I was surprised to find that not all know my 225-view famous perhaps semi-humorous elevator talk video. So here it is.

Please note the matched timing of the speech and the elevator. It took me some time to get the match right: Several times up and down the elevator. :-)

I recently initiated the Wikipedia article about the Court here in Lyngby and surfed a bit round on the homepage of the court. I stumbled upon an interesting case from 2011 about acquittal with a DNA match.

Here the case is with my translation and editing:

A 31 year old man from the western suburbs of Copenhagen was acquitted from accusations of theft totalling 200,000 Danish kroner from a villa in Gentofte. The evidence against the accused was alone a DNA match which meant that there were more than 1,000,000 times larger
probability for, that blood found on the site came from the accused than from another random person in the Danish population.

The accused which was first interrogated ca. 4 months after the crime, was not previously convicted for theft, had a well-paid job, own house, girlfriend and 2 kids and refused any knowledge of the theft.

The police did not perform any other investigations and the court found that the accused lived approximately 11.7 kilometers from the site of theft - like approximately 1,000,000 other person.

The court noted that the police could have performed a search at the house of the accused, could have obtained mobil phone records and looked for scars on the accused.

---

This is indeed a very interesting case of probabilities. A probability of 1 against 1,000,000 is probably not right. Unfortunate errors such as contaminations or paper work errors change the probability perhaps to as low a 1 against 1,000. When such errors are taken into account
they work in favor of the accused.

One may ask how they obtained the accused and his DNA in the first place. Was he suspected? Prior non-theft convictions? If he was suspected prior to the DNA test then even 1 against 1,000 is serious odds. It is much less serious if the man was routinely entered into a DNA register and the match appeared after a search in the database containing perhaps several 100,000 people.

It would be really interesting if the police appealed the decision and made more through investigations, e.g., are they able to track the mobil phone of the accused. It is important to know how such big odds should be interpreted and trusted.

One usually needs to take care when writing corrections: An error in an erratum looks silly. For those with knowledge of Danish would note that a word in the title has a typo: "Radioavsien" should have been "Radioavisen". Somehow the picture of the pig adds some humor to the typo.

In 2003 German European Parliament member Markus Ferber asked the EU Commission: "Is there any truth in the allegations that Mr Olsen was held in custody in Denmark over alleged activities for the State Security Service of the former GDR?" with Mr. Olsen being Morten Jung-Olsen, Head of Unit and Chief Negotiator for Bulgaria.

Mr Kinnock (Neil Kinnock I suppose) replied: "Mr Jung-Olsen has been acquitted of any allegations against him. As the Honourable Member will know, it is a basic rule in democracies that detention does not carry a presumption of guilt and that legal acquittal gives valid proof of the standing of an individual."

Something is rotten in the answer of Kinnock. First of all he doesn't really answer the question, because yes Mr Olsen was held in custody in Denmark over alleged activities for the State Security Service of the former GDR. He sat in prison for 111 days. There is truth in the allegation that he was held in custody.

Second, Jung-Olsen was really not acquitted. He was simply released as the case was deemed to old to go to court. The prosecutor even said that they had the right man.

One year later after the discussion in EU, forth came Stasi spy boss Werner Grossmann further supporting the prosecutor's statement.

So EU apparently employs a former Stasi spy.

Recently extending the Wikipedia article on the Danish security service I noticed that not many spys working in Denmark have been put to jail. Another notable case with a sort-of "guilty but not convicted" verdict was for the writer Arne Herløv Petersen.

So I was considering GIMP, LaTeXDraw, Inkscape, Xfig, GraphViz - and in a weak and confused movement FSLView - to draw a graph. Then I saw Dia, installed it, and I found it quite suitable. The arrows attach well to the objects and it has a range of output formats.

The unfinished graph displays neuroinformatics databases and web-linkable identifiers between them: My Brede Wiki and Brede Database along with fMRIDC, OpenfMRI, Cognitive Atlas, CogPO, IBVD, SumsDB, BODB, CoCoMac and the more general PubMed.

There is an arrow from PubMed to the Brede Database. That is because someone (not me) apparently has defined LinkOut for the Brede Database. Thank you.

Ulla Danielsen seems to be the only one updating on the case of Poul Thorsen and now reports that the tax evasion case against Poul Thorsen has been dismissed. It has been dismissed because of technical deficits in the indictment.

The court case has apparently been postponed multiple times, Danielsen writes.

Jens Ramskov seems to be the only other in Denmark reporting about the case lately. He had an article in December 2011.

If I understand it correctly the tax evasion court case is just one aspect of the Thorsen case.

By accidentally stubbling over my version of the Mysql-server on a wiki page and comparing that with the CogPO wiki version I found that I was on 5.0 while the newer Debian Squeeze was 5.1.

mysql-server-5.0 is a virtual package in Debian Squeeze relying on mysql-server-5.1 while I seemed to have 5.0.51a-24+lenny5. The distribution upgrade from Lenny to Debian apparently didn't upgrade the Mysql-server!? So was I off the security updates and with several vulnerabilities in the first part of the year?

One page on the Internet by Wolfgang Karall suggested installing the mysql-server package and purging the mysql-server-5.0 package, and I tried the following.

$ aptitude install mysql-server

$ aptitude purge mysql-server-5.0

$ /etc/init.d/mysql start

And yet my wiki runs.

So Posterous has been acquired by Twitter. Great. And Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. Great.

But then I read Is Twitter About to Ax Your Posterous Account? and Twitter has acquired shortform blogging company Posterous, Spaces will remain up and running for now writing:

"Twitter says that it will give users ‘ample notice’ if it is going to make any changes to the service. We’ll take them at their word on this one, but if I was someone running a personal blog on Posterous, I would think about finding another place to host it soon."

"So, in other words, Posterous will be available to you now, but we'll let you know if we plan on shutting it down. That must be a fairly likely scenario to warrant that language being included in the initial announcement of the acquisition."

hmmm...

To test an aspect of Adobe Acrobat (PDF to text conversion) I installed the program. Not that good an idea. I downloaded the installation program from the Adobe homepage, did a sudo ./AdbeRdr9.4.7-1_i486linux_enu.bin and now my Firefox was entangled with its plugin.

"sudo rm -r /opt/Adobe" did not help. It apparently installed a .so file in ~/.mozilla/plugins. nppdf.so, that is apparently not a part of Debian/Ubuntu. I erased that. If you go to Firefox menu Tools
"Manage Content Plug-ins" I still see four lines of the Adobe issue. One should think that right clicking or deleting would work. No.

"$ rm -r ~/.adobe/" didn't help.

With "$ egrep -r "Acrobat" ~/.mozilla/*" I tracked down "pluginreg.dat" and erased appropriate lines from "[PLUGINS]" section. Put that didn't help.

"$ locate nppdf.so" showed a lot of issues, and "$ sudo rm `locate nppdf.so`" apparently helped, as now PDFs open in evince.

Next time I should really try to see if there is a package, so "aptitude purge" or reconfiguration are possible.

BTW: The text conversion in Adobe Acrobat was not that good compared to other programs I tried. It found "fi" and "fl" ligature problem, two-column problem, greek character problem. Python library pyPdf might be promising as you might redefine the 'extractText()' method attempting an attack on the ligatures and other strange characters. pdftotext and PDFbox was also interesting. Any comments on this?