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Hospitals Earn More For Mistakes Than For Flawless Surgeries

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SurgeryU.S. Department of Defense
Why health care reform must include changes to how people pay for hospital care

Hospitals make more money when they make mistakes during surgery, and reducing mistakes could actually cut into a hospital's profits, according to a new study.

The study's authors suggest that changing the way people pay for hospital care could reduce complications, while maintaining the status quo could keep hospitals from trying to improve. On average, a surgery with complication netted a hospital $1,749 more for every patient on Medicare, or $39,017 more for a patient with private insurance, compared to a complication-free procedure.

The study doesn't mean that surgeons deliberately make mistakes to rake in the dough for hospitals, David Sadoff, one of the study's authors and a managing director at the Boston Consulting Group, told The New York Times. "We don't believe that is happening at all," he said. But it does mean that without change, there's little incentive to improve.

Sadoff and his colleagues-including researchers from the Boston Consulting Group, Harvard University and Texas Health Resources, which runs three large, nonprofit hospitals-had some specific suggestions for fixes, The New York Times reported. They recommend that insurers should not pay for poor care, but should give out bonuses for complication-free procedures. They also suggest that hospitals be required to post their complication rates publicly, so that people may choose to avoid poorly performing ones, forcing those places to change or close.

The researchers got their numbers from analyzing the medical charts from more than 34,000 surgeries at Texas Health Resources. Inspiration for the study came in part from the fate of previous studies that showed a simple checklist could drastically reduce surgical mistakes. (You may have seen the 2007 New Yorker article describing it.) In spite of the evidence, not many hospitals tried the checklist, Atul Gawande, The New Yorker article's author and a Harvard University surgeon and medical professor, told The Wall Street Journal. "We wondered whether finances were playing a part in it," Gawande said.

    



In 1884, A Popular Science Writer Got Way Too Stoned

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Actress Dorthy Short as Mary Lane in the film "Reefer Madness," 1936Louis J. Gasnier
From our archive, a dramatic first-hand account of marijuana overdose.

"An Overdose of Hasheesh," by Mary C. Hungerford, originally appeared in the February 1884 issue of Popular Science magazine.

Being one of the grand army of sufferers from headache, I took, last summer, by order of my physician, three small daily doses of Indian hemp (hasheesh), in the hope of holding my intimate enemy in check. Not discovering any of the stimulative effects of the drug, even after continual increase of the dose, I grew to regard it as a very harmless and inactive medicine, and one day, when I was assured by some familiar symptoms that my perpetual dull headache was about to assume an aggravated and acute form, such as usually sent me to bed for a number of days, I took, in the desperate hope of forestalling the attack, a much larger quantity of hasheesh than had ever been prescribed.

Twenty minutes later I was seized with a strange sinking or faintness, which gave my family so much alarm that they telephoned at once for the doctor, who came in thirty minutes after the summons, bringing, as he had been requested, another practitioner with him.
I took, in the desperate hope of forestalling the attack, a much larger quantity of hasheesh than had ever been prescribed.

I had just rallied from the third faint, as I call the sinking turns, for want of a more descriptive name, and was rapidly relapsing into another, when the doctors came. One of them asked at once if I had been taking anything unusual, and a friend who had been gent for remembered that I had been experimenting with hasheesh. The physicians asked then the size and time of the last dose, but I could not answer. I heard them distinctly, but my lips were sealed. Undoubtedly my looks conveyed a desire to speak, for Dr. G , bending over me, asked if I had taken a much larger quantity than he ordered.

I was half sitting up on the bed when he asked me that question, and, with all my energies bent upon giving him to understand that I had taken an overdose, I bowed my head, and at once became unconscious of everything except that bowing, which I kept up with ever-increasing force for seven or eight hours, according to my computation of time. I felt the veins of my throat swell nearly to bursting, and the cords tighten painfully, as, impelled by an irresistible force, I nodded like a wooden mandarin in a tea-store.

In the midst of it all I left my body, and quietly from the foot of the bed watched my unhappy self nodding with frightful velocity. I glanced indignantly at the shamefully indifferent group that did not even appear to notice the frantic motions, and resumed my place in my living temple of flesh in time to recover sufficiently to observe one doctor lift his finger from my wrist, where he had laid it to count the pulsations just as I lapsed into unconsciousness, and say to the other: "I think she moved her head. She means us to understand that she has taken largely of the cannabis Indica."
This exaggerated appreciation of sight, motion, and sound is, I am told, a well-known effect of hasheesh, but I was ignorant of that fact then...

So, in the long, interminable hours I had been nodding my head off, only time enough had elapsed to count my pulse, and the violent motions of my head had in fact been barely noticeable. This exaggerated appreciation of sight, motion, and sound is, I am told, a well-known effect of hasheesh, but I was ignorant of that fact then, and, even if I had not been, probably the mental torture I underwent during the time it enchained my faculties would not have been lessened, as I seemed to have no power to reason with myself, even in the semi-conscious intervals which came between the spells.

These intervals grew shorter, and in them I had no power to speak. My lips and face seemed to myself to be rigid and stony. I thought that I was dying, and, instead of the peace which I had always hoped would wait on my last moments, I was filled with a bitter, dark despair. It was not only death that I feared with a wild, unreasoning terror, but. there was a fearful expectation of judgment, which must, I think, be like the torture of lost souls. I felt half sundered from the flesh, and my spiritual sufferings seemed to have begun, although I was conscious of living still.

One terrible reality-I can hardly term it a fancy even now-that came to me again and again, was so painful that it must, I fear, always be a vividly remembered agony. Like dreams, its vagaries can be accounted for by association of ideas past and passing, but the suffering was so intense and the memory of it so haunting that I have acquired a horror of death unknown to me before. I died, as I believed, although by a strange double consciousness I knew that I should again reanimate the body I had left. In leaving it I did not soar away, as one delights to think of the freed spirits soaring. Neither did I linger around dear, familiar scenes. I sank, an intangible, impalpable shape, through the bed, the floors, the cellar, the earth, down, down, down! As if I had been a fragment of glass dropping through the ocean, I dropped uninterruptedly through the earth and its atmosphere, and then fell on and on forever.
I discovered that I was transparent and deprived of all power of volition, as well as bereft of the faculties belonging to humanity.

I was perfectly composed, and speculated curiously upon the strange circumstance that even in going through the solid earth there was no displacement of material, and in my descent I gathered no momentum. I discovered that I was transparent and deprived of all power of volition, as well as bereft of the faculties belonging to humanity. But in place of my lost senses I had a marvelously keen sixth sense or power, which I can only describe as an intense superhuman consciousness that in some way embraced all the five and went immeasurably beyond them. As time went on, and my dropping through space continued, I became filled with the most profound loneliness, and a desperate fear took hold of me that I should be thus alone for evermore, and fall and fall eternally without finding rest.

