Innovation

"At 9:44 a.m. the M.I.T. police were called in; by 10:30 a.m., the Cambridge police were en route, and by 11 a.m., Michael Pickett, a Secret Service agent and expert on computer crime, was on the scene. On his recommendation, a surveillance camera was installed in the closet and a second laptop was connected to the network switch to track the traffic. […] Michael Sussmann, a Washington lawyer and a former federal prosecutor of computer crime, said that M.I.T. was the victim and that, without more information, it had to assume any hackers were “the Chinese, even though it’s a 16-year-old with acne.” Once the police were called in, the university could not back away from the investigation. “After there’s a referral, victims don’t have the opportunity to change their mind.”—Noam Cohen New York Times "How M.I.T. Ensnared a Hacker, Bucking a Freewheeling Culture" 20 January 2013 (link)

"MIT and the U.S. Secret Service conducted the video surveillance of the closet at MIT that discovered Swartz’s downloading. He was charged by the Middlesex County district attorney’s office with breaking and entering in the daytime. Lawyers familiar with the case have told me that it was anticipated that the state charge would be continued without a finding, with Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner. Tragedy intervened when [federal prosecutor Cameron] Ortiz’s office took over the case to send “a message.”—Harvey A. Silverglate Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly "The Swartz suicide and the sick culture of the Justice Dept." 24 January 2013 (link)

"U.S Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz today defended her office’s prosecution of Reddit co-founder and Internet activist Aaron Swartz, expressing sympathy for his family and saying she is “terribly upset” she is being blamed for his suicide. […] “The evidence they had, the charges they brought, this case was fairly and appropriately and reasonably handled,” she added. […] Ortiz’s prosecution of Swartz has drawn harsh nationwide criticism, ranging from Internet freedom circles to Congress…"—John Zaremba and Matt Stout Boston Herald "Emotional Carmen Ortiz `terribly upset’ over Swartz suicide" 17 January 2013(link)

Belch

"So now, “in the City by the Bay," [San Francisco] if you want to roller skate naked down Castro Street wearing a phallic-symbol hat and snorting an eight-ball off a transgender hooker’s chest while underage kids run behind you handing out free heroin needles, condoms and coupons that’s your right as a free citizen of the United States. But if you want to put a Buzz Lightyear toy in the same box with a hamburger and fries and sell it, you’re outta line, mister!”—Jayson Lusk The Food Police 2013 (page 3)

"For reasons that scientists don't yet fully understand, people who spend time in high altitudes tend to shed weight. [Robert Roach, research director at the Colorado Center for Altitude Medicine and Physiology in Denver] cautions, "We're still shooting in the dark," but he and his colleagues are investigating whether subjecting people to the effects of high altitude by having them sleep in specialized tents at night, might lead to weight loss."—Amanda Onion ABC News "Could High Altitude Cure Obesity?" 7 January 2006 (link)

"To accept the respondents’ interpretation of the authority granted to the Board by the New York City Charter would leave its authority to define, create, mandate and enforce limited only by its own imagination. The fact that respondents interpret the Charter precisely to conclude same, tolls the bell on this regulation. The Portion Cap Rule, if upheld, would create an administrative Leviathan and violate the separation of powers doctrine. The Rule would not only violate the separation of powers doctrine, it would eviscerate it."—Hon. Milton A. Tingling New York Supreme Court "NY Coalition vs. NY Dept. of Health" 11 March 2012 (link)

Kids

"[Erik] Martin estimates that about 20 percent of the content on Reddit is N.S.F.W. (not safe for work), but emphasizes that this also includes “Trees,” Reddit’s dedicated marijuana-loving community. Regardless of the accuracy of Martin’s estimate (many experts think the porn traffic is much higher), the popularity of subReddits like “Gone Wild” and the now-banned “Creepshots,” which featured photos of girls taken without their knowledge, helped create a profile of the typical Redditor as a nerdy, pervy, compulsively masturbating pothead."—Jay Kang New York Times "Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear?" 28 July 2013 (link)

"Deputies say [83-year-old Seminole pedestrian] James Morris Wheeler was struck around 8:43 a.m. by L.C. Dudley, 85, who was driving a 2004 Mercury Grand Marquis southbound on 113th Street North and 74th Avenue around." Staff Tampa Tribune "Seminole pedestrian killed while crossing road" 27 July 2013 (link)

