Al's Morning Meeting

The Seattle PD site explained further:

The technology is license plate recognition and works much like a camera. It is installed on a patrol vehicle and automatically takes "digital" pictures of the license plates on the vehicles that the patrol car is passing. If the license plate that was read is listed as a stolen vehicle or is flagged for any other reason, the officer is notified that [he or she has] just passed a "vehicle of interest."

The computer has the ability to read up to 1,000 plates per hour, it covers two or more lanes of traffic at once, can read the plates during day and at night. It also takes less than one second from the time a vehicle is in the field of view to a determination it is a "vehicle of interest." When a vehicle is identified, [an] audible warning is sounded and the vehicle is imaged, time-stamped and registered.

There are many advantages to using this technology, the most obvious being the speed [at] which the computer can work. On average, thousands of plates can be scanned during a shift, [when] an individual officer might get only 100 plates during a shift (if [he or she is] focused exclusively on traffic). The technology is also performing a task that is already permitted, only doing it much more efficiently. Overall, the technology will realize some very important goals:

• It will increase the number of stolen cars recovered by the police department, before those cars are dumped or trashed and left by the car thief.
• It will increase the number of offenders who are ultimately arrested and prosecuted for the crime of auto theft.

I am seeing these systems pop up all over the country, in places like Schenectady, N.Y.; Long Beach, Calif.; Baltimore and in Canada, too. Officer.com, a police-news Web site, says:

Since four months ago, police departments in Las Vegas, Michigan and the California Highway Patrol have picked up the program, and the Los Angeles Police Department is currently testing a similar system.

In Utah, KSL-TV says, the "car zappers" have helped to recover more than 100 stolen cars already. KSL said: 

Sgt. Curtis Stoddard, Utah Motor Vehicle Enforcement Division: "It's out there looking for that amber alert, that stolen vehicle now... and right there picks up."

For Stoddard, it's a very effective way to check, say, a parking lot for stolen vehicles.

[...] "As an officer, I'm gonna just focus on certain things...broken windows, punched locks but this doesn't care. It doesn't just look for those things. It's going to run everything," [he said].

[Stoddard said,] "Officers are going to use their time better. It's more accurate. They work well at night."

Some police argue that this system is actually more fair than manually scanning license plates, because the computer scans every tag, not just ones an officer considers to be suspect. 

Murder-Suicide Claims 1,200 Lives a Year

The Violence Policy Center [PDF] has just completed a study of murder-suicides, a crime that claims at least 20 lives every week in America.

Surprisingly, the study shows that the suicide rate of police officers is larger than the rate for that of the general population. It also estimates that twice as many police officers commit suicide than die in the line of duty. The study says officers may have a heightened risk for murder-suicide. (See Page 11 of the study.) The report says most murder-suicides involve jealousy, but, among the elderly, declining health seems to be an underlying motivator. The report said:

Depression and the strain of providing care for a failing spouse have been cited by experts as a significant contributing factor to murder-suicide among older persons. Health-care options that provide aid to older caregivers and that aim to monitor and treat depression in such cases may be one useful intervention.

Here is more from the study's press release, including how it was conducted:

The study used a national news clipping service and Internet survey tools to collect incidents nationwide from January 1, 2005, through June 30, 2005, and is one of the largest and most comprehensive studies ever conducted on murder-suicide. During this six-month period, at least 591 Americans died in 264 murder-suicides, and almost all murder-suicides (92 percent) involved a firearm. Using these figures, the VPC estimates that nearly 1,200 Americans die each year in murder-suicides. Additional study findings include:

• Six states had more than 10 murder-suicides in the six-month study period:  Pennsylvania (18); Texas (18); California (17); Florida (15); North Carolina (14); and, Tennessee (11).
• Ninety-four percent of the offenders in murder-suicides were male.
• Seventy-four percent of all murder-suicides involved an intimate partner (spouse, common-law spouse, ex-spouse, or boyfriend/girlfriend). Of these, 96 percent were females killed by their intimate partners.
• Most murder-suicides with three or more victims involved a "family annihilator" -- a subcategory of intimate partner murder-suicide. Family annihilators are murderers who kill not only their wives/girlfriends and children, but often other family members as well, before killing themselves.
• Forty-seven children and teens under the age of 18 were murdered in murder-suicides.
• Most murderers in murder-suicides are older than their victims.
• Seventy-five percent of murder-suicides occurred in the home. 

Rite in the Rain

I am kind of geeked about a product that my Poynter/NewsU pal Ben Russell showed me the other day. It is an "all-weather writing paper" called "Rite in the Rain." I just keep thinking about all of the times I stood in the rain trying to take notes and came back with a soggy mess that I could not read.

This is a journalists' dream.

We were bored the other day, so we popped a piece of this paper under a faucet and started writing notes (with a pencil). We pulled the paper out from under the water and it was fine. We tried the same thing with a regular piece of paper and, of course, it fell apart in 30 seconds. It looked an awful lot like the "Rite in the Rain" Web site's test.

The "Rite in the Rain" paper seemed to work best with pencil, not pen. They do sell an "all-weather pen," too, which promises that you can use it underwater .

Here is how they make the paper.

"Rite in the Rain" also makes reporters' notebooks. They are about twice as expensive as regular notebooks. The company tells me that they make an Iditarod musher's journal, too, which all racers use. The company says sports journalists working in terrible weather also use it. Just in time for hurricane season.

Air Bags for Motorcycle Riders

Another overdue idea. Although, presumably, people who do not wear helmets won't wear these, either.

Understanding the Sweet Spot

There are scientists who love to study the physics of baseball and are starting to understand exactly where the sweet spot of the bat is. Still, there are so many things they don't know.

Some more resources:

• Physics of Baseball Web Site
• University of Massachusetts-Lowell Baseball Research Center
  

More of "The Star-Mangled Banner"

For those of you who get torked off about translating "The Star-Spangled Banner" into Spanish, these will send you over the top. Here are some more links to the languages the national anthem has been translated into:

• Morse Code  (Listen; it's very cool.)

• Yiddish (1943)
  

• French (Translated in 1999 by American Cajuns.)

• Navajo (1988)

• And, this year, American Samoan

Thanks to BoingBoing.net, here are the first two bars in binary code:

01001111 01101000 00100000 01110011 01100001 01111001 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110011 01100101 01100101 00100000 01100010 01111001 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100100 01100001 01110111 01101110 00100111 01110011 00100000 01100101 01100001 01110010 01101100 01111001 00100000 01101100 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100 00001101 00001010