Thursday, 15 April 2010
Dutch nurse Lucy De Berk acquitted of patient murders
An appeals court in Arnhem ruled that there was no evidence that Lucy de Berk had committed a crime in all 10 cases.
The Supreme Court called for a review in 2008 after evidence came to light suggesting that all the deaths could in fact be explained by natural causes.
The prosecution service said a senior official had apologised to Ms De Berk.
"This judgment means that Lucy de Berk has spent six-and-a-half years in jail as an innocent person," it added. "It is important that Lucy de Berk is financially compensated as soon as possible."
The acquittal marks one of the biggest miscarriages of Dutch justice.
Bogus statistics
"I'll have to let it sink in a little while," Ms De Berk told reporters after the Arnhem Appeals Court cleared her of all charges on Wednesday.
During last month's retrial, prosecutors conceded that the evidence they had used to build their original case was flawed, and that they had not been flexible enough after they became convinced of her guilt when investigating the deaths.
 |  The court believes that investigations have uncovered no facts or circumstances that could give grounds for suspecting an unnatural cause Arnhem Appeals Court ruling |
Afterwards, investigators found what they thought was a trend of suspicious deaths among 13 patients - all of whom were very young and disabled, or very old and in poor health - treated by Ms De Berk in the previous four years. Five others almost died in what investigators said were suspicious circumstances.
In 2003, she was convicted of four murders and three attempted murders, and sentenced to life in prison.
Part of the evidence against Ms De Berk was the testimony of a statistician, who said the odds were 342 million-to-one that it was a coincidence she had been on duty when all the incidents occurred.
Then in 2004, an appeals court convicted her of three additional counts of murder and upheld the life sentence.
The Supreme Court, which had upheld her conviction in 2006, eventually ordered a review of Ms De Berk's case in October 2008, calling into doubt statistical evidence about the chances of her innocence and the cause of death of the baby.
On Wednesday, the judges said it was impossible that the baby had been killed in 2001, "much less that the baby's death was the result of intentional action".
"With respect to the other deaths and life-threatening incidents, the court believes that investigations have uncovered no facts or circumstances that could give grounds for suspecting an unnatural cause," they added.
The single mother's manifesto
David Cameron says the ‘nasty party’ that castigated people like me has changed. I’m not buying it.
by J.K. Rowling
Hand-held projector images respond to the real world
Powerpoint presentations are about to get a sprinkle of fairy dust. A hand-held projector can now create virtual characters and objects that interact with the real world.
The device - called Twinkle - projects animated graphics that respond to patterns, shapes or colours on a surface, or even 3D objects such as your hand. It uses a camera to track relevant elements - say a line drawn on a wall - in the scene illuminated by the projector and an accelerometer ensures it can sense the projector's rapid motion and position.
Software then matches up the pixels detected by the camera with the animation, making corrections for the angle of projection and distance from the surface.
The device could eventually fit inside a cellphone, says Takumi Yoshida of the University of Tokyo. A prototype which projects a cartoon fairy that bounces off or runs along paintings on a wall or even the surface of a bottle (pictured) was presented at the recent Virtual Reality 2010 meeting in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Yoshida and his colleagues are also developing a way for graphics from several projectors to interact, which could be used for gaming.
Anthony Steed of University College London is impressed. Many researchers have been attempting to create virtual graphics that can interact with a real surface, he says, but Twinkle can cope with a much greater range of environments.
First Listen: The Nels Cline Singers, 'Initiate'
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King Queen
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Zingiber
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Mercy (Procession)
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Into It (You Turn)
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Boogie Woogie Waltz
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Never Forgotten (A Must Watch!)
Hillsborough: "Justice for the 96"
The disgusting lies printed in The Sun
It says:
“The Truth.
Some fans picked pockets of victims
Some fans urinated on the brave cops
Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life.”
Julian Assange interviewed by Stephen Colbert
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Julian Assange | ||||
Library of Congress: We're archiving every tweet ever made
The LOC announced the news, appropriately enough, on Twitter. Twitter isn't just about being pretentious and notifying the world about the contents of your lunch (though it's about those things too).
Matt Raymond, one the Library's official bloggers, notes that "important tweets in the past few years include the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election, and a set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter."
But even those billions of other tweets and retweets, the ones about how you just got back from the worlds' most epic jog or how you're sick at home with the crocodile flu or how your crappy Internet connection just went down again and you can't take it any more—those matter too.
There's been a turn toward historicism in academic circles over the last few decades, a turn that emphasizes not just official histories and novels but the diaries of women who never wrote for publication, or the oral histories of soldiers from the Civil War, or the letters written by a sawmill owner. The idea is to better understand the context of a time and place, to understand the way that all kinds of people thought and lived, and to get away from an older scholarship that privileged the productions of (usually) elite males.
The LoC's Twitter archive will provide a similar service, offering a social history of hipsters, geeks, nerds, and whatever Ashton Kutcher is. As Twitter continues its march into the mainstream, the service really will offer a real-time, unvarnished look at what's on people's minds.
Digital technologies pose a problem for the Library and other archival institutions, though. By making data so easy to generate and then record, they push archives to think hard about their missions and adapt to new technical challenges. While archiving the entire Web and all its changes is simply impossible, the Library of Congress has collected a curated, limited subset of Web content "since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000." Today, it has 167TB of Web data.
Raymond sums up the Library's goal: "In other words, if you’re looking for a place where important historical and other information in digital form should be preserved for the long haul, we’re it!"
People seem to agree that this is big news; as Raymond noted when I contacted him for details, "I'm already getting flooded. This is already our biggest re-tweeted tweet ever!"
So if you don't want history to remember that burrito you had for dinner last night (and its aftermath), tweet carefully—now it's for posterity.
The best of times...
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Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive -- ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow.
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