All of academia has a replication crisis at the moment however this is less theoretical than most and easily passes the sniff test.

You know how bismuth crystals have all sorts of different colors? It’s essentially growing a “bismuth crystals” on top of a cmos camera, except the “bismuth crystal” is much more random and the specific wavelength of light it lets through is dependent on some physics fuckery.

Will it ever be commercially produced? I doubt it, but hope I’m wrong:

• the lenses will not perfectly overlap each sensor resulting in many having ‘leakage’ from other frequencies resulting in a high signal to noise ratio
• there doesn’t seem to be a way to guarantee a consistent number of sensors per frequency resulting in highly variable sensitivity per frequency.
• Relying on randomness and only releasing the ones that are “good enough” is a fairly common practice but the yields are abysmal which causes the price to skyrocket.
• The use of a spectrogram is primarily as a scientific instrument, and an instrument which has wildly variable sensitivity/selectivity per sensor is a cause for concern.

I however do see potential uses for a cheap handheld machine that can do a quick and dirty material composition check. Contaminant tester (drugs, assembly lines, chemical stocks, etc.), hobbyist labs, chemical reaction monitor, etc.

“killed by Israeli fire” is quite the choice of phrase.

That “short time” and odd date range (January to April) should both be red flags to be highly suspicious of them taking credit for external factors and cherry picking data/date ranges.

My analysis was based on taking them at face value as being the sole reason for the change, with the knowledge that the numbers they are reporting are highly deceptive. Even from that naive perspective their numbers are bad.

However, the data shows a sharp increase in the murder rate starting around 2014 due to unknown causes. The dropoff from 2010-2014 is often attributed to the defeat of the CIA backed Shower Posse gang after the Tivoli incursion in 2010.

I would bet that the current high murder rate is due, in part, to IMF loans (starting in 2013), global transition away from sugarcane to beets (predominantly EU in 2015), CIA involvement and COVID tourism impacts dramatically destabilizing the local economy. That’s something that no amount of killing by the government sanctioned cartel will have any positive impact on.

2024 homicide rate was ~40.1 per 100,000. Jamaica population is ~2.8 million so ~1100 murders/year. 37% decrease in homicides is ~420/year. Increase in police killings is 67.

Assuming you can attribute the change totally to whatever the police are doing (almost certainly not the reality) that puts the situation as a 1:6 trolley problem.

Is it an improvement? Technically yes, but imagine anything else working that way and it should be pretty obvious the JFJ is right that this is insane.