Monday, July 29, 2013

Old reliable: After nervous start in 1943, trumpeter has played thousands of military services

BARRON, Wis. ? Chuck Kirkwood thought he was in trouble when he was called into the Barron High School office about 70 years ago.

Instead, he was asked to play taps for a military funeral. He accepted, and calculations are that he's performed at about 3,500 funerals and counting, the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram reported (http://bit.ly/161E3lf).

"I was never in the service, but I feel so indebted to those who serve," Kirkwood, 84, said. "I feel I don't deserve a lot of credit for what I do. Those who have served and are serving should always be getting the honor ? not me."

It was 1943 when he was sent to the principal's office, recalling high school band director Francis White recommended Kirkwood play taps at military ceremonies when the person who normally performed was not available.

"I've been playing at military funerals ever since," Kirkwood said. "I've played for Veterans Day, Memorial Day, flag-raising ceremonies and a number of other events in Barron and many other communities around here. I enjoy it, but I have to say, I remember being a bit nervous that first time in high school."

Kirkwood in recent years has kept a log of military services in which he's performed. Based on an average of slightly more than 50 a year, he estimated he's played in more than 3,500 such services.

Kirkwood started playing the trumpet in an effort to help his breathing.

"I had asthma real bad as a kid, and my dad (Charles) was a pharmacist in Barron. A doctor friend suggested that I play a horn to help my breathing," Kirkwood said. "I started playing and haven't quit."

Kirkwood managed to play at military funerals even while doing mechanical work for 44 years for the Barron County Highway Department.

"When I first started doing it, I would take a couple hours of vacation, but then one of the other fellas I worked with talked to the Highway Committee and said Legionnaires weren't getting docked when they went, so then I didn't either," Kirkwood said. "I would take my suit to my mother's house, change clothes, play, change back and go back to work. I made up the time missed by working longer those days."

Source: http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/music/217334731.html

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Sunday, July 28, 2013

From the Supreme Court Steps to a Museum's Collection, via Facebook

The story of how a poster celebrating the end of the Defense of Marriage Act made its way into history

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NMAJH/Facebook

Last week a container arrived at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. Inside was the newest piece in the museum's permanent collection, and, in a sense, the newest physical object of Official Jewish History, if that's what the museum's imprimatur conveys.

Shira Goldstein, the museum's exhibitions coordinator, opened it up and pulled out the poster it held. As far as art go, the poster wasn't much -- text on a white background. But what it said and where it had been imbued the poster with some greater significance. In bright rainbow letters it proclaimed: MAZEL TOV (to EVERYONE!). Three weeks earlier, on June 26, 2013, it had been outside the U.S. Supreme Court, held up in celebration as the Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act.

That the poster had arrived at the museum at all was a bit of a miracle in itself, a small miracle, facilitated by the formal structure Facebook gives to the social networks we are all a part of.

A colleague of Goldstein's had first noticed the poster in an image on the New York Times's website, part of a gallery the newspaper ran covering the day. "We immediately knew it represented a wonderful Jewish response to the Court's decision and thought it would be a great way to tell the story of this historic moment," Goldstein wrote to me. But how would they find it? Who had the poster?

Goldstein had the museum put up call for the poster on its Facebook page, which 46 people re-shared. Other people wrote their own posts announcing the museum's search. Additionally, Goldstein reached out to a couple of Jewish programs and institutions in DC, asking them to publicize her efforts. Two days later she got an email from Cody Pomeranz, a summer intern at the Center for American Progress. He had the poster.

How exactly the search made its way to Pomeranz is a bit unclear. Here's what we do know: His colleague at CAP, Hannah Slater, is the one who put the whole thing together. On Friday the 28th she opened up Facebook and saw a post from a friend of hers named Adam Berman, who had shared it from a friend of his, whom Slater does not know. The text was signed by yet a third person, "Adam S.," whom neither Slater nor Pomeranz knows. "I have no idea how many people may have shared the message before I saw it," Slater says. Here's what the post she saw looked like:

Mazel Tov.jpg

NMAJH/Facebook

How were these people all connected? They didn't know each other through Facebook; they knew each other from growing up or summer camp or college or work. Such networks have always existed, and they've always been used to convey news and gossip and opportunities. What Facebook did was to give those natural social ties a technological layer, and that layer allowed a message to spread far and wide at a speed that would once have been unimaginable.

"What's crazy," Pomeranz says, "is how many people were talking about it." After he had contacted the museum, he went back read through the Facebook comments of people searching for the poster. "I think I remember one guy saying, 'I hope this mensche steps up!' It was a weird feeling, in a good way."

