Magic Statistics

UK Home Secretary John Reid has announced that Britain’s most violent criminals will lose the right to be considered for parole halfway through their sentences.

The Home Secretary wants to end the present system under which offenders given discretionary life sentences for crimes less than murder, and those given indeterminate sentences for public protection, are not considered for parole automatically at the halfway stage of the minimum term laid down by the judge. Mr Reid wants judges to be given much greater discretion in sentencing so that they can order that certain offenders must serve longer than the halfway point of the minimum term — the tariff — before being considered for release by the Parole Board.

Other crime-fighting measures announced include a prison-building programme intended to add 8000 places in British jails by 2011 and a proposal to order violent offenders to contribute toward health-care expenses incurred by their victims.  Courts would have discretion to order offenders’ income garnisheed to ensure such orders are fulfilled.

Canadian justice officials would do well to consider implementing some of those proposals here, I think.

Previous related posts:

• What has the UK Home Office done wrong now?
• Clarke sacked
• Violent crime up in the UK

Earlier this year, astronomers observed a thermonuclear explosion on the surface of a star named RS Ophiuchi 5000 light years from Earth.  The explosion caused a blast wave moving at over 1700 km per second.  The mind-boggling thing is: The star on which the detonation was seen is a white dwarf, a star that has exhausted its nuclear fuel.

How can a nuclear explosion occur on the surface of a dead star that has no nuclear fuel left? RS Ophiuchi is actually a binary star system; one of the two stars is a red giant and the other a white dwarf.  The red giant gives off hydrogen gas that is captured by the white dwarf; eventually so much hydrogen accumulates on the surface of the dead star that it detonates.

The blast wave results from a huge nuclear explosion which takes place on the surface of one of a pair of stars, about 5,000 light years from Earth, which are closely circling one another. Gas captured from one star, a red giant, builds up on the surface of its white dwarf companion (a super-dense dead star about the size of the Earth which was once the core of a star like the Sun whose outer layers have been lost into space).

Eventually enough gas collects on the white dwarf for thermonuclear reactions to begin, similar to those which power the Sun but which runaway into a massive explosion. In less than a day, its energy output increases to over 100,000 times that of the Sun, and the gas (about the mass of the Earth) is thrown into space at speeds of several thousand km per second. This ejected matter then slams into the extended atmosphere of the bloated red giant and sets up blast waves that accelerate electrons to almost the speed of light. The electrons release radio waves as they move through a magnetic field that are then picked up by the telescope arrays.

This image shows an artist's impression of the RS Ophiuchi system at the time of the explosion.  Hydrogen gas given off by the red giant in the right foreground is transferred to the white dwarf in the left background and eventually detonates.

RS Ophiuchi is known to have exploded in the past, most recently in 1985.  After each explosion, gas begins to accumulate on the white dwarf until the next blast.  The cycle of explosions may end if the mass of the white dwarf increases with each blast, in which case it will ultimately be torn apart.

via Faith-Science News.

Previous related post: The greatest of great balls of fire

An Amnesty International report points the finger at Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft for undermining the rights of Chinese to freedom of expression.  From the report's executive summary:

The control the Chinese authorities maintain over their citizens' right to freedom of expression and information is continuing and pervasive. This has put the spotlight on the contribution of Internet companies such as Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google to China's efforts to maintain such control and restrict fundamental freedoms. In assisting the Chinese administration by complying with its censorship demands, these companies are seen to be facilitating or sanctioning the government's efforts to control the free flow of information. They thereby contravene established international norms and values, and compromise their own stated principles.

International concern regarding the role of US companies in China's Internet censorship policy has led the US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations to hold a joint hearing of the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations and the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific. Among the parties that provided testimony, views were expressed that US Internet companies, including Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google, have colluded with the Chinese authorities, undermining their self-proclaimed corporate values, as well as the human right to freedom of expression and information. [footnote omitted]

Amnesty International has criticised the three companies' business practices before.  Yahoo has handed over to the Chinese government information that helped locate and apprehend dissidents, including Shi Tao, a journalist imprisoned in 2005 for ten years.   Following a request from Chinese authorities, Microsoft closed a blog on MSN Spaces.  Google launched a custom-designed Chinese version of its search engine which returns censored results.  When called on these actions, the companies caved in to intimidation and financial inducements from Chinese officials rather than uphold their own avowed business principles.

All three companies have demonstrated a disregard for their own internally driven and proclaimed policies. They have made promises to themselves, their employees, their customers and their investors which they failed to uphold in the face of business opportunities and pressure from the Chinese government. This raises doubts about which statements made by these organisations can be trusted and which ones are public relations gestures.

One of the three, Google, has at least acknowledged that its actions in China contradict its corporate slogan, "don't be evil".  Amnesty says that is a first step, but much more needs to be done before Google can claim to be working by that slogan.  But even that is more than Yahoo or Microsoft has owned up to.

