Before we delve into the posts we’re reading and loving elsewhere on the internet, don’t miss this dispatch from the Zaatari Refugee Camp on the innovative refugee communities making something out of nothing.
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‘A ‘thrilling’ mission to get the Swedish to change overnight‘ (Maddy Savage for BBC News)
How do you change over an entire country from left hand drive to right hand drive? The logistics of how this incredible feat was accomplished in Sweden are fascinating — and along the way, they provide some guidance for the successful implementation of other ambitious urban planning projects.
Some 360,000 street signs had to be switched nationwide, which largely took place on a single day before the move to right-hand driving, with council workers joined by the military and working late into the night to ensure the task got done before H-Day formally revved into gear on Sunday morning. All but essential traffic was banned from the roads.
‘Framed for Murder By His Own DNA‘ (Katie Worth for Wired)
Members of the public, including those serving on the juries of murder trials, have decided ideas about the reliability of DNA evidence and forensics as a whole. A growing body of research, though, suggests that forensics is not as cut-and-dried as it’s often presented. How many people are in prison because of ‘airtight’ forensics when they’re really innocent?
A survey of the published science, interviews with leading scientists, and a review of thousands of pages of court and police documents associated with the Kumra case has elucidated how secondary DNA transfer can undermine the credibility of the criminal justice system’s most-trusted tool. And yet, very few crime labs worldwide regularly and robustly study secondary DNA transfer.
‘Databodies in Codespace‘ (Shannon Mattern for Places)
Ambitious projects to ‘measure everything’ sound intriguing and dramatic, like the wave of the future. But what kind of information is being gathered, and how will it really be used? The answers to these questions are something that boosters are reluctant to answer, and that should be a warning sign.
This is the promise of big data and artificial intelligence. With a sufficiently large dataset we can find meaning even without a theoretical framework or scientific method. As Wired-editor-turned-drone-entrepreneur Chris Anderson famously declared, “Petabytes allow us to say: ‘Correlation is enough.’ We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.”
‘Improbable Cause‘ (Amy Dempsey for the Toronto Star)
A series of mysterious deaths. A vindictive ex-wife. A crime that no one treated as one until it was too late. Why did three people die in suspicious circumstances before police finally identified their deaths as murders, rather than unfortunate accidents?
Caleb Harrison was not the first person in his family to die at 3635 Pitch Pine Cres. He was not even the second. In April 2010, his 63-year-old mother, Bridget Harrison, was found dead at the bottom of the stairs leading to the second floor. Her body lay steps away from the powder room where one year earlier she had discovered her husband, Bill Harrison, cold and lifeless. His death at 64 was classified as natural until Bridget died under suspicious circumstances and a coroner updated his file, placing the deaths of husband and wife in the same category. “Undetermined.”
‘The Delay‘ (Rachel Monroe for Esquire)
This is a harrowing tale of a child abduction investigation gone horribly wrong on a Diné reservation, and how communities cope with devastating losses.
I thought about the bureaucratic banality of that phrase—jurisdictional issues—and the gruesome reality it glossed over as I drove through Shiprock, a town of around 8,000 people located on the Navajo reservation. Spanning twenty-seven thousand square miles across New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona, it’s an area of strip-mall churches, roadside sagebrush, and billboards warning kids about the dangers of meth. The town itself is named after the Shiprock Pinnacle, an otherworldly volcanic-rock formation that juts up about fifteen hundred feet from the desert floor. Nineteenth-century explorers thought it looked like a clipper ship. To the Diné, or Navajo, it is known as Tsé Bitʼaʼí, or “rock with wings,” and is considered a sacred site. During my time in Shiprock, the pinnacle loomed in the distance, marking the horizon, like an idea I couldn’t get out of my head.
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Photo: Scott Cutler/Creative Commons