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From the Los Angeles Times

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An unlikely duo's auto safety quest

A college professor and a former federal transportation official team up to seek standard installation of black boxes in cars — a system they hoped would do for traffic safety what it's done for aviation.

by Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times

January 1, 2011

Four children were dead on an Oklahoma highway.

It was a crash scene so horrific that Jim Hall, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, flew down from Washington to oversee the investigation.

He spotted one of his engineers fiddling with some computer chips. "I asked him what he was doing," Hall recalled. "And he told me he was trying to download some data, that he had found a black box."

Until that day in 1994, Hall had not known that automakers were quietly installing black boxes, also known as event data recorders or EDRs, and encrypting the data.

Tom Kowalick, a North Carolina community college professor who taught the history of the Holocaust, made his own chance discovery of the devices several years later. Unlike Hall, he had no expertise, but was obsessed with the mysterious traffic death of his father in 1982.

Hall and Kowalick had almost nothing in common, except for being Army veterans. Kowalick liked to jump out of airplanes as a hobby; Hall vowed he "would never jump out of a good airplane."

They became unlikely partners in 2001 in an audacious effort to push the worldwide automobile industry to begin installing standardized black boxes in every new car — a system they thought could revolutionize auto safety the way it had with aviation.

"The way to leapfrog safety is to copy the model from aviation," Hall said. "Most of the major air safety improvements have come as a result of information from recorders."

But their quest has led into a thicket of legal, constitutional and economic issues. They encountered arguments about who would own the data, its impact on defect lawsuits, whether computers would incriminate drivers, the cost effect on manufacturers and patent rights over the design of the systems.

Nearly a decade later, they are still at it.

The men met by chance in Washington. By the late 1990s, black boxes were no longer a secret. Kowalick was serving on a federal advisory committee studying the devices and had begun writing the first of seven books on the topic. At a government conference where Kowalick had a display, Hall wandered by and struck up a conversation with him. The two agreed to stay in touch.

Kowalick had tried to interest the government, technical organizations and the auto industry in his ideas, but got nowhere. On a hunch, he went to Greece, where the international electronics group IEEE was meeting. He cornered the group's chairman and asked him to form a committee to develop black box standards.

"He told me I was pushing on an open door," Kowalick recalled.

In a move that took the auto industry by surprise in 2001, Kowalick and Hall became co-chairmen of an IEEE committee and began pushing for a wide-ranging EDR standard — a departure from the norm of industry engineers calling the shots.

The duo were an odd match for the auto industry. Kowalick, 62, is intense, nervous and driven. He has forgotten to wear socks to meetings because he becomes so charged up.

He walks into interviews with a handcart piled 5 feet high with documents and computer hard drives. A former Army paratrooper who has made 3,000 jumps, he never shies away from a fight.

Hall, 68, readily acknowledges that Kowalick brought intensity and energy to the effort. An attorney and lifelong political practitioner, Hall worked for a series of courtly Southern senators and is skilled in the art of persuasion. Perfectly groomed, he would never forget his socks.

Their crusade left the auto industry miffed. After nearly a dozen committee meetings, representatives from General Motors, Toyota and Chrysler abruptly left. One major auto industry consultant complained the process was "dysfunctional."

The pushback did not surprise Hall, a Vietnam War veteran who earned a Bronze Star.

"You know where the industry was coming from," Hall said. "Toyota was the best example of how the industry wanted to control the information. Wouldn't everybody like to control the information about their own mistakes?"

Toyota was among the most aggressive automakers in claiming control of the encrypted EDR data in its vehicles, and refused to provide downloads to its customers. After catching national attention last year for sudden acceleration problems, the company agreed to provide 10 EDR readers to federal officials. But the tools are not yet available to accident investigators across the country.

Hall and Kowalick did succeed in publishing a 171-page standard under IEEE sponsorship in 2005 that described how automakers should design an EDR. An update was approved in 2010.

Under their standard, automakers would record 86 different streams of data — including whether a motorist was using a turn signal before a crash, and the acceleration forces in every direction that affect a vehicle in a rollover.

It was the kind of system that proponents had long hoped would disclose whether driver errors, vehicle defects or highway design flaws were causing crashes. It would not be as sophisticated as an airliner black box, but would be far more capable than what the industry currently puts into vehicles.