Mazel Tov Photo-650.jpg

Left: Pomeranz with the poster at the CAP office. Right: Goldstein with the poster in Philadelphia at the National Museum of American Jewish History

Pomeranz credits another intern with the idea for the sign. "I'm Jewish and I tend to say 'mazel tov' a lot in place of 'congratulations,' " he wrote to me. "One of my fellow interns said, 'Why don't you do that for a sign?' " Pomeranz liked the idea, so he grabbed the markers and got to work.

"Back in September," he adds, "I saw my oldest sister get married. It was a Jewish wedding, and when her husband broke the glass and we all jumped up and roared "Mazel Tov!" It was an incredible moment of joy, love, and family."

"Everyone deserves that moment, regardless of sexual orientation" he continues. "So after I finished 'Mazel Tov,' I added, in parentheses, 'to EVERYONE!'."

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~3/eER_xkGHiOc/story01.htm

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Saturday, July 27, 2013

Zynga stock drops after gambling plans fizzle

Zynga stock falls 17 percent in morning trading. Zynga says it's dropping plans for a US gambling license that would let it offer casino-type online games with real money.?

By Associated Press / July 26, 2013

The corporate logo of Zynga Inc, the social network game development company, is shown at its headquarters in San Francisco in 2012. Zynga will largely abandon its long-running efforts to build a real-money gaming business in the United States, a prospect investors once believed to be the struggling company's sole lifeline. Zynga stock tumbled on the news.

Robert Galbraith/Reuters/File

Enlarge

Zynga?investors cashed in their shares Friday after the company said it was dropping its plans to pursue online casino-style games in the U.S.

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THE SPARK: The San Francisco company said late Thursday that it was no longer seeking the U.S. gambling license it would need to move into casino-style games, which are played for real money. The company still plans to test a gambling product in the United Kingdom.

Zynga?posted second-quarter earnings late Thursday and reported that it had trimmed its losses. The company has been cutting staff to reduce costs.

THE BIG PICTURE: Adding online gambling could have given?Zynga?a potentially large source of revenue that the company badly needs.

When?Zynga?went public late 2011, its games, such as "Farmville" and "Mafia Wars," were the most popular on Facebook. Things have changed since then. King.com, the maker of "Candy Crush Saga," has unseated?Zynga as the top social games maker.

The second-quarter results were?Zynga's?last under the direction of founder and CEO Mark Pincus. The company brought aboard former Microsoft executive Don Mattrick as CEO , who ran the Xbox video game business.

THE ANALYSIS: Mattrick is well-regarded in tech circles and there is some optimism in his ability to turn?Zynga's fortunes around.

Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter sees changes within Mattrick's first 180 days at the company. "We believe Mr. Mattrick will act swiftly to focus on a handful of new initiatives and to right-size?Zynga's?staffing levels," Pachter wrote.

Zynga?did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

SHARE ACTION:?Zynga?Inc., fell 60 cents, or 17 percent, to $2.90 in morning trading Friday, then stabilized in early afternoon trading. The stock is down 63 percent since its initial public offering in December 2011.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/J48PJBOoPW4/Zynga-stock-drops-after-gambling-plans-fizzle

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Friday, July 26, 2013

MetroPCS adds Lumia 521 and Optimus F3, covers 19 new cities

If you've been holding out for a new $40/month smartphone, you're in luck. We're not even three months separated from T-Mobile's MetroPCS acquisition and the value carrier is already reaping benefits from Ms. Magenta. The Bring-Your-Own-Phone carrier is getting its first Windows 8 Phone handset, the HSPA+ Nokia Lumia 521, and the Jelly Bean-running LG Optimus F3. Both phones feature 5MP cameras, July 26th street dates for select markets and attractive pricing -- the 521 is $99, while the F3 is $149. The news doesn't stop rolling there, either.

Not only is the wireless provider's device lineup expanding, but its coverage area is too. Metro's availability is growing to 19 additional cities (listed after the break), including Washington, DC; Cleveland, Ohio and Fresno, California. Sadly, the embedded press releases don't mention the most important aspect of all: whether you can get the F3 in a Grimace-worthy hue.

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Source: MetroPCS

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/26/metropcs-lumia521-optimusf3-19-new-cities/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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Thursday, July 25, 2013

US crude oil supplies drop by 2.8 million barrels

NEW YORK (AP) The United States's crude oil supplies shrank last week, the government said Wednesday.

