A first for criminal courts in the commonwealth could open up a new revenue stream for makers of thermal imagers: Massachusetts police departments. Universal Hub reports Boston Municipal Court has convicted a man of gun possession based on thermal imaging evidence.
After a foot chase through Dorchester, cops used a thermal imaging scanner to show a gun found on the chase route had been recently held. During the trial, prosecutors brought in MIT mechanical engineering student Priam Pillai as an expert on thermal imaging.
The trio took the T’s data from August 12, ran it through openFrameworks and Matlab statistical software, and made the images with Adobe Illustrator.
So next time you hear an announcement about a disabled train or signal problems or an unruly passenger, just think about how pretty the delay will look on a poster.
Listen to hear Gaffin explain what professional journalists and the twittering mobs do and don’t do well; Kirsner talk about his attempts at hunting down a nasty commenter for an Obama-esque beer summit; Shah express bemusement at the silly journalists and their self-imposed limits on what are, at heart, capitalist enterprises; and Banks talk about transforming a newspaper’s business model during the never-ending journalistic apocalypse.
The Massachusetts Executive Office of Transportation tweets about another MBTA visualization, this time for the Commuter Rail. So far I haven’t seen one dot stop on the track to wait for another dot to push it.
Hours of fun for data geeks and a potentially useful service to see how your neighborhood is doing (you can overlay wards and city-council districts), and any implications this went online only so the mayor could “wifi” his opponents who’ve been calling for something similar is, of course, completely reprehensible.
Matthew “L’il Hacker” Weigman got 11 years for, among other things, hacking phone carriers, and arranging for a SWAT team to visit his landlord’s house. Universal Hub has the details about the 19-year-old hacker from Revere:
Weigman was sentenced in federal district court in Dallas, where he’d been tried because a key part of the charges against him involved his cracking of a Verizon data center in Texas, which let him obtain numerous fake phone numbers and IDs, listen in on phone calls and cancel the phone service of his enemies. The government began investigating Weigman when he was 15 – he was formally charged when he turned 18.
The Dorchester Reporter … reports … that the BPD, which not only blogs, but also tweets, has partnered with Salt Lake City-based Public Engines Inc. to use its CrimeReports.com website to map incidents to which BPD officers respond.
The Dot Reporter itself beat the BPD to the punch with a map with information from police logs from precincts Dorchester and Mattapan earlier this year.
Via Universal Hub, whose Adam Gaffin built the Reporter’s (and Universal Hub’s) crime map.
Staff writer Galen Moore has been all over both ends of this phenomenon recently — GIStechnology and hyperlocalmedia.
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