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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (Feb. 23, 2011)
local news Nyxio continued from page 1 If you love settling in front of your big- screen television, guess what: Here come the smart TVs. The VioSphere’s little sister, the Realm, is a 22-inch flat screen smart TV pre-loaded with Windows 7, and boasting wi-fi, camera, microphone, DVD player and Bluetooth. “A smart television does much more than a regular television, it doesn’t mat- ter about the inputs, it’s what’s inside,” Johnson says. “You can use my VioSphere as a server, you can control your home with it. “I could connect to this TV with my —Giorgio Johnson phone, and actually look at you stand- ing there, no kidding,” he says. But the really mouthwatering item, if a you can’t watch all flash sites — you can’t go on Hulu,” he says. “But with ours you recent visit by the Skanner News staff is any can watch any of that because it’s Windows indication, is the Venture Mobile Media Viewer, which builds on existing MMV 7, full blown.” Johnson says he’s working on roll-up key- technology with bigger media file storage, boards for people who want to set up a full and a non-radiation LCD panel with 62- mobile office, although it also operates with inch, 16:9 wide screen display. Find out more at www.Nyxio.com. a built-in touch-screen keyboard. the Omega and watch TV on it as well. One of the things that favors the Omega over the iPad is that you can watch any website on the Omega. “There’s no restriction, so, with the iPad what we do in home entertainment and technology.” Johnson – who has lived all over Asia and Europe — got his mechanics training at Portland State University. His first job out of college was testing electronics at a factory in Singapore. After a few years of perfecting other peoples’ electronics, he struck out on his own, selling televisions and mov- ing into hardware design. Johnson’s interests have also led him to run an eyeglasses company and an entertain- ment management business. Today, Nyxio’s products are sending gadget lovers – not to mention gamers – into dizzy swoons of media indul- gence. The Omega Windows 7 tablet PC and the smaller Edge are fully-functioning com- puters with wi-fi, webcam and High- Definition Multimedia Interface. The products are both touch screen and wire- less, and soon will have 3G capacity. You can connect a wireless antenna into ‘What we do here could put us on the map in regards to what we do in home entertainment and technology’ Report continued from page 1 from the Legislature. The Corrections Department closed an expensive prison for elderly inmates in Yakima last year, consolidating most of those inmates at the Coyote Ridge prison near Pasco. It is now preparing to close the McNeil Island Corrections Center in Puget Sound in April. The majority of the inmates in Washington prisons are being held for vio- lent crimes like murder, rape and assault, according to figures provided by the state Department of Corrections. There were 11,835 inmates (69 percent) serving time for violent crimes in 2010, and 5,240 (30 percent) serving time for drugs, property crimes or the category of “other.” In 2000, 62 percent of Washington prison inmates were doing time for violent crimes and 37 percent for in prison for drugs, prop- erty crimes or “other.” Nationally, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that 52.4 percent of state prison inmates were doing time for violent crimes in 2008, the latest year available. In Washington, the big change in the prison population has been the reduction of people serving time for drugs. That fell from 3,208 in 2000, 21 percent of inmates, to 1,714 by 2010, 10 percent of inmates. The reduction is a result of various state laws that reduced sentences for many drug crimes while increasing them for violent crimes. were 64 percent of the prison population in 2010, but were 74.8 percent of the state population. Blacks were 18 percent of the prison population, despite being just 3.5 percent of the population. Hispanics were 8 percent of the prison population, but 10.2 percent of the state population. American Indians were 1.5 percent of the state popu- lation but 4.3 percent of the prison popula- tion. Asian/Pacific Islanders were 7.2 per- cent of the state population but 3.5 percent of the prison population. In 2000, Whites made up 58.9 percent of Washington’s prison population, while Blacks comprised 22 percent, Hispanics 12.2 percent, American Indians 3.6 per- cent, and Asian/Pacific --Tracey Thompson Islanders were 2.7 percent, according to the Corrections Department. Nationally, the Bureau of Washington has a prison population of Justice Statistics said 35.5 percent of all just under 3 inmates per 1,000 residents, state prison inmates were White in 2008. well below the national average of more The racial makeup of a state’s prison popu- lation depends largely on the racial distribu- than 5 inmates per 1,000. In 2010, the vast majority of the state’s tion of the state’s population, said Paige