It looks like the Baby Lilly case is rapidly coming to closure. According to the BBC, Rachael Davies has admitted to being the mother and concealing the birth of Baby Lilly:

Baby Lily mother concealed birth

Rachael Davies admitted concealing a birth

A woman has admitted concealing the birth of her stillborn daughter whose body was found by a Warwickshire river.

Rachael Davies, 26, of Wharrage Road, Alcester, was arrested after police used DNA testing to link her to the child, nicknamed Lily by officers.

Stratford-on-Avon magistrates heard Lily was found near the River Alne last May. She had suffered a fractured skull and collarbone.

Davies will be sentenced at Warwick Crown Court at a later date.

The court heard Davies kept the baby’s body in her car overnight before dumping it, sometime between January and May last year.

Apparently the murder investigation was dropped, even though the baby sustained a skull fracture and a broken collarbone. However, I couldn’t find anything that detailed whether these injuries were post-mortem or not. According to David Everett, the prosecutor, “She said it showed no signs of life when it [sic] had been born.” From an earlier article describing Baby Lilly’s injuries (emphasis mine):

Det Ch Insp Adrian Pearson, of Warwickshire Police, said Lilly was found in a Mothercare bag. She was newly born and still had her umbilical cord attached.

Mr Pearson said: “Since the discovery of her body, we’ve been able to establish that she suffered significant and traumatic head injuries after she was born.

“We believe that she died very soon after birth, but that she didn’t sustain those injuries in the course of birth or in the course of pregnancy. They were inflicted on her very soon after she was born.”

OK… while I guess it’s possible that the injuries could have occurred post-mortem (say by banging against rocks and such in a river), I’d like to know the full explanation there. Personally, I don’t get how she can argue that she didn’t know she was pregnant, and then, giving birth to a stillborn baby, decided the best course of action was to dump the body. With her pajamas and an a bag from the place she worked. But apparently, that’s what happened.

As I said before, I don’t know if the justice system will be able to bring justice to this, only closure. For times like this, I can only hope that Ms. Davies actually does feel remorse and guilt for what she’s done, and that guilt in this case will administer its own justice, meted out fairly and appropriately. And I do hope that Baby Lilly was stillborn. It’s just too horrible to think what must have been done to her had she not.

Greg Linden makes some interesting points regarding metasearch, aka federated search. When I created MetaCrawler back in 1994, I did so with the belief that combining the results of multiple engines would provide better results than any single engine — such as WebCrawler, Lycos, InfoSeek, and OpenText. It turns out this is true. More importantly, it’s still true. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN / Live Search all provide good results, and when they differ a simple voting strategy to combine results makes the sum greater than any of the individual results.

So why isn’t MetaCrawler dominant instead of just a minor blip compared with the big three?

One of the key downsides with metasearch is performance — the metasearch engine is always a little slower than the average engine. But is performance the only issue? Or is it so dominant? Not clear.

What about operational reliability? An issue with federation is that each federated service needs to be available and reliable — each system needs to be able to handle the load. With federation, especially federating external systems, operational issues are more likely, and scale is more difficult. As query volume increases, each federated service needs to be scaled up appropriately as well.

Could it be the brand? Certainly, brand + quality is better than either in isolation, but does brand + quality surpass poor branding and better quality? Again, not clear.

I can’t say for sure… it’s probably some combination of all of the above. This being said, in thinking about it, I suspect operational reliability and to an extent control over data will win out from a business perspective. Federation means others are in control of part of the solution — and even if the others are part of the same company but different groups, it can still be difficult to ensure that the federated services are in sync with the entry point. So, to that extent, it should come as no surprise that folks like Google will advocate putting everything in one index.

When I was in Scotland last year, a local case on the news was that of a newborn baby girl found dead near the River Alne near Stratford in Warwickshire. I’m not completely sure why this story grabbed my attention. Sadly, stories of premature deaths of infants and toddlers are not rare, but this one struck me. I know my own daughter can be trying - very, very trying - but still, dump her body in a river just boggles the mind [Ed: apparently, she was stillborn.]. The authorities named the baby Lilly.

Back in December, a woman was arrested and subsequently bailed over the matter. Then, on March 7th, 2007, the woman was charged for concealing a birth regarding the baby.

I’m not sure if any justice system can actually bring justice for this. I suspect that the mother’s guilt will be its own justice, regardless of whether or not there’s prison time. And perhaps they’ll find the father and figure out what his role in this has been, if any. There’s nothing really to be done for this tragedy, sadly, but bring some measure of closure to it. But I do hope that this will finally bring some closure to things.

Update: The woman has now appeared in court and has been named / photographed, although I’m a bit hesitant to post all that here. Once someone gets the tag of child killer it doesn’t come off, even if it turns out that they’re innocent, so I’ll leave the naming until after the verdict. This being said, let’s hope the British justice system gets to it!

Update 3/30/07: The woman, Rachael Davies, has pleaded guilty to concealment of a birth, but no murder charges were filed.

Update 4/1/07: Minor editing to this article, as it’s getting linked to and there are some things upon re-reading that don’t convey what I wanted to say.

