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Should texts, e-mail, tweets and Facebook posts be the new fingerprints in court?

Posted on February 28, 2015 by ev1

In an episode of the CBS show Criminal Minds that aired last year , an FBI team is on a frantic hunt for a missing 4-year-old. The team soon realizes that the girl has been given away by a relative, Sue, and that theres no way Sue is going to reveal her whereabouts.

A crucial break comes when FBI profiler Alex Blake puts her word wisdom to work. Blake, who is also a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, notices that Sue uses an unusual turn of phrase during an interview and in a written statement: I put the light bug on.

The FBI team launches an Internet search and soon discovers the same misuse of light bug for light bulb in an underground adoption forum: Ill switch the light bug off in the car so no one will see.

Same author, right? On that assumption, the team springs into action and bingo! the missing child is found.

Inspiration for Blakes expertise came from former FBI special agent and linguist James R. Fitzgerald, who became an adviser to Criminal Minds in 2008. Blake, he says, is a combination of him and his fiancee, Georgetown associate linguistics professor Natalie Schilling.

The incident, Fitzgerald says, is based on a 2008 homicide case, State of Alabama v. Earnest Stokes. In a linguistic report he prepared for the prosecution, Fitzgerald said he found the term light bug in an anonymous letter attempting to lead investigators off the track (His [sic] had busted the light bug hanging down) and in a tape-recording of suspect Earnest Ted Stokes. That was one of the lexical clues leading Fitzgerald to opine with a likelihood bordering on certainty that Stokes was the author of the unsigned letter.

The [Criminal Minds] writers love these real-life examples, Fitzgerald explains in an e-mail.

Thats not surprising. As more of our communication is written, the linguistic fingerprints we leave provide enticing clues for investigators, contributing to the small but influential field of forensic linguistics and its controversial subspecialty, author identification.

The new whodunit is all about who wrote it.

Answering that question becomes ever more urgent as we create a virtual trove of data in e-mail, in texts and in tweets that are often anonymous or written under pseudonyms. Private companies want to find out which disgruntled employee has been posting bad stuff about the boss online. Police and prosecutors seek help figuring out who wrote a threatening e-mail or whether a suicide note was a forgery. A groundbreaking murder case in Britain was decided after a linguistic analysis suggested that text messages sent from a young womans phone after she went missing were more likely to have been written by her killer than by her. And in Johnson County, Tenn., the outcome of the April Facebook murders trial may well hang, according to Assistant District Attorney General Dennis D. Brooks, on whether a linguist can convince jurors of the authorship of a slew of e-mails soliciting murder that were written, he says, under a fictitious name.

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Should texts, e-mail, tweets and Facebook posts be the new fingerprints in court?

UTHealth's Belinda Reininger Recognized for Excellence in Public Health Practice

Posted on February 28, 2015 by ev1

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Newswise HOUSTON (Feb. 27, 2015) Belinda Reininger, Dr.P.H., M.P.H., associate professor in the Department of Health Promotion & Behavioral Sciences at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth), has been honored with the Faculty Award for Excellence in Academic Public Health Practice. The Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) and Pfizer, Inc. made the announcement today.

I am thankful for this award, particularly because it shines a light on the enthusiastic commitment to wellness in the City of Brownsville and the surrounding region. My incredible staff and faculty colleagues, the local dedicated leaders and the people of this region inspire me every day to search for sustainable solutions to the health issues we face, said Reininger.

Reininger joined UTHealth School of Public Health Brownsville Regional Campus as a faculty member in 2001. Her research has focused on evidence-based, community approaches to improving health in minority populations. She has authored dozens of peer-reviewed publications and has been the principal investigator on multiple studies on chronic diseases.

Since joining the Brownsville campus, Reininger has made a significant impact on the community by working to reduce obesity and diabetes rates in a region where 80 percent of adults are overweight or obese. Reininger works in partnership with an active community advisory board that has supported policy and environmental changes.

By helping create and organize events such as Cyclobia and the annual city-wide weight loss challenge, Reininger has been an integral part of Brownsvilles transformation to a healthier community.

In 2008, Reininger co-led an initiative to establish the Brownsville Farmers Market, which now operates every Saturday and provides vouchers to low-income families to help them obtain fresh produce. The market has also established a community garden program, giving residents the opportunity to grow their own fruits and vegetables.

Belinda is the epitome of a faculty member who translates science into practice and who dedicates herself to improving the health of an entire community, said Susan Tortolero Emery, Ph.D., director of the Center for Health Promotion and Prevention Research at UTHealth School of Public Health. Tortolero Emery nominated Reininger for the award.

