Aug 22 2013
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Aug 22 2013
Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette
This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.
Find the past “On This Day in History” here.
August 22 is the 234th day of the year (235th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 131 days remaining until the end of the year.
On this day in 1950, Althea Gibson became the first African American on the US Tennis Tour.
On this day in 1950, officials of the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) accept Althea Gibson into their annual championship at Forest Hills, New York, making her the first African-American player to compete in a U.S. national tennis competition.
Growing up in Harlem, the young Gibson was a natural athlete. She started playing tennis at the age of 14 and the very next year won her first tournament, the New York State girls’ championship, sponsored by the American Tennis Association (ATA), which was organized in 1916 by black players as an alternative to the exclusively white USLTA. After prominent doctors and tennis enthusiasts Hubert Eaton and R. Walter Johnson took Gibson under their wing, she won her first of what would be 10 straight ATA championships in 1947.
In 1949, Gibson attempted to gain entry into the USLTA’s National Grass Court Championships at Forest Hills, the precursor of the U.S. Open. When the USLTA failed to invite her to any qualifying tournaments, Alice Marble–a four-time winner at Forest Hills–wrote a letter on Gibson’s behalf to the editor of American Lawn Tennis magazine. Marble criticized the “bigotry” of her fellow USLTA members, suggesting that if Gibson posed a challenge to current tour players, “it’s only fair that they meet this challenge on the courts.” Gibson was subsequently invited to participate in a New Jersey qualifying event, where she earned a berth at Forest Hills.
snip
Though she once brushed off comparisons to Jackie Robinson, the trailblazing black baseball player, Gibson has been credited with paving the way for African-American tennis champions such as Arthur Ashe and, more recently, Venus and Serena Williams. After a long illness, she died in 2003 at the age of 76.
Ms. Gibson became the first African American woman to join the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour, in 1963, retiring in 1978.
Aug 22 2013
Life was born in darkness in poisonous, oxygen-free volcanic vents in the depths of the oceans – or so current leading theories hold. Dr. Frankenstein’s primeval soup that bore life with the aid of lightning strikes is being relegated to mythology alongside autochthonous creation of humans and curing depressions with austerity.
Terry Turpin is not yet the Master of Light but he has made a promising start with a reach backward to the future with light.
Turpin processes images in real-time that take 20 engineers 6 months to process at Raytheon (RTN) or Lockheed (LMT). And he does it in a device about the size of a shoebox
Page 3, .pdf file
http://www.gildertech.com/publ…
As you probably guessed, most of what Turpin is doing is hidden behind high security walls. What you perhaps didn’t expect is that Turpin’s superfast computers are analog computers.
What NSA and by extension IRS and the whole security state spying apparatus could do with such computers is obvious but analog computers need lots of work to enter the digital world. For now, they are only useful in very small numbers for finding real security threats.
Best, Terry
Aug 22 2013
Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette
Pfc. Bradley Manning was sentenced this morning to 35 years in prison for passing classified documents to Wikileaks that exposed war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. None of the those crimes have been investigates and no one has been charges in their commission.
The sentence was more severe than many observers expected, and is much longer than any punishment given to any previous US government leaker.
The 25-year-old soldier was convicted last month of leaking more than 700,000 classified documents and video. The disclosures amounted to the biggest leak in US military history.
He was found guilty of 20 counts, six of them under the Espionage Act, but was acquitted of the most serious charge of “aiding the enemy”. [..]
The 1,294 days Manning has already spent in military custody, since May 2010, will be deducted from his sentence. The figure includes 112 days that is being taken off the sentence as part of a pre-trial ruling in which Lind compensated Manning for the excessively harsh treatment he endured at the Quantico marine base in Virginia.
He has to serve a minimum of a third of his sentence, meaning he will be eligible for parole in just over eight years, and, at the very earliest, could be released under parole soon as 2021. He can earn 120 days per year off his sentence for good behaviour and job performance.