"Where," I thought, "is the Saviour, who has called his own to his side? Has he forsaken me now?" And I strove in my dumb agony to cry to him. There was, it seemed to me, a forgotten text which, if remembered, would be the spell to stop my fatal falling and secure my salvation. I sought in my memory for it, I prayed to recall it, I fought for it madly, wrestling against the terrible fate which seemed to withhold it. Single words of it came to me in disconnected mockery, but erased themselves instantaneously. Mentally, I writhed in such hopeless agony that, in thinking of it, I wonder I could have borne such excess of emotion and lived. It was not the small fact of life or death that was at stake, but a soul's everlasting weal.

Suddenly it came. The thick darkness through which I was sinking became illuminated with a strange lurid light, and the air, space, atmosphere, whatever it might be called, separated and formed a wide black-sided opening, like the deadly pit which shows itself in the center of a maelstrom. Then, as I sank slowly into this chasm, from an immeasurable distance above me, yet forcibly distinct, the words I longed for were uttered in a voice of heavenly sweetness: "He that believeth on me hath everlasting life, and shall not come unto condemnation." My intense over-natural consciousness took possession of these words, which were, I knew, my seal of safety, my passport to heaven. For one wild instant a Hash of ineffable joy, the joy of a ransomed soul, was mine. I triumphed over sin and hell and the unutterable horrors of the second death. Then I plunged again into the outer darkness of the damned. For the talisman which had been so suddenly revealed was, as if in mockery, as suddenly snatched from me, and, as before, obliterated from my recollection.
As if I had been a fragment of glass dropping through the ocean, I dropped uninterruptedly through the earth and its atmosphere, and then fell on and on forever.

Then all the chaos beyond the gap into which I was falling became convulsed, as if shaken by wind and storm. Hideous sounds of souls in torment, and still more hideous peals of mocking, fiendish laughter, took the place of the hitherto oppressive silence. I was consumed by a fearful, stinging remorse for the sins done in the body. Unlike the experience of the drowning, my sins did not present themselves to my remembrance in an array of mathematical accuracy. On the contrary, not one was specifically recalled, but, if my daily walk and conversation had through life been entirely reprobate, and the worst of crimes my constant pastimes, my consequent agony of self-reproach could not have been greater. My conscience, in its condition of exaggerated self-accusation, was not only the worm that never dieth, but a viper that would sting eternally, a ravening beast that, still insatiate, would rend and gnaw everlastingly.

Read the rest of this trippy tale in the February 1884 issue of Popular Science.

    


FYI: What Is Anhydrous Ammonia, The Chemical At The Site Of The West, Texas, Explosion?

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West, Texas ExplosionCulture Map Austin
One of agriculture's most dangerous substances, anhydrous ammonia requires several precautions to handle.

At least five people are dead and more than 160 injured after an explosion at an anhydrous ammonia fertilizer plant in the small Texas town of West. Anhydrous ammonia is a highly toxic, volatile chemical that may have exacerbated the explosion and can blind, suffocate, burn, and kill humans. What is it? And why is it so dangerous?

What is it?
Anhydrous ammonia is a widely used, efficient form of nitrogen fertilizer. When used in agriculture, it's compressed into a clear, colorless liquid and stored at extremely low temperatures. In its natural form, in the open air, it's a gas, so agriculturists use special equipment to compress and handle it, storing it in tanks that can withstand 250 psi. But outside of that tank, it quickly reverts back to its gaseous state. Contact with it as a liquid can cause severe chemical burns and inhaling it can cause damage to the lungs. The "anhydrous" portion of it--"without water"--refers to the fact that the chemical reacts with water, meaning the effects are especially damaging when they combine with the human body's moisture, whether that's in the eyes, lungs, or other parts of the body. When that happens, the reaction forms a highly basic solution that's very corrosive.

Why is it used?
The same thing that makes it dangerous make it useful as a fertilizer. When injected into the soil as a liquid, anhydrous ammonia expands into a gas, where it's more easily absorbed by the soil. Adding nitrogen to soil is a potent way of making the soil more fertile.

What's the treatment?
There's no specific treatment, but it's recommended that anyone handling the chemical keep a nearby supply of clean water on hand. First aid procedure is to flush with clean water where the liquid meets the person's body, to dilute the effects of the burn. (A small amount of body moisture can cause the corrosive reaction, but a large amount of water will dilute it.) In its gaseous state, the ammonia might be even more dangerous. Inhaling it causes the chemical to react with moisture in the lungs, potentially damaging the lung lining, causing respiratory problems and even death. In that case, the University of Minnesota recommends people provide "cardiopulmonary resuscitation if the victim is not breathing, and summon emergency medical assistance."

Is it explosive?
Yes--under certain conditions, at least. It's not, on its own, very flammable, but if there's a leak of the chemical, it can ignite when it becomes about 16 to 25 percent of the air--a huge, usually detectable concentration--and reaches temperatures of at least 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Since it takes that much heat to ignite, the gas likely wasn't the source of the fire, although it could've ignited and exacerbated it if the fire was caused by something else. The tanks are also stored at high pressure, so could become explosive during a fire. And in the case of the West, Texas explosion, there was a lot of the stuff: as much as 54,000 pounds.

    


A Box With A Hidden Video Camera Documents Its Own Journey Through The Mail

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From Here To ThereRuben van der Vleuten
What happens to your package after it leaves your arms

Recently I found myself in need of shipping several valuable and highly breakable items, and I dreaded what would become of them after their boxes left my care. Would the invisible conveyor belts, giant bins and beshorted UPS guys really handle them with care? Next time maybe I will follow this guy's lead and put a camera in the box just to be sure.

London designer Ruben van der Vleuten was curious about the shipping process, so he secured a small camera inside a box, cut a tiny hole for it to view the world, and programmed a timer with an Arduino microcontroller. The camera was set to make a three-second video every minute, and longer videos when the controller detected the box was moving. Then he rode his bike to the post office and shipped it to himself. Here's a timelapse of what his package experienced.

[via FlowingData]

    


Why It's So Hard For Scientists To Study Medical Marijuana

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Marijuana MadnessDreamstime
The nation's research-grade cannabis is controlled by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, whose mission to curb use is at odds with that of researchers looking to study pot's therapeutic properties.