"It could have been revolutionary," said Ricardo Martinez, a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration chief in the 1990s. "These new vehicles are pulsing with data, and you are talking about a very small amount of it that can dramatically improve safety."

But the standard is not binding, and no automakers are believed to have adopted it.

Wade Newton, a spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said the industry was not opposed to EDRs that record more information, but said they could take time to develop.

In response to Hall and Kowalick, automakers developed their own standard under the authority of the Society of Automotive Engineers. It aimed mainly at standardizing existing practices.

"Everybody in the industry buys into how valuable more information about crashes can be," said Brian Everest, a General Motors manager who chairs the engineers society's committee for EDRs. But, he added, "They really haven't been around that long."

In 2006, the NHTSA issued its own regulation for EDRs that would take effect in 2012. It did not require automakers to install the devices; if an automaker voluntarily puts one in a vehicle, it would have to record only 15 data elements, not the 86 envisioned by Hall and Kowalick.

When the NHTSA issued its final regulation, it estimated the cost at 50 cents per vehicle. Even then, the industry asked to delay the regulation, a request that is pending.

The NHTSA is now considering requiring automakers to install EDRs. The change came in the wake of its reliance on EDR data in investigating the sudden acceleration problems in Toyota vehicles.

Hall calls the whole process a textbook study in how to paralyze an idea.

"It has been tied down in the bureaucracy of Washington, D.C.," Hall said recently.

Though he has left his formal role in the IEEE, Hall still advocates for EDRs and has pushed for federal legislation that would strengthen future requirements.

For Kowalick, the issue remains a central mission in his life, perhaps second only to skydiving.

"I am still obsessed by it," he said recently. "Everything I do, I finish. I want to see this finished."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-auto-safety-20110102,0,7889832,print.story

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Suits filed over dog shootings highlight growing field of animal law

A Maryland couple sues the sheriff's office after their Labrador is shot by deputies. Legal experts say such cases are on the rise as pets are coming to be viewed as more than property — at home and in court.

by Lorraine Mirabella, Baltimore Sun

January 2, 2011

Reporting from Baltimore

Sheriff's deputies knocked on Roger and Sandra Jenkins' front door early one Saturday to serve a court paper to the couple's teenage son. Within minutes, a chaotic scene unfolded, and the family's chocolate Labrador retriever had been shot by one of the deputies and had collapsed bleeding in the snow.

The dog survived, but its owners say it is permanently disabled. The couple sued the Frederick County Sheriff's Office in October, alleging reckless endangerment and infliction of emotional distress.

The case highlights the rapidly evolving field of animal law, which is growing as people insist that pets are not property, but part of the family.

"The common law is that a dog is just chattel — a piece of property that's easily replaced," said Rebekah Lusk, an associate attorney with the Thienel Law Firm in Columbia, Md., who handles animal law cases and represents Roger and Sandra Jenkins. "People focusing on animal law are saying the courts need to see animals as not just a replacement piece of property."

Maryland lawmakers approved a measure in 2009 allowing pet owners to set up trusts for their animals. An owner can designate a trustee to oversee the care of the animal upon the owner's death in the same way that a parent would create a trust for children.

Custody cases involving pets have been filed too. In July, a Calvert County Circuit Court judge ordered a divorcing couple to share custody of their dog.

And law schools are seeing greater interest in the animal law field. Seminars address animal welfare, pet trusts, veterinary malpractice, endangered species protections, 1st Amendment issues, pet-custody disputes, the link between animal cruelty and violent behavior, and animals' legal standing.

"Judges are no longer laughing these issues out of court," said Alan Nemeth, an adjunct professor at the University of Baltimore who teaches a seminar in animal law. "It's become more legitimate, even in divorce cases. That's a big change, and it has been happening across the country."

Courts in some jurisdictions have begun to make a link between domestic violence and cruelty to animals, said Susan Hankin, an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Law. "If someone goes to court to get a protective order, it includes not just the victim and her children, but her pets can be included."

Hankin, who teaches an animal-law seminar that includes estate planning, custody and service animals, said interest in the topic was growing.