"Celestar defense firm chief executive officer Greg Celestan wanted to bring two younger associates to the Tampa headquarters from his firm's office near Washington, D.C. When they said they wanted to live somewhere without relying on a car, he told them to stay there. "I think that the lack of reliable mass transit adversely affects our ability to attract a younger demographic that does not want to drive to work or entertainment," Celestan says. […] Cushman & Wakefield commercial real estate executive Larry Richey points to the nation's two mass transit laggards among major metro areas: Tampa Bay and Detroit, which just declared bankruptcy."—Robert Trigaux Tampa Bay Times "Lagging on mass transit, Tampa Bay tries to get its act together again" (link)

Weapons

"A woman ran a red light in Tampa in the summer 2010, killing a bicyclist on the sidewalk. No charges. A Naples man ran a red light in his pickup truck, killing a 76-year-old woman in 2011. No charges. A Sarasota County woman ran a flashing red light, killing a 58-year-old woman also in April. No charges. When alcohol is involved, criminal charges are filed. […] To make [a vehicular homicide] charge, prosecutors must be able to prove that the person was driving 'in a reckless manner likely to cause the death of, or great bodily harm to, another.' Unknowingly running a red light and slightly speeding is not included under that definition…"—Jessica Vander Velde Tampa Bay Times "Red light crashes are often accidents, not crimes, law says" 19 July 2013 (link)

"Steven Rickert, a bus driver since 2006, contacted the sheriff's office on Tuesday to tell investigators he might have struck the man while driving a HART bus. The pedestrian was identified Tuesday as Eric Lewis, 43, of Tampa. He was hit and killed shortly before 9 p.m. Monday on 79th Street, near Fir Drive. Rickert told investigators he was heading west on Fir Drive and turned north on 79th Street. He said he didn't know he struck a person until he heard about the hit-and-run crash on Tuesday morning, the sheriff's office said. Rickert has been in two previous accidents while driving a HART bus, [HART spokeswoman Marcia] Mejia said. The first crash occurred in February 2007 and the second in January 2010. In the January 2010 crash, a black 1996 Dodge struck the HART bus driven by Rickert at Fletcher Avenue and 42nd Street. No one was cited. The crash was ruled "preventable" and Rickert was given additional training."—Jose Girona, Tampa Tribune "Driver in fatal hit and run was driving HART bus" 21 February 2012 (link)

"Hours after the wreck, a tipster called investigators to say his sister's boyfriend had a damaged red Ford Explorer, according to a search warrant obtained this week by The Tampa Tribune. The man said the boyfriend had called him, crying, shortly before 4 a.m. At first, the boyfriend said something had hit the Ford, but he wasn't sure what, court documents show. Later, the boyfriend said the Ford had struck two deer on Van Dyke Road. When deputies tried speaking to the boyfriend, he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and requested an attorney, the search warrant states."—Josh Poltilove Tampa Tribune "Tips lead to breakthrough - but no hit-and-run arrest" 6 October 2010 (link) ed. Shawn Burton, the driver, received 7 years for the death of USF cancer researcher Kayoko Ishizuka. The sentence would have been longer if he remained at the scene and was found drunk.

Proof

"The sample was put into a DNA database and turned up a “hit” — a local man by the name of Lukis Anderson. Bingo. Mr. Anderson was arrested and charged with murder. There was one small problem: the 26-year-old Mr. Anderson couldn’t have been the culprit. During the night in question, he was at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, suffering from severe intoxication. Yet he spent more than five months in jail with a possible death sentence hanging over his head. Once presented with Mr. Anderson’s hospital records, prosecutors struggled to figure out how an innocent man’s DNA could have ended up on a murder victim. Late last month, prosecutors announced what they believe to be the answer: the paramedics who transported Mr. Anderson to the hospital were the very same individuals who responded to the crime scene at the mansion a few hours later."—Osagie K. Obasogie New York Times "High-Tech, High-Risk Forensics" (link)

"The murderer dubbed the Phantom of Heilbronn had been baffling German investigators for two years. The criminal was a rarity, a female serial killer, and a very busy one: police had linked DNA evidence from 40 crimes — including the infamous homicide of a policewoman in the southern German town of Heilbronn — to the same woman. Police had found her DNA on items ranging from a cookie to a heroin syringe to a stolen car. They had put a $400,000 reward on her head. Profilers from around Europe were called in to help hunt her down.[…] The police thought they'd been looking everywhere. But it turns out they should have been looking down — at the cotton swabs they were using to collect DNA samples. On March 26, German police revealed that the cotton swabs they use may have all been contaminated by the same worker at a factory in Austria — and that the Phantom of Heilbronn never existed."—Claudia Himmelreich Time World "Germany's Phantom Serial Killer: A DNA Blunder" 27 March 2009 (link)

