Slashdot Mirror

The reality is different - crime rates aren't much different than elsewhere

I'm not sure if you are comparing like to like. It's been a long time since I took courses outside my areas of specialty (~ 20 years), but when I was in school (college) theories of social density and its correlation to behavioral pathology were widely accepted. Much available data supported the correlation and many studies were published.

The general idea is that when you increase the number of people per square unit of surface area "deviant" behavior among humans increases. Rape and murder is part of this pathology, but so are things like indecent exposure, assault, swearing, etc. I don't have any judgments about such behavior. I'm just saying that crime rates, if we are to believe studies that link social density to behavioral pathology, do differ depending on where you live. Crime in a rural area (low social density) will be less than crime in an urban area. This means that a country like Australia (an entire continent) will have less crime per capita than, say, Los Angeles.

I googled for a bit using "social density" and "crime" but couldn't come up with anything with that "gotta click" feel. It might be because such theories have been debunked (unlikely), are no longer in vogue (likely), or something else (very likely).

Here's the front end of one article that you need JSTOR access to read. Maybe others (or me later) can follow up with better links showing one way or the other. I actually should be doing other research at the moment. : )

Actually, copyright was originally granted to the publishers, not the authors.
http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/the-statute -of-queen-anne/
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0149-6611(192103) 36%3A3%3C146%3AQAAANO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U

The USA constitution allows congress to grant copyrights to the authors, but for the purpose of promoting the arts and sciences. Any rewards that the authors or publishers get from it should be evaluated as a means, not an end. By that standard, I think our current laws are overbearing and too restrictive to get the job done.
http://www.farcaster.com/presentations/copyright-d rei97/tsld009.htm

A little googling will go a long way (and use of that term will likely be considered by Google a violation of Google's IP)

http://vaw.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/5/2/16 4
http://vaw.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/7/9/96 4
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0899-2851(199821) 206%3C12%3ACHIFSH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4
http://polyzine.com/arabwomen.html

I wasn't really speaking of Afghanistan, but I believe that now that the US is preventing their tradional means of killing of those that violate their usual morals that they'll adapt like these other neighboring countries and you'll see these honor killings happen there as well. You don't get it. I'm not saying that they are worse off. I'm saying that the girls are in more danger once they actually start acting westernized or sexually active and living what we'd consider and normal teenage life. I bet it isn't happening right now because most are more afraid of the US than of the women. Give it 5-10 years while most have forgotten Afghanistan or Iraq and see how those female suicide rates have climbed. I was first made aware of this through an AOL news article (happening in Turkey) and was surprised. The families were using every means at their disposal to make the female feel that their life was worthless and that to do the best for their family that they should kill themselves. I've just tried searching for any data concerning Afghanistan suicides or honor killings and haven't yet found anything. That only means that the data or news reports aren't open to you or I. It doesn't mean these things aren't happening over there.

Did you have an actual quibble with my post, or did you just want to be a jackass?

This study says 20%. This one says most of the bottom 21% can't figure out the price difference between two advertised products. The National Institute for Literacy says nearly 50% of Americans are in the lowest two levels of literacy - 20% higher than Sweden.

Anything else?

The problem with chemicals such as DDT is that they are persistent within the environment, and bioaccumulate. The levels used in a wetland to control mosquitos may only be low, but still be enough to damage the higher-order predators, as well as the mosquitos (ie: 1 frog gets a dose of x mg. A bird eats 10 frogs, bringing its dose to 10x. A cat eats 10 birds, which makes its dose 100x, etc)

DDT can also mimic oestrogren in some species, causing developmental problems in male offspring

It can also cause deformities and immuno supression.

They actually are probably a huge contributor to the rate of research since they have enable researchers to more quickly find information.

No.

Looking for research information on Google is like looking using Wikipedia to quote information for a paper.

We researchers use the following (between other) places to do serious research:
Scirus
Citeseer
ACM digital library
JStor
PubMed

There are some other specialized catalogues for Economics (Jstor is quite good) or other non computer science related even directly Elsevier.

