Word: mosaical
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...fatally shot a classmate, so school officials decided to be on the safe side. They brought the drawing to the attention of Gary Underwood, chief of police for the city's public schools, who ran the child's case through the department's new computer "threat-assessment" program, called Mosaic-2000. With a battery of 42 questions--Is the student harassed by peers? Has the student recently experienced rejection?--Mosaic purports to calculate rough odds on whether a child will turn violent...
Long used by law-enforcement and government agencies to examine threats made against their personnel, Mosaic software is now being field-tested in about 20 public school districts from Jonesboro, Ark., to Los Angeles to Salem, Ore. In its assessment of the stick-figure artist, the program suggested that the boy shared several traits with past violent offenders and guided the school to put him in counseling and under close watch. "When those kids walked into Columbine with bombs, no one was expecting it," says Underwood. "We're now on alert if this child comes into school with a bulge...
There are more specific challenges to Mosaic's pedigree. The U.S. Marshals Service and the L.A. police department may swear by the earlier versions of Mosaic, but many psychologists insist it has not been through a proper scholarly review. Mike Furlong, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, recently test-drove the Mosaic-2000 program and concluded, "This is just a private firm asking America's schools to create an open experiment." De Becker says his method is scheduled to undergo two academic evaluations...
...goal. Anderson defies expectation specifically by refusing to produce such hurdles. While he has the opportunity to create critical wins or losses in each story, he refuses to make plot take over and refreshingly redirects these moments, remaining faithful to character and allowing conflicted desire to obstruct itself. The mosaic storytelling of the film, handled with exquisite skill by editor Dylan Tichenor, is well formatted for this type of examination because in the absence of event, it keeps our interest suspended by cutting between storylines...
This doesn't mean that Robbins tries to be all things to all people, a fatal flaw of most directors who try to attract mainstream audiences. Clearly he had a very specific vision in mind for this film, which is theatrical in style and pointedly liberal in its mosaic-like reconstruction of a chapter of American history. Robbins wins us over by playing it fast and loose with material that could easily have appeared dry and familiar, so that the occasional weak link and oversimplification in the film's interlocking web of stories seems irrelevant in the face...