Generally recognized as a strong, analytic program, and the costs of the course is quite fair, we think.

June 12-15, 2006
This three-day workshop in spatial analysis, held at Michigan State University's School of Criminal Justice, will use the full-featured Windows-based spatial statistics program CrimeStat III, commonly used by law enforcement agencies and criminal justice researchers. CrimeStat produces output for use with geographic information systems (GIS) and can be linked with the crime mapping efforts of police departments. The course will cover computing spatial dimensions, distance measures, and several "hot spot" methods including fuzzy mode, nearest neighbor, risk-adjusted nearest neighbor, and K-means clustering. This intensive workshop will also offer opportunities for hands-on computing experiences using NACJD data or data from related agency or research projects. Participants will learn how to produce results in CrimeStat and import them to ArcGIS for further analysis or presentation.

Please visit www.icpsr.umich.edu/sumprog for details.

Ronald E. Wilson
Program Manager

Mapping & Analysis for Public Safety Program and Data Resources
@ the National Institute of Justice
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/

810 7th Street, NW
Room 7201
Washington, DC 20531

---

Tamara Thompson at PI Buzz tips all of us to Census Trax.  It has a ways to go to be fully functional, but it's another interesting example of what imaginative people are doing with Google Maps.

"California census data mapped

By Tamara Thompson
Census Trax  has amassed U.S. Census housing and demographic data, displaying it in
pop-up boxes by Census block or zip code. Search by street or zip code to find population numbers and characteristics, housing types, vacancies and other data. Move your mouse around the map to get information on adjacent blocks and tracts. Census Trax currently covers only California and is free during beta testing."

---

Chase Davis has an interesting entry on his blog car-case.net related to how he did a two-hour DM project at his paper in Colombia, MO.

3/28/2006

Data mining: a starting point



Data mining is hard. Neural networks,decision trees – it’s a lot to chew, especially without the propertraining most of us lack. But paging through books, running failedexperiments and dealing with the associated headaches lately got me thinking: How do journalists get in on the ground floor?If data mining is the automated extraction of useful and previously unknown information from large datasets,maybe it is simply an extension of automation – a way of abstractingand scheduling searches that tap into continuous streams of data andgive reporters information they can use.  (more)

Long-time IAJ friend George Dailey, ESRI's K-12 Education Program manager, contributes a fine, basic article to the current issue of ArcUser on how to normalize census data.  It's would make an especially good handout to have while teaching.

See "Normalizing Census Data Using ArcMap" at
http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0206/files/normalize2.pdf

---

Recently in Santa Fe, NM there was a tragic accident when a driver plowed through the front of a shopping center medical clinic, killing three persons inside.  We watched a news chopper from an Albuquerque TV station hover over the scene for at least a couple of hours.  We have no idea what it costs per hour to operate a high-tech machine like that, but for small-market stations -- and perhaps even newspapers -- the article below (from GIS Development) suggests a relatively low-cost alternative for aerial shots. 

What does this have to do with analytic journalism?  For starters, think of how such aerial images could help vet and enrich infographics.  Need to illustrate the real size of demonstrations such as the recent ones related to U.S. immigration policy?  Here's the
chance.  Of course the usual caveats apply: you might want to check with your liability and workman's comp folks before letting a reporter/photographer get airborne in one of these.

Abstract:

Airborne video imaging has been used for many years for various mapping
applications worldwide. Experience has shown that it is a technology
that is neither well-suited to spectral remote sensing (due to its poor
spectral capabilities), nor is it well-suited to spatial remote sensing
(due to its poor geometric properties). Even so, airborne video imaging
has proved enormously popular for some very specific mapping
applications. One such application is mapping of linear infrastructure
features, such as roads, pipelines or powerlines. Any country, whether
developing or developed, can benefit from mapping of its linear
infrastructure assets. However, to derive full benefit from this type
of mapping, the data collection and processing must be both
cost-effective and efficient. This paper presents an innovative yet low
cost methodology for acquiring airborne video data, based on the use of
an aircraft known as a powered parachute (PPC). A PPC is a low cost,
simple aircraft which can fly safely at low speeds and altitudes, but
still provides an extremely stable platform for imaging sensors. Tests
carried out in Australia have shown it to be an ideal platform for
airborne video imaging of linear features. However, the choice of
platform is only part of the system – the remaining component,
which is no less important, is the software that is used to process the
video data. Over the years many different algorithms have been
developed for mosaicking video images into continuous scenes. This
paper also presents a methodology for rectifying, processing, and
analysing sequential video images. The resulting combination of
platform, camera and software forms an ideal system for asset mapping,
which can realistically be implemented in less developed countries.<more>

---

A recent posting on Paul Grabowicz's listserv would seem to indicate something's afoot, at least in LA, in terms of recognizing the practitioner's need for analytic journalism.

