Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
We don't know if there has as yet been any empirical research done on how interested media consumers are in online crime mapping — and how good the coverage is — but there is a body of literature debating readers' interest in crime per se. It would seem to be a pretty good bet, though, that if people are interested in crime AND if more and more are going online via broadband, that some dynamic crime maps would get some hits.
Remember that crime mapping is not just about pushing digital push-pins on a map, GoogleMap or otherwise. “Journey to Crime” maps or maps showing where a car was stolen and when it was recovered can provide interesting insights.
Here are some links recently posted to the CrimeMapping listserv that could be of value to journalists:
Journey-after-crime: How Far and to Which Direction DO They Go? http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/boston2004/papers/Lu.ppt
Linking Offender Residence Probability Surfaces to a Specific Incident Location http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/dallas2001/Gore.doc
Journey to Crime Estimation http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/CRIMESTAT/files/CrimeStatChapter.10.pdf
Applications for Examining the Journey-to-Crime Using Incident-Based Offender Residence Probability Surfaces http://pqx.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/7/4/457
The Geography of Transit Crime: http://www.uctc.net/papers/550.pdf
See, too: Paulsen, Derek J. “WRONG SIDE OF THE TRACKS: EXPLORING THE ROLE OF NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF HOMICIDE IN SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTING DANGEROUS PLACES.” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 9(3) (2002) 113-127
Sometimes journalists have a tendency to be too literal. We want to ask a question and we want the response to be a quote that is without ambiguity. One that's fills in some of the space between our anecdotes. But other times, we need tools that work like a periscope, a device that allows us to not look at the object directly but through a helpful lens. Such periscopes for analyzing the economy are indirect indicators. Monday's (5 Dec. 2005) NYTimes' Business Section was loaded with references to such indicators that journos could keep in mind when looking for devices to show and explain what's happening. Check out “What's Ahead: Blue Skies, or More Forecasts of Them?” Be sure to click on the link “Graphic: Indicators From Everyday Life“ Another indirector was mentined Sunday on National Public Radio in “Economic Signs Remain Strong“ There, an economist said he tracks changes in the “titanium dioxide” data, the compound is used in all white paint and reflects manufacturing production.
Kudos to Derek Willis and Adrian Holovaty of The Washington Post for the Washingtonpost.com site “U.S. Congress Votes Database.” One element we find of recent and special interest is the “late night votes” variables for both the House and Senate. With a little more probing and data slicing and dicing, it would make an interesting bit of visual statistics/infographics to do a longitudinal comparison of the time of votes in various congresses. This site/searchable database is a fine example of how investing in some basic data preparation can create the potential for a ton of stories. Why, for example, do Democrats have such a preponderance (18 out of 20) of Representatives on the “missed votes” list, but only 9 out of 20 on the similar list for the Senate? This is also a fine example of how a newspaper can do good things for itself while doing good things for the community and readers. This database gives the WP reporters and editors a quick look-up of Congressional activity, the kind of fact and detail that can enrich a story. At the same time, citizens can turn to this value-added form of the public record to answer their own questions. Derek Willis wrote to the news librarians listserv: “Folks, It's not part of a story or series, but the Post today launched a site that may prove useful to your newsrooms or even as an inspiration to learn Python: a congressional votes database that covers the 102nd-109th congresses (1991-present). Currently browsable, we're working on adding a search engine and other features to it. Adrian Holovaty, who works for washingtonpost.com, and I assembled the data and he built the web framework to display it. All of the data is gathered using Python, the database backend is PostgreSQL and the web framework is Django.”
A couple of articles have passed across our desk in recent days that illustrate the impact — and importance of understanding — decentralized (or “distributed”) systems and complex adaptive systems.
For starters, take a look at “Reinventing 911 How a swarm of networked citizens is building a better emergency broadcast system.” http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/warning.html Author Gary Wolf writes: “I've been talking with security experts about one of the thorniest problems they face: How can we protect our complex society from massive but unpredictable catastrophes? The homeland security establishment has spent an immeasurable fortune vainly seeking an answer, distributing useless, highly specialized equipment, and toggling its multicolored Homeland Security Advisory System back and forth between yellow, for elevated, and orange, for high. Now I've come [to Portland, Oregon] to take a look at a different set of tools, constructed outside the control of the federal government and based on the notion that the easier it is for me to find out about a loose dog tying up traffic, the safer I am from a terrorist attack.
“To understand the true nature of warnings, it helps to see them not as single events, like an air-raid siren, but rather as swarms of messages racing through overlapping social networks, like the buzz of gossip. Residents of New Orleans didn't just need to know a hurricane was coming. They also needed to be informed that floodwaters were threatening to breach the levees, that not all neighborhoods would be inundated, that certain roads would become impassible while alternative evacuation routes would remain open, that buses were available for transport, and that the Superdome was full.