According to ASPPH, the Faculty Award for Excellence in Academic Public Health Practice was presented to Reininger for her outstanding commitment to achieving and integrating academic public health practice within research, teaching and service.

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UTHealth's Belinda Reininger Recognized for Excellence in Public Health Practice

Monkey Cage: Partisan bias about climate change is more prevalent than you think

Posted on February 28, 2015 by ev1

By Toby Bolsen, James N. Druckman and Fay Lomax Cook February 27 at 1:00 PM

Why do Democrats and Republicans differ so much on the fundamental science of global warming? A key reason is the politicization of climate science. Politicization means emphasizing the inherent uncertainty of science in order to cast doubt on the existence of a scientific consensus. The result is that citizens become uncertain about whether to trust politicized scientific information even though, in the case of climate change, there is a clear scientific consensus about the reality of human-induced global warming.

Unfortunately, our new research shows how far this politicization extends: not simply to citizens, but to congressional staffers and even scientists themselves. Our study is one of the first to simultaneously assess the beliefs of the U.S. public and key elites in the policy-making process that is, scientists who conduct research on new technologies that may offer solutions, and advisers to members of Congress who help enact legislation.

We conducted simultaneous surveys of the U.S. public, scientists who are actively publishing research on energy technologies in the U.S., and congressional staffers in August 2010. (More information about these surveys is in our article.) We asked each of these groups about whether global warming is happening and, if so, whether it is the result of human activity.

We found that ideology and party identification affected beliefs about global warming in each group. Both scientists and congressional staffers were more likely than the public say that human-caused global warming is happening. But ideology and party identification influenced beliefs across each of the three samples although to a lesser extent among energy scientists compared to the public and staffers.

More alarmingly, we asked a series of factual knowledge questions on each survey related to science comprehension, energy knowledge, and political knowledge. We find that as conservatives and Republicans become more knowledgeable about energy, politics, and science they become less likely to say that human-caused global warming is happening.

Some recent work by Dan Kahan and others argues that this type of reasoning is individually rational, because it helps to uphold social identities, cultural commitments, and personal worldviews, but it is collectively detrimental to society because it undermines the ability of science to arbitrate debates where science can inform the public. Once a debate has become politicized, educating the public about the facts associated with global warming rarely leads individuals to change their incorrect beliefs.

A true scientific consensus is rare. When a consensus is reached, we should do everything possible to make certain the public is aware. The challenge is finding ways to counteract the politicization, and thereby negate the ability of political actors to render that consensus useless.

Toby Bolsen is an assistant professor of political science at Georgia State University. James N. Druckman is the Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science, and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Fay Lomax Cook is on leave from Northwestern University as assistant director of the National Science Foundation and director of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation.

This post is part of a series on politics and science. Other posts in the series include:

Opinion: Roy died for speaking his mind

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Danzig

Story highlights Bangladeshi-American blogger Avijit Roy was killed Thursday Frida Ghitis: Root cause of Islamist extremism is not poverty

Roy and his wife, Rafida Ahmed Bonya, now in critical condition after also being attacked Thursday, were in Bangladesh to attend the national book fair, where Roy was promoting his books advocating tolerance, education and secular humanism.

Frida Ghitis

Why was he killed? At the time of writing, the perpetrators had not been caught, but there seems little doubt he was killed by Islamist radicals, who were likely angered by his devastatingly critical writings. Just last month he wrote about the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris and the December 16 massacre in Peshawar, Pakistan, in which Pakistani Taliban opened fire inside a school, killing 145 people, including 132 children. "To me," he wrote, "such religious extremism is like a highly contagious virus."

Roy strongly disagreed with President Barack Obama's statements distancing the so-called Islamic State from Islam. "ISIS," he said, "is what unfolds when the virus of faith launches into action and the outbreak becomes an epidemic."

His assassination came the same day we learned the identity of the man known as Jihadi John, infamous for narrating in English as Western hostages of ISIS were decapitated. He has been identified as the London-raised, university educated Mohammed Emwazi.

Taken together, these two tragedies help shed light on what motivates people to conduct these brutal acts.

The revelations about Emwazi's life story were pieced together with the help of an organization that wants to make us believe Jihadi John's radicalization is the fault of the British security services, not of a murderous, apocalyptic ideology that helped make 2014 the deadliest year for terrorist attacks on record.

According to the Washington Post, which relies partly on information from a group called CAGE, Emwazi was described by some as a perfectly normal young Londoner, showing no signs of becoming the barbaric murderer he is alleged to have become, until security services started harassing him. The problems began, friends referred to in the article would have us believe, when he tried to go on safari to Tanzania with a couple of friends. He was stopped in Tanzania, and according to the article, he claims he was accused of planning to travel to Somalia, where the al Qaeda affiliate al Shabaab has been conducting its reign of terror.

