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The first three items today deal with yet more failures of government. Slate starts us off with a overview of a devastating WaPo article on how, for decades, the FBI evidence gnomes falsified evidence in service to prosecutors.
The Washington Post published a story so horrifying this weekend that it would stop your breath: “The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.”
What went wrong? The Post continues: “Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far.” The shameful, horrifying errors were uncovered in a massive, three-year review by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Project. Following revelations published in recent years, the two groups are helping the government with the country’s largest ever post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.
Chillingly, as the Post continues, “the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.” Of these defendants, 14 have already been executed or died in prison.
The massive review raises questions about the veracity of not just expert hair testimony, but also the bite-mark and other forensic testimony offered as objective, scientific evidence to jurors who, not unreasonably, believed that scientists in white coats knew what they were talking about. As Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, put it, “The FBI’s three-decade use of microscopic hair analysis to incriminate defendants was a complete disaster.” …
Next Megan McArdle covers how the collection of past due support from dead beat dads has created catch-22 situations for many blacks; including Walter Scott who was gunned down by police in North Charleston, SC a few weeks ago.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the government found itself financially supporting a lot of single-parent families in which one parent was not contributing to the support of their children. Unsurprisingly, this led authorities to crack down on “deadbeat dads,” with stiff penalties for parents who didn’t pay the money they owed. And that kind of situation might have helped lead to Walter Scott’s shooting death on April 4. Like many poor men, Scott owed back child support that had incurred severe penalties, including stints in jail, and his family argues that he probably fled from the police during a routine traffic stop because he feared another arrest. …
… Naturally, it’s not enough to just mandate payment; you also have to mandate penalties, or else selfish mothers or fathers will simply refuse to pay. Punishments were set up for noncompliance, and systems were set up to automatically garnish paychecks. It all seems very fair — unless the system makes a mistake, or Mom or Dad genuinely can’t find enough work, at which point it suddenly becomes Kafkaesque. I once watched a colleague struggle through New York state’s bureaucracy, which through its own screw-up had garnished so much of his paycheck that he basically had no money for food or rent. The error took months to fully resolve, because why should they care about some deadbeat dad feeding himself?
At least he was employed, and he knew he would probably get his money back. For the very poor, demands for child support can turn into an insurmountable mountain. And the penalties can actually make it harder for them to make their payments: Scott reportedly lost a $35,000-a-year job because the state of South Carolina misdirected his checks, then jailed him for nonpayment. …
The NY Times reports on missing black men. Or course, being the Times, they could not come up with the thought that maybe the government has, through our welfare system, made fathers and husbands superfluous. Our country is filled with similar perverse incentives, and this is perhaps the most damaging to our culture.
In New York, almost 120,000 black men between the ages of 25 and 54 are missing from everyday life. In Chicago, 45,000 are, and more than 30,000 are missing in Philadelphia. Across the South — from North Charleston, S.C., through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi and up into Ferguson, Mo. — hundreds of thousands more are missing.
They are missing, largely because of early deaths or because they are behind bars. Remarkably, black women who are 25 to 54 and not in jail outnumber black men in that category by 1.5 million, according to an Upshot analysis. For every 100 black women in this age group living outside of jail, there are only 83 black men. Among whites, the equivalent number is 99, nearly parity.
African-American men have long been more likely to be locked up and more likely to die young, but the scale of the combined toll is nonetheless jarring. It is a measure of the deep disparities that continue to afflict black men — disparities being debated after a recent spate of killings by the police — and the gender gap is itself a further cause of social ills, leaving many communities without enough men to be fathers and husbands.
Perhaps the starkest description of the situation is this: More than one out of every six black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old have disappeared from daily life. …
Space junk, a problem created by many governments, is a target of lasers in a proposal reported in Spectrum.
The easiest (and probably best) way to deal with the space junk problem is to stop producing space junk in the first place. We’re trying to do that, which is great. But even if space agencies and commercial launch companies all commit, tomorrow, to rockets and satellites that will deorbit themselves after no more than 25 years, there’s still all kinds of debris flying around up there, threatening our orbital infrastructure.
Many ways of dealing with orbital debris have been proposed, and some are even being tried out. Researchers working at RIKEN, a research institution in Japan, are leading an international team that wants to put a laser cannon on the International Space Station to try to shoot down small pieces of junk on the fly.
One of the most difficult parts of dealing with space junk is finding it in the first place. To then shoot it with a laser at a distance of 100 kilometers or more, you have to be able to track it very precisely, which necessitates a very sensitive wide-angle optical telescope. Fortunately, the ISS is about to get one. EUSO, the Extreme Universe Space Observatory, will be installed on the ISS in 2017, and the researchers at RIKEN must have said to themselves, “hey, we could slap a laser on that thing and blast space junk.” So they’re going to give it a try. …
Science 2.0 has an idea for ending the summer break literacy slide.
Those “Diary Of A Wimpy Kid” books are not “The Good Earth”, they are not going to win Pulitzer Prizes, but they are a lot better for kids in the summer than staying glued to YouTube videos. And for most kids, that is going to be the choice. Rather than sending home a reading list (poor schools) or stacks of books (rich schools) in the hopes of combating the the literacy loss experienced during the summer break, a new study finds that letting kids choose the books is better.
The study, conducted in kindergarten, first-, and second-grade classrooms in the Rochester City School District, showed that students who were allowed to choose their own summer reading saw lower levels of literacy loss over the summer months. Erin T. Kelly, M.D., the study’s lead researcher, will present her findings at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting on April 25. …
Anti-Social Media Week says Tuesday is the saddest day of the week on Twitter.
Tuesday is the saddest day of the week on Twitter. I can tell you that because I’m looking at The Hedonometer, a digital graph created by data scientists to track happiness on the social network. Since 2009, The Hedonometer has been analyzing millions of tweets around the globe to calculate the average happiness levels. And those tweets have produced some very surprising results.
For example, one of the saddest days analyzed was the day Michael Jackson died. Some of the happiest days were US elections. On average, Louisiana is the saddest state. Hawaii is the happiest. If you’ve got more Twitter followers, you’re more likely to tweet happy things, and if you use the word “office” it’s likely you’re feeling down.
Buried deeper in the data are even bigger insights. Happiness researchers have long known that travel makes people happy. In fact, a Dutch study found that the greatest increase in happiness came from just anticipating travel, not even the actual vacation itself. Their study found that planning a trip boosted happiness levels significantly for eight weeks prior to departure. …