“No central authority possessed this information. Knowledge was fragmentary, parceled out among tens of thousands of people on the ground. There was no way to gather all these observations and deliver them to where they were needed. During Hurricane Katrina, public officials from top to bottom found themselves locked within conventional channels, unable to receive, analyze, or redistribute news from outside. In the most egregious example, Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff said in a radio interview that he had not heard that people at the New Orleans convention center were without food or water. At that point they'd been stranded two days.
“By contrast, in the system Botterell created for California, warnings are sucked up from an array of sources and sent automatically to users throughout the state. Messages are squeezed into a standard format called the Common Alerting Protocol, designed by Botterell in discussion with scores of other disaster experts. CAP gives precise definitions to concepts like proximity, urgency, and certainty. Using CAP, anyone who might respond to an emergency can choose to get warnings for their own neighborhood, for instance, or only the most urgent messages. Alerts can be received by machines, filtered, and passed along. The model is simple and elegant, and because warnings can be tagged with geographical coordinates, users can customize their cell phones, pagers, BlackBerries, or other devices to get only those relevant to their precise locale.” Second item of interest I'm sure many of you noted Dexter Filkins Pg1 lead story in the NYT on Friday, 2 Dec. 2005. The online version headline is “Profusion of Rebel Groups Helps Them Survive in Iraq.” That, unfortunately, lacks the truth and insight of the print version headline: “Loose Structure of Rebels Helps them Survive in Iraq — While Al Qaeda Gains Attention, Many Small Groups Attack on Their Own.“
It seems that finally someone in the journalism community has figured out that what's happening in Iraq — and around the world — is a decentralize, CAS. Too bad journalists — journalism educators, students and professionals — haven't been exposed to the concepts and vocabulary to really present the problem in all its, ahem, complexity.
A recent edition of MIT's Technology Review tells a tale with direct parallels to analytic journalism. That is, investigators bringing well-known and established analytic tools to new applications. In this case, using computer scans to conduct a “visual autopsies.” See: “Dead Men Do Tell Tales Virtual autopsies reveal clues that forensic pathologists might miss. By John Gartner http://www.technologyreview.com//wtr_15922,1,p1.html?trk=nl
Serious Games Initiative http://www.seriousgames.org/ The Serious Games Initiative is focused on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges facing the public sector. Part of its overall charter is to help forge productive links between the electronic game industry and projects involving the use of games in education, training, health, and public policy. Says information specialists Marylaine Block: “As one who believes nobody should be allowed to run for office until they have played Sim City for at least six months, I think such games have enormous potential for helping people explore complex social problems and possible solutions.”
With newspapers — and news magazine — cutting staff on an almost weekly basis, some of us in journalism are going to have to reinvent ourselves. One of our tenents of Analytic Journalism is simulation modeling, a methodology and analytic tool we believe will be to the social sciences in the 21st century (and journalism IS a social science) what quantum physics was to the hard sciences in the 20th. So here's an interesting opportunity for someone.
“> The Department of Mathematics as the University of California, Los > Angeles is soliciting applications for a postdoctoral fellowship > position in Mathematical and Computational Social Science. The > qualified applicant will work in the UC Mathematical and Simulation > Modeling of Crime Group (UCMaSC), a collaboration between the UCLA > Department of Mathematics, UCLA Department of Anthropology, UC > Irvine Department of Criminology, Law and Society and the Los > Angeles Police Department to study the dynamics of crime hot spot > formation. The research will center on (1) development of formal > models applicable to the study of interacting particle systems, or > multi-agent systems, (2) simulation of these systems and (3) > directed empirical testing of models using contemporary crime data > from Los Angeles and other Southern Californian cities. > > The initial appointment is for one year, with possible renewal for > up to three years. For information regarding the UCMaSC Group visit > > http://paleo.sscnet.ucla.edu/ucmasc.htm > > DUTIES: Work closely with an interdisciplinary team of > mathematicians, social scientists and law enforcement officials to > develop new mathematical and computational methodologies for > understanding crime hot spot formation, diffusion and dissipation. > Responsibilities include teaching one course in the Department of > Mathematics per year, publication and presentation of research > results. > > REQUIRED: A recent Ph.D. in Mathematics, Physics or a related > field. The qualified applicant is expected to have research > experience in one or more areas that would be relevant to the study > of interacting particle/multi-agent systems including, but not > limited to, mathematical and statistical physics, complex systems, > and partial differential equations modeling. The applicant is also > required to have advanced competency in one or more programming > languages/environments (e.g., C++, Java, Matlab). > > Qualified candidates should e-mail a cover let, CV and the phone > numbers, e-mail addresses, and postal addresses of three > individuals who can provide recommendation to: > > Dr. P. Jeffrey Brantingham > Department of Anthropology > 341 Haines Hall > University of California, Los Angeles > Los Angeles, CA 90095″
A piece on calling the elections in Detroit:
BY CHRIS CHRISTOFF FREE PRESS LANSING BUREAU CHIEF
November 10, 2005
What was a viewer to believe?