Eighteen states (plus the District of Columbia) allow cannabis use for certain medical conditions. Despite that, scientists have a harder time doing research on the potential medical benefits of marijuana than they do on "harder" drugs like ecstasy or magic mushrooms. The public may think of pot use as no big deal, but federal laws make it difficult for researchers to obtain legal supplies. Clinical researchers can get permission from the DEA to grow or create restricted compounds like LSD, MDMA or psilocybin in the lab; not so with cannabis.

The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 placed marijuana in the most restrictive use category, Schedule I, deeming it a drug with no medicinal value and high potential for abuse. To do clinical research with marijuana, you need a DEA license, and you need to get your study approved by the FDA. When it comes to actually obtaining research-grade marijuana, though, you have to go through the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a process that has proved problematic for some researchers determined to study the potential medical benefits of pot.

"Marijuana is a linchpin in the War on Drugs," explains Brad Burge, the director of communications for the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Research (MAPS), an organization currently embroiled in a lawsuit with the DEA over the right to establish a medical marijuana farm. "There's a lot of investment in marijuana remaining illegal."

Anecdotal evidence suggests that marijuana can reduce chronic pain, reduce muscle spasms in patients with multiple sclerosis and perhaps even help treat symptoms of PTSD. The small amount of clinical research out there also supports the idea that marijuana could be an effective treatment for pain. A 2007 study found that smoking cannabis reduced chronic pain in HIV-positive patients by 34 percent. Results from a Canadian study in 2010 further supported the theory that it can reduce the intensity of neuropathic pain--pain caused by damage to the nervous system--and help patients sleep.

If you're going to run a trial to show that marijuana has positive effects, the NIDA essentially is not going to allow it.
Both the American Medical Association and the American College of Physicians have called for more research into the therapeutic uses of marijuana and for the U.S. government to reconsider its classification as a Schedule I substance.

The University of Mississippi grows and harvests cannabis for studies funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, yet because NIDA's congressionally mandated mission is to research the harmful effects of controlled substances and stop drug abuse, the institute isn't interested in helping establish marijuana as a medicine.

"If you're going to run a trial to show this is going to have positive effects, they're essentially not going to allow it," Lyle Craker, a professor and horticulturist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says.

The federal government's position on marijuana, according to a January 2011 document featured prominently on the DEA's homepage, is that

The clear weight of the currently available evidence supports [Schedule I] classification, including evidence that smoked marijuana has a high potential for abuse, has no accepted medicinal value in treatment in the United States, and evidence that there is a general lack of accepted safety for its use even under medical supervision… Specifically, smoked marijuana has not withstood the rigors of science-it is not medicine, and it is not safe.

Burge tells a different story. "The United States government has gone to great lengths to prevent [medical] research on whole-plant marijuana," he says, though research into isolated components of the plant has gone on.

"We have an FDA-approved protocol, but the only way to actually get marijuana for the study, the only federally approved source, is at University of Mississippi," he says. "NIDA refused to sell us the marijuana for this study."

There's a lot of investment in marijuana remaining illegal.According to NIDA, the agency can provide research-grade marijuana to projects that have received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), or to a non NIH-funded project that has an approved Investigational New Drug application on file with the FDA; has proper DEA registration; and has been approved as scientifically valid by a Health and Human Services scientific review panel.

The agency describes its position on cannabis research as such:

NIDA as well as other Institutes and Centers within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have supported and will continue to support research on both the adverse effects and therapeutic uses for marijuana provided the research applications meet accepted standards of scientific design and, on the basis of peer review, public health significance, and Institute priorities.

Because MAPS only needs supplies, not funding, the organization, with the help of Lyle Craker, has been trying to establish a private medical marijuana farm to supply cannabis for research for the past 12 years. The organization is currently suing the DEA for denying its license even after a DEA judge ruled in 2009 that such a license would serve the public interest.

Meanwhile, MAPS has applied to buy pot from the NIDA for a study on PTSD. In 2011, the scientific review panel from the Department of Health and Human Services rejected the application, citing concerns with the study's design, though the protocol had already been approved by the FDA and has since been approved by the University of Arizona's institutional review boards. MAPS has added a few safety procedures and plans on resubmitting the protocol to the HHS scientific review panel, but MAPS founder Rick Dobiln says he is "not hopeful since the core elements of the protocol design remain the same."

Not everyone has had solely negative experiences with the bodies that control the flow of research-grade marijuana. The process just requires some bureaucratic legerdemain. />

In 1992, Doblin approached Donald Abrams, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and the chief of Hematology/Oncology at San Francisco General Hospital, and suggested he look into doing a clinical trial on the benefits of cannabis for HIV patients.

"Having gone to college in the '60s myself, I thought it might be worth investigating," Abrams says. "Little did I know how difficult that would be." First, he attempted to study the role cannabis could play in treating patients suffering from HIV Wasting Syndrome, a condition that caused patients to lose weight and basically wither away and die without even getting an infection. But NIDA failed to approve his request for funding.

As long as authorities responsible for scheduling drugs are able to ignore the research, they can close their eyes and plug their ears.Within a few years, the first effective anti-retroviral drugs essentially made Wasting Syndrome virtually disappear. They also gave Abrams his shot at studying cannabis. Because the drugs were metabolized in the liver by the same enzyme system that metabolizes many recreational drugs, he received funding in 1997 to do a clinical trial on whether or not recreational marijuana use might interact with the drugs and make them less effective or more toxic. The study, which gave patients three cannabis cigarettes a day over a 25-day hospital stay, found that the cannabis did not change the levels of AIDS drugs in the bloodstream, and the immune system may have even benefited from it. The patients also showed an increase in weight and appetite.

Abrams did further work on medical marijuana in HIV patients in conjunction with the University of California's Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research, an organization founded by the California state legislature and funded with $9 million dollars over a period of three years. The center worked out an arrangement where it could receive cannabis from NIDA, as long as NIDA wasn't actually financially supporting the research. But when California's budget surplus ran out, so did the center's funding.

Abrams is in the process of trying to do a study, funded by NIDA, on the effect of cannabis on people with sickle cell anemia, but its financial future is uncertain in the wake of sequestration. (The National Institutes of Health lost more than a billion dollars in its budget through the sequester.) Though his funding was already scheduled to start, as of right now, Abrams has yet to hear whether it will come through at all.

Federal budget concerns aside, there's a general lack of money available for marijuana research. "It's hard to get funding. There's not a pharmaceutical company. It's a plant," Abrams explains. "There's nobody other than the government."

I've never used marijuana, but if it's shown to have some medicinal effects, it should become a medicine.Even for organizations like MAPS, which is privately funded, there are plenty of roadblocks to keep medical marijuana research from happening. "As long as authorities responsible for scheduling drugs are able to ignore the research, they can close their eyes and plug their ears," Burge says, "but if there is an FDA-approved, ethics-board-approved, DEA-licensed study that shows medical benefits, it's harder and harder for them to deny it."