“It is heartening that the mainstream scientific community today has validated so much of what the defense bar has been asserting for many years in the courts, the legislatures and in the public arena. This report should help avoid some of the heartache and injustice associated with the wrongful convictions and imprisonment resulting from junk science in the courtroom, and the myth that forensic science is infallible. The search for truth does not favor the prosecution or the defense, and neither should publicly funded forensic labs. The defense bar has long maintained that forensic laboratories and their personnel should be independent of the police and prosecution."—John Wesley Hall National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers News Release "National Academy of Sciences Finds Serious Deficiencies in Nations Crime Labs" 18 February 2009 (link)

Loop

"We have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that's to produce adaptable and complex movements. There is no other reason to have a brain. Think about it. Movement is the only way you have of affecting the world around you. […] think about communication -- speech, gestures, writing, sign language -- they're all mediated through contractions of your muscles. So it's really important to remember that sensory, memory and cognitive processes are all important, but they're only important to either drive or suppress future movements. There can be no evolutionary advantage to laying down memories of childhood or perceiving the color of a rose if it doesn't affect the way you're going to move later in life. Now for those who don't believe this argument, we have trees and grass on our planet without the brain, but the clinching evidence is this animal here -- the humble sea squirt. Rudimentary animal, has a nervous system, swims around in the ocean in its juvenile life. And at some point of its life, it implants on a rock. And the first thing it does in implanting on that rock, which it never leaves, is to digest its own brain and nervous system for food. So once you don't need to move, you don't need the luxury of that brain. And this animal is often taken as an analogy to what happens at universities when professors get tenure, but that's a different subject. (Applause) So I am a movement chauvinist. I believe movement is the most important function of the brain -- don't let anyone tell you that it's not true."—Daniel Wolport, TED Talks, "The real reason for brains" July 2011 (link)

"When you have anxiety or depression, exercise often seems like the last thing you want to do. But once you get motivated, exercise can make a big difference."—Mayo Clinic (link)

"Losers, sad excuses for human beings who have no reason to feel good about themselves or their failed, miserable lives, are approximately 25 times as likely to suffer the emotionally crippling effects of depression as any other group researched, the study claims. […] Because of their severe, profound "loserdom," realistic treatment options for depressed losers are almost nil, the Stanford report concludes. "The only treatment that makes any sense is loathing and rejection," Wyler-Hustad noted. "It is only logical that stupid, fat, ugly, bed-wetting, crybaby losers be shunned as outcasts and be treated with the hatred and disrespect they so richly deserve.""—The Onion, "Study: Depression Hits Losers Hardest" 5 March 1997 (link)

Momentum

"The [afterburn] hypothesis goes something like this: When you exercise, you rev up your body's metabolism. Because things in motion want to stay in motion, even after you stop exercising, your body's engine continues to rev for some time following the workout. Thus, even once you stop running, you continue to burn up more fuel for some period following exercise. The only problem with this hypothesis is that it hasn't always held up in research studies. Some have found no post-exercise effect. Others obtained results that were negligible. Yet others identified significant afterburn - to the tune of hundreds of extra calories."—Adam Cohen and Dr. Stephen Prescott, The Oklahoman, "Is exercise 'afterburn' real?" 24 May 2011. (link)

"This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall. […] Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. “Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.”—James Vlahos, New York Times, "Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?" 14 April 2011. (link)

"The brain is ravenous. Though just 2 percent of the body’s mass, it uses 20 percent of its resting energy, and the body’s other main sources of energy—amino acids, which are broken down from proteins, and fatty acids and glycerol, which are broken down from fats—cannot power the brain. This is a bother, because we store pound on pound of fat, which most of us would just as soon burn for fuel, whereas we store only a few ounces of glycogen. Our brains are thus on a nearly constant prowl for sugar. There is, however, a fallback: ketone bodies, which are highly acidic compounds created when fatty acids are broken down for energy. The best-known ketone is acetone, as in the clear flammable liquid used to remove nail polish and scour metal surfaces before painting. Once thought to be waste products, ketones are in fact fuel—and fuel that can power the brain.—Steve Hendricks, Harper's Magazine, "Starving your way to vigor." (page 51)

