So there's a journalism class at Northwestern that investigates claims of wrongful convictions and innocence in inmates. It's called the Medill Innocence Project, and it's been around for a decade, and gotten 11 innocent men out of jail, including 5 from death row.

So of course, they're still at it, this time investigating a 31-year-old murder conviction. The Cook County prosecutors are having none of it this time, though. They are subpoenaing grades, transcripts, and so on for the whole class.

Local prosecutors have subpoenaed the grades, grading criteria, class syllabus, expense reports and e-mail messages of the journalism students themselves.

The prosecutors, it seems, wish to scrutinize the methods of the students this time. The university is fighting the subpoenas.

Wow. Intimidation much?

What the students have found is pretty interesting, too.

The students said they had found, among other things, that two eyewitnesses had recanted their testimony against Mr. McKinney and could not have seen him commit the killing because they were watching a boxing championship (Leon Spinks vs. Muhammad Ali). The students collected an affidavit from a gang member who, they say, confirmed Mr. McKinney’s alibi that he was running away from gang members when the shooting took place.

The students have also suggested alternative suspects in the case and offered witnesses who said they had heard the others admit their involvement.

It doesn't surprise me that prosecutors don't like to admit that they were wrong. It does somewhat surprise me that prosecutors don't like to admit that their predecessors 30 years ago might have been wrong. Why fight to keep an innocent man in jail if he's really innocent? Why not find out and let him out if they were wrong? It's not like you have to say you yourself made a mistake; indeed, you can play yourself as the hero righting a wrong.

Or you can go after a class of journalism students. Which, btw, seems like a stupid group to try to intimidate. It seems like the perfect place for them to go to the press, with whom they're hoping to work and would love some real contact.

VaR is the premier risk analysis metric used by wall street. Basically, it wraps up the risk from any kind of trade into one, easy-to-understand number. That number is the ceiling of their losses, calculated to be 99% accurate. And trained on the last three years of data.

Anyone see any problems with that? What happens the other 1%? What if the last three years weren't representative of what might happen in the next year due to one or the other being abnormal? And is having a risk metric that tells you you're safe incorrectly worse than no metric at all? I think so.

All this stuff was in a great NYTimes Magazine article earlier this month, which I missed until recently. It's well worth reading -- it's not often that you find a good magazine story about how to calculate a statistic.

So far, three days in, Obama has:

• Closed the black prisons, and set in motion the closure of Gitmo
  
• Banned the use of torture (including waterboarding)
  
• Reversed the Bush administration secrecy policy, urging FOIA requests to be approved rather than denied by default
  
• Instituted new lobbying ethics rules, and symbolically froze white house salaries
  
• Praised Roe v Wade and said some nice things about women's empowerment, and now is overturning the awful Mexico City rule from the Bush years

As a member of the liberal end of the country, I for one am very pleased. Government should be open, not secret, and that includes imprisoning people we don't like.

Krispy Kreme is giving away a free donut to anyone who wants one on inauguration day. Who can argue with a free donut?

Well, actually, it turns out someone can. That someone is the American Life League, a pro life group that objects to the word "choice" in the promotion.

"The doughnut giant released the following statement yesterday:

'Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American's sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20. By doing so, participating Krispy Kreme stores nationwide are making an oath to tasty goodies -- just another reminder of how oh-so-sweet "free" can be.'

"Just an unfortunate choice of words? For the sake of our Wednesday morning doughnut runs, we hope so. The unfortunate reality of a post Roe v. Wade America is that 'choice' is synonymous with abortion access, and celebration of 'freedom of choice' is a tacit endorsement of abortion rights on demand.

"President-elect Barack Obama promises to be the most virulently pro-abortion president in history. Millions more children will be endangered by his radical abortion agenda.

"Celebrating his inauguration with 'Freedom of Choice' doughnuts - only two days before the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision to decriminalize abortion - is not only extremely tacky, it's disrespectful and insensitive and makes a mockery of a national tragedy.

Um, guys? I'm pretty sure that complaining about someone giving away free donuts is not going to convince any doubters about the justice of your cause. Especially if the grounds for your objection is that they are giving you a "free donut of choice", as opposed to, I suppose, taking away your donut choice and selecting an option for you.

It's tempting to make this a metaphor for the entire right-to-life campaign, but instead I'll just say: what a bunch of humorless morons.

Well, actually, they did make me laugh. If only I thought they weren't serious.

Stanford just announced a $100 million energy institute.

Recognizing that energy is at the heart of many of the world's tribulations—economic, environmental and political—Stanford is establishing a $100 million research institute to focus intently on energy issues, President John Hennessy announced today. The $100 million in new funds will enable the hiring of additional faculty and support new graduate students, in addition to the more than $30 million in yearly funding now spent on energy research.

The new Precourt Institute for Energy will draw on deep scientific expertise from across the campus and around the world. From the minuscule—materials scientists prying loose more electricity from sunshine through more efficient photovoltaic cells—to the national effort to develop sustainable energy and the global search for ways to reduce atmospheric levels of carbon, the new institute will be at the forefront.

Why is this notable? Two reasons.

First, Stanford is doing the best possible thing to deal with our energy problems and global warming: come up with better energy sources than burning fossil fuels. Regardless of whether you think global warming is caused by people or a problem, new, efficient, clean energy sources are valuable and worthwhile.

Second, the guy who will be running it? My dad. From the NYTimes article:

The Precourt Institute for Energy will be headed by Lynn Orr, a professor of petroleum engineering who currently directs Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project, a research initiative that looks at ways to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions through technologies such as fuel cells or carbon capture and storage.