If legitimate scientific trials showed no medicinal effects from marijuana, Craker says he'd be happy to let the subject die. "I pursued it because I've heard from people that this is a medicine," he explains. "I've never used it--I don't plan to--but if it's shown to have some medicinal effects, it should become a medicine." As long the possibility of medical properties exist, he says, "how could we not test this?"

    


Super-Fast New Telescope Solves Star Birth Mystery

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ALMA Galaxies This image shows six of the most fertile galaxies in the early universe as seen by ALMA (in red). The red circles indicate the regions where galaxies had been detected by a less-sensitive telescope setup called APEX. The earlier telescope did not have sharp enough images to pin down the identity of the galaxies, but ALMA does. The ALMA observations, at submillimeter wavelengths, are overlaid on an infrared view of the region as seen by the Spitzer Space Telescope (blue). ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), APEX (MPIfR/ESO/OSO), J. Hodge et al., A. Weiss et al., NASA Spitzer Science Center
ALMA is the best way to see these births in super-fertile galaxies, which helps scientists understand how galaxies form.

Birth is messy, for stars as for anything else, and it can be hard for astronomers to see through the dirt and crud. This is especially true in distant, very old galaxies, which also happen to be some of the most fertile galaxies. To better understand how stars in these galaxies are born, astronomers need to see through the dust surrounding them--the interstellar afterbirth, if you will. This takes a telescope that can see long wavelengths of light, around one millimeter. It takes a telescope with some soul.

The newly christened Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array can do it better and faster than any observatory to come before it. This week, astronomers report using ALMA for just a few hours, and making new sensitive observations of these star-forming regions in the early universe. ALMA is so powerful that it did in a few hours what it took other telescopes decades to achieve.

"ALMA is so powerful that it has revolutionized the way that we can observe these galaxies, even though the telescope was not fully completed at the time of the observations," said lead study author Jacqueline Hodge of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, in a statement.

Prior to ALMA's observations, the best map of these galaxies was with an ALMA precursor, the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX). Perched at the ALMA site 16,400 feet above sea level in the Chilean Andes, APEX's 12-meter dish surveyed a piece of sky in the southern constellation of Fornax (the Furnace) about as big as the full moon. It found 126 galaxies, but they were fuzzy blobs, and so not very useful to study. ALMA is an array of 66 of these dishes (16 of those are slightly smaller), making it much more sensitive.

ALMA was able to spot the same galaxies within two minutes each, pinpointing them in a region 200 times smaller than the APEX blobs and at triple the sensitivity. Put another way, ALMA doubled the total number of these observations ever made--spread over more than a decade--in a couple hours, and with unmatched precision.

The main reason this is helpful: ALMA was able to tease out the blobs and identify numerous galaxies, where in other observations, what looked like a single blob was actually numerous objects. This makes astronomers more comfortable, because it means the blobs were not birthing ludicrous amounts of stars, which would have made them unstable. "The ALMA images revealed multiple, smaller galaxies forming stars at somewhat more reasonable rates," said Alexander Karim of Durham University in the UK.

The paper is published in the Astrophysical Journal. Go here to read more about the amazing ALMA telescope.

    


New App Tells Icelanders If Their Hookup Qualifies As Accidental Incest

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Don't Kiss Strangers In IcelandDreamstime
In a small country, you've got to be careful about keeping it in the family.

The world can seem like a mighty small place, but nowhere more so than in Iceland, a country of 320,000 people where getting it on with a relative isn't even a question--the question is, how distantly? Thanks to a new app that warns users if they're too closely related, Icelandic daters can now go to bed feeling a little more assured that they won't eventually run into their one night stand at a family reunion.

The Android app, Islendiga-App or the "App of Icelanders," will sound an "incest prevention alarm" if two closely related users bump their phones together. It combs through the Islendingabok, or the Book of Icelanders, a database that has compiled genealogical information for up to 95 percent of the country's population, and determines whether or not you share a grandparent.

As the AP notes, most people know who their first cousins are, so the app might not be entirely useful. Most Icelanders share common descent from a group of ninth-century Viking settlers, so really, the danger probably lies more in kissing your second cousins.

"Everyone has heard the story of going to a family event and running into a girl you hooked up with some time ago," Reykjavik resident Einar Magnusson, told the AP. "It's not a good feeling when you realize that girl is a second cousin. People may think it's funny, but (the app) is a necessity."

Of course, as the News of Iceland points out, being related to everyone in the country has its merits--you're related to Björk!

A team of students from the University of Iceland built the app as part of a contest to find creative uses for the Islendingabok, and it's not entirely incest-based. You can also access all the information on the online database, and it'll remind you when your relatives' birthdays are. But "Bump the app before you bump in bed" is a far catchier slogan than "Remember Great-Aunt Sally's birthday this year!"

[Yahoo! News]

    


Kepler Search Finds Two New Cozy, Possibly Watery Planets Around Faraway Star

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Kepler-62f Kepler-62f, which is 1.41 times the size of Earth, is in just the right spot for liquid water to exist--if it is rocky and has an atmosphere. NASA
Scientists can't know for sure if the worlds have water. But they could, making them a potential habitat for life.

In our solar system, only one world has just the right size, just the right temperature and just the right home for liquid water. Long ago, at least one other rocky planet had water, too, but it's gone now; Mars dried up and turned to rust. A distant moon called Europa has a lot of water, but too far from the sun's warmth, the moon remains frozen. Closer in, Mercury and Venus are too hot to keep it.

"Between the fire and the ice is this green zone, the habitable zone, where a planet could have liquid water on its surface," said William Borucki, principal investigator on the planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope. In that zone, conditions are right for thick greenhouse atmospheres, and for planets with sufficient gravity to hold on to them.

Now for the first time, exoplanet hunters think they've spotted not one such world, but three, hanging out smack in the middle of that Goldilocks zone, in solar systems very far from this one. The planets are just a tad bigger than Earth and orbit stars very much like our sun. One system, Kepler-62, has two Earth-sized planets orbiting in the cozy habitable zones. The Kepler-69 system has one possibly habitable planet. These could be the most similar worlds to our own astronomers have ever found.

"They are the best candidates so far for habitable planets outside our solar system," Borucki said.

Here's the breakdown: The Kepler-62 system has five planets in all: 62b; 62c; 62d; 62e and 62f. The Kepler-69 system has two planets, 69b and 69c. Kepler-62e, 62f and 69c are super-Earth-size planets. 62-e is 60 percent larger than the Earth while Kepler-62f is about 40 percent larger, making both of them "super-Earths." They are close together, so much that each would appear like our full moon in the other's sky. Life forms living on either world would not have very far to travel to meet their neighbors.