Of course your University library may be useful and proceedings tend to help too.

that is just what i thought when i read the article, had a look in goggle scholar and found this abstract. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0080-4622(1984022 4)305%3A1122%3C145%3ATAOHIF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7 it is because of vortices. the reason people did not understand how the bee's and other incests did not fly was because of there flat wings, they did not understand how lift was created with a flat structure, the theory went that the bee's were "swimming" in Air not actually flying as such, and that would not have let them be able to fly at there flap rate.

Plus the article that asserted this in the first place is crap and only has been cited in the media and not other scientific papers (prove me wrong someone).

Peer reviewed science:

Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants J. P. McBride, R. E. Moore, J. P. Witherspoon, R. E. Blanco
Science, New Series, Vol. 202, No. 4372 (Dec. 8, 1978) , pp. 1045-1050

Abstract
Radiation doses from airborne effluents of model coal-fired and nuclear power plants (1000 megawatts electric) are compared. Assuming a 1 percent ash release to the atmosphere (Environmental Protection Agency regulation) and 1 part per million of uranium and 2 parts per million of thorium in the coal (approximately the U.S. average), population doses from the coal plant are typically higher than those from pressurized-water or boiling-water reactors that meet government regulations. Higher radionuclide contents and ash releases are common and would result in increased doses from the coal plant. The study does not assess the impact of nonradiological pollutants or the total radiological impacts of a coal versus a nuclear economy.

Long term political and economic development will need a higher proportion of society educated at a higher level. These laptops are a wonderful start IMHO. But it also requires cheap knowledge if the impact is going to continue throughout a child's life. Once you get up to degree level knowledge becomes hidden away in obscure academic journals and pricey monographs. It doesn't take a university education to understand this stuff but right now it requires a university education to get hold of this stuff. Organisations like http://www.jstor.org/ and Ebscohost have online monopolies of most academic journals and charge a fortune to access them - despite most research coming from publicly funded scholars (at least in the UK). This kind of knowledge needs to be opened up, not just in the third world but here too. File-sharing pdfs, anyone?

Once a planet with life and industry is located, you then simply start scanning frequencies for non-random signals. At this point, Earth fails the test and they move on*.

Heh. Actually, an interesting paper on the topic was published in Science back in January 1978. You probably need a subscription to read it. The title is "Eavesdropping: The Radio Signature of the Earth" by W.T.Sullivan III, S.Brown, C.Wetherill. Maybe I should nab a copy of the paper and put it online somewhere ...

To summarize, they considered the radio signal of Earth as it would appear to a remote radio astronomer listening in at various latitudes. They assumed that no content could be decoded; only the radio spectrum was measurable. The idea was that the aliens had technology roughly comparable to our own, and could record our signal over time, and analyze it. They calculated that the spectrum of several hundred of our broadcast stations could be reliably measured out to at least 25 light years, and 250 light years for the military radar.

Their conclusions were interesting. For example, the usual doppler effects, plus knowing the size and mass of the sun, gave the Earth's orbit and the fact that we have a large satellite.

But the fun part is based on the fact that our strong radio signals (military radar and commercial television) are strongly directional, with most of the energy going out horizontally. So the remote astronomers would receive mostly signal from the Earth's limb. Broadcasts use narrow frequencies, so a particular station would appear in the spectrum very briefly and fade. 12 hours later, most of them would reappear, slightly doppler shifted up or down. Then 24 hours later (23:56 actually), the original frequency would appear. They now know our rotation period, and from the amount of the doppler shift, the planet's radius can be calculated. This will depend on the station's latitude, of course, and the max is the actual radius of the planet.

Over a period of a year, a collection of the broadcast stations can be collected, and when they are detected gives their longitude. We know latitudes from the doppler shifts. So we have a rough map of the broadcast stations. One thing that stands out in this map is that the planet has two kinds of surfaces, and almost all the stations are on the smaller of these. From the planet's orbit and the sun's brightness, we infer that it's a world with liquid water. The fixed positions of the stations (determined over several years) tells us that the stations are on land, which is roughly 1/4 of the planet's surface; the other surface is ocean. The stations are clustered strongly on the boundary, so the planet's advanced species is a land animal that likes to live near ocean shores.

