![tastefullyoffensive:
Overly Attached Dog[via]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/8083b50051e759dcf156eed7121e13b6/tumblr_mj97emL6mI1qewacoo1_r1_500.png)
Overly Attached Dog
[via]
![psydoctor8:
Missed one: false confessions.
Most of us are familiar with certain legal, psychologically coercive interrogation techniques that elicit false confessions - like bold face lies from detectives (“we found your DNA on the knife”), as well as ones that fall under police misconduct like lengthy interrogations without food or water, pursuing custodial interviews with juveniles without an interested guardian present or physical abuse, but we shouldn’t let uneducated juries slip under the radar when speaking of wrongful convictions and confessions. Some of the findings juries come up with despite reason, evidence or just common sense, are outrageous.
Shockingly, there are times when a confession even trumps irrefutable scientific physical evidence. Kassin notes that there are 19 cases on record — and perhaps many more — where there is a confession followed by DNA that contradicts that confession. One South Carolina case, where he was an expert witness, was featured on “Dateline” last July. Billy Wayne Cope was accused of murdering his 12 year old daughter, Amanda. He had been isolated for three days and interrogated. Transcripts of the interrogation show that he denied killing his daughter 650 times. He was told he failed a lie detector test that he in fact had asked for. Ultimately, he confessed to committing the murder. The lab results, which came back several weeks later, showed that the girl was also sexually assaulted and the semen and saliva did not match Cope. Sometime after that, the DNA was run through CODIS, a computer software program that operates local, state and national databases of DNA profiles from convicted offenders, unsolved crime scene evidence and missing persons. A match was made to a known sex offender, James Sanders, who was in the area. Yet Cope was prosecuted and convicted anyway, as a coconspirator with Sanders, even though Sanders had no idea who Cope was. That was six years ago. Cope remains imprisoned. [via]
I sat down with Saul Kassin when he first came to John Jay to talk about his work, he’s a long time major player in this area. Here he is talking about the ramifications of false confessions at the Vera Institute. Definitely worth a watch.
img: California Innocence Project via MJ](http://25.media.tumblr.com/b0a0245e839b7d3174f7d93d981a8eb1/tumblr_mihgx6Rs0c1qan221o1_500.jpg)
Missed one: false confessions.
Most of us are familiar with certain legal, psychologically coercive interrogation techniques that elicit false confessions - like bold face lies from detectives (“we found your DNA on the knife”), as well as ones that fall under police misconduct like lengthy interrogations without food or water, pursuing custodial interviews with juveniles without an interested guardian present or physical abuse, but we shouldn’t let uneducated juries slip under the radar when speaking of wrongful convictions and confessions. Some of the findings juries come up with despite reason, evidence or just common sense, are outrageous.
Shockingly, there are times when a confession even trumps irrefutable scientific physical evidence. Kassin notes that there are 19 cases on record — and perhaps many more — where there is a confession followed by DNA that contradicts that confession. One South Carolina case, where he was an expert witness, was featured on “Dateline” last July. Billy Wayne Cope was accused of murdering his 12 year old daughter, Amanda. He had been isolated for three days and interrogated. Transcripts of the interrogation show that he denied killing his daughter 650 times. He was told he failed a lie detector test that he in fact had asked for. Ultimately, he confessed to committing the murder. The lab results, which came back several weeks later, showed that the girl was also sexually assaulted and the semen and saliva did not match Cope. Sometime after that, the DNA was run through CODIS, a computer software program that operates local, state and national databases of DNA profiles from convicted offenders, unsolved crime scene evidence and missing persons. A match was made to a known sex offender, James Sanders, who was in the area. Yet Cope was prosecuted and convicted anyway, as a coconspirator with Sanders, even though Sanders had no idea who Cope was. That was six years ago. Cope remains imprisoned. [via]I sat down with Saul Kassin when he first came to John Jay to talk about his work, he’s a long time major player in this area. Here he is talking about the ramifications of false confessions at the Vera Institute. Definitely worth a watch.
img: California Innocence Project via MJ
(via scinerds)
Your dad knew how to take an epic shot before you did and he’s got the photo composition skills to prove it. Back when a man could get shit-housed off a few dollars of sweat-pant money, he was out capturing the portraits that inspired Bob Ross to paint. He was a pornographer of mother nature’s beauty who exposed the world to sights they’d never seen.