Manning faced a maximum possible sentence of 90 years, although few legal experts expected he would receive anything near that amount.
The sentence will automatically be appealed.
The Center for Constitutional Rights condemned the sentence and praised Manning as a whistleblower who never should have been prosecuted. This is part of their statement:
We are outraged that a whistleblower and a patriot has been sentenced on a conviction under the Espionage Act. The government has stretched this archaic and discredited law to send an unmistakable warning to potential whistleblowers and journalists willing to publish their information. We can only hope that Manning’s courage will continue to inspire others who witness state crimes to speak up.
There are calls for President Barack Obama to pardon Manning or commute his sentence to time served. Considering Obama had declared Manning guilty before the trial started, there are serious doubts that will happen.
Aug 22 2013
This is what happens in the criminal justice culture of testalying.
Chemist in lab scandal told investigators: ‘I messed up bad’
By Brian Ballou and Andrea Estes, Boston Globe
9/26/12
The former state chemist at the heart of the state drug lab scandal admitted to investigators that she improperly removed evidence from storage, forged colleagues’ signatures, and didn’t perform proper tests on drugs for “two or three years,” according to a copy of a State Police report obtained by the Globe.
Annie Dookhan, whose misconduct may have jeopardized evidence in about 34,000 drug cases, also admitted that she recorded drug tests as positive when they were negative “a few times” and sometimes tested only a small sample of the drug batch that she was supposed to analyze.
…
However, the troopers’ interviews with other chemists in the lab make clear that Dookhan’s colleagues had concerns about her unusually large caseload and lab habits and raised them with supervisors. But the supervisors took little action even when they learned that she had forged other chemists’ initials on some drug samples.
…
The state lab in Jamaica Plain was closed in August after State Police discovered the potential magnitude of Dookhan’s actions. As a state chemist for nine years, Dookhan handled 60,000 drug samples and sometimes provided expert testimony in court.
Annie Dookhan, alleged rogue state chemist, may have affected 40,323 people’s cases, review finds
By David Abel, John R. Ellement and Martin Finucane, Boston Globe
8/20/13
Governor Deval Patrick’s administration said today it believes that the criminal cases of 40,323 people may have been tainted by the actions of alleged rogue drug lab chemist Annie Dookhan and the management failures at the now-closed Department of Public Health lab where she worked.
…
But to the Committee for Public Counsel Services and the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, the administration’s final tally does not fully capture the damage done to individual defendants. The Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state’s public defender agency, believes all 190,000 cases sent through the Department of Public Health lab dating back to the early 1990s are now suspect and should be dismissed.“The whole thing is disturbing,” Anthony Benedetti, chief counsel for the committee said of Meier’s findings and the drug lab scandal. “I think every one of the 40,000 cases she touched should be thrown out. Whether it was possession (of illegal drugs) or distribution (of illegal drugs), the conviction is tainted because of the conduct of Annie Dookhan.”
Matthew Segal, legal director of the ACLU Massachusetts, said the state’s criminal justice system must do more to help those whose civil rights may have been violated by Dookhan’s alleged mishandling of evidence, and the failure of her superiors to stop it.
“David Meier’s announcement today confirms that we are no closer to solving this problem,” said Segal. “There are 40,000 people whose convictions have been potentially tainted and the vast majority of them haven’t had a day in court. Merely identifying them isn’t justice.”
…
In addition to unraveling hundreds of drug convictions, the scandal has also cost the state millions of dollars to pay individual prosecutors’ offices, multiple state agencies, and the judiciary searching for ways to ensure no one was wrongly convicted.
…
For fiscal 2013, lawmakers set aside $30 million for Dookhan-related costs, and the administration set up a procedure that required other government agencies to apply for funding to the state Administration and Finance Agency.Today, the administration said it has approved $10.4 million in requests, of which only $7.6 million has so far been spent by the agencies involved.
But they were guilty you say.
Really? How do you know?
Aug 22 2013
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