---

A rich resource.

Free 50 state legislation keyword tracking tool

By Tamara Thompson (PI Buzz) Reports....

The National Conference of State Legislatures website tracks current news by state and topic in each of the state legislatures. Their legislative bill tracking tool
is better than many of the states’ own search engines, enabling
searches by keywords. A unique feature is the ability to compare, on
one page, all appearances of your keywords in bills in all states. The
site would be perfect if you could then receive automatic updates by
email or in your newsreader.

A free registration is required to save your searches at the site,
then return to them later without having to reenter the search terms.

Go to the search page and enter your terms and select “exact
phrase”. For example, “identity theft” returns
multiple links; selecting 2006 Introduced Identity Theft Legislation takes you to a results page, organized by state, of all matching legislation.

A new site feature, reflecting the application of information tracking technology to state government, is a one page chart that lists the state legislators who have blogs and the legislative sites that offer RSS feeds.

A summary page, Crime Records and Justice Information Sharing, lists 2005 legislative bills on information technology in this field.

Comes this interesting post on the Complexity and Social Networks Blog....

Social Networks and the Business World

By Alexander Schellong

Social Network Theory and its principles are applied by more and more companies in a way that some of us might not be aware of yet. So what we buy, how we rate products/services, post in forums, pictures we upload or present of ourselves on the web is significantly influencing other, likeminded individuals. In return we are influenced by the network cluster we belong to for a specific habit and the like. Collaborative filtering is a key component of using social networks for different purposes. Further information can be found here. Below you will find a list of various industry and application examples:

Social Networking plattforms
There are the obvious social networking online plattforms. Among them are the open business and personal contact manegement oriented like Tribe.net , openbc, friendster or the inivitation only communities like asmallworld. Either planned or already implemented users can take advantage of added services (search functionality, messaging) by paying a monthly fee 10< USD. Furthermore, there are the rather dating/partner match making plattforms like match or eharmony.

Retail/eCommerce
Most of today's ecommerce sites use collaborative filtering to improve sales, cross-,up- and downselling. A prominent example are Amazon's recommendations based on various user behaviours on their website.

Music/Radio
Tapping into our musical tastes Last FM, Genielab or Pandora present us with streaming music. Here the main business model lies in linking to the respective ecommerce sites like Apple's iTunes.

Books
The same applies to the area of what we might want to read next which also serves ecommerce purposes.

Movies and more
MovieLens is a free service provided by GroupLens Research at the University of Minnesota. Whether, you want to book a hotel, whole vacation there are numerous examples of collaborative filtering apps on websites.

Pictures
The most prominent example for sharing, managing and searching for pictures is Flickr or myspace. The latter gaining revenues from online-ads.

Search engines
As I have elaborated in an earlier entry on google bombs the network structure (ties) play an important role in search engine algorithms.

Knowledge Base and OpenSource
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia builds on the power of decentralized, voluntary collaboration building an enourmous depository of multi-language information. Whether it was the development of Linux, Mozilla/Firefox or MySQL all rely on and consist of social networks. Further examples of openSource projects can be found at Sourceforge.

SNA Consulting
As we can see the character and concepts of networks is mainly utilized for recommendations. Actual applications of SNA is done by a few companies and consultants like Rob Cross, IBM, Orgnet or Visiblepath. These companies try to uncover the informal networks within organisations to improve knowledge sharing, initiate change or bridging silos.

Finally, you can always follow latest trends in social network analysis at PNG's subpage on SNA by Ines Mergel.

---

It's tough to keep track of all the various measures at various levels of government aimed at the Internet, one way or another.  This essay at LLLRX.com by Beth Wellington illustrates the complexity of the topic, along with suggesting implications for all U.S. based analytic journalists.

"Campaign Finance and the Internet: A Commentary on the Online Freedom of Speech Act

by Beth Wellington

Beth Wellington is a Roanoke, Virginia based poet and journalist. She is a contributing editor to the New River Free Press, a book reviewer for the Roanoke Times and a member of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (SAWC) and the Appalachian Studies Association. From 1980 to 1997, she was the founding Executive Director of New River Community Sentencing, Inc. in Christiansburg, Virginia and its predecessor, New River Community Action's Community Sentencing Program. She contributes to both SourceWatch.org and Wikipedia.org. Beth's blog on culture and politics is The Writing Corner.

Published March 21, 2006

On March 15, The New York Times published The Internet Campaign Loophole, an editorial harshly criticizing H.R. 1606, "The Online Freedom of Speech Act."

---