Gang Activity and Overall Levels of Crime: A New Mapping Tool for Defining Areas of Gang Activity Using Police Records

In this note, a new method for defining gang activity areas based uponpolice records is illustrated using the Chicago Police Department's1996 incident files. This method is based upon standard geographictechniques and uses a uniform grid that divides the city into 150-msquares. It is shown that this technique may be useful both in describinggang activity areas and in describing the spatial distribution of crime inlarge cities. A strong relationship is found between the number of gangsthat are active in an area and the general level of criminal activity.     

Robust Shoeprint Retrieval Method Based on Local‐to‐Global Feature Matching for Real Crime Scenes

In this study, an automatic and robust crime scene shoeprint retrieval method is proposed. As most shoeprints left at crime scenes are randomly partial and noisy, crime scene shoeprint retrieval is a challenging task. To handle partial, noisy shoeprint images, we employ denoising deep belief network (DBN) to extract local features and use spatial pyramid matching (SPM) to obtain a local‐to‐global matching score. In this study, 536 query shoeprint images from crime scenes and a large scale database containing 34,768 shoeprint images are used to evaluate the retrieval performance. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other state‐of‐the‐art methods in terms of retrieval accuracy, feature dimension, and retrieval speed. The proposed method achieves a cumulative match score (CMS) of 65.67% at top 10 which is 5.60% higher than the second best performing method.     

Do crime hot spots affect housing prices?

ABSTRACT

Our knowledge about what happens to housing values when properties are close to places with high concentrations of crime, often called ‘hot spots’, is limited. Previous research suggests that crime depresses property prices overall, but crime hot spots affect house prices more than crime occurrence does and may affect prices of single-family houses more than prices of flats. Here we employ hedonic price modelling to estimate the impact of crime hot spots on housing sales, controlling for property, neighbourhood and city characteristics in the Stockholm metropolitan region, Sweden. Using a Geographic Information System (GIS), we combine property sales by coordinates into a single database with locations of crime hot spots. The overall effect on house prices of crime (measured as crime rates) is relatively small, but if its impact is measured by distance to a crime hot spot, the effect is non-negligible. By moving a house 1 km further away from a crime hot spot, its value increases by more than SEK 30,000 (about EUR 2,797). Vandalism is the type of crime that most affects prices for both multi- and single-family housing, but that effect decreases with distance from a crime hot spot.     

科技创新对科技人才聚集的影响及其空间溢出效应——基于空间面板Durbin模型的实证研究

基于2000-2017年省际面板数据和空间面板Durbin模型，研究了地区科技创新能力对科技人才聚集的影响及其空间溢出效应。结果表明：地区科技创新能力提升不仅有助于本地区科技人才的聚集，也有利于通过溢出效应促进邻近地区的科技人才聚集；科技创新能力提升对科技人才聚集的影响具有显著的地区差异；科技创新与科技人才聚集均具有空间相关性。因此，应强化科技创新与科技人才聚集的结合，在完善多方联动机制的基础上共建跨区科技人才流动平台，科学构建科技人才自由流动机制，并引导科技人才向科技创新优势和创新特色地区聚集。     

基于BEMD二次分解与维纳滤波相结合的图像去噪算法

目的提出基于二维经验模态分解(BEMD)与维纳滤波相结合的图像去噪算法并验证其去噪效果。方法通过对含噪的图像进行BEMD尺度分解,提取前两阶含噪的尺度分量,使用维纳滤波进行一次去噪,然后再次进行BEMD分解和滤波去噪,从而达到去噪的目的。将本文提出的算法与经典算法进行比较,验证该算法的可行性和鲁棒性。结果实验表明,该算法不仅能够有效降低图像的噪声,而且能很好地保持图像信息。结论本文提出的图像去噪算法思路新颖,效果良好,在法庭科学图像处理领域有很好的参考和应用价值。     

Bordering through domicide: spatializing citizenship in Calais

ABSTRACT

This paper examines domicidal practices against illegalized border crossers in Calais, France as a technology of citizenship and migration governance. It addresses recent calls to include actions and interventions which restrict citizenship in the context of illegalized migration within critical citizenship studies literature. Studying the state violence upholding and spatializing normative citizenship allows for a deeper understanding of citizenship’s implication in the European border regime, and raises questions on the concept’s continued application to theorizations of migrants’ political movements and spatial manifestations. The paper proposes anti-citizen politics as an alternative before arguing that the presence of this politics within the city’s squats and jungles, more than the physical occupations as such, is what the French state seeks to eradicate through acts of domicide. Working from empirical examples, the article describes a ‘carrot-and-stick’ domicide currently at work in Calais where the eviction and destruction of autonomous forms of migrant inhabitance is combined with a simultaneous offer of state managed accommodation. These tactics operate together to drive migrants out of the city of Calais, away from the UK border, and ultimately into a determination of their detain/deport-ability via citizenship’s scrutiny.     

Impact of FDI on Inbound Business Tourism——Empirical Research Based on Spatial Econometrics

This paper studies the spatial distribution features of FDI and Inbound Business Tourism (IBT) in China, as well as the relationship between them using the spatial autocorrelation model and spatial panel econometric model. The research shows that FDI and IBT are consistent in spatial distribution which is in the core-edge mode. Both of FDI and IBT show a positive spatial correlation. LISA charts shows that the two are in the two element distribution structure，forming a “club” gathering model and presents the phenomenon of “inside” convergence. The spatial econometric model estimation shows that the development of IBT in adjacent areas has a strong spillover effect and FDI has positive effect on IBT. IBT grows by 0.3855% with every 1% growth in FDI. The comparative analysis of the three regions shows that the effects of FDI on IBT and geographical spillover effects of IBT are as follows: East＞ Middle＞ West.     

Comparing Agenda Content and Roll-call Behaviour in Regular and Lame-duck Sessions of the House of Representatives, 1879–2010

This paper investigates how agenda content and floor behaviour in the US House of Representatives vary across regular and lame-duck sessions. The presence of departing members created a legislative environment marked by increased ideological and participatory shirking, resulting in higher levels of uncertainty. That uncertainty affected how members devised proposal strategies in the face of more fluid voting patterns in lame-duck sessions. The analysis of a unique data set comprised of roll-call votes on House floor motions with an identifiable sponsor from 1879 to 2010 (the 46th to 111th Congresses) uncovers significant changes in the relative frequencies of particular categories of votes, in the success rates on votes within those categories, as well as in the spatial characteristics of floor motions. These findings underscore how the move to the lame-duck session ushered in a distinct and different legislative environment.