"There's an increasing recognition that animals play a role in our life that's different from property," she said. "It really includes a wide range of legal territory.... You can learn a lot of the areas of law by looking at the relationship between people and their companion animals."

In the Jenkins' case, according to the lawsuit filed in Frederick County Circuit Court, two deputy sheriffs went to the family's home in Taneytown, Md., in January to serve a court paper on their 18-year-old son, who no longer lived with his parents and was facing a drug-possession charge.

Roger Jenkins says he told a deputy that he needed to put the family's dogs away before he allowed him in the house. The lawsuit says that while Jenkins was letting the dogs outside to put them in a kennel, his Labrador, Brandi, noticed the unfamiliar vehicles in the driveway and began barking.

That prompted an officer to shoot the dog in the leg and chest without warning, according to the lawsuit. "Characteristic of the Labrador retriever breed of dog, Brandi is very friendly, not aggressive, and posed no threat to the deputies," the lawsuit states. "Her natural instinct, as is any dog's instinct, is to announce the presence of unfamiliar people on her property by barking."

The Frederick County Sheriff's Office denies liability and says the actions were legally justified, according to a document filed with the court in December.

The incident followed the July 2008 shooting deaths of two Labrador retrievers in Prince George's County, Md., during a raid by a police SWAT team and county narcotics officers at the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo. Police mistakenly thought his wife was involved in drug trafficking.

A lawsuit filed by Calvo against the state of Maryland is pending.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-animal-law-20110102,0,6312337,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Computers That See You and Keep Watch Over You

Hundreds of correctional officers from prisons across America descended last spring on a shuttered penitentiary in West Virginia for annual training exercises.

Some officers played the role of prisoners, acting like gang members and stirring up trouble, including a mock riot. The latest in prison gear got a workout — body armor, shields, riot helmets, smoke bombs, gas masks. And, at this year's drill, computers that could see the action.

Perched above the prison yard, five cameras tracked the play-acting prisoners, and artificial-intelligence software analyzed the images to recognize faces, gestures and patterns of group behavior. When two groups of inmates moved toward each other, the experimental computer system sent an alert — a text message — to a corrections officer that warned of a potential incident and gave the location.

The computers cannot do anything more than officers who constantly watch surveillance monitors under ideal conditions. But in practice, officers are often distracted. When shifts change, an observation that is worth passing along may be forgotten. But machines do not blink or forget. They are tireless assistants.

The enthusiasm for such systems extends well beyond the nation's prisons. High-resolution, low-cost cameras are proliferating, found in products like smartphones and laptop computers. The cost of storing images is dropping, and new software algorithms for mining, matching and scrutinizing the flood of visual data are progressing swiftly.

A computer-vision system can watch a hospital room and remind doctors and nurses to wash their hands, or warn of restless patients who are in danger of falling out of bed. It can, through a computer-equipped mirror, read a man's face to detect his heart rate and other vital signs. It can analyze a woman's expressions as she watches a movie trailer or shops online, and help marketers tailor their offerings accordingly. Computer vision can also be used at shopping malls, schoolyards, subway platforms, office complexes and stadiums.

All of which could be helpful — or alarming.

“Machines will definitely be able to observe us and understand us better,” said Hartmut Neven, a computer scientist and vision expert at Google. “Where that leads is uncertain.”

Google has been both at the forefront of the technology's development and a source of the anxiety surrounding it. Its Street View service, which lets Internet users zoom in from above on a particular location, faced privacy complaints. Google will blur out people's homes at their request.

Google has also introduced an application called Goggles, which allows people to take a picture with a smartphone and search the Internet for matching images. The company's executives decided to exclude a facial-recognition feature, which they feared might be used to find personal information on people who did not know that they were being photographed.

Despite such qualms, computer vision is moving into the mainstream. With this technological evolution, scientists predict, people will increasingly be surrounded by machines that can not only see but also reason about what they are seeing, in their own limited way.

The uses, noted Frances Scott, an expert in surveillance technologies at the National Institute of Justice, the Justice Department's research agency, could allow the authorities to spot a terrorist, identify a lost child or locate an Alzheimer's patient who has wandered off.

