalin would have ended up occupying almost all of German, which would have significantly changed the balance of power in the Cold War. Had the Allies invaded France in 1943, rather than invading Sicily, they probably would have made faster progress than they did in 1944. VE Day would have come a year earlier, with the Allies capturing most of Germany.

My unending thanks to all the men and women who fought this day, and the entire war, in 1944. Via The Volokh Conspiracy » D-Day thoughts.