News and Blogs Together, Friday, May 18, 2007

• Don't care much for Slate or William Saletan, but he gets one good article out of about every 10. Here's his for this month so far, a nice overview of the use of GPS tracking, its problems, and implications (h/t Real Cost of Prisons).
• I’ve learned unpleasantly lately that somehow considerations of morality, culpability, and justice seem to have been excluded from corrections sentencing practice in the name of process and professional turf, but for those of you who, like me, believe that a criminal justice process should be underpinned by those things, here and here (h/t Mind Hacks) are a couple of interesting articles for your thought and reaction.
• Also via Mind Hacks, a thoughtful Madam Fathom post on neuroeconomics that discusses how long-term and short-term behavior (and all its risks and rewards) seem to be processed differently in the brain, meaning literally that efforts to stop short-term impulsive rewarding behavior by threat of long-term punishment might not prove successful with folks who don't have strong connections between the two. Hmm, anybody had any experience with that in the real world? And what do those findings say again about the ability and opportunity to tinker with folks' brains, technocorrections-wise, to change behavior?
• Speaking of steps toward technocorrections in the name of improved social outcomes: Do Chip Implants Protect or Violate Privacy?
  Care Facility Will Electronically Tag Alzheimer's Patients Despite Protests
• Would this apply to drug use, too? "The more a high school student overestimates the percentage of people in the general population who smoke cigarettes, the more likely he or she will be to smoke, reports a University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine study published in the current issue of the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. The study sheds new light on this and other identifiable risk factors that may make teenagers susceptible to smoking and offers findings that may be particularly valuable for smoking intervention programs."
• Finally, the new and surprising just keep on coming. Yesterday, counting a dance school as a "school" for sex offender sentence enhancement purposes. Today, what do you do with sex offenders when a hurricane forces an evacuation? Well, in LA you have a hell of a time getting any community to accept a sex offender evacuation facility.