"Kepler-62e probably has a very cloudy sky and is warm and humid all the way to the polar regions. Kepler-62f would be cooler, but still potentially life-friendly," Harvard astronomer and co-author Dimitar Sasselov said in a statement.

As for the composition of Kepler-69c, scientists are not sure, but its orbit of 242 days resembles that of Venus. They are too small for their masses to be directly measured, but astronomers think they are likely composed of rock and water without a significant amount of gas surrounding them.


Just so it's clear, there are a lot of assumptions in these statements. Astronomers can't know for sure whether the planets in the Kepler-62 system are rocky, or have atmospheres that could provide sufficient pressure to keep water on their surfaces. They make educated guesses about this based on the planets' size--too small to be gas giants, so probably rock worlds like Earth--and their location. This gives an assumption about the amount of radiation they receive from their sun, which could warm the worlds enough to keep water liquid and to impact the weather.

"We are not clear what makes up these planets, because we don't have any [like them] in our solar system. We have to go to models and theory to understand what's going on," explained Thomas Barclay, a Kepler scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute in Sonoma, Calif.

Based on their size and locations, they could have water. If they have water, they could theoretically, maybe, be host to life. We'll probably never know, because no mission--neither existing nor planned--can detect that. But that doesn't stop planet-hunters from getting excited, and wondering what waterborne creatures may live there. If there are life forms on any of those worlds, they would impact the planets' atmospheres in ways that could maybe be detectable far in the future.

Now into its fourth year staring at 170,000 distant suns, the Kepler Space Telescope has racked up plenty of impressive finds, from adorably tiny scorched worlds to gigantic super-Jupiters to binary star systems harboring planets straight out of Star Wars. Today's news ups the ante, astronomers said.

"Kepler has brought a resurgence of astronomical discoveries, and we are making excellent progress toward determining if planets like ours are the exception," Borucki said, "or the rule."

The papers are published in Science and The Astrophysical Journal.

    



Find Out, For Better Or Worse, What Music Your Twitter Friends Like

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Twitter #Musicscreenshot by Dan Nosowitz
Twitter's new music app creates a playlist of the music that's blowing up on your Twitter feed. But is that the kind of music you want to listen to?

Twitter released its music service today, for web and iOS devices like the iPhone. It taps into your Twitter feed to recommend music through four channels, the most interesting of which is "NowPlaying," made up of the stuff the people you follow have tweeted about. If you have a paid Rdio or Spotify subscription, you can then listen to the full tracks as a kind of Twitter-curated playlist. It's slick and simple and works really well!

But here's the problem: do you really want to listen to a playlist created by the people on Twitter, even the people you follow?

On Rdio and Spotify, sharing and figuring out what your friends are listening to are big parts of the service. On Rdio, you manually create new friend lists, and Spotify taps into your Facebook friend list. But Twitter is an entirely different beast than either of those methods of collecting friends.

Facebook is entirely made up of your friends; Facebook has been doing its best to insert brands and news sources and things like that into the service, but your friends list is a list of your friends, pure and simple. It's even unlikely that your list of friends includes all that many people you don't know in real life. So it stands to reason that you'd be interested in the music tastes of at least some of them, and hopefully most of them.

But Twitter is not exactly a social network in the classic sense of Facebook and MySpace. It's not a web of profile pages; it's a publishing and consumption platform. So your Twitter feed is likely to have lots of people you don't know in real life, lots of accounts belonging to entities which are not people, and even some people you actively dislike. I follow a variety of news sources and journalists both as part of my job and to stay generally informed. My following them isn't a declaration of support; I don't always like these people, nor do I particularly care what music they're listening to.

Twitter functions as a newswire for lots of people, and that's a very different use case than Facebook. There's not even the implication that you might be "friends" with the people you follow on Twitter.

Then, too, there are people I follow for entertainment or all sorts of other reasons. I participate in the #followateen trend, in which you find a teen, any teen, and follow them, just to see what's going on in their little teen world. My teen hates trigonometry and has a big crush on someone named Matty McKibben. She is fascinating, but I don't need her to create a playlist for me.

But the other side of that coin is that sometimes this is what Twitter is: a firehose of stuff you may or may not like, may or may not agree with, may or may not expect. My Rdio "heavy rotation," consisting of what my friends are listening to, is reliably good; we all have fairly similar tastes. But to get something completely out of left field, something I'd never investigate on my own, maybe it needs to come from someone like a 16-year-old who is thrilled that she can wear flip-flops to assembly but is worried about stubbing her toe.

I suspect that's what people will see. The other channels in the Twitter Music app are less promising; there's "Popular," kind of the top 40 of Twitter; "Emerging," very slightly less popular stuff (mostly indie rock); and "Suggested," which looks through your own tweets to suggest stuff you might like based on what you've tweeted about. "NowPlaying" is the one category that Twitter can do that nobody else can do better. "Suggested" will be better on Pandora, top 40 is top 40, and there are lots of places more capable than Twitter of recommending emerging artists, so it's the ability to use your personal Twitter feed as a music recommendation service that's the most promising element.

But will Twitter Music turn you on to stuff you love that you'd never listen to on your own? Or just play you stuff you'd never listen to because you don't like it?

    


Zetas Cartel Is Recruiting Americans

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Treasury Department chart of Los Zetaswikimedia commons

Los Zetas, an infamous Mexican cartel, is apparently lowering its standards--it's now recruiting Americans.

Previously, Zetas recruited largely based on skill, with ex-police and ex-military folk targeted. Now? Turns out that American citizenship has its share of perks, especially for a foreign group trying to operate in the United States, and that counts as skill enough.

According to the FBI report released to Public Intelligence, Zetas hopes that American members will help improve the cartel's access to arms, as Americans have an easier time getting weapons, like AK-47s, and passing them South.

It is unclear how much less safe this makes Americans, if it makes them less safe at all. Zetas is involved in some intense violence, but it's clear that the cartel has suffered attrition. By moving away from its ex-police and ex-military recruiting standard, Zetas is diluting its security mindset. American citizens may provide some new access to the country, but they are also vulnerable targets. Sitting across the border, these new recruits might be the easiest mark for either law enforcement or a rival cartel.

Bringing in new recruits unfamiliar with the organization and the way cartels work also weakens the command and control abilities of cartel leaders. There is a hint of desperation in this move, because of all the new weaknesses it introduces into what had been a formidable organization. There's a chance this will revitalize the cartel, and provide more avenues for laundering money and buying arms, but to me it reads as almost a desperate play by a wounded creature.