Crude supplies declined by 2.8 million barrels, or 0.8 percent, to 364.2 million barrels, which is 4.2 percent below year-ago levels, the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration said in its weekly report.

Analysts expected a decrease of 2.6 million barrels for the week ended July 19, according to Platts, the energy information arm of McGraw-Hill Cos.

Gasoline supplies dropped by 1.4 million barrels, or 0.6 percent, to 222.7 million barrels. That's 6 percent above year-ago levels. Analysts expected gasoline supplies to rise by 800,000 barrels.

Demand for gasoline over the four weeks ended July 19 was 3.1 percent higher than a year earlier, averaging 9.1 million barrels a day.

U.S. refineries ran at 92.3 percent of total capacity on average, up 0.1 percentage point from the prior week. Analysts expected capacity to fall to 91.9 percent.

Supplies of distillate fuel, which include diesel and heating oil, fell by 1.2 million barrels to 126.5 million barrels. Analysts expected distillate stocks to increase by 1.9 million barrels.

This story has been automatically published from the Associated Press wire which uses US spellings

Source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10902975&ref=rss

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Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Katherine Jackson confused during testimony

Celebs

19 hours ago

Katherine Jackson testifies in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Mona Edwards

An artist rendering of Katherine Jackson on the witness stand in a Los Angeles courtroom.

Katherine Jackson's two-day stint on a Los Angeles courtroom witness stand ended with the 83-year-old grandmother tearfully declaring that concert promoter AEG Live never told her family that Michael Jackson was sleep-deprived for 60 days, was paranoid, losing weight and deteriorating before everyone's eyes.

"They watched him waste away," she testified. "They could have called me. He was asking for his father. My grandson told me that his daddy was nervous and scared." AEG Live is the entertainment company that was in charge of Michael Jackson's ill-fated comeback tour.

Clutching a tissue, appearing confused and sometimes citing memory problems, Katherine said she didn't know the extent of her son's weakness until the trial began. Repeating her testimony from Friday that she was not aware Michael Jackson was a drug addict, Katherine said that she never saw her son under the influence of drugs and never saw him ?loopy, or out of it," even on the telephone. But after her other children told her they believed he was addicted to prescription drugs despite Michael's denial, she participated in an intervention at his Neverland ranch in 2002.

?I knew he was taking them (pain pills) but I didn?t know he was abusing them,? Katherine told the jury. She said Michael was upset when the family staged the intervention "because when we got there, there was nothing wrong with him.? The intervention, she added, didn't really take place because Michael Jackson was upset and yelled at his family, and Katherine Jackson became embarrassed to be there, she testified.

On cross-examination, a lawyer for AEG showed Katherine an open letter to the media she signed and released in 2007 denying there was ever a family intervention and also denying that Michael Jackson was addicted to drugs and alcohol. The lawyer also played a 2010 Oprah interview in which Katherine admitted that Michael was an addict.

Katherine and Michael Jackson's three children have sued AEG Live claiming the entertainment company that promoted the King of Pop's last concerts failed to pick up on warning signs that could have saved his life. As part of the lawsuit, the Jackson family also alleges that AEG did not properly investigate Conrad Murray, the doctor who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the superstar's death in 2011 and sentenced to four years in prison.

"Even though [Michael] asked for (the drug propofol), (Murray) could have said no," Katherine testified.

Jackson died while rehearsing his 50-show comeback tour in London, three weeks before the tour was to start. His two eldest children have also testified at the trial, 16-year-old Michael Jackson, Jr. known as "Prince," who testified about his relationship with his dad and the harrowing day he lost his father; and his sister, Paris, 15, who offered videotaped testimony. Paris is currently being treated in a hospital after a suicide attempt in June. On Friday, her grandmother testified that Paris tried to kill herself "because she wanted to be with daddy."

On Monday, Katherine testified that she did not believe her son was responsible for his death. When questioned by AEG lead counsel Marvin Putnam, she "did not remember" if she attended Murray's manslaughter trial and assisted the prosecution in that case.

Katherine also said she did not know that her son used propofol and that he gave Murray money "because he felt bad for [him] because he didn't have no money -- not because (Michael) had hired him." Despite the fact that she is ?83-years-old and may not remember everything clearly,? Katherine testified that she distinctly remembers that AEG hired Murray -- not her son. She had no idea the doctor spent six nights a week at her son's home.