An official from CAGE, which is described by the Washington Post as a "rights group," described Emwazi as "extremely kind, extremely gentle," before Britain's MI5 started making his life hell for no apparent reason other than that he was a Muslim.

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Opinion: Roy died for speaking his mind

The Joy of the Gospel Fills the Heart and Life

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Danzig

In His First Lenten Homily, Father Cantalamessa Reflects on Pope Francis Apostolic Exhortation and on the Concept of the Personal Encounter with Christ Rome, February 27, 2015 (Zenit.org) Luca Marcolivio | 445 hits

The theme of Father Raniero Cantalamessas first Lenten homily is Evangelii Gaudium, in which the Papal Household Preacher points out first of allthe thread that unites several post-Council Popes on the subject of evangelization.

In his Apostolic Exhortation, Pope Francis reminds that the starting point of any sort of evangelization is Baptism: an affirmation that is not new said Blessed Paul VI in Evangelii nuntiandi, and Saint John Paul II in Christifedels laici, while Benedict XVI emphasized the special role of the family in it.

However, in Evangelii Gaudium there is a new element, which is evangelization understood as an encounter with a person, Jesus Christ. This concept, by now somewhat absorbed by post-Conciliar Catholicism, is not, however, entirely taken for granted.

There was a time, in fact, when the idea was favored of an ecclesial encounter, which occurs, namely, through the Sacraments of the Church, whereas the expression personal encounter had to our Catholic ears vaguely Protestant resonances.

For his part, Pope Francis is not thinking obviously of a personal encounter that substitutes the ecclesial; he wishes to say that the ecclesial encounter must also be a free, desired, spontaneous encounter, and not purely nominal, juridical or habit-bound, said Father Cantalamessa.

The Papal Household Preacher then reviewed Christian initiation in the course of the centuries, where early Christianity, underground and persecuted for at least two centuries under the Roman Empire, made the choice of Baptism in adult age, with the catechumenate, and it was the fruit of a personal decision, in addition also risky because of the possibility of martyrdom.

During the Middle Ages, with the coming of the first Christian kingdoms beginning with Clovis Franks Christianity itself was affirmed with the relative inculturation of the masses and Christianity became the hegemonic religion, practiced by almost the totality of the population and transmitted with Baptism, from early childhood, no longer being the consequence of a personal choice.

The advent of modernity, which began with humanism and evolved with the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, marks the progressive process of secularism, with the lost of faith or at least of religious practice in ever larger sectors of the population.

Hence the urgency of a New Evangelization, namely of an evangelization that moves from bases different from the traditional and that takes into account the new situation, putting the men of today in conditions of making a free and mature personal decision, precisely as the early Christians who were baptized as adults, thus being real and not just nominal Christians.

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The Joy of the Gospel Fills the Heart and Life

WorldViews: Why an American blogger was hacked to death in Bangladesh

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Danzig

On Thursday night, Avijit Roy, a well-known Bangladeshi American writer and religious skeptic, was surrounded by unidentified assailants armed with cleavers and hacked to death on a street in Dhaka. His wife, Rafida Ahmed, sustained serious woundsand is fighting for her life. On social media, you can find awfulimages of the immediate aftermath of the incident, with Ahmed, drenched in blood, standing stunned by the fallen body of her husband.

A previously unknown Islamist militant group named Ansar Bangla 7 claimed responsibility for the attack, according to the Associated Press, saying on Twitter that Roy wastargeted "because of his crimes against Islam."

Roy, who was based in the United States, had just arrived in Bangladesh a week prior to attend a book festival. An engineer by training, he had launched a popular, secularist blog and gained a reputation as a prominent advocate of humanism and tolerance. His Hindu background was less relevant than his scientific atheism. Friends claimed he had received numerous death threats from fundamentalists irked by his outspoken commentary on religion.

"I have profound interest in freethinking, skepticism, philosophy, scientific thoughts and human rights of people," Roy wrote on his Facebook page, by way ofbiographical description.In apost on his Mukto-Mona blog, Roy, 42, questioned the credibility of the Koran, challenging the contention of some Islamic scholars that there's any "scientific" merit to the text.

Following the hideous terror attacks on a school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar and on the Paris offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo last month, Roylikened religion to a virus in a tweet.

Such sentiments proved too dangerous in Bangladesh's complicated milieu. The country has one of the largest populations of Muslims in the world, and Islam is enshrined as a state religion. In 2013, another secular blogger, Ahmed Rajib Haider, was killed by extremists, sparking similar free speech protests as Roy's death prompted this week.