Baseline

"It was not meaningful to [Shin] that North Korea in the dead of winter is ugly, dirty, and dark, or that it is poorer than Sudan, or that, taken as a whole, it is viewed by human rights groups as the world's largest prison. His context had been twenty-three years in an open-air cage run by men who hanged his mother, shot his brother, crippled his father, murdered pregnant women, beat children to death, taught him to betray his family, and tortured him over a fire."—Blaine Harden (page 121)

"Suicide is a powerful temptation for North Koreans plucked out of ordinary lives and subjected to the labor camps' regime of hard labor, hunger, beatings, and sleep deprivation. […] The Party [said Kang Chol-hwan] saw suicide as an attempt to escape its grasp, and if the individual who had tried the trick wasn't around to pay for it, someone else needed to be found. […] North Korea's National Security Agency warns all prisoners that suicide will be punished with longer sentences for surviving relatives…"—Blaine Harden (page 72)

"But South Koreans struggle mightily to fit into their own success-obsessed, status-conscious, and education-crazed culture. […] South Koreans work more, sleep less, and kill themselves at a a higher rate than citizens of any other developed country…"—Blaine Harden (page 172)

Ignorance

"The United Arab Emirates has been heavily criticized by rights groups, which say it condones sexual violence against women. Human Rights Watch has called its record "shameful," saying it must change the way it handles such cases. In December 2012, a British woman reported being raped by three men in Dubai. She was found guilty of drinking alcohol without a license and fined. In January 2010, a British woman told authorities she was raped by an employee at a Dubai hotel. She was charged with public intoxication and having sex outside of marriage. An Australian woman reported in 2008 that she was drugged and gang-raped. She was convicted of having sex outside marriage and drinking alcohol, and she was sentenced to 11 months in prison."—Nicola Goulding and Phil O'Sullivan, "Norwegian woman: I was raped in Dubai, now I face prison sentence" (link)

"In 1984, when Calvin Burdine was awaiting sentencing for allegedly stabbing his gay lover to death, the prosecuting attorney encouraged the jury in his closing remarks to award Burdine the death penalty, rather than life in prison, on the grounds that sending a gay man to prison was akin to sending a kid to a candy store. After 17 minutes of deliberation, the jury obliged and sentenced Burdine to die. His death sentence was later overturned (mostly because Burdine's public defender had slept through much of his trial), but the homophobic thinking – that prison is some kind of paradise for gay men – lingers on."—Sadhbh Walshe, "The grim truth of being gay in prison" (link)

St. Julien: I know about the Johns Committee, but could you give me an idea of your impressions of it and what you heard about it?
Deer: It put a terrible damper on the University [of South Florida]. I am terribly aware of this. There was a fellow in English, the one that Charlie Johns really descended on, who incidentally is now a very distinguished scholar in the New York State University System. He is the head of one of the New York State University colleges. This is who Charlie Johns descended upon. And of course what made my husband and I both go into a panic was that he got in trouble for teaching an essay that we booked standard and used on the subject of pornography. It was just absolutely standard. It really put a damper on what people felt that they were free to do and say. We lost not only that guy, but we lost an extremely good philosopher at that time.—Harriet Deer (page 30)

Biblical

"The origins of homosexuality are obscure, as is the question of whether it is sin or sickness. […] Rather than review the multitudinous theories, conclusions, contentions and claims advanced through the years to “clarify” consideration of homosexuality, we have contented ourselves with presenting as an appendix to this report as complete and responsible a bibliography on the subject as we believe can be compiled, and leave to each individual the prerogative of selecting the authority and theory that most nearly jibe with his own views. We would, however, suggest that the Biblical description of homosexuality as an “abomination” has stood well the test of time."—Johns Committee Report (page 9)

"Whether it be with youth or with older individuals, homosexuality is unique among the sexual assaults considered by our laws in that the person affected by the practicing homosexual is first a victim, then an accomplice, and finally himself a perpetrator of homosexual acts."—Johns Committee Report (page 14)

"Incarceration is not a satisfactory answer in many cases, for indeed prison life produces its own specialized brand of deviates, known as “institutional homosexuals,” who would not, in freedom, consider homosexual activity, but in prison turn to it in search of escape from sexual tensions. The Florida Legislature in 1963 recognized this problem and enacted legislation directing the Division of Mental Health and Division of Corrections of the State to plan for the construction of facilities at the prison system’s new receiving and treatment center “for the care of child molesters and criminal sexual psychopaths.”—Johns Committee Report (page 17)