This report represents a damning indictment of three giants of the internet world.  Will Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft now finally live up their self-proclaimed ideals, or will they bow down before the almighty dollar yet once more?

The full report is available here (pdf).

via Macworld UK.

The UK government believes that heroin addicts wind up in prison because they steal to support their habits.  If more addiction programs and counsellors were available to help them quit, then they would stop breaking the law.  Nonsense, says Theodore Dalrymple.

The criminal records of most addicts who end up in prison are extensive before they ever took up heroin - indeed, a few of them claim to have first taken heroin in prison. In the 1950s, it was found that at least three quarters of the still very small number of heroin addicts in Britain (the numbers of such addicts having increased by between 2,500 and 6,000 times since then to between 150,000 and 300,000) had criminal records before they ever took heroin.

In other words, in so far as there is a causative connection between addiction and criminality, it is that criminality - or whatever predisposes people to it - causes addiction and not addiction that causes criminality.

Most addicts take heroin irregularly for about a year before deciding to take it habitually.  Addiction does not catch them unawares; they know what they're getting into.

Telling heroin addicts that they are victims of a disease that needs treatment enables them to avoid responsibility for the way they have chosen to live.

The headmaster of a Church of England school has removed John Lennon's song "Imagine" from a school concert programme.

Pupils at an Exeter school have been stopped from singing Imagine, the John Lennon song, because their head teacher deemed it antireligious.

OK, I'm afraid this calls for a short rant.  No one has to "deem" the song anti-religious: The song proclaims its irreligion.  "Imagine" extols a world in which there's "no religion".  HELLO!

One may debate whether irreligion is good or bad, but as to the song's perspective on that question, there can be no doubt.

The decision by Geof Williams, headmaster of St Leonard's Primary School in Exeter, Devon, is eminently sensible:

"We are a Church school and we believe God is the foundation of all we do.

"As such we did not feel that Imagine was an appropriate song to perform publicly."

I confess I don't understand why this is viewed as a decision of such controversy and import that at least two leading British newspapers feel compelled to report it.  To me, it would be newsworthy if a church school allowed the song to be sung at a concert.  But I guess that's just me.

Because hybrid cars have greater fuel efficiency than conventional cars, it is usually assumed that they do less damage to the environment.  Gasoline usage is only part of the total energy consumption of motor vehicles, however.

To assess the full environmental impact of motor vehicle use, CNW Marketing Research gathered data on the cost of automobiles from concept to disposal.  The results are surprising.  When the energy required to build, service, and dispose of automobiles is added to the equation, hybrid cars tend to use more energy than vehicles with conventional internal-combustion engines.

The report is entitled, appropriately, "Dust to Dust Energy Report".

CNW Marketing Research Inc. spent two years collecting data on the energy necessary to plan, build, sell, drive and dispose of a vehicle from initial concept to scrappage. This includes such minutia as plant to dealer fuel costs, employee driving distances, electricity usage per pound of material used in each vehicle and literally hundreds of other variables.

To put the data into understandable terms for consumers, it was translated into a "dollars per lifetime mile" figure. That is, the Energy Cost per mile driven.

The most Energy Expensive vehicle sold in the U.S. in calendar year 2005: Maybach at $11.58 per mile. The least expensive: Scion xB at $0.48 cents.

While neither of those figures is surprising, it is interesting that driving a hybrid vehicle costs more in terms of overall energy consumed than comparable non-hybrid vehicles.

For example, the Honda Accord Hybrid has an Energy Cost per Mile of $3.29 while the conventional Honda Accord is $2.18. Put simply, over the "Dust to Dust" lifetime of the Accord Hybrid, it will require about 50 percent more energy than the non-hybrid version.

The sport utility vehicle is scorned by environmental groups, and SUV owners often criticised for supposedly harming the global environment.  But it turns out that some SUVs use less energy than hybrids.

And while many consumers and environmentalists have targeted sport utility vehicles because of their lower fuel economy and/or perceived inefficiency as a means of transportation, the energy cost per mile shows at least some of that disdain is misplaced.

For example, while the industry average of all vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2005 was $2.28 cents per mile, the Hummer H3 (among most SUVs) was only $1.949 cents per mile. That figure is also lower than all currently offered hybrids and Honda Civic at $2.42 per mile.

One of the biggest lessons of this study is that fuel economy is only one part of overall energy efficiency.  CNW president Art Spinella points out that lower fuel efficiency in consumers' home countries may be dwarfed by additional energy used in the manufacturing country.

"Gasoline or fuel usage during the life of a vehicle is an important component, but we're looking at the entire cost of energy and its pollution coefficient to society. For example, driving a Prius in Los Angeles does wonders for cleaning the air, but it actually exports pollution to Japan where the higher energy usage generates more smokestack discharge."

The full report can be downloaded here as a zipped Word document.

via theWatt.

Previous related posts:

• Car critic frustrates environmentalist cause
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