To quote a summary paragraph:

After several years of careful monitoring of the intensity and frequency variations of several hundred stations, the observer could deduce (i) the complete orbit of the earth; (ii) the existence of station broadcast schedules influenced by the sun; (iii) the presence of an ionosphere and perhaps even a troposphere; (iv) the size, rotation rate, and axis of rotation of the earth; (v) a complete map of the stations; (vi) the mass and distance of the moon; (vii) the size of the radiating antennas; and (viii) various cultural inferences concerning our civilization.

It's an interesting read. I wonder if anyone has done a similar study since then? Google finds 21 matches for the article's title, but they all seem to be bibliographic references. It could be interesting to dig into some of the matches and see what else turns up.

Two objections:

1. First, is there an objective test that ranks people from best to worst? If not, how do we determine "best" in a way that is blind to the prejudices of those doing the hiring?

   If prejudice does, however unconsciously, play a part in the hiring procedure, would it not be sensible to apply a correction (affirmative action) just as you would apply a correction to any other measurement susceptible to systematic error?

2. Second, even in the absence of malicious prejudice, George Ackerlof, in his Nobel-prize-winning paper "The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" demonstrated that

   Employers may refuse to hire members of minority groups for certain types of jobs. This decision may not reflect irrationality of prejudice---but profit maximization. For race may serve as a good statistic for the applicant's social background, quality of schooling, and general job capabilities. ... For an employer may make a rational decision not to hire any members of these groups in responsible positions---because it is difficult to distinguish those with good job qualifications from those with bad qualifications. This type of decision is clearly what George Stigler had in mind when he wrote, " ... Enrico Fermi would have been a gardiner, Von Neumann a checkout clerk at a drugstore."

   Thus, from a purely mathematical treatment of markets we find that the cost of acquiring information might lead rational employers to choose not to hire minority applicants, even if they are the best qualified. When the free market fails to give the best-qualified applicant a fair chance, affirmative action becomes necessary to correct for this systematic bias.

Actually, Duke is also popular because in 1996 they were a hotbed for the deconstructionist/post-modernist cultural movement with their journal Social Text, until Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, submitted a deliberately pseudoscientific paper and they published it.

On the same day the volume of Social Text with his article came out, Sokal announced in another journal, Lingua Franca, that the article had, in fact, been a hoax, making Duke look like a bunch of idiots.

On my forum we had a fight about this. Someone posted a state highschool graduation test from the eairly 1900s and noted that few highschool students today could pass it. Well I looked at it and I can tell you why right off the bat, it was a bunch of route memorization. Knowing lots of little facts was what was needed. No logic, no critical thinking, no higher reasoning. Knowing geogrphic and historical facts, and simple arithmatic was what you needed.

That exam story is BS, and Snopes.com explains it.

We HAVE devices with perfect memories, computers.

Tell that to anybody who has lost data despite following a backup plan.

IF you need the precise information, you log in to JStor and look it up.

I didn't see any local public libraries in the list of participating libraries; I saw only university libraries open only to current university students. How does somebody who has already graduated from one of the institutions on the list become an "Authorized User of the JSTOR archive" as the TOS puts it? As good as computers and computer networks are at storing and spreading information, they're pretty darn good at hiding information from the general public (apart from the black market).

I'm having a hard time actually finishing it, but I'm fascinated by Stephenson's view of the world at that time... all these very bright people, who as a _culture_ just realized that they don't know _anything_ and want to figure it all out!

Through most of European history received wisdom a la Aristotle was the definition of how the world worked. Remarkably suddenly, this was overcome, and the world changed. Or rather, the perception of the world changed, and people set out to learn the way things really worked, instead of accepting explanations that were centuries old.

It's just amazing.

If you are so inclined, and are at an institution that subscribes, you can read the original articles online - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society are online back to their origins in 1665 at JSTOR (which by the way is a great resource).

scripsit Mose250:

I'm not sure exactly how you'd define "young people," but it's been my experience that the fallability of internet resources has been one of the most common topics drilled into the heads of middle- and high-school students, at least in the past decade or so.

My familiarity is only with undergrads, as I don't really have any contact with younger students. I find that too many of our students seem to think that research begins and ends with an AOL or MSN search. There's very little use even of something like JSTOR, much less actual paper (gasp!) journals...