The future of law enforcement, national security and military operations will most likely rely on observant machines. A few months ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's research arm, awarded the first round of grants in a five-year research program called the Mind's Eye. Its goal is to develop machines that can recognize, analyze and communicate what they see. Mounted on small robots or drones, these smart machines could replace human scouts. “These things, in a sense, could be team members,” said James Donlon, the program's manager.

Millions of people now use products that show the progress that has been made in computer vision. In the last two years, the major online photo-sharing services — Picasa by Google, Windows Live Photo Gallery by Microsoft, Flickr by Yahoo and iPhoto by Apple — have all started using face recognition. A user puts a name to a face, and the service finds matches in other photographs. It is a popular tool for finding and organizing pictures.

Kinect, an add-on to Microsoft's Xbox 360 gaming console, is a striking advance for computer vision in the marketplace. It uses a digital camera and sensors to recognize people and gestures; it also understands voice commands. Players control the computer with waves of the hand, and then move to make their on-screen animated stand-ins — known as avatars — run, jump, swing and dance. Since Kinect was introduced in November, game reviewers have applauded, and sales are surging.

To Microsoft, Kinect is not just a game, but a step toward the future of computing. “It's a world where technology more fundamentally understands you, so you don't have to understand it,” said Alex Kipman, an engineer on the team that designed Kinect.

‘Please Wash Your Hands'

A nurse walks into a hospital room while scanning a clipboard. She greets the patient and washes her hands. She checks and records his heart rate and blood pressure, adjusts the intravenous drip, turns him over to look for bed sores, then heads for the door but does not wash her hands again, as protocol requires. “Pardon the interruption,” declares a recorded women's voice, with a slight British accent. “Please wash your hands.”

Three months ago, Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown, N.Y., began an experiment with computer vision in a single hospital room. Three small cameras, mounted inconspicuously on the ceiling, monitor movements in Room 542, in a special care unit (a notch below intensive care) where patients are treated for conditions like severe pneumonia, heart attacks and strokes. The cameras track people going in and out of the room as well as the patient's movements in bed.

The first applications of the system, designed by scientists at General Electric, are immediate reminders and alerts. Doctors and nurses are supposed to wash their hands before and after touching a patient; lapses contribute significantly to hospital-acquired infections, research shows.

The camera over the bed delivers images to software that is programmed to recognize movements that indicate when a patient is in danger of falling out of bed. The system would send an alert to a nearby nurse.

If the results at Bassett prove to be encouraging, more features can be added, like software that analyzes facial expressions for signs of severe pain, the onset of delirium or other hints of distress, said Kunter Akbay, a G.E. scientist.

Hospitals have an incentive to adopt tools that improve patient safety. Medicare and Medicaid are adjusting reimbursement rates to penalize hospitals that do not work to prevent falls and pressure ulcers, and whose doctors and nurses do not wash their hands enough. But it is too early to say whether computer vision, like the system being tried out at Bassett, will prove to be cost-effective.

Mirror, Mirror

Daniel J. McDuff, a graduate student, stood in front of a mirror at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. After 20 seconds or so, a figure — 65, the number of times his heart was beating per minute — appeared at the mirror's bottom. Behind the two-way mirror was a Web camera, which fed images of Mr. McDuff to a computer whose software could track the blood flow in his face.

The software separates the video images into three channels — for the basic colors red, green and blue. Changes to the colors and to movements made by tiny contractions and expansions in blood vessels in the face are, of course, not apparent to the human eye, but the computer can see them.

“Your heart-rate signal is in your face,” said Ming-zher Poh, an M.I.T. graduate student. Other vital signs, including breathing rate, blood-oxygen level and blood pressure, should leave similar color and movement clues.

The pulse-measuring project, described in research published in May by Mr. Poh, Mr. McDuff and Rosalind W. Picard, a professor at the lab, is just the beginning, Mr. Poh said. Computer vision and clever software, he said, make it possible to monitor humans' vital signs at a digital glance. Daily measurements can be analyzed to reveal that, for example, a person's risk of heart trouble is rising. “This can happen, and in the future it will be in mirrors,” he said.

Faces can yield all sorts of information to watchful computers, and the M.I.T. students' adviser, Dr. Picard, is a pioneer in the field, especially in the use of computing to measure and communicate emotions. For years, she and a research scientist at the university, Rana el-Kaliouby, have applied facial-expression analysis software to help young people with autism better recognize the emotional signals from others that they have such a hard time understanding.

