From Michael Erard’s “The Strange Tale of Charlie Smoke” (Legal Affairs: November/December 2002):
… Social Insurance Number - the Canadian equivalent of a Social Security Number …
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Posted on May 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Writing Ideas, law, politics | Comments Off
From Patrick Keefe’s “Camera Shy” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):
One extralegal solution is a project called iSee. Launched several years ago, iSee is an online interactive map of the locations of surveillance cameras in Manhattan. To use iSee, you simply open the map of Manhattan and double-click on your point of departure and your destination. After [...]
Posted on May 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, law, politics, security | Comments Off
From Patrick Keefe’s “Camera Shy” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):
In London, a city even more intensively scrutinized by closed-circuit television cameras than New York, citizens can at least retrieve copies of footage taken of them through a provision in Britain’s Data Protection Act. Americans have no such legal recourse. …
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iSee: online map of CCTVs in [...]
Posted on May 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business, law, politics, security | Comments Off
From Brian Montopoli’s “The Queue Crew: Waiting in line for a living” (Legal Affairs: January/February 2004):
ON CAPITOL HILL, a placeholder is someone paid by the hour to wait in line. When legislative committees hold hearings, they reserve seats for Congressional staffers, for the press, and for the general public. The general-public seats are the only [...]
Posted on May 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Writing Ideas, business, law, politics, weird | Comments Off
From Daniel Brook’s “A History of Hard Time” (Legal Affairs: January/February 2003):
Dickens wasn’t the first European intellectual who had crossed the Atlantic to visit Eastern State Penitentiary. A decade earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville had been sent by the French government to study the Philadelphia prison. …
What drew the attention of Americans and Europeans was an [...]
Posted on May 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, science, security | Comments Off
From Dashka Slater’s “Lights, Camera, Lockdown” (Legal Affairs: May/June 2003):
The first two Alcatraz films, Alcatraz Island and The Last Gangster, arrived in theaters in 1937; the most recent, Half Past Dead, came out last November. In the 65 years in between, Alcatraz has been the subject of some two dozen movies and has made guest [...]
Posted on May 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, politics, security | Comments Off
From Ross Guberman’s “Home Is Where the Heart Is” (Legal Affairs: November/December 2004):
ABOUT 50 MILLION AMERICANS BELONG TO HOMEOWNER ASSOCIATIONS, also known as HOAs or common-interest developments, which are composed of single-family homes, condominiums, or co-ops. Four out of five new homes, ranging from starter homes to high-rise apartments to gated mansions, are in one [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Jascha Hoffman’s “Crash Course” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2004):
Typically there are two kinds of injuries [in hit-and-run cases], those from the initial impact, and the ones from hitting and sliding on the asphalt, known as “road rash.” To illustrate the different types of impact a pedestrian can suffer, Rich cued up a series of video [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Language & Literature, law, science | Comments Off
From Wikipedia’s “Dante Gabriel Rossetti“:
[Dante Gabriel Rossetti's wife Elizabeth Siddal] had taken an overdose of laudanum shortly after giving birth to a dead child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in her grave at Highgate Cemetery. … During these years, Rossetti was prevailed upon by friends to exhume his [...]
Posted on May 29th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Language & Literature, history | Comments Off
From F. John Reh’s “How the 80/20 rule can help you be more effective” (About.com):
In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country, observing that twenty percent of the people owned eighty percent of the wealth. In the late 1940s, Dr. Joseph M. Juran [...]
Posted on May 22nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, business | Comments Off
From Rebecca Ulam Weiner’s “Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing” (Legal Affairs: January/February 2006):
YOU WON’T FIND THE WORD “MERCENARY” on the homepage of the International Peace Operations Association, the trade group for the private military industry. While many of the IPOA’s member companies are staffed by elite former soldiers of the United States military who now make [...]
Posted on May 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, law, politics, security | Comments Off
From Geoffrey Gagnon’s “King James I, of Michigan” (Legal Affairs: September/October 2005):
One letter that isn’t on display is the one that James Jesse Strang said he received from Smith just before the Mormon leader was murdered in June 1844. In the letter, which now resides in a university library, Smith bequeaths the nascent Mormon Church [...]
Posted on May 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Religion, history, politics | Comments Off
From Geoffrey Klingsporn’s “The Secret Posse” (Legal Affairs: March/April 2005):
What do these scenarios have in common? Under current military policy, both fall under the heading of “Information Operations,” officially defined as “actions taken to affect adversary information and information systems while defending one’s own information and information systems.” …
The law that, in effect, prevents the [...]
Posted on May 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law | Comments Off
From Carolyn Kleiner’s “The Demon of Andersonville” (Legal Affairs: September/October 2002):
During the last 14 months of the Civil War, nearly 13,000 Union prisoners of war died at the Confederate prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia—more than at Antietam, one of the war’s bloodiest battles, and more than at any of the other hundred or so Civil [...]
Posted on May 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | Comments Off
From Emily Bazelon’s “Grave Offense” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):
In 1810, there were five medical schools in the United States, in 1860 there were 65, and by 1890 that number had doubled.
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Posted on May 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, science | Comments Off
From Emily Bazelon’s “Grave Offense” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):
In December 1882, hundreds of black Philadelphians gathered at the city morgue. They feared that family members whom they had recently buried were, as a reporter put it, “amongst the staring corpses” that lay inside. Six bodies that had been taken from their graves at Lebanon Cemetery, [...]
Posted on May 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Language & Literature, history, law, science | Comments Off
From Jessica Sachs’s “Expiration Date” (Legal Affairs: March/April 2004):
More than two centuries of earnest scientific research have tried to forge better clocks based on rigor, algor, and livor mortis - the progressive phenomena of postmortem muscle stiffening, body cooling, and blood pooling. But instead of honing time-of-death estimates, this research has revealed their vagaries. Two [...]
Posted on May 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Brendan I. Koerner’s “Under the Microscope” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):
The mantra of forensic evidence examination is “ACE-V.” The acronym stands for Analysis, Comparison, Evaluation, and Verification, which forensic scientists compare with the step-by-step method drilled into countless chemistry students. “Instead of hypothesis, data collection, conclusion, we have ACE-V,” says Elaine Pagliaro, an expert at [...]
Posted on May 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, science, security | Comments Off
From Caleb Crain’s “In Search Of Lost Crime” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):
… the 1860 Brooklyn divorce case of Beardsley v. Beardsley. …
Richard Busteed, the lawyer for Mrs. Beardsley’s aggrieved husband, denounced her in his closing arguments as “the harlot of the nineteenth century,” and his showy performance brought tears to the eyes of many in [...]
Posted on May 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Language & Literature, history, law | Comments Off
From Caleb Crain’s “In Search Of Lost Crime” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):
… the 1833 trial of Rev. Ephraim K. Avery … discovered Sarah Maria Cornell’s body hanging from a stake among his haystacks …
Consider, as a final example of the pleasures to be had in trial pamphlets, the knot in the rope around Sarah Maria [...]
Posted on May 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law | Comments Off