The owner of Rat Island–that two-acre rock outcrop off the coast of Long Island City–shrugs.
“The only thing I’m going to own after I sell Rat Island and my real estate is my E-ZPass,” said Mr. Brennen, who pays nearly $1,500 a year on the island and is also auctioning off property on City Island. “New York City and State won’t be able to hurt me anymore.”
Last month I blogged about a virtual Amazon experiment that wanted to see if a large number of virtual monkeys could recreate the works of Shakespeare. Looks like they have some success.
Today (2011-09-23) at 2:30 PST the monkeys successfully randomly recreated A Lover’s Complaint. This is the first time a work of Shakespeare has actually been randomly reproduced. Furthermore, this is the largest work ever randomly reproduced. It is one small step for a monkey, one giant leap for virtual primates everywhere.
The monkeys will continue typing away until every work of Shakespeare is randomly created. Until then, you can continue to view the monkeys’ progress on that page. I am making the raw data available to anyone who wants it. Please use the Contact page to ask for the URL. If you have a Hadoop cluster that I could run the monkeys project on, please contact me as well.
This project originally started on August 21, 2011. Over the course of the project, over 5 trillion character groups have been randomly generated and checked out of the 5.5 trillion possible combinations.
I can’t wait to get these million Amazonian monkeys predicting the Supreme Court!
Safety costs include tax-funded expenditures, such as tracking sex offenders. These safety costs ultimately harm society (in the form of a higher tax bill).
A low estimate of the cost of dealing with sex offenders is $179,000 annually, Jones said. That number includes salaries for the assistant prosecutor, who handles all cases involving children, the sheriff’s deputies who monitor offenders once they leave prison, mailing costs for notifications that go out to neighbors when a sex offender moves into town and costs to hunt down offenders who have skipped the state and violated reporting requirements….
The across the board changes, with reporting requirements for even the least severe of sex crimes, have also permeated the court system. Chris Pagan, a defense attorney who has represented people accused of sex crimes, says the law is clogging the docket. “It is certainly a lot more difficult to settle sex cases now than it was before,” he said. “People who are truly innocent, the fact that there would be a registration requirement is a deal stopper most of the time.”
Very interesting piece in the Times about the tough penalties for crimes, the discretion prosecutors get, and how this diminishes cases that go to trial–and the unseen cost, the concretization of the law.
Plea bargains have been common for more than a century, but lately they have begun to put the trial system out of business in some courtrooms. By one count, fewer than one in 40 felony cases now make it to trial, according to data from nine states that have published such records since the 1970s, when the ratio was about one in 12. The decline has been even steeper in federal district courts.
And there’s also the concentration of power with Prosecutors:
The transfer of power to prosecutors from judges has been so profound that an important trial ritual has become in some measure a lie, Mr. deVlaming said — the instructions judges read stating that the jury determines guilt or innocence, and the judge a proper sentence. The latter part is no longer true when mandatory minimums and, in many cases, sentencing guidelines apply, but jurors often do not know that.
Legal scholars like Paul Cassell, a conservative former federal judge and prosecutor who is now a law professor at the University of Utah, describe the power shift as a zero-sum game.
“Judges have lost discretion, and that discretion has accumulated in the hands of prosecutors, who now have the ultimate ability to shape the outcome,” Mr. Cassell said. “With mandatory minimums and other sentencing enhancements out there, prosecutors can often dictate the sentence that will be imposed.”
Without question, plea bargains benefit many defendants who have committed crimes and receive lighter sentences than they might after trial. It also limits cases that require considerable time and expense in court.
If doctors are communicating over skype, lawyers can’t be that far away.
Since telepsychiatry was introduced decades ago, video conferencing has been an increasingly accepted way to reach patients in hospitals, prisons, veterans’ health care facilities and rural clinics — all supervised sites.
But today Skype, and encrypted digital software through third-party sites like CaliforniaLiveVisit.com, have made online private practice accessible for a broader swath of patients, including those who shun office treatment or who simply like the convenience of therapy on the fly.
One third-party online therapy site, Breakthrough.com, said it has signed up 900 psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors and coaches in just two years. Another indication that online treatment is migrating into mainstream sensibility: “Web Therapy,” the Lisa Kudrow comedy that started online and pokes fun at three-minute webcam therapy sessions, moved to cable (Showtime) this summer.
“In three years, this will take off like a rocket,” said Eric A. Harris, a lawyer and psychologist who consults with the American Psychological Association Insurance Trust. “Everyone will have real-time audiovisual availability. There will be a group of true believers who will think that being in a room with a client is special and you can’t replicate that by remote involvement. But a lot of people, especially younger clinicians, will feel there is no basis for thinking this. Still, appropriate professional standards will have to be followed.”