Month: July 2012

D.C. officer allegedly made threatening comments about first lady

A D.C. police officer who worked as a motorcycle escort for White House officials and other dignitaries was moved to administrative duty Wednesday after he allegedly was overheard making threatening comments toward Michelle Obama, according to several police officials.

The police department’s Internal Affairs Division is investigating the alleged comments and notified the U.S. Secret Service Wednesday, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to give details of the investigation.

D.C. officer allegedly made threatening comments about first lady

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One More Time: The Break-Up-the-Banks Debate

The LIBOR scandal has brought back to the fore the debate over what to do with the banks -- though more so in the UK than the U.S., which with the exception of the usual critical voices, like Simon Johnson, have mostly been preoccupied with other matters. (That may well change when big U.S. banks such as Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase & Co., and U.S. bank regulators like the Federal Reserve, get called into the principal's office.)

One More Time: The Break-Up-the-Banks Debate

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Imprisoned U.S. Drug Offenders Skyrockets from 41,000 to 507,000 in 30 Years

According to statistics compiled by The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit dedicated to prison reform, the total number of people in jails and prisons for violating drug laws soared from 41,000 in 1980 to 507,000 by 2010.

During this same 30-year period, the overall prison and jail population more than quadrupled, from 502,886 to 2,266,832 inmates. The United States leads the world in per capita incarceration at 743 per 100,000, ahead of Rwanda (c595) and Russia (568).

By 2010, just over half (51%) of all inmates in federal prisons were convicted of drug-related crimes. For state prisons the percentage is much smaller, 17.8% (violent offenders make up the largest share in these prisons, 53.2%).

Imprisoned U.S. Drug Offenders Skyrockets from 41,000 to 507,000 in 30 Years

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Confidence in organized religion hits all-time low in Gallup poll

 

Americans' confidence in religious institutions has hit an all-time low, with only 44 percent expressing a "great deal" of confidence in organized religion, according to a new Gallup survey.


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This follows a downward trend since the 1970s, when 68 percent of Americans had a high degree of confidence.

Gallup cites two big blows to confidence in organized religion: 1980s scandals involving televangelists like Jim Bakker and the Catholic sex abuse scandal in the 2000s. 

Confidence in organized religion hits all-time low in Gallup poll

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Manning’s lawyer: WikiLeaks whistleblower treated worse than a terrorist

bradleymanning-afp

The lawyer defending Bradley Manning against charges that he “aided the enemy” by disclosing state secrets to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, is arguing that US soldiers are being treated more harshly in application of the law than terrorists.

David Coombs, the civilian lawyer who has been representing the soldier for the past two years after he was arrested in Iraq on suspicion of being the WikiLeaks source, will be pressing his case in a military court next week. In a motion that he has lodged with the court as part of the lead up to a full court martial, he warns that unless the “aiding the enemy” charge is clarified it would leave Manning in a more onerous legal position than terrorists facing exactly the same count.

“It defies all logic to think that a terrorist would fare better in an American court for aiding the enemy than a US soldier would,” Coombs writes in the motion.

Manning’s lawyer: WikiLeaks whistleblower treated worse than a terrorist

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Mapping Inside Buildings By Tracking Earth's Magnetic Field

The kind of accurate geolocation offered by Global Positioning Systems has typically been difficult to apply indoors because metallic structures like buildings disrupt the Earth’s magnetic field, rendering compasses like the one found in many smartphones useless when inside. So map- and app-maker IndoorAtlas decided to spin these magnetic disturbances into something useful. Via an upcoming smartphone app, the company has created a way for users to navigate indoorsusing those very magnetic disturbances as their guide.

It works fairly simply (you can see just how simply in the video below). A map maker--which can be anyone, really--takes a building’s blueprint or floorplan and imposes it on a traditional map, like a Google Maps satellite image. Then the mapmaker simply walks along the passageways inside the building with smartphone in hand to chart the magnetic variations within the building as he or she goes. This magnetic map is then uploaded to IndoorAtlas’s database.

Once the map is made, visitors to the building can download the map to their phones and use it to navigate the floorplan of the building. Unlike other proposed indoor navigation systems thatwe’ve written about previoulsy, it doesn’t require any additional hardware to be installed in the building, like Bluetooth nodes or Wi-Fi. And because virtually anyone with access to a floorplan can be a mapmaker, the potential for the number of available maps to proliferate quickly is high. A visual explainer is below.

Mapping Inside Buildings By Tracking Earth’s Magnetic Field

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WebRTC

WebRTC is a free, open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs. The WebRTC components have been optimized to best serve this purpose. 

Our mission: To enable rich, high quality, RTC applications to be developed in the browser via simple Javascript APIs and HTML5.

Our current milestone: To iterate on our first implementation and use web developer feedback to improve the WebRTC API.

The WebRTC initiative is a project supported by Google, Mozilla and Opera. This website and its content is created and maintained by the Google Chrome team.

WebRTC

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