Katherine could not recall if she had a bank account in 2010 and said she was surprised to learn that her son was having financial problems before his death. ?I heard that from different people,? she said. ?I heard for years that Michael Jackson was broke but he wasn?t.?

Katherine, who has been taking care of her son's children since he died, said that Michael paid many of her living expenses and would sometimes give her extra spending cash. When asked why she didn't keep a record of the payments her son made on her behalf, Katherine appeared annoyed: "What does this have to do with the death of my son?"

At the conclusion of her testimony, Katherine left the courtroom to rest. The trial, in its 13th week, continues.

This report contains additional reporting from E!'s Claudia Rosenbaum.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/entertainment/katherine-jackson-returns-witness-stand-confused-memory-problems-6C10707428

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Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Inside the mind of Texas State?s serial killer hunter

Hap Mansfield | On 22, Jul 2013

Kim Rossmo, a Texas State criminology research professor, is known internationally for his method of geography-based criminal profiling. He has applied his methodology to cases modern and historic including the legendary Jack the Ripper murders. PHOTO by JAMIE MALDONADO FOR BOBCAT MAGAZINE/JAMIEMPHOTO.COM

Kim Rossmo, a Texas State criminology research professor, is known internationally for his method of geography-based criminal profiling. He has applied his methodology to cases modern and historic including the legendary Jack the Ripper murders. PHOTO by JAMIE MALDONADO FOR BOBCAT MAGAZINE/JAMIEMPHOTO.COM

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by HAP MANSFIELD

It?s called the ?Pig Farm? case, one of the most grisly serial murder cases ever recorded in Canada or anywhere else.

So grisly that well fewer than one-third of the perpetrator?s alleged murders were ever prosecuted, and he still has life in prison, which is the steepest penalty under Canadian law. As to the cases that were never prosecuted, the evidence that never went before a jury tells how grisly ? the DNA of two victims found in packages of ground meat, a partial leg bone of another victim found in a cistern, assorted bones and teeth buried about the farm property, which Canadian lawmen privately called the ?killing fields? ?

It was grisly, and it was more grisly than it had to be, due to the initial reaction of the Vancouver police.

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In 1998, a young Vancouver detective named Kim Rossmo started to look into a disturbing trend. For years, women turned up missing from a notoriously seedy neighborhood in Downtown Eastside Vancouver known as the Low Track, where life is cheap, especially the lives of women, who were disposable, and worse. Drug addiction and the sex trade, poverty and hopelessness ? that was the daily bread.

Rossmo now is the university chair in criminology and director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence and Investigation (GII) at Texas State. The Pig Farm case started him on his life?s work. But it was not a glorious start.

Rossmo attacked the case with a new investigative technique called geographic profiling for analyzing serial violent crimes based on an inspired, revolutionary algorithm. After he set up a geographic profiling section with the Vancouver Police Department, he was asked to investigate the concentration of women who had gone missing in the Low Track area. It had all the earmarks, Rossmo thought, of a serial murderer.

Rossmo prepared an investigative plan and recommended releasing a public warning that a killer may be preying on prostitutes in the Low Track. He also conducted an analysis of the number of reported missing women over time, adopting an approach used by epidemiologists on disease outbreaks. The analysis statistically supported the serial murderer theory.

Rossmo?s analysis was ignored. A hot-headed inspector in charge of the homicide section scoffed at the serial killer idea, upbraided Rossmo, then refused to even talk to him. Several police officers at one particularly fatal meeting said the inspector had what amounted to a ?temper tantrum.? Rossmo?s fledgling geographic profiling division was eventually shut down. His contract was not renewed.

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Robert William ?Willie? Pickton lived on a 14-acre farm in Port Coquitlam, just outside of Vancouver. Pickton, a quiet, secluded man, lived in a grubby double-wide trailer and maintained the work of butchering pigs on his farm long after he and his siblings made several million dollars by selling some of the family property to developers eager to build townhouses for a burgeoning population.

The money gave Pickton latitude with the down-on-their luck women who had turned to the streets to make a living, and often, support their drug addictions. Pickton could move with relative anonymity in the Low End.

It ended about a dozen murders too late. Allegedly.

On Feb. 6, 2002, police executed a search warrant for illegal firearms on Pickton?s property. They found illegal firearms. They also found the I.D.s, a few purses, and bits of clothing of a number of the missing women in the trailer.

On Feb. 22, 2002, Pickton was charged with two counts of first-degree murder. On April 2 that year came three more first-degree murder charges in the deaths of three more women. On April 9, another first-degree murder charge. Canadian authorities were excavating the property. Four more charges came on Sept. 20. On Oct. 3, another four charges. Now, Pickton faced 15 charges of first degree murder.