As polls closed Tuesday, WDIV-TV (Channel 4) declared Freman Hendrix winner of Detroit's mayoral race by 10 percentage points.
WXYZ-TV (Channel 7) showed Hendrix ahead by 4 percentage points, statistically too close to call.
But WJBK-TV (Channel 2) got it right, declaring just after 9 p.m. that Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was ahead, 52% to 48%, which turned out to be almost exactly the final 53%-47% outcome declared many hours later.
And it was vote analyst Tim Kiska who nailed it for WJBK, and for WWJ-AM radio, using counts from 28 of 620 Detroit precincts.
Kiska did it with help from Detroit City Clerk Jackie Currie. She allowed a crew that Kiska assembled to collect the precinct tallies shortly after the polls closed at 8 p.m.
Using what he calls a secret formula, Kiska calculated how those 28 precincts would predict the result citywide.
His formula also assumed that absentee voters chose Hendrix over Kilpatrick by a 2-1 ratio.
That's different from the methods of pollsters who got it wrong Tuesday, Steve Mitchell for WDIV and EPIC/MRA's Ed Sarpolus for WXYZ and the Free Press. Both men used telephone polls, calling people at home during the day and evening and asking how they voted.
It's a more standard method of election-day polling, but Tuesday proved treacherous.
Kiska, a former reporter for the Free Press and Detroit News, has done such election-day predictions since 1974, but said he was nervous Tuesday.
“Every time I go into one of these, my nightmare is I might get it wrong,” said Kiska, a WWJ producer. “I had a bad feeling about this going in. I thought there was going to be a Titanic hitting an iceberg and hoping it wouldn't be me.”
Kiska said he especially felt sorry for his friend Mitchell.
Mitchell said he's been one of the state's most accurate political pollsters over 20 years, but said his Tuesday survey of 800 voters turned out to be a bad sample.
He said polling is inherently risky, and that even well-conducted polls can be wrong one out of 20 times. “I hit number 20 this time.”
For Sarpolus, it's the second Detroit mayoral race that confounded his polls. He was the only major pollster in 2001 who indicated Gil Hill would defeat Kilpatrick.
Sarpolus said the pressure to get poll results on the air quickly made it impossible to adjust his results as real vote totals were made public during the late evening.
Of Kiska, Sarpolus said: “You have to give him credit. … But you have to assume all city clerks are willing to cooperate.”
Contact CHRIS CHRISTOFF at 517-372-8660 or christoff@freepress.com.
For those interested in the forensic process — and in this case, computer forensics — be sure to check out this fine, fine piece of digital detective work by Mark Russinovich, a computer security expert with Sysinternals. He discovered evidence of a “rootkit” on his Windows PC.
We don't think journalists need to know how to DO this kind of deep-diving probing, but we should be aware that it is possible and, broadly speaking, the methods if only to know the appropriate search terms. Through heroic forensic work, he traced the code to First 4 Internet, a British provider of copy-restriction technology that has a deal with Sony to put digital rights management on its CDs. It turns out Russinovich was infected with the software when he played the Sony BMG CD Get Right With the Man by the Van Zant brothers.
Here's WIRED Magazine's take on the story, “The Cover-Up Is the Crime“
And here's what Dan Gillmor had to say about it, with additional links.
Matt Ericson of the NYTimes has delivered yet again a piece of superb infographics. This one, sadly, illustrates the 2000+ U.S. deaths in Iraq. (See “Deaths in Iraq by Month” in the 26 Oct. 2005 story “2,000 Dead: As Iraq Tours Stretch On, a Grim Mark“) William Playfair (1759-1823) was the Scottish engineer and political economist who did the ground-breaking work in visual statistics. Charles Joseph Minard, in the mid-nineteenth century, produced the classic infographic of Napoleon's March to (and retreat from) Moscow. Minard's great work is notable for displaying multiple data sets on a timeline as well as their geographical relationships.
Ericson has done something similar by showing the combat deaths in Iraq from the March 2003 invasion until mid-Oct. 2005 as the occupation continues. Ericson shows not just the numbers, but the branch of service, the locations of the deaths and the causes of death (i.e. explosive devices, vehicle or plane crashes, etc.).
It's a brilliant piece of work that also demonstrates the added value that very good journalists and their editors can bring to what should be public discussion. But this kind of work doesn't happen overnight, nor is it cheap to do. (Are you listening Knight-Ridder, Gannett, et al.?)
We would only hope that someone at the Times would work to develop a flash program/presentation that would, in a relatively automatic mannter, constantly update this important informational display.
