Boston Tech Vs. the Bomber 170
An anonymous reader writes "Amid rumors of an impending arrest in the Boston Marathon bombing, Xconomy has a rundown of local companies working on technologies relevant to the investigation and aftermath. The approaches include Web analytics to identify communication patterns, image and video analysis of the crime scene, surveillance camera hardware and software, and smart prosthetic devices for amputees. A big challenge the authorities face is the sheer volume and different proprietary formats of video from security cameras, mobile devices, and media groups. Ultimately this will be a case study in whether an individual bent on destruction can remain anonymous in an era of digital surveillance, social media, and crowdsourcing."
Re:Not in the article (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/how-%E2%80%98extra-9%E2%80%99-could-ward-zombie-apocalypse [networkworld.com]
Re:The Mechanical Turk may be faster... (Score:5, Interesting)
Translation: 4chan accused everybody with a black backpack of being the bomber. Especially if they were caught looking at a girl's ass instead of the shitty view of the marathon.
And none of them match the FBI's person of interest description.
Re:recovery, not prevention. (Score:1, Interesting)
Serial killing: one after another, over a long period of time. Jeffrey Dahlmer was a serial killer
Mass killing: lots of people at once. Adam Lanza was a mass murderer.
And you are talking out of your ass. Name a non DV inspired mass murderer who wasn't socially isolated. I'm sure you will find someone, but it isn't easy. Lanza, Holmes, Loughner, Cho, Harris & Klebold, etc., were all socially isolated and had a very poor level of integration into society.
Here's a quick questionnaire:
1. Would you try to stop a brother or sister from dating someone who had previously been hospitalized for a suicide attempt?
2. Would you be willing to closely work with a person who was rumored to have bipolar II disorder?
3. If you were hiring a person for a job or renting a house, would it bother you if that person revealed an anxiety disorder? Depression? Schizophrenia? How would their compliance to medication affect your view?
4. If you knew a woman who had a mental illness, would you recommend an abortion if she became pregnant?
5. Do you think a person with a serious mental illness should be able to vote? To drive?
6. Do you think "due process" to contest confinement should be applicable to those who have been diagnosed with a mental illness?
There have been surveys of these exact questions. You might not want to know what people answered. People are bigoted assholes, and to say the mentally ill haven't been outcast is bullshit.
Re:recovery, not prevention. (Score:5, Interesting)
Shooting lots of people seems a very specific reaction to a loss if impulse control. Why didn't he lose bladder control, or some such more obvious reaction to loss of control.
Perhaps because the centers of the brain responsible for bladder control aren't the same parts that handle aggression... otherwise our action movies would consist of burly men gunning down their enemies while wearing Depends.
The Charles Whitman article states he was predisposed to violence and popped pills.
He passed Marine basic training and a full psychological workup. They didn't find anything. He applied to study mechanical and architectural engineering as part of his efforts to become a commissioned officer. Although his college career sputtered, he maintained his reputation as an outstanding Marine, and in one case single-handedly lifted up an overturned Jeep to free fellow soldiers in an accident. There's no history of a predisposition for violence cited in any available professional medical assessments for him. The pills they found on him after he was shot were part of a survival kit that he had assembled beforehand, no doubt part of his military training. He had no history of drug abuse, and the drugs given at the time were available within the military at the time (but not today) as stimulants for long-term deployments.
The article that you read, undoubtedly is sensationalist garbage, an attempt to try to explain irrational impulses. Because if it can be explained, then he can be blamed. We certainly don't want a mass murderer to appear as though his violence was the result of an uncontrollable medical condition -- because that would mean that the violence wasn't preventable. It would mean we were powerless against it. It would mean, most critically for the average person, that a higher moral authority didn't exist and didn't prevent it from happening -- that the universe doesn't reward good behavior and punish bad behavior, but that it doesn't care. That sometimes, bad things just happen. Whatever article you read, is based on emotive reasoning.
In actuality, this was a perfectly normal man who, likely as a result of an emergent medical condition, lost his impulse control through no fault of his own, became violent, and killed a bunch of people before being killed himself. That doesn't at all fit with our need for vengance -- though people usually call it 'justice' instead. But it isn't. The need for vengance is a major motivation for our justice system, just not one anyone wants to discuss because it's taboo.
Re:recovery, not prevention. (Score:5, Interesting)
My point was that violence is inherently anti-social.
Hmm, is it really? Some violence perhaps, like the mass/serial killer examples (though if one serial killer is copying his hero, is that social behaviour or not?). But take, say, Northern Irish terrorism, or perhaps extreme religious terrorism, too. Or gang violence. Couldn't that be caused in part by inherently social processes? By people wanting to belong to the group, to be admired by the group, or a group talking each other in to more and more extreme and 'pure' views? The most extreme example - war - is a very social activity indeed. Being anti-violence in a war can itself be seen as anti-social by others.
I wouldn't want to say that (especially) bizarre behaviour motivated by extreme religious views or behaviour isn't a mental health issue as well, though, one that sometimes turns in to a criminal issue. But it isn't easy to draw the line (Jonestown? Al Qaeda in 2001? The crusades? Terrorist groups responding to relatives killed by US drones? The Westboro nutters?).