The excavations through November 2003. The Crown would argue before court that Pickton butchered his victims. There were fears that bodies were left on the farm to decompose or be eaten by the pigs. There were fears that bodies were fed to the pigs. There have been reports that human meat was mixed with pork meat raised on the farm and sold to the public. The British Columbian government said it spent $70 million on the investigation.

On May 26, 2005, 12 more first degree murder charges were brought against Pickton.

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The trial began on Jan. 30, 2006. Pickton pleaded not guilty to all 27 counts. The judge, Justice James Williams, threw out one count for lack of evidence. But there were still 26 counts. Williams later explained in Canadian news reports that a trial for 26 counts of murder would have been unwieldy, perhaps lasting two years and being susceptible to a mistrial. He separated off six counts that he deemed materially different from the other 20. The trial went forward on the six separated counts.

The trial lasted almost two years, anyway. Here are a few of the highlights, according to just one report from The National Post: Pickton did not deny that the remains of the six women were found on his farm. He just denied killing them. The hands and feet of three victims were found in buckets in a workshop freezer. Two halves of one victim?s skull, as well as her hands and feet, were found ?in a pink soup of decomposing human matter.? From the wounds on all four, it appeared they were shot in the head with a .22-calilbre gun. Taking apart the walls of a pig pen, investigators found the hand bones of another victim. The jaw, mandible and some teeth of another victim were found on the property.

Here?s more, quoting directly from the story: ?During Pickton?s interrogation, his friend (Scott) Chubb was shown on video saying Pickton had told him a good way to kill a female heroin addict was to inject her with windshield-washer fluid. In another tape played for Pickton, his associate Andrew Bellwood said Pickton talked about killing prostitutes by handcuffing and strangling them, then bleeding and gutting them before feeding them to pigs.?

On Dec. 9, 2007, the jury returned its verdict. On six charges of first-degree murder, not guilty. On six charges of second-degree murder, guilty. The difference is technical. First degree murder carries life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years. Second degree murder is life in prison, but the judge can set parole at 10 to 25 years. Williams made it 25.

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In 2011, the British Columbia provincial government established the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, headed by former attorney general Wally Oppal, to find out what went wrong in the case. After an extensive review, Commissioner Oppal issued a 1,448-page report in December 2012, exhaustively listing the investigation?s failures and apologizing to the victims? families. He criticized police management for not paying attention to Rossmo?s warnings, which potentially could have helped save the lives of 14 women and sped the investigation forward more efficiently.

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Rossmo has never claimed that geographic and statistical profiling is all that?s needed for an investigation. He says is it gives police officers a place to start. One of the barriers to Rossmo?s suggestion of a serial killer in Vancouver was that there were no bodies found and any witnesses were addle-pated from drugs. There was no evidence and there were no reliable witnesses. Pickton, it turns out, had butchered the victims and fed some of the offal to his pigs. Some of the women involved in the case are still too scared to talk. The geographic profiling was the only thing unaffected by these variables.

Rossmo doesn?t discuss the matter angrily. Instead, he wonders, how can we stop making mistakes like this?

?I was very interested in how people could get it so wrong,? he said. ?I started reading everything I could about wrongful convictions, which is the other side of a failed, unsolved criminal investigation.?

At Texas State, Rossmo researched a number of subjects, including psychology, probability, organizational behavior, engineering failures, and military disasters, and came up with the framework for what he calls Criminal Investigative Failures. His research has led to a series of articles, a book, and a presentation now in much demand by police agencies.

Rossmo is world famous for his mathematical formula for geographic profiling, and the GII at Texas State is one of the few places in the world where it is taught and practiced. He came up with the formula in an unusual circumstance.

?I was in Japan, doing some unrelated research on police k?bans, and was on the bullet train looking out the window when it hit me. So I wrote it down on a napkin,? he explained.

An article in Maclean?s magazine said Rossmo taught himself calculus when he was in the 10th grade and later asked to take the grade 12 provincial final examination in algebra after the first week of classes. He took that test and scored 100 percent.

?I was very good in math in high school, and at the time I wanted to be a mathematician,? said Rossmo. ?But then I got pulled into the adrenaline side and became a police officer.?

Originally studying mathematics at the University of Saskatchewan, he shifted to criminology and then became a police officer in Vancouver. He is the first law enforcement officer in Canada to get a PhD, which he did during off hours while working shift work on patrol. It was the algorithm developed during his doctoral dissertation research at Simon Fraser University that led to the methodology called geographic profiling.

