Month: April 2011

prisoners and jail inmates in the U.S. by states, 2005

Getting statistics for persons incarcerated in the U.S. by state is more difficult than one might expect.  Counts of persons in jails, which do not include short-term police lock-ups, are not regularly available by state in the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) series for prison and jail inmates at midyear.  The most recent year for which jail inmates are available by state is 2005.

Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Vermont have integrated local-state prison systems. Hence separate jail inmate counts for these states do not exist.  Jail inmates counts for these states can be estimated by assuming that their jail inmates totals have the same proportion in the national jail total as their combined jail-prison totals have in the national combined jail-prison total.

Prisoners held in state and federal prisons are reported annually by state in BJS prisoner publications.  The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Prisoners Series (Prisoners in (year)) and its Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear Series (Prison Inmates at Midyear (year)) both include tables of prisoners by state. These tables are entitled “Prisoners under the jurisdiction of state or federal correctional authorities, by jurisdiction.” The state totals in such tables do not include federal-jurisdiction prisoners held within that state.  The U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons provides annual counts of federal prisoners by prison in its annual State of the Bureau report, but it does not aggregate these counts by state. The state distribution of federal prisoners differs considerably from the state distribution of state prisoners.  In particular, Kentucky and West Virginia have large shares of federal prisoners relative to their state prisoner shares.

Another complication is the difference between custodial and jurisdictional prisoner counts.  Jails hold in addition to local prisoners some state and federal prisoners because of bed rental agreements, overcrowding constraints, and temporary holding responsibilities. Hence counts of prisoners under the jurisdiction of local officials (local prisoners) are not the same as counts of persons held in local jails.

Jail and prison inmate counts on a specific day also differ from average daily populations across a year.  Seasonality in jail populations is larger than seasonality for prisons, because the average jail stay is less than thirty days, while the average prison stay is over a year.

The Census of Prisons for 2005 and the Census of Jails for 2005 allow these technical complications to be disentangled and analyzed.  Based on data from those sources, here’s prison and jail populations, subtotaled by states.

users transforming content forms

Blogger’s new dynamic views transforms the organization of blog posts. Blogs usually have scrolling posts with web-paged post groups.  If that description seems complicated, you probably have taken for granted the conventional form of a blog.  Blogger dynamic views dissolves that convention and reshapes a blog into a flipcard checkerboard and four other views (change the view via the dropdown tab on the top right). Each different view differs in the arrangement of blog posts and in the flow from one post to another post.

Each Blogger dynamic view replaces the author’s customized presentation.  That replacement concerns authors.  One direction for dynamic views would be to give authors more control over the layout of each dynamic view.  But that’s probably not the direction in which dynamic views points.  With Blogger dynamic views, Google is pushing forward users’ options for blogs’ bindings.

What makes a book is its binding.  Digital content has much greater possibilities for bindings than those for books.  For different users and in different circumstances, different bindings can be more useful and more enjoyable.  Authors should embrace those possibilities.

If you find the text of purplemotes tedious and frustrating, you are welcomed to view just its photos — here’s an apparently ad hoc assortment and here’s the collection of flowers.

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The photo above shows Justin Michael Finnegan‘s book sculpture entitled Frustration (2009).  Finnegan is dyslexic.  His work was on display at the Smithsonian in the exhibit, Revealing Culture.

incumbent transition faster to VoIP in Japan than in U.S.

In transitioning from a telephone network to a broadband network, telephone service shifts from a network-specific telephone service to a variety of Internet Protocol (IP) telephone applications. As measured by the share of Voice-over-IP (VoIP) service in total non-mobile telephone service, the telephone application transition is happening faster in Japan than in the U.S.  In Japan on June 30, 2010, VoIP telephone service accounted for 36% of non-mobile telephone service.  The corresponding figure for the U.S. was 19%.

Japan is well-recognized for its advanced development of fiber to the home and its world-leading broadband speeds and bandwidth prices.  But relatively low-performance digital subscriber line (DSL) service is sufficient to support VoIP. The faster telephone application shift in Japan is associated not with broadband speed, but with different incumbent telephone company behavior.

New telephone service entrants in both Japan and the U.S. have predominately used VoIP.  In Japan, the non-NTT share of VoIP service in non-NTT telephone service was 71% on June 30, 2010.  The corresponding figures for non-ILEC telephone service providers in the U.S. was 55%. The behavior of incumbents differs much more between Japan and the U.S. On June 30, 2010, the share of NTT VoIP service in NTT telephone service was 22%, while the corresponding figure for ILECs in the U.S. was 2%.  U.S. incumbent telephone service providers are changing relatively little their existing non-mobile telephone service.

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Data: transition to VoIP telephone service in Japan and in the U.S. (Excel version)

press-release media aggregators

On February 25, 2011, Technische Universität Muenchen (TUM) put out a press release on TUM Professor Erwin Emmerling’s study of the Bamiyan Buddhas’ remains.  Emmerling indicated that reconstructing one of the Buddhas might be possible.  A UNESCO press release three days later highlighted the upcoming March 3-4 meeting at UNESCO of the Bamiyan Expert Working Group.  The UNESCO press release noted in passing:

UNESCO does not favour rebuilding the Buddha statues, but the Experts Meeting will examine other ways to present their remains and niches while maintaining research and preservation in the Bamiyan Cultural Landscape.

A UNESCO press release after the meeting discussed the results of the meeting.  Among those results was this point:

A total reconstruction of either Buddha sculpture is not to be considered for the moment in view of the scientific data presently available, and according to the best estimates of available resources against cost.

The Bamiyan Buddhas are interesting, important historical artifacts.  Whether they can be and will be reconstructed is a technical and symbolic issue largely unrelated to what makes the Bamiyan Buddhas interesting and historically important.

Google currently shows about 195 English-language results for a web search “Emmerling reconstruct Buddha” over the past two months.  The story was covered on CNN;  in the Washington Post, via a report reproduced from Science Now, which published photos included with the TUM press release; in the Omaha World-Herald; in the Guardian;  in the New York Times; in the Boston Globe’s Boston.com; on MSNBC; and in many other traditional and new media news outlets.  Most of the stories add little information beyond the information available in the TUM and UNESCO press releases.  None of them link to those press releases.  Most play up the possibility of reconstructing the Buddhas.

Aggregating content from other organizations has long been a component of the newspaper business.  In the U.S. in the late 1880s, Associated Press wire dispatches made up 80-100% of news copy in mid-western, small-town daily newspapers.  Then and now, major newspapers also often reprint verbatim wire dispatches and lightly rewrite press releases.[*] But unlike in the past, today anyone can aggregate and redistribute content.

To succeed as aggregators today, news outlets have to either acquire personal connections or a highly distinctive news stream.  Those with the best connections to individual persons — through family, friends, affiliations, organizations, and geographic communities — prevail in distributing the same news.  Hence mass-market news isn’t a good business for a large organization in a socially complex society with open infrastructure for news distribution.

The alternative for news outlets is to create a highly distinctive news stream.  That positions the news outlet as a new social connection rather than as an organization playing across existing social connections.  Linking to sources creates context for distinguishing between the linker and the linked.  Without that first step of explicitly linking, news outlets blindly aggregate themselves into an undistinguished mass.

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[*] On the importance of U.S. national wire services in providing content for local newspapers, see Blondheim, Menahem (1994), News over the wires : the telegraph and the flow of public information in America, 1844-1897 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), esp. p. 195.