    


Life Inside The Most Densely Populated Place On Earth [Infographic]

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A former military fort controlled by the Triads, Kowloon Walled City was demolished 20 years ago. Here's what life was like there.

Manhattan has the highest population density of any city in the United States, at 27,000 people per square mile. Whoof! That is an awful lot of people. Unless you're comparing it to the vice-ridden former Chinese military fort known as Kowloon Walled City, which prior to its destruction in 1994 had a population density of 3.25 million people per square mile.

The Walled City dates back about a thousand years, but it was only in the 1950s that it turned from a former military fort into an outrageously densely populated structure controlled by vicious gangs. But it remained one of the most peculiar inhabited areas on the planet, its jurisdiction unclear, a country within Hong Kong within China or Britain. To mark the 20-year anniversary of its demolition, the South China Morning Post made this fascinating infographic. If you like the sorts of graphics that show intricate structures, this is definitely one to pore over. Read more about it here.

[via ArchDaily]

    


A Monkey-Bird Mashup And Other Amazing Images From This Week

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Monkey-Bird Reddit user gyyp posted a series of Photoshop collages merging different animals. We're particularly fond of this one, the Proboscird: half proboscis monkey, half bird. The nose is incredibly aerodynamic. Reddit via Design Taxi
Plus glitches as art, a pristine frozen lake, and more


Click to enter the gallery

    


5 Crazy Machines Smugglers Use To Get Drugs Across The Border

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A drug-smuggling submarine found in EcuadorDEA, via wikimedia commons
Catapults, cannons, submarines, and more!

Prohibition is the mother of criminal ingenuity. When the U.S. banned alcohol, bootleggers came up with all kinds of tricky innovations to get their booze past the feds and into the mouths of a thirsty public.

Today, the drug war has given birth to genius inventions like the pneumatic pot cannon (see slide two). In this gallery, we've rounded up the five most absurd and outrageous machines smugglers have used to dodge border patrol and coast guard to meet the huge black market demand.


Click here to enter the gallery

    


Just Seeing Hillary Clinton's Face Improves Women's Public Speaking

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Encouraging HillaryLawrence Jackson
A new study finds women give longer and more confident political speeches when they are exposed to images of female role models.

What do women in politics need? Strong female role models.

A new paper in the May issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests that even just seeing images of female role models can help women speak publicly and perform as leaders.

Previous research has found that the presence of female leaders in government has a significant effect on girls' educational goals, and seeing other women in STEM careers can help women want to pursue those careers themselves. However, other studies have found that seeing high-level female leaders can actually make women feel inferior about their own leadership qualities.

To dig deeper, scientists asked 149 students from a Swiss university (81 women, 68 men) to give a persuasive political speech against increasing student fees, within the context of a virtual reality program that put them in front of an audience of six men and six women. For some participants, the back wall of the virtual room featured a hanging picture of Hillary Clinton. For others, it showed a portrait of Bill Clinton or Angela Merkel, and for some the wall remained blank.

The researchers timed and videotaped the speech, then asked the students to evaluate their performance. A separate group of people unaware of the experimental conditions watched the speeches and rated them based on fluency and body language.

Both the people watching the speeches and those giving them perceived longer speeches as being more positive. When there was no role model in view, men spoke longer than women. The same held true for speaking under the withering gaze of Big Bill.

Female role models eliminated the gender gap, though. Women gave longer speeches and evaluated themselves more positively when they were primed with with images Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel than when they saw Bill Clinton or weren't primed at all. The outside observers also rated their speeches higher.

"Female political role models can inspire women and help them cope with stressful situations that they encounter in their careers, such as public speaking," the authors write. "A lack of female powerful role models leads to a vicious circle, because if women fail to take leadership positions, they also fail to provide role models for junior women to follow."

They go on to recommend that "active steps should be taken in order to increase the number of women in leadership positions, which would consequently increase their visibility and empower other women on their path to leadership."

[via Research Digest]

    


Can Virtual Reality Treat Addiction?

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Drug WeekPopular Science
Researchers are plugging in smokers, alcoholics, and even crack addicts to expose them to a relapse environment--and teach them how to deal with it. Will it work?

When the addicts enter the room, they haven't met the people inside. They've never been there before, but the setting is familiar, and so is the pipe on the table, or the bottles of booze on the ground. Soon enough, someone's offering them a hit, or a drug deal's going down right in front of them.

They've been trying to get better--that's why they're doing this--but now they have cravings.

It's about then that a voice instructs them to put down the joystick and look around the room without speaking, "allowing that drug craving to come and go like a wave." The voice asks them periodically to rate their cravings as, after a couple minutes, they start to relax. The craving starts to dissipate and they hear a series of tones: beep-boop-boop.

It's all being orchestrated by a wizard behind the virtual curtain: Zach Rosenthal, an assistant professor at Duke. For years now, with funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Department of Defense, Rosenthal has been running virtual reality trials like this with drug addicts in North Carolina (and veterans, hence the DOD funding) who are trying to recover. About 90 people, passing in and out of the NIDA study, have been coming to Rosenthal for treatment through virtual reality. They're hooked up to a virtual reality simulator and dumped somewhere (a neighborhood, a crack house) where the researchers can slowly add cues to the environment, or change the environment itself, altering the situation to based on each patient's history and adding paraphernalia (drugs, a crack pipe) as necessary.

The idea is that people will develop coping strategies, then take those strategies back to the real world. With coping mechanisms in their tool kits, users will get better, faster. But just because someone says no in a fake world, does that mean he'll say no in real life?

* * *

Rosenthal's research employs a methodology called virtual reality cue reactivity. Put simply, that means using virtual reality to trigger a reaction, then to monitor that reaction. In substance abuse treatment, that usually involves transporting addicts to a software artist's representation of a drug den or party and teaching them to deal with the situation.

Patients, after all, could still see they were in a lab, and they might not be able to bring the coping mechanisms outside that environment.While virtual reality cue reactivity is a relatively new methodology, cue reactivity is not. Its best-known incarnation is in treating phobias: to help, say, arachnophobics, researchers will show them a brown dot, then a fake spider, then a real spider in a jar, then a real spider freely crawling around. The patients slowly acclimate to seeing a spider until they're comfortable. Cue: spider; reactivity: person freaking out.

"Acclimating" roughly approximates what happens with addiction treatment, too. The theory: when addicts enter a simulacrum of the environment they'll have to face in the real world, they're able to safely learn coping techniques--to develop the strength to refuse drugs, despite cravings.

In decades past, researchers would try to treat smokers and alcoholics using real-life triggers. Show the addicts a lighter or an empty bottle, or even a photograph of something associated with smoking and drinking, to trigger cravings, then teach them coping strategies. It seemed to work, to some degree, but it was limited. Patients, after all, could tell they were in a lab, and they might not be able to transfer the coping mechanisms to an outside environment.