I like how in the press release is says Dad is a professor in "energy resources engineering", while the NYTimes article says it's "petroleum engineering". Both are right, actually -- the department of petroleum engineering, Dad's home since 1985, got renamed a couple of years ago. Partly for propaganda reasons, since petroleum is out, but also to reflect the broader scope of the department.

Anyway, good luck Dad. I look forward to my first car that runs on dilithium crystals.

I consume most of my news on the web. And it sucks.

Television, radio, and paper news all have limitations and advantages. Paper allows you to go more in depth, while tv can show things that would take the proverbial thousand words to describe. Because the media are so different, paper news and tv news are different beasts. They've had time to evolve into their respective niches, and while neither is perfect, they do a good job.

Web-based news, on the other hand, is mostly just paper articles or tv clips served up on a web page. With few exceptions (Wired does some interesting things) no mainstream news outlet uses the power of the medium to do anything. The web is just a delivery vehicle for their regular newsroom stories.

It could so easily be much more. One perennial problem with news articles is the question of how much background to include. Context can be everything in framing and understanding a story, but putting in lots of context means less space devoted to the recent happenings. This is especially irksome in ongoing stories, where space has to be devoted in every article for context, or else left out in the assumption that readers have been paying enough attention to events to have internal context.

On the web, the problem can just disappear. Write one good background article and link to it from the top of your stories on the topic. Now you can devote all your time to writing the actual story, and readers who need context have it right there. Yet nobody does this. Why not?

I would go further. I would put as many things in context as possible. Running a story about the economic downturn? Link to a background piece that includes historical comparisons for all the numbers you're talking about today, so if your article is about job losses, have an easy place to compare job losses for previous recessions. It would be a huge effort to do this for every article, except that you have many articles on the topic, and each one would likely require only minor edits to the background piece.

If you are of the right mindset, you could even make each of those background pieces Google Knols, and let them become the reference for everyone. Wikipedia probably has all the information represented in these, but the format is a little different, and it's not necessarily trivial to find out how a current event compares to previous events if those events aren't themselves important enough to have entries.

This is a fairly trivial, obvious use of the power of the web to convey news in a useful way that doesn't match other media. I imagine there are many more, with impacts as large. Why aren't the major news organizations moving in that direction? If AP included as part of its articles links to background pieces, all of those sites that serve up AP stories would have a compelling upgrade for their readers, for instance.

Are the organizations still stuck in paper mode? Or are innovations coming, and just haven't arrived yet?

There are two antiunanimity stories in the press right now. The first is the impeachment of Blagojevich, in which there was one lone nay vote: Milton Patterson.



I wonder what his thinking was. He claims not to be defending Blago, just didn't think there was enough to impeach him. That's a stand, I guess.

The second involves Rickey Henderson. No baseball player has been unanimously elected to the hall of fame on the first ballot, and it seemed like the consensus best leadoff man in the history of the sport, with tons of records to his name, was going to be it. But one ancient sportswriter didn't feel like voting him in. He claims he accidentally left him off the ballot, but that seems unlikely.



So, two guys making strange decisions to swim against the current. Neither affected the outcome in any way -- there's still an impeachment, and Rickey's going to the Hall -- but I guess they can both be settled in their conscience that they didn't get peer pressured into anything.

A Japanese researcher has combed through images of Kim Jong Il in recent years, and has announced that the dictator died in 2003, and all more recent appearances have been by body doubles.

It's an interesting claim. I wonder if it's verifiable. Even if all the public appearances have been by doubles, that could just mean that he is super paranoid about assassins. Or has some disfigurement, or whatever.

It's strange to think about how a country ruled by one man can stagger on even without him, if the illusion of his presence is good enough. If he is dead, they can't hide it forever. 5 years is a really long time to pull it off though, and they may have done that already.

Here's the first gay couple to get legally married in California. Yay!



In related news, George Takei, of Star Trek fame, got his marriage license today. Apparently William Shatner isn't invited, though much of the rest of the bridge crew is.

---

In less congenial news, here's a pin spotted for sale at the GOP convention in Texas:



Racism much? Unless they are claiming that he will repaint the place. Come to think of it, that's not a bad idea. It hasn't had a good remodel since, oh, 1812 or so.

My parents are on a boat near Australia right now, and have no access to the internet or television or newspapers. However, each passenger is assigned an email address on the boat, so they can get email sent there.

My mother is feeling a little news deprived, so she asked if I could forward some headlines. Here's what I thought were the most relevant and important events of the day:

Well, let's see. Obama is still leading, rumor has it that Clinton will bow out but no sign of that yet.

Senator Kennedy had brain surgery and is looking forward to cancer treatments. The mars robot is scooping up and analyzing soil samples after a safe landing. The kids stolen by the Texas government from those weird fringe polygamists have gone home to their mothers.

The world series of poker has started. Gasoline is very expensive by US standards, but still cheaper than any other first world country. Angelina Jolie's twins may or may not have been born, according to conflicting reports. And [my cousin] might be getting married in a very small ceremony this month, according to rumors.

Yahoo and Microsoft may or may not be doing a deal. Yahoo is getting sued over not doing a deal. 7 million people are homeless in China from the earthquake. We're still occupying Iraq, and McCain wants us to invade Iran too. Nobody has solved aging or created artificial intelligence or discovered cold fusion, more's the pity.

The Sex and the City movie had a good opening. There is a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage on the California ballot for the fall. Microsoft is paying HP some huge amount of money to make MSN Search the default search engine. Both companies' stock dropped today (with the market).

The new iphone is rumored to come out on June 8th. We're both planning to get it. The king of Nepal is consulting astrologers on the best time to move out now that Nepal is no longer a monarchy. Tiger is back from surgery in time for the US Open. The Red Wings are probably going to win the Stanley Cup, but the Penguins avoided elimination tonight.

Did I miss anything?