AFP:

BERLIN — Body scanners being tested at Germany’s Hamburg airport have had a thumbs down from the police, who say they trigger an alarm unnecessarily in seven out of 10 cases, a newspaper said Saturday.

The weekly Welt am Sonntag, quoting a police report, said 35 percent of the 730,000 passengers checked by the scanners set off the alarm more than once despite being innocent.

The report said the machines were confused by several layers of clothing, boots, zip fasteners and even pleats, while in 10 percent of cases the passenger’s posture set them off.

Bruce Schneier has more.

John Kass:

That’s because Allesina has created a computer model that can determine the frequency of nepotism in hiring. He applied it to academic life in Italy, but the same model could just as easily be applied to political hiring here.

“I wanted to keep it simple so anyone with a laptop can repeat it,” he told us. “What I wanted to show was that it’s not a few bad apples. I wanted to show the magnitude.”

His findings, published in the online journal PLoS ONE, proved that nepotism is widespread among academics in Italy, and now the Italian media are all over it. But what about Chicago?