It's just here in a different form.
Recently, the city of Nashville billed Occupy Nashville $1,045 for security the day before it decided to evict the entire encampment. The Republican governor of that state, Bill Haslam, is also in the process of formulating a new policy to restrict the ability of protesters to occupy state grounds. ...Think Progress
Wisconsin's Scott Walker, also a Republican, wants protesters to pay for "being there." At least one legal scholar has his doubts about the legality of these levies.
Marquette University Law School prof. Edward Fallone told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that he’s “skeptical about charging people to express their First Amendment opinion. … You can’t really put a price tag on the First Amendment.” ...Think Progress
The right has a chorus it sings about rallies -- right wing rallies leave the protest area spotless, left wing rallies leave a mess. The debate continues and includes photos of American flags stuffed in trash cans and thrown on the ground after tea party rallies. Looks like a draw.
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The right, however, may get a little nervous today as the result of the development, by a computer science professor at Columbia, of software that detects lies.
Dr. Hirschberg is teaching computers how to spot deception — programming them to parse people’s speech for patterns that gauge whether they are being honest.
For this sort of lie detection, there’s no need to strap anyone into a machine. The person’s speech provides all the cues — loudness, changes in pitch, pauses between words, ums and ahs, nervous laughs and dozens of other tiny signs that can suggest a lie....... David F. Larcker, an accounting professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, audited a course in computer linguistics taught by Dr. Jurafsky and then applied its methods to analyze the words of financial executives who made statements that were later disproved.
These executives were, it turned out, big users of “clearly,” “very clearly” and other terms that Joseph Williams, the late University of Chicago professor who wrote the textbook “Style,” branded as “trust me, stupid” words....NYT