The two women are the co-founders of Affectiva, a company in Waltham, Mass., that is beginning to market its facial-expression analysis software to manufacturers of consumer products, retailers, marketers and movie studios. Its mission is to mine consumers' emotional responses to improve the designs and marketing campaigns of products.

John Ross, chief executive of Shopper Sciences, a marketing research company that is part of the Interpublic Group, said Affectiva's technology promises to give marketers an impartial reading of the sequence of emotions that leads to a purchase, in a way that focus groups and customer surveys cannot. “You can see and analyze how people are reacting in real time, not what they are saying later, when they are often trying to be polite,” he said. The technology, he added, is more scientific and less costly than having humans look at store surveillance videos, which some retailers do.

The facial-analysis software, Mr. Ross said, could be used in store kiosks or with Webcams. Shopper Sciences, he said, is testing Affectiva's software with a major retailer and an online dating service, neither of which he would name. The dating service, he said, was analyzing users' expressions in search of “trigger words” in personal profiles that people found appealing or off-putting.

Watching the Watchers

Maria Sonin, 33, an office worker in Waltham, Mass., sat in front of a notebook computer looking at a movie trailer while Affectiva's software, through the PC's Webcam, calibrated her reaction. The trailer was for “Little Fockers,” starring Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller, which opened just before Christmas. The software measured her reactions by tracking movements on a couple of dozen points on her face — mostly along the eyes, eyebrows, nose and the perimeter of her lips.

To the human eye, Ms. Sonin appeared to be amused. The software agreed, said Dr. Kaliouby, though it used a finer-grained analysis, like recording that her smiles were symmetrical (signaling amusement, not embarrassment) and not smirks. The software, Ms. Kaliouby said, allows for continuous, objective measurement of viewers' response to media, and in the future will do so in large numbers on the Web.

Ms. Sonin, an unpaid volunteer, said later that she did not think about being recorded by the Webcam. “It wasn't as if it was a big camera in front of you,” she said.

Christopher Hamilton, a technical director of visual effects, has used specialized software to analyze facial expressions and recreate them on the screen. The films he has worked on include “King Kong,” “Charlotte's Web” and “The Matrix Revolutions.” Using facial-expression analysis technology to gauge the reaction of viewers, who agree to be watched, may well become a valuable tool for movie makers, said Mr. Hamilton, who is not involved with Affectiva.

Today, sampling audience reaction before a movie is released typically means gathering a couple of hundred people at a preview screening. The audience members then answer questions and fill out surveys. Yet viewers, marketing experts say, are often inarticulate and imprecise about their emotional reactions.

The software “makes it possible to measure audience response with a scene-by-scene granularity that the current survey-and-questionnaire approach cannot,” Mr. Hamilton said. A director, he added, could find out, for example, that although audience members liked a movie over all, they did not like two or three scenes. Or he could learn that a particular character did not inspire the intended emotional response.

Emotion-sensing software, Mr. Hamilton said, might become part of the entertainment experience — especially as more people watch movies and programs on Internet-connected televisions, computers and portable devices. Viewers could share their emotional responses with friends using recommendation systems based on what scene — say, the protagonists' dancing or a car chase — delivered the biggest emotional jolt.

Affectiva, Dr. Picard said, intends to offer its technology as “opt-in only,” meaning consumers have to be notified and have to agree to be watched online or in stores. Affectiva, she added, has turned down companies, which she declined to name, that wanted to use its software without notifying customers.

Darker Possibilities

Dr. Picard enunciates a principled stance, but one that could become problematic in other hands.

The challenge arises from the prospect of the rapid spread of less-expensive yet powerful computer-vision technologies.

At work or school, the technology opens the door to a computerized supervisor that is always watching. Are you paying attention, goofing off or daydreaming? In stores and shopping malls, smart surveillance could bring behavioral tracking into the physical world.

More subtle could be the effect of a person knowing that he is being watched — and how that awareness changes his thinking and actions. It could be beneficial: a person thinks twice and a crime goes uncommitted. But might it also lead to a society that is less spontaneous, less creative, less innovative?

“With every technology, there is a dark side,” said Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth. “Sometimes you can predict it, but often you can't.”

