{"id":255295,"date":"2023-04-26T14:27:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-26T18:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=255295"},"modified":"2023-04-26T14:27:00","modified_gmt":"2023-04-26T18:27:00","slug":"the-fake-criminal-profiler-who-wanted-to-be-sherlock-holmes-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2023\/04\/26\/the-fake-criminal-profiler-who-wanted-to-be-sherlock-holmes-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The fake criminal profiler who wanted to be Sherlock Holmes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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From David Gauvey Herbert in NY Mag: “In January 2010, a team of detectives and a prosecutor flew to Philadelphia to present a case to a league of elite investigators called the Vidocq Society, which met once a month to listen to the facts of cold cases. The group\u2019s co-founder, Richard Walter, was billed as one of America\u2019s preeminent criminal profilers. But that quickly unravelled: Since at least 1982, he has touted phony credentials and a bogus work history. He claims to<\/a> have helped solve murder cases that, in reality, he had limited or no involvement with \u2014 and even one murder that may not have occurred at all. These lies did not prevent him from serving as an expert witness in trials across the country. His specialty was providing criminal profiles that neatly implicated defendants, imputing motives to them that could support harsher charges and win over juries. Convictions in at least three murder cases in which he testified have since been overturned. In 2003, a federal judge declared him a \u201ccharlatan.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This school has no classes, no teachers and lots of freedom<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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Christopher Spata writes for the Tampa Bay Times: “At the Spring Valley School, three dozen students ages 5 to 18 are trusted to do what they want. There are no classes, grades or homework. There are no \u201cteachers,\u201d only \u201cstaff.\u201d Students decide when it\u2019s time to graduate. Democracy rules, and students\u2019 voting power far outweighs that of the school\u2019s four adults. The kids at Spring Valley can fire or hire staff, admit or expel students and spend its budget. If you call<\/a>, it\u2019s likely a 15-year-old will answer the phone. When a Tampa Bay Times reporter asked to observe a day inside the tiny private school, the students considered the request and voted to allow it. Spring Valley has doubled tours for prospective families to twice a week, and an expansion of the 2,500-square-foot schoolhouse begins this summer. Students and staff voted recently to increase tuition from $4,850 to $6,717, the first significant increase in over a decade.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Bees are sentient: inside the amazing brains of nature\u2019s hardest workers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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From Annette McGivney in The Guardian: “When Stephen Buchmann finds a wayward bee on a window inside his Tucson, Arizona, home, he goes to great lengths to capture and release it unharmed. Buchmann\u2019s kindness \u2013 he is a pollination ecologist who has studied bees for over 40 years \u2013 is about more than just returning the insect to its desert ecosystem. It\u2019s also because Buchmann believes that bees have complex feelings, and he\u2019s gathered the science<\/a> to prove it. This March, Buchmann released a book that unpacks just how varied and powerful a bee\u2019s mind really is. The book, What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories and Personalities of Bees, draws from his own research and other studies to paint a remarkable picture of bee behavior and psychology. It argues that bees can demonstrate emotions resembling optimism, frustration, playfulness and fear, traits more commonly associated with mammals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Goya\u2019s coded love letter to the Duchess of Alba<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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Michael Glover writes in Hyperallergic: “How to define the astonishing allure of this great portrait by Goya? He kept it in his studio for years. In fact, as far as we know, he never parted with it. It defined him. And yet the painting feels both highly personal and strangely set apart, as if the subject possesses all the reality of a vivid human presence and all the unreality of something that can only ever be brittle and unstable, as unreachable and ungraspable as any other<\/a> object of fantasy. Look at her flushed face, for example, and the drama of those arched black brows. It seems to possess all the fragility of porcelain \u2014 or an unbroken egg \u2014 and all the clarity of a dream. And her look is \u2026 what exactly? A touch sad? A touch helpless? A touch pleading? There is also a certain pride, a certain stiffness, if not haughtiness, in her stance. That face is just a tad mask-like.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Artificial intelligence and the American smile<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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From Jenka on Medium: “Why do you smile the way you do? A silly question, of course, since it\u2019s only \u201cnatural\u201d to smile the way you do, isn\u2019t it? It\u2019s common sense. How else would someone smile? As a person who was not born in the U.S., who immigrated here from the former Soviet Union, as I did, this question is not so simple. In 2006, as part of her Ph.D. dissertation, \u201cThe Phenomenon<\/a> of the Smile in Russian, British and American Cultures,\u201d Maria Arapova, a professor of Russian language and cross-cultural studies at Lomonosov Moscow State University, asked 130 university students from the U.S., Europe, and Russia to imagine they had just made eye contact with a stranger in a public place \u2014 at the bus stop, near an elevator, on the subway, etc.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In search of lost time<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Tom Vanderbilt writes in Harper’s: “When I was a kid, in the touch-tone era in the Midwest, I often dialed, for no real reason, the \u201ctime lady\u201d\u2014an actress named Jane Barbe, it turns out\u2014who would announce, with prim authority \u201cat the tone,\u201d the correct time to the second. I was, in those days, a bit obsessed with time. I would stare, transfixed, at the Foucault pendulum at Chicago\u2019s Museum of Science and Industry as it swept slow traces through its day; or gawp at the patinaed<\/a> green clock, topped by a scythe and hourglass-carrying temporal patriarch and marked with a single word\u2014time\u2014that adorned the Jewelers Building on East Wacker Drive. But nothing felt so immediate, so curiously satisfying, as having the exact time delivered through the intimacy of the phone\u2019s earpiece. Yet it left me with a gnawing inquiry: How does she know what time it is?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the tables are turned<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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When the tables are turned.. \ud83d\ude02 pic.twitter.com\/1gGiQ8gZ7F<\/a><\/p>— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) April 23, 2023<\/a><\/blockquote>