So hipsters, when you’re taking panoramic iPhone 5 shots of nature’s wilds and attempting to share your moment of serenity on instagram so you can whore it out for double taps, remember this…
Your dad would be insta-famous if instagram was around when he was capturing his human experience.
Acoustic Levitation
Using sound waves to levitate individual droplets of solutions containing pharmaceutical drugs and drying them in mid-air. Why do this? This is useful because most of the drugs on the market are either amorphous or crystalline and the crystalline form doesn’t get absorbed by the body. So levitating the solution allows the drug to be made into an amorphous state (by evaporation) because if it were to touch any surface it would simply crystallize. They call this “containerless processing”.
The frequencies used are just above the audible range at about 22 kilohertz and when the two speakers are aligned they create two sets of sound waves, perfectly interfering with each other creating a phenomenon known as a standing wave. This allows the objects to levitate in areas within the waves known as nodes as the acoustic pressure is enough to cancel the force of gravity.
Badass!
(via scinerds)
(via scinerds)
Happy Birthday Stephen Hawking!
“It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. Its a crazy world out there. Be curious.” — Prof. Hawking
Image: Noted physicist Stephen Hawking (center) enjoys zero gravity during a flight aboard a modified Boeing 727 aircraft owned by Zero Gravity Corp. (Zero G). Hawking, who suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) is being rotated in air by (right) Peter Diamandis, founder of the Zero G Corp., and (left) Byron Lichtenberg, former shuttle payload specialist and now president of Zero G. Kneeling below Hawking is Nicola O’Brien, a nurse practitioner who is Hawking’s aide. At the celebration of his 65th birthday on January 8 2007, Hawking announced his plans for a zero-gravity flight to prepare for a sub-orbital space flight in 2009 on Virgin Galactic’s space service. Credit: NASA
Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author. Among his significant scientific works have been a collaboration with Roger Penrose on gravitational singularities theorems in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation, often called Hawking radiation. Hawking was the first to set forth a cosmology explained by a union of the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. He is a vocal supporter of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge between 1979 and 2009.
Hawking has achieved success with works of popular science in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general; his A Brief History of Time stayed on the British Sunday Times best-sellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. Hawking has a motor neurone disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a condition that has progressed over the years. He is almost entirely paralysed and communicates through a speech generating device.
![tastefullyoffensive:
[via]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/c0aaee2d63bd42a92853482d16c122dc/tumblr_mg40510bM81qewacoo1_r1_500.jpg)
curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being
done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soulcrushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education. —
Paul Lockhart — A Mathematician’s Lament (via scinerds)
I would love to see what he would advise instead.
(via memyselfiamweird)
“By concentrating on what, and leaving out why, mathematics is reduced to an empty shell. The art is not in the “truth” but in the explanation, the argument. It is the argument itself which gives the truth its context, and determines what is really being said and meant. Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity— to pose their own problems, make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be wrong, to be creatively frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble together their own explanations and proofs— you deny them mathematics itself. So no, I’m not complaining about the presence of facts and formulas in our mathematics classes, I’m complaining about the lack of mathematics in our mathematics classes.”
—
“Math is not about following directions, it’s about making new directions.”
(via scinerds)
![tastefullyoffensive:
[@nickbilton]
Truth!](http://25.media.tumblr.com/dcaa6bb5febad72b22af5981e3d0ea61/tumblr_mfu1wrv2Hg1qewacoo1_500.png)
The Sharpest View of The Sun
Here is one of the sharper views of the Sun ever taken. This stunning image shows remarkable details of a dark sunspot across the image bottom and numerous boiling granules which appear like kernels of corn across the top. Taken in 2002, the picture was made using the Swedish Solar Telescope operating on the Canary Island of La Palma.
Credit: SST, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
(via scinerds)
This photo was taken as the rain clouds began to build. Just as the sun was to set, it shone perfectly through the cloud, creating the “keyhole to heaven”. The Angel reflection around the outside of the cloud/light formation made this photo very unique.
(via scinerds)
Huge Saturn vortex swirls in stunning NASA photos
The strange six-sided feature is thought to be formed by the path of a jet stream flowing through the planet’s atmosphere.