Update 4/28/07: Sentencing scheduled for June 15th (was June 27th).

Update 8/17/07: After numerous delays, Rachael Davies has been sentenced to two years probation. From the Stratford Observer:

A JUDGE has sentenced the mother of a newborn found dumped in the River Alne to two years’ probation.

Rachel Davies, 26, of Wharrage Road, Alcester, had admitted at a hearing ahead of today’s sentencing at Warwick Crown Court to a charge of concealment of birth.

She said she had no idea she was pregnant until she went into labour one night in the home she shared with her parents. She told the court she gave birth whilst alone in the kitchen and panicked when the child, later named Baby Lilly by police, appeared lifeless.

Davies, who worked at Mothercare in Leamington at the time, put the baby’s body in her car overnight before calling work the next morning to say she was going to be late. She drove to Great Alne where she dumped Lilly in a plastic bag in the River Alne just off Wood Lane, sometime between January and May last year

A 13-year-old boy out walking with his family on May 11 2006 discovered the body along with blood-stained clothes and towels also in the bag.

Lilly had suffered significant injuries including a fractured skull and Warwickshire Police launched a murder inquiry. It was later discontinued when further evidence came to light suggesting the newborn had been stillborn.

More than six months later Davies was traced through Lilly’s father. She initially denied any involvement but DNA proved she was the baby’s mother.

And so, finally, closure to this tragic matter.

A random topic has come up that I wanted to get some feelers on, so I thought I’d make a post.

Question: How long do online communities live?

I’ll forego classifying communities in various ways… what I’m mostly talking about are online social communities of critical mass that live for at least a year. For example, say your blog has enough comments that it’s worth creating a forum for everyone who reads your blog, and over time the forum takes on a life of itself. People come not as much for the blog, but for the people on the forum, and talk about whatever, not just the blog topics.

How long does such a community last? And if we look at all communities, is there a power-law / Zipf distribution of lifespan, with many dying early and a few achieving immortality (or at least outliving the study)? Or could it be more of a Gaussian distribution, with most communities living within a certain range?

The reason I ask is that the Internet and Web have achieved critical mass, and enough time has gone by that this interesting technological and social phenomenon is having significant effects on people. I remember sniggering a bit at some friends back in 1993 who met online… geek love. But now, meeting someone online is perfectly acceptable, and there are several booming businesses that prove that. But while people have studied real communities for quite some time, there appears to be some differences in online communities that I’m seeing that provide some interesting dynamics.

The Problem of the Benevolent Dictator

Something that differs wildly between online communities and live communities is that online communities require tools, such as forums, blogs, and so forth, and these tools require administration. Somebody has to have the power to manage the settings, deal with moderation (or lack thereof), handle memberships, and ultimately police the community. In a live community, if there are rules (such as a country club, where there are membership dues and rules), there’s a committee there to evaluate transgressions and police effectively. In a live community without official rules, such as a group of friends or people with a shared interest, policing is more by majority consent. A single person can’t boot somebody typically; everyone, or at least most people, in the community need to agree.

In an online community, the admin can just boot somebody, usually just like that. In the forums I’ve frequented, while I’ve seen rules regarding good conduct, there’s rarely a process for handling the transgression besides having people with appropriate privileges simply boot the offender. Now, if the offender is just being a troll, fine, the community is certainly fine with that. But what happens when a reasonable member of the community ends up having a disagreement with the admin or a moderator with the power to boot?

I’m not sure if it’s reasonable anymore to just say, “Hey, it’s a frickin’ Internet group. Who cares?” People establish relationships in all sorts of ways, and chat, e-mail, and forum posts are every bit as reasonable as face-to-face conversation. People are still hurt by words, and people will react. And while it’d be nice to believe that people are always reasonable and act with full information, in reality people are emotional and act with minimal information.

So invariably, in any community, I wonder how long it takes before two people have some kind of disagreement, and what are the right factors for a community to survive and thrive, versus die either violently or by slowly drifting apart? Of late, there appear to be tons and tons of new communities / forums springing out all over the place. I wonder what the trend will be… will there be a constant number of communities, in some proportion to the number of people online? Will the number of communities continue to grow and outpace the growth of people coming online? Or will many communities die to make room for new ones? And what will end up happening to people as those communities die?

If you know of any research in the area, please let me know. So far, my own (albeit short) literature search hasn’t turned up much. Perhaps there’s just not enough data yet. But it’s been a very interesting brain exercise for me while I’ve been cooped up inside the house.

I’m in Pittsburgh for the week, and the weather has been a bit inclement. I’d forgotten just how biting the cold can be out here. Back in Seattle, even when it was snowy (or icy the days after), a couple wool baselayers and a jacket and I was good to go cycling. Here… I don’t want to leave the house! I don’t even want to go into the (unheated) garage to get a bottle of water (which is nice and chilled, btw). Brrrr!!!
I know, just random. Had to get it off my chest.

I know, I haven’t been posting. I suck. Let’s see if I can’t post something while I’m out here.