A decade ago, he noted, no one predicted that cellphones and text messaging would lead to traffic accidents caused by distracted drivers. And, he said, it was difficult to foresee that the rise of Facebook and Twitter and personal blogs would become troves of data to be collected and exploited in tracking people's online behavior.

Often, a technology that is benign in one setting can cause harm in a different context. Google confronted that problem this year with its face-recognition software. In its Picasa photo-storing and sharing service, face recognition helps people find and organize pictures of family and friends.

But the company took a different approach with Goggles, which lets a person snap a photograph with a smartphone, setting off an Internet search. Take a picture of the Eiffel Tower and links to Web pages with background information and articles about it appear on the phone's screen. Take a picture of a wine bottle and up come links to reviews of that vintage.

Google could have put face recognition into the Goggles application; indeed, many users have asked for it. But Google decided against it because smartphones can be used to take pictures of individuals without their knowledge, and a face match could retrieve all kinds of personal information — name, occupation, address, workplace.

“It was just too sensitive, and we didn't want to go there,” said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google. “You want to avoid enabling stalker behavior.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/science/02see.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

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EDITORIAL

Homeland Blather

It is disturbing to listen to Representative Peter King, the incoming chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. He has announced plans to hold a hearing next month into what he calls the “radicalization of the American Muslim community.” Mr. King, a New York Republican, is no stranger to bluster, but his sweeping slur on Muslim citizens is unacceptable.

The new chairman, of course, acknowledges “the great majority of Muslims in our country are hardworking, dedicated Americans.” At the same time he claims, with no evidence, that the hearing is urgently needed because “law enforcement officials throughout the country told me they received little or — in most cases — no cooperation from Muslim leaders and imams” in tracking domestic threats, according to his essay in Newsday.

We hope that if Mr. King insists on going ahead, he at least calls a true cross section of law enforcement officials, who we are sure will rebut that hype.

We agree with Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the nation's first Muslim elected to the House, who called Mr. King's words “very scary.” It is worthwhile to try to fathom “what turns somebody from a normal citizen into a violent radical,” Mr. Ellison says, but not by vilifying an entire community for openers.

It is all the more perplexing because Mr. King was one of the few Republicans to back the Clinton administration's interventions in the Balkans to protect Muslims. He has popped off far too often in recent years, claiming, among other things, that President George W. Bush “deserves a medal” for authorizing waterboarding.

He had better recall his role as a gifted intermediary in helping to settle Ireland's sectarian troubles. He would have bristled at any simplistic talk about the “radicalization” of the Irish Catholic or Protestant communities. Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security is a very serious job. Mr. King needs to get serious.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/opinion/02sun3.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From Google News

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Worker killed at Suburban Hospital

An employee was killed inside Suburban Hospital in Bethesda on Saturday, prompting Montgomery County police to put the facility on lockdown for more than three hours as they searched for the attacker, authorities said.

Dozens of officers, and at least one police dog, searched the entire 222-bed hospital and accounted for every patient, hospital employee and visitor, said Lucille Baur, a police spokeswoman.

The attacker has not yet been found.

As the search was conducted, visitors and patients were not allowed to leave the hospital, and people who were being brought to the facility for treatment were diverted to other hospitals, said Ronna Borenstein, a Suburban spokeswoman.

The hospital was reopened shortly before 2:30 p.m., after police determined that there was no danger to patients, visitors or staff members, Baur said.

Citing the ongoing investigation, officials said little about the circumstances of the death, which Baur said is being investigated as a homicide. Baur said the investigation is "very active," but said police did not have a description of any possible suspect; she would not say whether they believe they have identified one.

The victim, a 40-year-old man, was found in a "non-patient care" area of the hospital, Borenstein said, but she did not say whether the area in question is open to the public or restricted to hospital workers.

Baur said that the man had suffered trauma to the upper body, but declined to be more specific.

Police were dispatched to the hospital after reports of a stabbing, but Baur would not confirm that the victim was stabbed to death.

Police were notifying the victim's relatives and said his name would probably be released Sunday.

The victim had worked at the hospital since 2006, Borenstein said, but she did not specify what his job was.

Borenstein and Baur also would not detail the circumstances under which the victim was found, declining to say whether another hospital worker found him or whether someone in the facility heard a commotion.