What

"PETA, [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] considered by many to be the highest-profile animal rights group in the country, kills an average of about 2,000 dogs and cats each year at its animal shelter [in Norfolk, Virginia]."—Michael Winerip (link)

"…we also experience food through a third sensory system called chemesthesis, which is based on touch and is perceived by the face’s trigeminal nerve. Branches of this nerve go to the eyes, nose, tongue and teeth, where they sense pain, irritation and temperature. This includes the burning sensation of chili peppers and the cooling sensation of a minty mouthwash. (Some people have argued that these perceptions should also be considered basic tastes.) Fat is perceived through the trigeminal nerve, which sends signals to the brain that our mouth is experiencing something viscous, slippery or (as in the case of ice cream) creamy."—Julie Wan (link)

"According to Amtrak, the major passenger rail provider in the United States, and a World Resources Institute (WRI) study, trains produce an average of 0.21 kg of carbon per passenger mile. This is compared to 0.35 kg of carbon per passenger mile for car transport and 0.48 kg of carbon per passenger mile for air transport."—Brendan McGuigan (link)

Place

"The diminutive scale of the early models of the cosmos resulted from the assumption that the earth sits, immobile, in the center of the universe. If the earth does not move, then the stars do: the starry sphere must rotate on its axis once a day in order to bring the stars trooping overhead on schedule, and the larger the sphere, the faster it must rotate. Were such a cosmos very large, the speed mandated for the celestial sphere would become unreasonably high. The stars of Ptolemy's universe already were obliged to hustle along at better than ten million miles per hour, and were the celestial sphere imagined to be a hundred times larger it would have to be turning faster than the velocity of light. One did not have to be an Einstein, or even to know the velocity of light, to intuit that was too fast—a point that had begun to worry cosmologists by the sixteenth century. All geocentric, immobile earth cosmologies tended to inhibit appreciation of the true dimensions of space."—Timothy Ferris (page 34)

"But just as Darwin and Copernicus and the biological scientists and physical scientists have removed us from our special perch, they've also done something else: they've connected us to the rest of life, connected us to the rest of the planet, and connected us to the cosmos beyond. To me, that's a very profound gift." —Neil Shubin (link)

"…biologists and geologists have learned a priceless lesson: by bringing natural phenomena into time, by making them dynamical and contingent, we make possible a more complete and more rational understanding of them. What I am proposing is that a similar shift must take place in our understanding of physics and cosmology. The laws of nature themselves, like the biological species, may not be eternal categories, but rather the creations of natural processes occurring in time. […] a theory of a whole universe, if it is to be consistent with what we know of quantum theory and relativity, must be a theory of a complex, self-organized universe."—Lee Smolin (pages 18-19)

Boss

"It turns out that Newton's laws aren't fundamental, they are emergent; that is, they are what happens when quantum matter aggregates into macroscopic fluids and objects. It is a collective organizational phenomenon. The thing is, you can't predict Newton's laws from observing the behavior of atoms, nor the behavior of atoms from Newton's laws."—Michael Gazzaniga (page 125)

"The key to understanding emergence is to understand that there are different levels of organization. My favorite analogy is that of the car. If you look at an isolated car part, such as a cam shaft, you cannot predict that the freeway will be full of traffic at 5:15 P.M. Monday through Friday. In fact, you could not even predict the phenomenon of traffic would ever occur if you just looked at a brake pad. You cannot analyze traffic at the level of car parts. Did the guy who invented the wheel ever visualize the 405 in Los Angeles on Friday evening? You cannot even analyze traffic at the level of the individual car. When you get a bunch of cars and drivers together, with the variables of location, time, weather, and society, all in the mix, then at that level you can predict traffic. A new set of laws emerge that aren't predicted from the parts alone."—Michael Gazzaniga (page 136)

"…a unique language, which has yet to be developed, is needed to capture the thing that happens when mental processes constrain the brain and vice versa. The action is at the interface of those layers. In one kind of vocabulary it is where downward causation meets upward causation. In another vocabulary it is not there at all but in the space between brains that are interacting with each other. It is what happens at the interface of our layered hierarchical existence that holds the answer to our quest for understanding mind/brain relationships. How are we to describe that? That emergent level has its own time course and is current with the actions taking place. It is that abstraction that makes us current in time, real and responsible. The whole business about the brain doing it before we are conscious of it becomes moot and inconsequential from the vantage point of a different level of operation. Understanding how to develop a vocabulary for those layered interactions, for me, constitutes the scientific problem of this century."—Michael Gazzaniga (page 220)