In a late essay on the Reagan drug war, the Beat novelist William Burroughs gave a surprising statistic. Heroin was freely available by prescription in Britain in 1957, he wrote, so addicts could shoot up from a government stock of junk dispensed by the National Health Service. "There were about 500 addicts in the U.K.," in those days, Burroughs wrote blandly, "and two narcotics officers for metropolitan London." When the U.K. criminalized heroin in 1971, he argued, it lapsed into "the same dreary spectrum as the USA — thousands of addicts, hundreds of drug agents, some of them on the ... Read More
Cybercop Fights Organized Internet Crime
March 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
It was August 2005, and Steve Santorelli had recently left Scotland Yard to join Microsoft's Internet Crimes Investigation Team. He was camping in the forest near Redmond, Wash., with some of his team members, trying to escape their technology-dominated existence, when a call came in from the Microsoft lab. Other team members had just cracked the code to the notorious Zotob computer virus. "At the campsite, I overheard one of the guys mention the nickname C0der, and uniquely spelled C-Zero-D-E-R, being identified as the author of this virus. I almost choked on my coffee," Santorelli says. ... Read More
Time for Robin Hood to Make a Comeback
March 11, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
What do you think of when you think of Nottingham? We know, we know — the shopping, the nightlife district, the ... um ... er ... oh, who are we kidding? We all think of Robin Hood, of course. But try telling that to the city leaders. Researchers from Nottingham University Business School surveyed nearly 400 visitors and locals on the question, "If I say 'Nottingham' to you, what immediately comes to mind?" Nearly one-third of respondents named the legendary archer and bandit; shopping came in second, followed by crime. (Apparently "stealing from the rich" really caught on in Nottingham, ... Read More
How Hugo Boss Lost a Cleveland Union Battle
March 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In late 2009, the city of Cleveland was sitting under a cloud of gloom so thick you could cut it with an industrial power saw. Forbes saw fit to name it "America's Most Miserable" and "Worst Winter Weather" city. Its foreclosure crisis made national headlines, it lost a Ford plant and a Chrysler plant, and its largest bank, National City, was scooped up for a fraction of its worth and stripped of its name by an out-of-town company. So when clothier Hugo Boss announced it was closing its plant in the Cleveland suburb of Brooklyn and moving operations to Turkey, at first it seemed like just ... Read More
How Did Students Become Academically Adrift?
March 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Here's the situation. You're an assistant to the president at DynaTech, a firm that makes navigational equipment. Your boss is about to purchase a small SwiftAir 235 plane for company use when he hears there's been an accident involving one of them. You have the pertinent newspaper clippings, magazine articles, federal accident reports, performance graphs, company e-mails and specs and photos of the plane. Now, write a memo for your boss with your recommendation on the SwiftAir 235 purchase. Include your reasons for finding that the wing design on the plane is safe or not and your ... Read More
Derek Bok on Fixing College Failure
March 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
A longtime critic of higher education, Derek Bok is the author of six books on the ivory tower, most recently Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More, published in 2005. Bok has an insider's view: He was president of Harvard from 1971 to 1991 and acting president from 2006 to 2007, the only person to serve twice in the job. During his first stint, Bok established what is now the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning to help boost the quality of instruction at Harvard. Today, at 80, he is a research professor at the ... Read More
Slugging — The People’s Transit
March 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Workers who have come down from the surrounding high-rise offices begin to line up on a sidewalk in downtown Arlington, Va., across the Potomac from the nation's capital, about 3:30 in the afternoon. They stand in a perfect queue, iPods and newspapers in hand, and they look, by all indications, like they're waiting for the bus. Public transit never shows. But, eventually, a blue Chrysler Town & Country does. The woman behind the wheel rolls down her window and yells a kind of call-and-response. "Horner Road?" "Horner Road?" repeats the first woman in line. "Horner Road!" And ... Read More
Standing in Alcohol Won’t Get You Drunk
March 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Sorry, folks. It turns out you can't get drunk by submerging your feet in alcohol. The belief is widespread in Denmark, where, apparently, there's not much to do during those long winter nights but experiment with different, and frankly bizarre, ways of inviting alcohol into your pores. But according to research in the December issue of the British Medical Journal, there's really no point to stomping around in vats of alcohol — unless you're making wine, of course. The study was led by Dr. Peter Lommer Kristensen from Denmark's Hillerød Hospital, who recruited three adult volunteers to ... Read More
David Onek — Law Enforcement Facilitator
March 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Improving the juvenile justice system has been the focus of David Onek's professional life for some 20 years. He uses an innovative approach that might seem obvious but has been underutilized: He gets everyone in the field talking to each other. Onek's experience in influential policy, governmental and academic positions in the San Francisco Bay Area has led him to believe that because of sharp disagreements dividing them, law enforcement officers, members of community groups, prisoners and corrections officers are unable to bridge much smaller gaps on many issues — or even to realize how ... Read More