But Bangladesh also has a deeptradition of secularism the country broke away from Pakistan following a bloody war in 1971. Bengali nationalism, harbored also by the country's religious minorities, trumped the pan-Islamism that defined the Pakistani state. Bangladesh does not have blasphemy laws on its books, nor are there any officialshariah courts.

The current government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has embarked on a controversial, criticized crackdown of Islamists in the country, which included prominent politicians who had sided against the country's independence four decades ago. This effort was cheered by mass pro-democracy,anti-fundamentalist protests in 2013.

But Hasina hasnot helped the cause of liberal thinkers like Roy and is accused of instituting a creeping authoritarianismwhere dissent and free speech is curtailed. Her opponents, including the country's main Islamist party, have been frozen out of parliament. As they fume alongthe margins, there are fears ofincreasing militancy and radicalization.

Bangladesh's toxic culture of zero-sum politics has led to a long, twisted history of extrajudicial violence, assassinations and street protests paralyzing the country's political life. Roy's killersmay have hated him for his views on Islam, but they operated in a far larger, fraught context.

U.S. blogger hacked to death

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Danzig

Story highlights Victim's father says extremists backed by Bangladesh's main Islamist party killed his son Police: Avijit Roy died after being attacked on a street in Dhaka, Bangladesh

He recalled the case of another secular blogger, Ahmed Rajib Haider, who was hacked to death outside his home in Bangladesh in February 2013 by assailants with machetes.

"The virus of faith was the weapon that made these atrocities possible," Roy wrote in the article, which is to be published in Free Inquiry magazine in April.

On Thursday night, the engineer and writer known for speaking out for secular freedom died after being attacked by machete-wielding assailants in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, a local police official said.

Roy, the founder of the website Mukto-Mona, and his wife were assaulted as they walked back from a speaking engagement, said Krishna Pada Roy, a deputy commissioner with the Dhaka police.

Police were investigating a "local hard-line religious group" that praised the killing online, the BBC reported.

Ajay Roy, Avijit's father, filed a case of murder with the Shahbagh police on Friday without naming suspects.

The father, a retired professor at Dhaka University, later told reporters his son was killed by extremist and communal groups backed by Jamaat-e-Islami, the main Islamist political party in the country. Avijit Roy had received death threats several times for posting his views on blog, his father said.

Jamaat-e-Islami, however, protested Ajay Roy's statement and demanded punishment of the killers.

Shahbagh police officer-in-charge Sirajul Islam said, "The nature of the attack suggests a fanatic group might have been behind the murder."

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U.S. blogger hacked to death

Leonard Nimoy Showed Us What It Truly Means To Be Human

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Danzig

Leonard Nimoy didn't just have a massive impact on science fiction, he also transformed pop culture. Nimoy, who died today, took the thankless supporting role of an emotionless alien science whiz, and turned Spock on Star Trek into an icon.

Before Spock came along, alien beings in mass media (and most written SF as well) were one-dimensional. They represented the "other," the strange and unknowable beings who could only throw our human characters in relief. In the hands of most actors, Spock would have been a one-note joke character: the guy who spouts off formulas and equations in a monotone. Spock could easily have become the butt of Star Trek's jokes, or just a weird side character.

But Nimoy imbued Spock with a life and complexity that were impossible to deny. Far from being a one-note character, Spock became one of the most complex and nuanced people on television. From his inner torment to his quiet amusement at the humans around him to his occasional flashes of anger, Spock was a constantly surprising mystery, with a lot of layers.

As I wrote a few years ago (in a piece that I was overjoyed that Nimoy retweeted):

Nimoy was playing a common science fiction "type" the impassive alien and he took it to a different place. Before Spock, science fiction was full of emotionless aliens who spoke in a monotone or imitated a stereotypical "computer" inflection. Nimoy gave a whole range of nuance to the Vulcan role, conveying a lot of different stuff with every raised eyebrow or furrowed brow. Nimoy's Spock never seemed to have emotions, as we understood them but he still had a range, and moods. A huge host of sympathetic aliens on television owe their genesis to Spock.

Here's a pretty great video from just over a year ago, where the singer Pharrell interviews Nimoy about his process in creating the role of Spock:

In an anecdote that Nimoy has recounted many times, the genesis of his portrayal of Spock came from one early episode, where he learned to say the word "fascinating" in a detatched, cool fashion. As NPR recounted:

The first time actor Leonard Nimoy said the word [fascinating] was in an episode where the crew of the USS Enterprise faced a strange, sinister entity. No matter where the ship turned, the object managed to be in their way. The bridge was on high alert so Nimoy shouted out his next line with the same energy: "Fascinating!"

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Leonard Nimoy Showed Us What It Truly Means To Be Human

Atheist blogger killed in Bangladesh