That's where virtual reality comes in. It's still only an approximation of reality, but researchers believe it has some advantages over earlier forms of treatment. For one, the immersiveness of the environment--a created world, in which almost anything can be a trigger--helps patients better transfer what they learned in the lab to the real world, researchers say. For another thing, the environments and triggers are minutely customizable. A smoker who always stood outside a coffee shop with a cup of joe can have that coffee shop and black coffee recreated. An addict describes his history of drug use and artists render it. So an alcoholic might approach a bar and ask for a Budweiser in a can--and get exactly that, reproduced right down to the label. Some teams are even capable of simulating smells, like cigarette smoke. At least one study found smokers were more likely to quit when given the virtual reality treatment.

Until recently, most experiments in the field dealt with smokers and alcoholics. They also dealt more with research than with treatment: scientists were working to establish that cravings could be induced in virtual reality before they tried to treat anyone through virtual reality.

Patrick "Spike" Bordnick is a professor and associate dean for research at the University of Houston, who focuses on addiction and virtual reality. He started his research because he got frustrated with the limits of traditional cue reactivity (the reality-based kind): "I started looking in the lab one day and thought, the environment, the context is off… no one's ever smoked in this lab." Bordnick and his team did some of the earliest work on the topic, first proving that virtual reality could trigger a craving in nicotine-dependent people. Later, they upgraded their technology to include devices that produced smells, like cigarette smoke, and more easily manipulated software.

Amy Traylor, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama who's worked with Bordnick and conducted virtual reality studies of her own, says "the thing we don't really take into account [with traditional cue reactivity studies] is that the environment itself can serve as a cue." And Traylor says the patients, even if they still realize where they really are, buy it. Both her and Bordnick bring up a subject who tried to reach out for a virtual drink while strapped in to the machine.

* * *

Most of those studies just test craving--they don't go so far as to treat addicts. Now, though, researchers have started looking at testing and treating addicts' cravings for drugs like crack, cocaine, and heroin through virtual reality. The big question: Is it more effective than more traditional treatments?

A feasibility study by Bordnick took 46 adult smokers and put them through a 10-week treatment program. One group used virtual reality treatment and nicotine replacement therapy (like gum and patches) while the other group got only the nicotine replacement therapy. The study found that, for the VR therapy group, "[s]moking rates and craving for nicotine were significantly lower."

But that's just one study. And the technique is still way too new--and the scientific literature way too sparse--to declare virtual reality some sort of junkie panacea.

Not that that's the point. Researchers prefer to think of virtual reality treatment as a complement to other, more traditional treatment methods, like counseling, medication and rehab. Rosenthal makes the point that even if virtual reality is only as reliable as reality-based cue reactivity, the method could still be useful--by acting as an alternative for people who don't react to the standard form of exposure to paraphernalia. (He has a study with crack addicts, but it's still underway, so he doesn't have complete data to present yet.) Traylor echoes that. She points out that virtual reality cue reactivity research into phobias makes otherwise unfeasible research feasible: someone with a fear of flying can be virtually put on a plane.

Bordnick summed up the process like this: "If I wanted to teach you to ride a bike, I could show you a video of a bike." That could work, "but wouldn't it be better if I could actually get you on a real bike?" It could be--it likely at least works in some way--but it'll take some more studies to prove how much better. Right now, after seeing success with smokers, Bordnick is moving on to an environment for heroin, which he says is the team's most realistic yet.

There are other advantages. Researchers can build an entire bar to simulate a drinking environment (and, in fact, they have), but it's more economical to use a virtual environment, where fake components get plopped into place--no moving parts necessary.

Until we find out exactly how effective virtual reality cue reactivity is for treating substance abuse, Rosenthal is supplementing his research with more traditional (but still novel) methods. Subjects in his virtual environment are played electronic blips after they start to come down, and later, when they get cravings in the real world, they can call a number to hear the tones again, assuaging the craving. That's a parallel for how virtual reality cue reactivity will likely be used: as a secondary world, not a replacement for the real one.

    



Watch Live As ISS Cosmonauts Go On A 6-Hour Spacewalk

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For your viewing pleasure: a space-station installation.



Streaming by Ustream

Right now, on board (or off board, technically) the International Space Station, two Russian cosmonauts are installing the Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory Module, and NASA has been so kind as to give the public a peek. The spacemen are even wearing helmet-mounted cameras, giving us the occasional first-person view of the job. Even just seeing the cosmonauts' tools and wires floating around is breathtaking.

    


The Video Tech That Helped Find The Boston Bombing Suspects

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One of the Boston bombing suspects, from a video the Federal Bureau of Investigation released yesterdayFederal Bureau of Investigation
Software that spots colored cars and hats, and even specific the ages and genders, helps analysts comb through hours of surveillance footage.

Three days after the Boston Marathon bombings, a security camera caught one of the suspects robbing a 7-11. Law enforcement recognized him from photos and videos released by the FBI yesterday. The identification led police to the manhunt now underway in the suburbs of Boston.

Law enforcement had terabytes of photos and videos related to the Boston Marathon bombing, NPR's Morning Edition reported, thanks to the increased presence of security cameras. Without computer help, it would take a person years to watch all the footage end to end.

The sleuthing that eventually ID's the two suspects, believed to be brothers from Chechnya, Russia, likely depended on some newer technology that helps human analysts with the time-consuming job of looking through all that camera footage.

Over the last few years, computer programs have emerged that is able to spot patterns in the same way a human can. The programs pull out only relevant video, leaving people with less to look through. "You can ask for things like, 'Show me all red cars that went east,'" Alex Shipp, chief executive of a video surveillance software company called 3VR, told Morning Edition. Software is also able to look for things such as the black and white hats the suspects wore on the day of the bombing. Given high resolution video, 3VR software is able to identify footage of people of a particular gender and age.

In the future, surveillance cameras may have even greater abilities. One company, BRS Labs, is building a camera system that, after observing a place for some time, "learns" what's normal behavior for that place, Slate reported in a piece arguing for greater video surveillance. Then the camera can mark times when it sees people behaving unusually, such as loitering, leaving a package and walking away or jumping turnstiles. BRS Labs has signed a contract with the San Francisco public transportation system.

For now, however, it still takes plenty of manpower to catch a suspect from video footage. Automated identification, though a useful aid to speed up a search, doesn't always work, especially with lower resolution or chaotic footage.

    


Shark Attacks On Humans Vs. Human Attacks On Sharks [Infographic]

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Shark Attacks By The NumbersJoe Chernov/Robin Richards via Adventure Journal
You seriously have no idea how many more sharks are killed by people than people are killed by sharks.

