Leading Indicators and Spatial Interactions: A Crime-Forecasting Model for Proactive Police Deployment

We develop a leading indicator model for forecasting serious property and violent crimes based on the crime attractor and displacement theories of environmental criminology. The model, intended for support of tactical deployment of police resources, is at the microlevel scale; namely, 1-month-ahead forecasts over a grid system of 141 square grid cells 4000 feet on a side (with approximately 100 blocks per grid cell). The leading indicators are selected lesser crimes and incivilities entering the model in two ways: (1) as time lags within grid cells and (2) time and space lags averaged over grid cells contiguous to observation grid cells. Our validation case study uses 1.3 million police records from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, aggregated over the grid system for a 96-month period ending in December 1998. The study uses the rolling-horizon forecast experimental design with forecasts made over the 36-month period ending in December 1998, yielding 5076 forecast errors per model. We estimated the leading indicator model using a robust linear regression model, a neural network, and a proven univariate, extrapolative forecast method for use as a benchmark in Granger causality testing. We find evidence of both the crime attractor and displacement theories. The results of comparative forecast experiments are that the leading indicator models provide acceptable forecasts that are significantly better than the extrapolative method in three out of four cases, and for the fourth there is a tie but poor forecast performance. The leading indicators find 41–53% of large crime volume changes in the three successful cases. The corresponding workload for police is quite acceptable, with on the average 5.2 potential large change cases per month to investigate and with 31% of such cases being positives.     

A cargo of lead ingots from a shipwreck off Ashkelon,Israel 11th–13th centuries AD

Shipwreck cargo of lead ingots, some marked, discovered off Tel Ashkelon, weighed about four tonnes. C14 analysis of charred wood from an ingot dated it to the 11th–13th centuries AD, Crusader times. Lead isotopic ratios provenanced the ingots to Mont‐Lozère, France. Various aspects of the lead trade are discussed, including: lead sources, extraction, casting, lead in the international maritime trade, weight units in medieval trade, prices, transportation, sale and storage, lead cargo and ballast, reconstruction of the wrecking event, salvage after the vessel was wrecked, Ashkelon as a trading coastal town in the 11th–13th centuries AD, and the possible destination of the cargo.     

The Episode of the Foundry Workers’ Strike in Hector Berlioz's Opera Benvenuto Cellini

Auguste Barbier and Léon de Wailly's libretto for Hector Berlioz's 1838 opera Benvenuto Cellini contains a work stoppage by the foundry workers who are casting the Italian Renaissance artist's sculpture of Perseus and the slain Medusa. While Cellini describes no such event in his autobiographical Vita, he does recount another story that may have suggested to the librettists their invention of the workers’ strike episode. Contemporary Romantic writers, including Alfred de Vigny and Victor Hugo, in their theater and verse, treated the themes of the suffering of industrial workers and the insensitivity of industrialists. Barbier published, also in 1838, Lazare, a collection of satiric poems that analyzed the social problems caused by the Industrial Revolution in Britain, above all the exploitation and suffering of the working class. The France of the 1830s saw a notable increase in the pace of industrialization, the formation of the proletariat and the manufacturing capitalist class, and the first laborers’ strikes. It is in this historical and literary context that one can best understand the incorporation of the apocryphal and anachronistic work stoppage episode into the opera libretto.     

Heterogeneous Presidential Source Cue Effects on Public Opinion: The Case of the Sotomayor Nomination to the Supreme Court

Do presidential source cues affect public opinion? If so, which types of voters are most susceptible to presidential source cue effects? This study uses a split-ballot experimental design embedded into a nationally representative survey to test for presidential source cue effects, using the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court as the test case. Results detect significant presidential source cue effects. Two factors, respondents' political predispositions and educational level, mediate those cue effects. The conclusion discusses the real world implications of the findings and offers suggestions to improve the use of experiments to test for presidential impacts on of public opinion.     

A theory and a model of social change and evolution

The principal theme is that the seeds of a society's evolution are not contained within it; they are sown in the interface of interdependent societies. In particular, it is contended that evolutionary change is a result of transformations in a society's external economic and political relationships. These alterations occur mostly because of advances in the technology of intersocietal trade and other relations which are intertwined with increased concentrations of political authority. A reconceptualization of culture and habitat and a fourfold definition of social change are offered.