Cities and counties rely on U.S. immigrant detention fees

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Municipalities in California and elsewhere—but mostly California—are increasingly tapping a new Federal revenue source.

Roughly two-thirds of the nation’s immigrant detainees are held in local jails, and the payments to cities and counties for housing them have increased as the federal government has cracked down on illegal immigrants with criminal records and outstanding deportation orders.

Washington paid nearly $55.2 million to house [immigrant] detainees at 13 local jails in California in fiscal year 2008, up from $52.6 million the previous year. The U.S. is on track to spend $57 million this year.

As usual, the details of profit-seeking behavior are even more outrageous than the supply-side nonsense:

Santa Ana’s Police Department, for example, expects as much as a 15% budget cut and has had a hiring freeze since October that has resulted in more than 60 sworn and civilian positions remaining vacant, Police Chief Paul Walters said. To offset reductions, Walters plans to convert two multipurpose rooms at the 480-bed jail into dormitory rooms this spring. That will accommodate an additional 32 immigrant detainees, which he expects will bring in $1 million more in revenue each year. He also hopes to get approval to raise the nightly price per detainee from $82 to $87.

“We treat [the jail] as a business,” Walters said. “The cuts could have been much deeper if it weren’t for the ability to raise money there.”

Japan: Blurring the line between bullets and trains

The country has ambitions for 310 mph bullet trains by 2025.

The trains planned for 2025 will reduce the travel time between Tokyo and Nagoya to 40 minutes from about 90 minutes. At that speed, commuters could go from L.A. to the Bay Area in just over an hour.

But can low-income Japanese afford to travel this way? Can the middle-class?

The New Cult Canon

The Onion’s A.V. Club offer their list of the new cult classics. I need to watch The Room and The Limey’s commentary track,

a heated feature-length argument that couldn’t be further from the ego-stroking sycophancy of most tracks. It’s a case study in what happens to a script after it’s run through the sausage factory of production; even with a sympathetic director at the helm—Soderbergh championed Dobbs’ script for Kafka before making it his second feature, and the two remain friends—the writer will always get the shaft in the end.

Fish mega-shoals could be world's biggest animal group

The article quotes the project’s leader commenting on the power of new visualization techniques that allowed the researchers to see hundreds of millions of fish forming vast mega-shoals off the coast of Massachusetts:

If we see what’s in the ocean we’ll be more mindful of conserving it.

No One Walks In LA — Except to Trader Joe's

The post: Curbed Los Angeles has “noticed an marked uptick in the number of pedestrians actually out on the streets, clearly identified as Trader Joe’s customers by their grocery bags.”

The first comment: “Trader Joe’s is secretly funded by urban theorists! Make parkind [sic] difficult enough, and people will walk!”

Go see rgreco’s bookmarks tagged walking+losangeles.

How Policy Distributes Wealth in the U.S.

This is the first part in what will probably be a three part series. It’s well-done and can be easily followed by most high-school students, though I’d also recommend Veronica Mars as another way to deliver the same message.

Slamming UK Anti-Science

Smashing Telly presents Dr. Ben Goldacre laying waste to the media’s obsession with scare stories involving science and medicine. In the linked video Goldacre takes on anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists, chiefly the LBC’s Jeni Barnett.

Goldacre writes The Guardian’s Bad Science column and maintains his own Bad Science blog. He’s also a delicious user, with plenty of good links but no tags.

Algorithmic game theory

Noam Nisan, a computer science professor at Hebrew University, recently started a blog on algorithmic game theory. If you’re like me, you immediately wondered what this even means—a topic handled in the first real post:

When Eva Tardos, Vijay Vazirani, Tim Roughgarden and myself were editing our book on Algorithmic game theory we knew that we wanted to cover this general area (from a somewhat focused perspective due to our theoretical-CS background), but we were not really sure what to call it — neither the book nor the area. Christos had a strong opinion what the field should be called Algorithmic Game Theory, so we decided to stick with that for our book as well. While the name itself is somewhat imprecise (I personally am missing “Internet”, “Markets”, and “Computation” in the name, but you can’t have it all in a snappy name), it seems that Christos’s naming for the field is sticking, so I’m going with it.

So far, the posts are all quite readable and interesting; I expected something a little more dense and intimidating.

What next after the megapixel wars?

This post goes in a different direction but I like where it begins:

Akira Watanabe, head of Olympus’ SLR planning department, said that 12 megapixels is plenty for most photography purposes and that his company will henceforth be focusing on improving colour accuracy and low-light performance.

A quotation from the interview with Watanabe may be found here.

Unbuilt Robert Moses Highway Maps

Not only does this post include two great (and chilling) maps of how Robert Moses’ New York City might have looked, but it warns us against our impulse to accept online base maps as apolitical representations.

I present my Google Maps version of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway and Mid Manhattan Expressways … Now there have been maps showing these proposed highways before … but the point of doing it up to look like a Google Map was to put these highways in a modern context … We have become so accustomed to viewing the world through Google Maps (or some other online mapping software) that I feel like these maps are starting to shape our view point of the city.

I’m reminded of the introduction to Denis Wood’s The Power of Maps, in which he says maps “enable the past to become part of our living . . . now . . . here.”