Sharks have been mythologized in our culture as ruthless brutes and hunters, but the truth is humans are way, way more of a threat to sharks than sharks are to us. About 100 million sharks are killed annually, mostly related to "finning" (when the shark fins are sliced off and sold, often for soup).

Marketer Joe Chernov wanted to visually express how the amount of shark attacks that kill people in a year stacks up against the number of people attacks that kill sharks. (It takes four seconds for us to kill the number of sharks that kill us in a year.) So Chernov teamed up with designer Robin Richards to make this incredible infographic comparing the stats. Note that the first figure is per year, while the second is per hour. Your jaw is about to fall about as far down as this image.

    


BigPic: What's This Smoky-Looking Photo From Space?

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Icy PatternsChris Hadfield on Twitter
Mysterious blue-and-white marbling

These are swirls of ice photographed off the northern coast of Japan. This image was taken from the International Space Station by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who tweeted it on April 19, 2013.

    


Should Police Scanners Be Public?

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Police Scanner: Bad?Uniden
Several innocent people have been accused of being responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing thanks to misinformation originating from police scanners. Why are these even broadcast?

The past week has seen a torrent of information, the majority inaccurate, gushing from the faucets of Twitter and Facebook and Reddit and cable news and tabloids and blog posts. The story has become not so much what happened as what didn't happen; as BuzzFeed notes, the most valuable service a respectable publication can perform right now is not to be the first but to act as Virgil, guiding the public through the morass of information they already have.

In the midst of all this, one of the most difficult sources of information to parse has been one of the oldest: the police scanner. Until this morning, feeds from the Boston Police Department, broadcast over the web and through apps, were publicly available to anyone. Broadcastify, which calls itself "the radio communications industry's largest platform for streaming live audio for public safety, aircraft, rail, and marine related communications," had tens of thousands of listeners. Many of those listeners relayed the chatter they heard to Twitter or Reddit, if members of the public, or through news outlets, if members of the media.

Police scanners seem like reliable sources of information, a direct line to those who know more than anyone else about what's going on on the ground. News reporters and organizations are posting direct quotes from scanners without any equivocation. You could almost see them thinking, "this stuff originates from the police themselves! It must be real!" Some of these channels, which are essentially just like any AM/FM station, are available to the public, or at least any member of the public with a computer (or, in the past, a $100 scanner). Those are mostly calls from dispatch, according to a detective from the Radnor, Pennsylvania police department who chatted with me about how scanners work. "You can hear police calls, fire calls, EMS calls, public works calls," he said. (Radnor is the hometown of Sunil Tripathi, a Brown student who became a prime suspect in the minds of the public for a few hours last night.) Lindsay Blanton, CEO of the company that owns Broadcastify, confirmed that, saying "Our feed provider terms of service restrict the broadcast of any law enforcement communications that are not routine dispatch frequencies and talkgroups."

The police doesn't much care that these are available to the public. They're not provided as a service to the public or out of any kind of desire to transparency; many police forces just don't bother encrypting these radio feeds because they're not seen as sensitive. This isn't the only way they communicate; on-duty officers have secure, encrypted lines as well, the detective from Radnor tells me. It's important to note that there's no law requiring police dispatch lines to be public; in fact, many departments, like the Pasadena Police Department, have decided to encrypt all of their frequencies. Pasadena cites concern for victims, whose names and locations are often broadcast over the channel, as the reason for the change.

What you hear on the scanner is what the dispatcher or communications center hears: a call that something is happening that requires investigation, and conversation that comes from addressing that call. That doesn't make it true, of course, nor does the dispatcher or any police officer make any claim to that effect. When somebody calls the police station and says they see a suspicious person lurking in an alley, what the public hears through the scanner is "possible suspicious person lurking in an alley." If it turns out to be a chair with a coat on it, that's no big deal for the police; they investigated and resolved the call. But if a member of the media hears that, and the call happens to take place in a city in which a recent bombing has killed three and injured hundreds, that chair with a coat can turn into a terrorist with one tweet.

Early this morning, the Boston Police Department tweeted this:

In response, Broadcastify shut down its scanner feeds, saying "MA State PD and Boston Police have requested via social media to not post search locations for the Boston bombing suspects - the Boston PD feed is temporarily offline due to this request." This is an indirect request, and a respectful response from Broadcastify; the scanner feed isn't "offline," it's merely harder to find, to try to tamp down the flow of misinformation. Lindsay Blanton, from Broadcastify, told me via email that "we did not receive any formal request - we're just making the temporary decision for now in light of the extraordinary events."

An academic paper from a doctoral student at the Indiana University School of Journalism examines the legality and ethics of tweeting information from police scanners more closely. Here's the conclusion, with the important part emphasized by me:

Tweeting public safety radio traffic - while probably legal and often beneficial - should be done sparingly and under pre-set guidelines designed to minimize the spread of flawed information and avoid compromising the safety of emergency personnel, the public, and media. If followed, such precautions should lessen the need - if not the likelihood - for an aggrieved party to seek legal recourse for alleged defamation.

Broadcastify is a perfect example of why the most important element of the debate is the need for specific rules. Though Broadcastify did eventually cut off the flow of scanner information to Twitterers, it was only done after several innocents had already suffered the consequences of false accusation.

* * *

It generally doesn't hurt that scanners are public. The law states that any criminal in possession of a scanner during the commission of a crime has an increased punishment, to stop them from using dispatch information to make their illegal activities easier, and the most sensitive information isn't exchanged via these channels. But scanners are assumed to be at best a vital part of law enforcement transparency, and at worst harmless, or even funny. They're for people like these guys to get their "personal safety, neighborhood crime awareness, emergency preparedness, and excitement!" It's only now, with the unholy combination of a massive crime story and a relentless need for new information, that police scan dispatches are elevated to the status of unimpeachable, insider fact.

So now we're reduced to the Boston Police Department having to issue a tweet with the hashtag #MediaAlert to tell us what a police scanner is and when to shut up about it. There's no law that says Broadcastify had to stop broadcasting the feed that led to an innocent kid from Pennsylvania, among many others, becoming national terrorist suspects. We need some sort of guidance to respond to the increased desire and outlets for information.

Making these rules won't be easy; this is a battle between transparency and oversaturation that will decide how much we are allowed to know and how much we should know. An absolute decision in either direction leads to chaos; people won't stand for having a direct line to law enforcement totally shut down, but we've proved over the past week that we are in no way responsible enough to handle an unfettered flow of information. It's delicate, and there are no easy answers, but something is going to need to change.

    


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