The search for the attacker kept some visitors locked inside the hospital for hours.

One of those visitors, Diane Hack Gould, said the mood inside was calm, even as police searched every room.

Hack Gould said she arrived at Suburban at about 10:45 a.m. Saturday - as police were locking down the hospital - to visit her mother.

A police officer stopped her in a hallway and said she couldn't come inside, Hack Gould said. She said she then explained that her mother is in critical condition, and the officer let her continue on her way to her mother's room after taking her name and phone number.

Hack Gould said she went to an elevator to get to her mother's floor, and that when the door opened, three police officers and a police dog were inside. "The officers suggested I take another elevator," she said.

She said she made it to her mother's room and found that police were going into each room, asking for driver's licenses or other photo IDs from each visitor and making copies.

While the search went on, doctors and nurses made their rounds and meals were served to patients, Hack Gould said.

"They [hospital staff] didn't exhibit any fear at all," she said. "Everybody was calm, everything was going on as normal."

Borenstein said the hospital initiated its emergency protocol, which included e-mail updates to hospital personnel every 15 minutes.

Hospital workers were told in the e-mails that police were at the facility because someone had been assaulted, but were not given further details, Borenstein said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/01/AR2011010102391.html

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Canton adopts call alert system for missing kids

ACIM's telephone program similar to Amber Alert and Silver Alert

by Terricha Bradley

Clarion Ledger

January 2, 2011

There are 4,200 law enforcement agencies using the program nationwide, 38 of them in Mississippi, including the Madison County Sheriff's Department.

Upon receiving a missing person call, the Canton Police Department will make its first call to a toll-free number that rings in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the program's national headquarters.

The calls are answered by information and mapping technicians, initiating the data-gathering process.

"It's a quicker, faster, smoother way to make residences and businesses alert," said Canton police Chief Vickie McNeill.

ACIM then launches potentially thousands of calls within minutes with an alert message detailing the person's description, last known whereabouts and other information.

The alert message will include the Canton Police Department phone number.

The program is a free service to law enforcement. Canton police officials will evaluate each potential activation of the program to ensure it is appropriate to the case and ensure the system is used.

Phone numbers called by this program include listed numbers and cell phone numbers available to ACIM in the Canton area.

Cell numbers, unlisted numbers, broadband/voice-over IP numbers or TDD/TTY devices can be added to ensure they are called in the event of an alert.

To enter your number, visit www.AChildIsMissing.org and click on "add your name" to enter your name, number and address.

The information will be used only for emergency message alerts.

The Rankin County and Hinds County sheriffs departments aren't using the system just yet.

"In this day and age, it's very necessary for an agency to have it at their disposal," said Lt. Jeffery Scott of the Hinds County Sheriff's Department.

"It's something the sheriff (Malcolm McMillin) is looking at. It's cost effective and would benefit the tri-county area."

http://www.clarionledger.com/article/20110102/NEWS01/101020350/Canton-adopts-call-alert-system-for-missing-kids

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Family Pushing For Silver Alert Law Change

Missing Elderly Woman Found Dead New Year's Eve

SAN ANTONIO -- Maria DeLaLuz Reyna, 78, went out to run an errand Dec. 23. She went to eat at the same place she usually did, but she never made it home that evening.

"We were trying to call her all day. She didn't answer, didn't answer, didn't answer," her daughter Yvonne Reyna said.

Worried, they contacted the San Antonio Police Department and asked them to issue a Silver Alert.

Similar to an Amber Alert, a Silver Alert is a nationwide public alert, designed to help with the safe return of missing elderly people. It is only issued if the missing elderly person suffers from Alzheimer's, dementia or a mental disability, which Reyna did not.

No alert was issued and nearly 10 days later, New Year's Eve, a man walking in a creek bed in Medina County found Reyna's body.

"Somehow she had driven off the road and landed down into a big ditch. She managed to get out and was laying in front of her vehicle, but by the time they got to her, she was deceased," Reyna said.

Reyna said she and her family believe that alert would have made the difference.

She said she and her family have already contacted Gov. Rick Perry and plan to try to change that law, to do away with the strict guidelines, so that it's easier for families with missing loved ones to have Silver Alerts issued

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