Geographic profiling starts with Rossmo?s formula, which fuels a computer program called Rigel, which, not accidentally, is named after a star in the constellation, Orion, the hunter. It is both common and uncommon sense. The formula takes into account things as simple as a crime location?s relationship to an offender?s residence and tougher stuff like distance decay (somewhat like radioactive decay only with distance and time as measures) and Manhattan distances, the distance that would be traveled to get from one data point to the other if a grid-like path is followed.

?Being a criminal is like having a job,? Rossmo said. ?You have to find a target, have to expend energy and time getting there, have to avoid getting seen by witnesses and caught by the police, and so on.?

Serial killers, however, are notable for their gruesome crimes. How does a law enforcement agent even stomach it?

?You need to compartmentalize it,? said Rossmo. ?It?s very much like a surgeon. He doesn?t think ?I?m cutting open a body? as much as he?s thinking, ?I need to get to the heart or liver or some organ in order to help this person?.?

The years of research that Rossmo has put into the subject yielded interesting results. The profiling shows that most humans have a pattern, whether it?s figuring when and where to get the closest and best slice of pizza or where and when to commit a crime unseen and how to get home again from the pizza joint with enough time to finish that essay on Hegel, or, in the case of a criminal, elude detection. Rigel, after ingesting hundreds of thousands of bits of data, can do calculations that most often prove to be incredibly accurate. Rigel can figure out, from these calculations, quite literally, where you most likely live.

A computer can figure out human patterns? It can, with the help of the human brain.

?Our minds are better at discerning patterns than a computer,? Rossmo said. ?It takes a massive amount of computer code to figure out some things our brains can do in a few moments. Where Rigel outperforms our brains is in instantaneously calculating millions of probability estimates.?

The GII center takes geographic profiling requests and has been most effective in helping police investigate serial crimes. Rigel has been used in a variety of applications from border patrol problems, to the predatory attacks of sharks, to the search for terrorists. It has even been used to trace the origins of diseases such as malaria.

All of this leads back to what is called environmental criminology, a field developed by Paul and Patricia Brantingham at Simon Fraser University, under whom Rossmo studied.

?Paul was my senior advisor in university,? said Rossmo. ?Their theoretical work in environmental criminology is the foundation of my work.?

Environmental criminology encompasses ideas that would serve urban planners, well. Ever since Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, there has been an ongoing debate about city planning and efficiency, and much of it has to do with how crime happens in urban areas with easy access, bad lighting, broken windows and little supervision. The Brantinghams? studies stress place and spatial relationships such as land usage, traffic patterns and street design and the quotidian movements of both criminals and victims.

One of Rossmo?s most basic teachings, however, boils down to something one normally does not associate with crime prevention: creativity.

?It is very important to teach students creativity,? states Rossmo. ?If you don?t have it, you can just end up making the same mistakes over and over. The whole goal is to try to help people view their problems in a creative fashion so they can come up with new solutions.?

Rossmo has been involved in a variety of interesting historical projects and has prepared geographic profiles for the Zodiac Killer, the Austin Ripper murders, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and the translated World War II Gestapo files from Berlin. His work has been portrayed in movies (Zodiac, for one), detective novels, and TV shows, such as Numb3rs and Law and Order. He has even been incorporated into a fictional character in the novel Burnt Bones by Jay Clarke (writing under the name Michael Slade).

There is actually a geoprofile of the Jack the Ripper case on the GII website. When asked about the extraordinary assertion in Richard Wallace?s 1996 book, ?Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend?, that author Lewis Carroll was actually the Ripper and confessed to it in anagrams in his children?s books, Rossmo laughed.

?You can always find connections if you?re looking for them, like that assertion that the Prince (Albert Victor, the Prince of Wales? son) did it,? he said. ?What do they say, there are seven degrees of separation from everyone? However, the likelihood of a suspect is a completely different matter. No one can find out what happened in the ?Ripper? case, really. There needs to be physical evidence, a witness, or a confession.?

It is the mark of Rossmo that no matter what he is working on, he tries to use his brain creatively to come up with a solution. Imagine what it takes to form problem-solving skills and classes from a negative experience like the Pig Farm case.

?I try to be positive about things,? he said. ?Everything has a reason or rationale.?

Source: http://smmercury.com/2013/07/22/inside-the-mind-of-texas-states-serial-killer-hunter/

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