U.S. Prisons and Mental Illness. Prisons have become America's default mental health system. According to a new study by Human Rights Watch, between two and three hundred thousand men and women in U.S. prisons are seriously mentally ill, about three times more than the number of mentally ill who are in mental hospitals. [Via TalkLeft.] [MetaFilter]

Crisis and opportunities in scholarly publishing. The 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies took place in Philadelphia, May 9-10, 2003. The presentations from the one public session, Crises and Opportunities: the Futures of Scholarly Publishing, are now online. See the separate pages by Carlos Alonso, Cathy Davidson, John Unsworth, and Lynne Withey. [Open Access News]

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there are some interesting presentations here. However, Professor Unsworth is no longer at Virginia, so I wonder what's up there…

Computers don't do good security screening. It's a recurring fantasy: if we could compile a nice database of information on people and then load it into a computer we could set the computer on “autopilot” and it would tell us which people to watch out for…. [Ernie The Attorney]