Communications, the police, and the Crime Commission

One important phase of a comprehensive study by the Science and Technology Task Force to determine ways in which science and technology can be applied more effectively to the criminal justice system in the United States has involved the investigation of police communications. Attention has been focused on the problems existing in the major population centers, where message traffic density is high, frequency spectrum crowding is severe, and large numbers of independent networks exist within relatively small geographical areas. This article describes the findings of the investigations and offers some recommendations for solving a number of these problems.     

Lorenz, Lorentz, and the gauge

Briefly discusses work by L. Lorentz and H.A. Lorentz together with the concept of the Coulomb gauge     

Abuse,Torture, Frames,and the Washington Post

W. Bennett, R. Lawrence, and S. Livingston (2006, 2007) argue that the press—and the Washington Post in particular—acquiesced to Bush administration framing of the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The administration, they say, framed the events as the isolated abuse of prisoners by “a few bad apples” unreflective of higher responsibility or administration policy. Absent—or near absent, Bennett et al. maintain, was a Post counterframe of the mistreatment as a systematic effect of high level policy, better captured by the word torture. Such pattern of framing, Bennett et al. conclude, supports the Indexing model of U.S. press behavior. This article shows that Bennett et al. understate the strength and consistency of Post counterframing. When articles in the Post are searched not for individual words but for more extended frames, it becomes clear that the Post did in fact engage in considerable counterframing even in the absence of elite political opposition. This case, it is therefore concluded, does not in fact support the Indexing model as Bennett et al. maintain but is rather the kind of case described by R. M. Entman (2004) in which the press exercises greater independence of elite political opinion than the Indexing model admits.