inmates, 10,925, were White. Blacks made Harrison, a statistician for the bureau. The inmate population is getting older, up the second largest number, 3,199. There were 1,402 Hispanic inmates, 735 which is the result both of the aging baby American Indians and 603 Asians and boomer population and tough-on-crime laws than mandated longer sentences, Pacific islanders. As a percentage of population, Whites McBride said. It’s not clear if more violent inmates mean that conditions inside the 13 prisons are more dangerous. Female guard Jayme Biendl was strangled to death inside the chapel of the Monroe Correctional Complex on Jan. 29. Court records show inmate Byron Scherf — who is 52 and serv- ing a life sentence for rape — confessed to detectives in a videotaped interview. Biendl is the first corrections officer to be killed on the job in decades. Officials at Teamsters Local 117, which represents corrections officers, believes the prison population is more dangerous than it used to be. The closure of McNeil Island will only make that worse, said Tracey Thompson, chief executive officer of the union. “Overcrowding with a lot more violent criminals in the system is going to be a recipe for disaster,” Thompson said. The union also contends that too many prisoners are being reclassified by prison administrators from violent to nonviolent, which allows them to be placed in the gen- eral population. Scherf, for instance, entered the prison system as a maximum security inmate but had been moved to medium security because of good behavior. The union would like to see an overhaul of the classification system, she said. The state is also expected to have 2,000 more inmates by 2016 and needs a new prison, Thompson said. The crime rate in the Evergreen State is the lowest in two decades. And the state ranks well below the national average in violent crime, mostly because violent offenders are locked away, McBride said. The downside is that Washington suffers above-normal amounts of property crime, because many of those offenders do not receive prison time, McBride said. Internet. France, England, Japan, Australia and many other countries also have forged ahead with national, government-led plans. “We must remember that we are educat- ing our children for jobs that don’t yet exist, to use technologies that haven’t yet been Already an Infrastructure ‘Overcrowding with a lot more violent criminals in the system is going to be a recipe for disaster’ Internet continued from page 1 business in the city. Joanne Hovis, president of Columbia Telecommunications Corp., a public inter- est, communications engineering and con- sulting firm, spoke to the Broadband Strategic Planning group from her office in Maryland, using Skype video con- ferencing. “Providing this utility and plan- ning to meet the community need is a core government function,” Hovis said. “What I see are significant national efforts in our competitor nations, particularly in Asia, but also in Europe, to deploy next generation technologies…” The United States is lagging behind, she said. China has more fiber to home connec- tions than the USA, for example, while in New Zealand 90 percent of homes and busi- nesses already are wired for high speed Portland several years ago took up a full broadband effort which collapsed due to the economy, but not before installing mile upon mile of fiber-optic cable that runs under city streets. These cables consti- tute the infrastructure needed to deliv- er high-speed Internet. Wireless connections can’t work alone; they need to be backed up by these powerful fiber cables. Having them already in place is an advantage that rural Oregon and Washington and many other communities across the country simply do not have. The commercial telecommunications companies that control our high speed Internet access have had little motivation to expand their services to rural areas or high poverty urban neighborhoods. Currently 15 ‘We must remember that we are educating our children for jobs that don’t yet exist’ invented to solve problems that we don’t yet know are problems,” she said. “If we don’t have the technologies and the platform to do this, we are putting ourselves and our children at a terrible disadvantage.” percent of Portland residents don’t have a choice of Internet provider. “The first goal I have in this planning process is what we can do to create compe- tition,” said Mary Beth Henry, second in command at the City of Portland’s Office of Cable Communications and Franchise Management. “Without competition you don’t have a market and you don’t have choice.” Perhaps one of the most intriguing ideas is that universal broadband could save gov- ernment, business and private citizens a lot of money. How? “What if we had robust, affordable broad- band, so everyone could telecommute one day a week,” Henry suggests. “You would- n’t have to build so many roads. You would put less stress on TriMet. We could reduce carbon emissions and make progress toward our sustainability goals.” february 23, 2011 The Seattle Skanner page 3