In the light of this I'm not surprised that the print sales are down. I'm perhaps more surprised that the electronic ones aren't doing better - results from the venerable Wikipedia (generally) excepted, I'd trust an encyclopedia before Google for general basic research. It's not so much a problem for me, but young people don't have as finely tuned BS detectors as older folks; they believe anything they read on the net. It's near impossible to get them to limit themselves to peer-reviewed sources in their papers, and they really do come back with some absolute crap from some random website.

Parents would do well to consider this when weighing Google against a good CD/DVD-ROM or a subscription to britannica.com; it's a lot cheaper than the print version used to be, and it's guaranteed quality information. Google is an invaluable tool, but it doesn't replace traditional sources of information. (At least until Google Print comes out of beta - then we really will be somewhere.)

In Windows XP, one click selects a file, then a second click (and a short delay) renders the file name editable. In Mac OS X, any click on the file name renders the file name editable. In my experience, on both platforms, the file renaming functionality is triggered by accident far more often than it is intentionally. Gnome, and the Nautilus file manager (the equivalent of Windows Explorer or Mac OS Finder) allows you to rename files only by right-clickling and choosing "Rename..." from the context-menu. While it may seem like the function is "hidden away" behind the context-menu, give that renaming files is a far less frequent tasks then double-clicking on them or moving them (click+drag), this is an appropriate trade-off. Accidentally triggered the file-renaming functionality in both Windows and Mac OS, I'm happy to report that the Gnome technique is much better.

Wait, so just because the guy is clearly incompetent at using any form of pointer input device, the GUI is to blame?!? I use Mac OS X every day and I think it is far more efficient at renaming files, which I have to do regularly when downloading journal articles from the likes of Jstor.

In OS X, if you click on the filename then the rename option becomes available. If you click on the icon, then you select the file. Predictable behaviour in my opinion, and allows you move and select files just as quickly, but rename even quicker.

This guy is clearly looking for reasons to justify GNOME's eccentricities and poor design, and seems to be ignoring the immense research that Microsoft and Apple put into interface design.

For matematics, computer science, applied mathematics, physics, statistics, and other things in that vein, the indespensible resource is MathSciNet, a service of the AMS (American Mathematical Society. Almost every article is reviewed, many have abstracts, and all have citations. Some have the full text of the article (or links to it).

You should also check out jstor.org, sciencedirect, and springerlink.

I trust a review if the reviewer seems knowledgeable and insightful. I buy a lot of opera on DVD and it's pretty easy to figure out who knows what he's talking about and who doesn't. With cookbooks, I look for people's description of what actually cooking the dishes was like. With technical books, I skip the "I loved it, you should buy it too" reviews and head for the long ones that discuss in depth the strengths and weaknesses of the author's presentation of the material. With other topics, YMMV, but this has worked for me and I have generally felt that I understood pretty much what I was buying.

Consumer reports it ain't, but most of what I buy at Amazon falls into the category of experience rather than search goods (see G.J. Stigler, "The Economics of Information," J. Pol. Econ., 69, 221 (1961); see also H.R. Varian, "Economics and Search," Plenary address at ACM SIGIR 1999). The question is, of what value is the time it would take you to research the quality of Amazon merchandise via a more trusted source than customer reviews?

Doing a search on Econlit, I find the following published in top journals:

1) Duggan, Mark. "More Guns, More Crime" Journal of Political Economy 109 (5), October 2001, pp. 1086-1114. Somebody cited a working version of this paper below. I've read this article and it is well done.

2) a symposium on this subject at The American Economic Association Annual Meeting in 1998, consisting of 4 short papers. They were published in American Economic Review 88 (2), May 1998, pp. 458-479. These articles did not undergo anonymous peer review, although they did undergo editorial review and represent about 8 different authors (writing in pairs of 2) which were solicited by the conference organizer. Presumably they have some diversity of opinion on the subject.

Some academic institutions have acces to JSTOR, which has the American Economic Review symposium articles available for download. Most people will have to go to a university library to get these references.

