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Geoprofiling Moves Into The Limelight
circletimessquare writes "Interesting and timely. A short piece at CNN talks about the software helping to track down the sniper currently terrorizing the Washington DC area. It was the doctoral thesis of a cop, Kim Rossmo, who developed it while walking the beat in Vancouver and reading about the hunting patterns of African lions. Googling, I found an older but deeper piece which mentions more of the tech behind the software, called Rigel. That led me to the website of ECRI, the company that makes Rigel. More good tech there."
Actually this isn't new, nore is it all that freaking scary.
It's a technique that's been in use for a long long time by police departments, only with a less quantitative aspect. But they dind't call it 'geographic profiling' they called it 'sticking pushpins into the map'...
They're not *tracking* people, they're entering crime data into a GIS.
No. This is based on the theory that most criminals (this technique is most often used with property crimes like burglary or armed robbery) like to work in familiar territory.
Forcing them into unfamiliar territory to screw up the profiling them loses them the advantages of commiting crimes on known ground and makes it more likely they'll be seen/caught.
There has been alot of talk and show these days about all those new computerized profiling technologies. (Face recoginition, et al.)
Finally, here is one that I think is right on the money.
Here is one that makes the computer just another tool in the policeman's tool box. This is in sharp contrast to present trends. For now the computer is helping solve the crimes and prevent future crimes, but it's not laying the blame on people who have yet to commit a crime.
I know this is mostly due to how the creator uses his experience, but (IMHO) that's what makes this soo nice.
Questionable. As with any technique designed to discover patterns in human nature, the focus already is on the aggregate, on how people tend to behave. There's going to be deviation no matter what. A good model accounts for this. A good detective understands the nature of the model and its limitations.
Take a look at the second article: Rossmo puts emphasis on certain locations based on his psychological assumptions about the quarry. At the same time, he discards or discounts other locations that he believes might skew his findings. This is just one tool in his arsenal: an important one, but other tools feed data in and yet others interpret what comes out. Sounds like the way to go.
I know it's human nature to find patterns in random data, but this seems just a wee bit far fetched to me.
Chances are s/he just wanted to say that s/he's god, and because of that has power over life and death (with no way for them to stop s/he).
Sometimes a nutjob is just a nutjob.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Shooting old men and children and women.
Something I've wondered in this case... why is it worse to shoot "old men and women and children" than it is to shoot anyone else? Are 35-year-old men some sort of second-class citizen, not worthy of sorrow? Sure, they may be more able to defend themselves in hand-to-hand combat, but that's not going to do them a lot of good when a sniper shoots them in the middle of the suburbs...
deus does not exist but if he does
I was part of the team that implemented an early version of the Rigel software used by Kim Rossmo.
At least in the early version, the algorithm was very simple. It was so simple you would have though it would never be useful. The beauty is that the algorithm doesn't need to pinpoint the house, just the neighborhood. It was much better to have a simple and easily provable algorithm than get another half a block of accuracy.
The available databases to convert from street address to spatial locations sucked. To me a big part of the magic was converting addresses where a crime occured to a UTM coordinate.
Most importantly, the magic of Rigel and Kim Rossmo is not the geoprofiling algorithms, but the marketting and public relations.