Illegal Traffic Tickets

Minneapolis recently had to remove their traffic cameras as per court order. It seems that these cameras were taking pictures of folks running red lights, then sending the owner a speeding ticket. Statistically, accidents at monitored intersections were down 13%. This all seems pretty reasonable.

The ACLU argued that the approach violated our civil liberties. By sending the ticket to the owner of the car, the state was making the claim that the OWNER of the car was presumed to be guilty of DRIVING the car through the intersection, thereby placing the burden of proving innocence on the defendent. Our legal system assumes innocent til proven guilty, so this is a big no-no.

This morning there was a letter to the editor who argued that the same thing is true with parking tickets. The owner of the vehicle is liable for fines incurred when a parking meter runs out. I'm not seeing how you can have one and not the other, so I'll be curious to see what happens here.

Nature or Nurture?

There was an interesting article a few weeks ago in the WSJ that described how nature and nurture might interleave to produce a child with certain characteristics.

There has long been a debate regarding the importance of genetics on how a child turns out. Another group argued that equally important, if not more so, was the importance of the environment the child grew up in. This was actually the them of "Trading Places".

It turns out the two are inter-related in a way that had not occurred to me.

When a child is born, he/she might be predisposed to behave a certain way. Of particular importance, it turns out, is how often he/she smiles. Parents like smiling kids, and will interact more with them if they are smiling. So, if genetics make a child more likely to smile, you get more interaction, positive reinforcement and all kinds of good things.

What happens if a child does not smile as an infant, or frowns a lot, or cries a lot. Parents get "testy", and the child does not receive the postive feedback and attention. Indeed, short tempered parents may start yelling at the child, and doing a variety of things that stunt the childs emotional and intellectual growth.

The key is that the nurturing environment does not exist in a vaccuum, but rather, is dependent to an extent on what nature provided the child.