2 points:
Firstly many people are reading the questioner's comment about "100lbs of TECHNICAL books" to mean "100lbs of COMPUTER books". Just looking over to my bookshelves, sure ther's a good few computer books out there; also about 30 kilos of reference works on palaeontology, some with print runs that made it to 3 figures; also a few tens of kilos of mineralogy references; lots of oilfield structure and stratigraphy analyses and reports ... Very little chance of any of them being on the web anywhere, particularly the "in-house" ones 25 years old.
Second point: a number of the learned journals are addressing this very issue because of library storage space issues. Go to Jstor and particularly to the process description to see how one industrial-scale program goes about doing this. Note in particular the twin parallel paths they use: OCR to produce searchable indices but delivering fax quality PDF images of the original journal pages to preserve complex images, typograpcy and editorial quality.
Another interesting source might be http://www.octavo.com , who amongst other things produce high-quality PDF distributions of historical documents, again linked to a searchable back end produced by OCR again.
The combination of batch, offline OCR and PDF'd images to automatically generate some sort of useable indices to the images seems to have been selected by a number of independant groups.
If you can't be bothered to go the whole hog to build a database, at least scan in the indices so you can do as much searching in the scanned books as you could in the originals.
Not JPEG images - TIFF or PNG. That's a no-brainer. Image contrast is the issue here (for the text sections at least), not absolute image size. My reference library stretches to 1.6GB and is growing steadily (and yes, most of it is copyrighted and legal).

2 points:
Firstly many people are reading the questioner's comment about "100lbs of TECHNICAL books" to mean "100lbs of COMPUTER books". Just looking over to my bookshelves, sure ther's a good few computer books out there; also about 30 kilos of reference works on palaeontology, some with print runs that made it to 3 figures; also a few tens of kilos of mineralogy references; lots of oilfield structure and stratigraphy analyses and reports ... Very little chance of any of them being on the web anywhere, particularly the "in-house" ones 25 years old.
Second point: a number of the learned journals are addressing this very issue because of library storage space issues. Go to Jstor and particularly to the process description to see how one industrial-scale program goes about doing this. Note in particular the twin parallel paths they use: OCR to produce searchable indices but delivering fax quality PDF images of the original journal pages to preserve complex images, typograpcy and editorial quality.
Another interesting source might be http://www.octavo.com , who amongst other things produce high-quality PDF distributions of historical documents, again linked to a searchable back end produced by OCR again.
The combination of batch, offline OCR and PDF'd images to automatically generate some sort of useable indices to the images seems to have been selected by a number of independant groups.
If you can't be bothered to go the whole hog to build a database, at least scan in the indices so you can do as much searching in the scanned books as you could in the originals.
Not JPEG images - TIFF or PNG. That's a no-brainer. Image contrast is the issue here (for the text sections at least), not absolute image size. My reference library stretches to 1.6GB and is growing steadily (and yes, most of it is copyrighted and legal).

Isn't this just another Lexis-Nexis or JSTOR.

your comment is full of misguided fears and half truths. number one with a little help the internet provides nearly unlimited access to journals through systems like jstor. most public schools can't afford any sort of journal subscription. sure i agree elementary school kids aren't writing research papers, but if they learn how to look things up on the internet (under a teacher/librarian's supervision), they will be better prepared than i was. which brings me to my other point, to rebut your point about the internet being an 'easy way out' of school work. sure its possible, but it's also possible that students are getting off the hook when it comes to doing research and critical thinking because most schools can't afford any sort of decent store of information (encyclopedias don't count, i'm talking modern journals, etc). an optimist might expect this to create a generation that's not lazier than what 'we current have' (although whether that's true or not is debatable) but instead is more able to critically read and understand arguments and information about a wide area of subjects, allowing them to identify their interests and passions earlier in life and make meaningful contributions.

One useful step in that direction is JSTOR. They have digitized the entire contents of over 100 leading journals in a range of academic fields, and made their abstracts searchable as well. Unfortunately, you or your library must subscribe to get at the goodies.

One useful step in that direction is JSTOR. They have digitized the entire contents of over 100 leading journals in a range of academic fields, and made their abstracts searchable as well. Unfortunately, you or your library must subscribe to get at the goodies.