You can speculate and reason all you like (”once a pedophile, always a pedophile”, “most of the list is good, and properly utilised”), but have you checked the facts?

States such as Vermont and Minnesota have responsible public sex offender databases, in which a very small minority of registered sex offenders are actually placed on the website, which are those deemed to pose a real risk in communities in which they live.

There are good ways to maintain responsible disclosure of sex offender registration, requiring pro-active notification by law enforcement and restricting public register access to a need-to-know basis would prevent public humiliation of nonviolent sex offenders while informing people in a community when a member of the community poses a real threat.

30% of convictions for sexual assault resulting in a person being required to register as a sex offender are non-violent acts, not against children. 76% of people convicted for sexual offences do not commit any further offence. 5.6% of violent sexual assaults are committed by people who had never previously been required to register as a sex offender. People children know and trust are responsible for 90% of all sexual violence against children.

4% of youth required to register as a sex offender committed another sexual offence, and 90% of all sex offenders did not commit a sex offence while under 18. This isn’t a minority of sex offenders, 25% of those required to register as sex offenders are required to do so because of a crime they committed while under 18. 47% of offences against children under 6, and 39% of offences against children between 6 and 12 were committed by children who were themselves under 18. In terms of predictive power, the number of contacts with police for all reasons was twice as good a predictor as a single sexual offence of committing a further sexual offence.

There is significant evidence that the hardship imposed on those required to register as sex offenders increases recidivism in some cases, and makes tracking difficult (there are very few places in some states that registered sex offenders can live, so what do they put as their address?). Sex offenders are least likely to re-offend if they live with their families, have a stable job, and a place to live. Sex offender registration takes away all of these, by causing frequent public vilification causing employment dismissal, by imposing residency restrictions that prevent sex offenders from living with their families, preventing them from attending church services or receiving treatment and help for their condition.

Sex offender registration has, in several cases resulted in vigilante murders of people whose offences causing their registration as sex offenders were neither violent nor predatory, in many cases being streaking and public urination. This isn’t isolated, one third to one half of registered sex offenders lose their home, job or family. 16% of registered sex offenders are physically assaulted as a result of registration. Typical assault and harassment includes physical threats, ringing the doorbell in the middle of the night and leaving, leaving feces and garbage on the offender’s doorstep, up to being beaten or stabbed. In some cases, shots have been fired into registered sex offenders’ homes, injuring their family members.

Requiring sex offender registration for large classes of nonviolent misdemeanours has caused states such as California to literally lose track of 44% of its registered sex offenders.

Life registration is unnecessary and overly onerous, as recidivism rates decrease to 12%, 9% and 4% after five, ten and fifteen years of remaining offence-free respectively.

Contrary to what you might think, treatment is a solid method of reducing recidivism, reducing recidivism by 41% when modern methods are applied properly.

Community notification and online databases, according to a report by the Washington Department of State, have little to no impact on either the rate or location of recidivism, indicating that the online databases neither prevent recidivism, nor force it to go elsewhere.

So while I don’t oppose sex offender registration entirely (it can be done responsibly and with an evidence-based approach), its implementation in the United States is nothing but the product of a moral panic, which does not achieve its stated aims, and is based on received wisdom rather than empirical evidence.

I’ve just finished up a week in Beautiful Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Wikimedia held its annual conference, Wikimania. I think the best way to describe it is “Crazy fun”.

Highlights (the sessions)

• Richard Stallman (enough said).
• Finding out some of the stuff Kate and Ævar have been doing on OSM.
• Chatting to Christian about DBpedia, an awesome semantic database produced from the Wikipedia data.
• Finding people unaware of my work on LiquidThreads who have been doing prototyping of their own on discussion improvements.
• Some of the fancy new stuff in the works, as summarised by Brion.
• The awesome work Michael Dale’s been doing on open video at Wikimedia.
• Finding out about the plans the usability folks have for MediaWiki.

Highlights (outside the conference itself)

• The taxi ride from the airport, which was conducted by a driver who (like most drivers here) did not understand the concept of a lane, and found 140 km/h to be a perfectly appropriate speed.
• The Mauseleum at Recoleta, and its colony of feral cats.
• Dancing the Tango with Florence (who described my dancing as “not super elegant”).
• Finishing the closing evening with pizza at 6 am, accompanied by Phoebe, Kat, Mako and others.
• The feeling of inadequacy that comes from being surrounded by people who speak at least 4 languages.
• Deciding with half an hour’s notice to visit Colonia (in Uruguay) with Betsy, Kate and Ævar.
• When out with Ævar, making liberal use of body language to explain the concept of a nightclub to a bemused taxi driver.

Comments about the conference (directed mostly at the organisers)

• The communal areas were great. It was especially good to hang out in our techie basement, although we were a bit separated from everybody else.
• It sucked that the staff hotel was so far from everybody else and was much nicer. It felt hierarchical, which is not how Wikimedia is supposed to work.
• The organisers did a good job of trying to stem the flow of stolen stuff.
• The party was a lot of fun, and very well-organised.
• The hotel was a pretty good choice, the lack of wifi in the rooms was a mixed blessing, drawing everybody out into the lobby to hang out.
• The internet in various parts was a bit flaky, which is a bit weird for a tech conference

See you all in Gdansk next year! And in Sydney the year after!

Unfortunately, even when following Apple’s instructions for getting push notifications going, I ran into this error:
Error in registration. Error: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=3000 UserInfo=0x1402f0 "no valid 'aps-environment' entitlement string found for application

As it turns out, I needed to give myself an entitlement called ‘aps-environment’, whereas I’d assumed (and I’d found nothing on the internet to contradict it) that this was an internal part of the provisioning profile, since Apple recommended I created a new provisioning profile once I’d activated APN on my application in the development portal.

This document from Apple explains how to do this.

I’m sort of hoping this helps somebody in the same flummoxed position as I

In the last 24 hours, I’ve bought (prices include shipping):

• An external 2.5″ HDD enclosure, £4.98
• A new dock-USB cable, £1.75.
• A dock-Component Video cable, £6.23.
• A brand-new wireless Apple Mighty Mouse £34 ex. shipping (estimated at £3.95, but I may be able to combine).

I’m also the top bidder on a £5 brand new wireless Apple keyboard, from the same seller as the mouse, so I may be able to combine the shipping and save there.

So basically I’ve bought about 5 things I’ve been meaning to buy for a while, but which eBay has brought back into my price range.