What do busy busy bumblebees and sinister serial killers have in common? They both stray far from their home when doing plying their trade, according to scientists from the University of London. When foraging for nectar, a bumblebee will create a ‘buffer zone’ around its nest that it won’t drink the flowers in, so that predators and parasites don’t follow it back to its home. The researchers found that this buffer zone was very similar to the pattern created by serial killers when they kill their victims. By studying the paths of bumblebees they hope to give forensic experts better clues as to where a killer might live based on his killings. We’d better make sure we keep the bees alive then.
Tag Archives: crime
Question Surveillance, Go to Jail
Normally I’d leave surveillance-outrage stories to BoingBoing, but really:
Four young residents of a North Philadelphia house who circulated petitions questioning police-surveillance cameras were rousted from their home Friday and detained 12 hours without charges while police searched their house…. 9th District Police Capt. Dennis Wilson…was quoted …as saying of the residents: “They’re a hate group. We’re trying to drum up charges against them, but unfortunately we’ll probably have to let them go.”
If they have nothing to hide, they shouldn’t be asking questions.
[Thanks, Eschaton; London ’05 photo by nolifebeforecoffee]
Crime stats as sculpture – Mount Fear
Another little gem spotted by the grinders: what would you get if you took the crime incident statistics for London and represented them as a 3D physical map?
Mount Fear is what you’d get. In the words of its creator, Abigail Reynolds:
The terrain of Mount Fear is generated by data sets relating to the frequency and position of urban crimes. Precise statistics are provided by the police. Each individual incident adds to the height of the model, forming a mountainous terrain … The imaginative fantasy space seemingly proposed by the sculpture is subverted by the hard facts and logic of the criteria that shape it.
While it makes for an intriguing art project, Mount Fear surely presages a short-range extrapolation of geolocative mash-ups.
In other words, being able to call up the data used for Mount Fear and overlay it on Google Maps running on your mobile device would make your next flat- or apartment-hunting experience that little bit more reassuring.
Or should that be less reassuring?
Criminal malware – now with End User License Agreements!
Malicious software and obfuscatory legalese – two bad tastes that, I imagine, taste even worse together. [image by j l t]
Thankfully, as I’m not in the business of trying to turn a profit by building botnets, it’s not a flavour combo I’ve encountered myself, but there are reports that such things really do exist. Caught with the same economic problem as legitimate software houses – an infinite good, easily reproduced – malware crews are including EULAs with their program packages.
Of course, a malware author can’t fall back on the courts to enforce the terms of the agreement, and so the threatened actions are a little more, er, direct – basically, if you mess with the code they’ll rat you out to the antivirus companies. But, in the words of Mike Masnick at TechDirt:
“… we already know that almost no one reads normal software EULAs, so I somehow doubt that the online scammers using this software are bothering with the fine print either.”
I can’t say I’m feeling too sad about that.
The Street Finds Its Own Use for Things (…and so does prison)
The vibration function in the Nintendo 64’s Rumble Pak can be hacked into an improvised tattoo gun. Someone let MAKE Blog know…