Using Social Media to Measure Temporal Ambient Population: Does it Help Explain Local Crime Rates?

A challenge for studies assessing routine activities theory is accounting for the spatial and temporal confluence of offenders and targets given that people move about during the daytime and nighttime. We propose exploiting social media (Twitter) data to construct estimates of the population at various locations at different times of day, and assess whether these estimates help predict the amount of crime during two-hour time periods over the course of the day. We address these questions using crime data for 97,428 blocks in the Southern California region, along with geocoded information on tweets in the region over an eight month period. The results show that this measure of the temporal ambient population helps explain the level of crime in blocks during particular time periods. The use of social media data appear promising for testing various implications of routine activities and crime pattern theories, given their explicit spatial and temporal nature.     

Mobilizing for a ‘Europe from below’: network,territory, and place in the anti-austerity Blockupy movement

In March 2015, the anti-austerity movement, Blockupy, protested the inauguration of the ECB's new premises. This article explores Blockupy's construction of a sociospatial imaginary of a ‘Europe from below’. The article: (1) analyses the construction of the transnational Blockupy network, (2) compares the territory of the elite's austerity Eurozone with that of a different ‘Europe from below’, and (3) shows how the ECB premises have been the central place of European austerity and protest. This approach supplements recent debates on multispatiality, and shifts the lens used to analyse crises from a structural one to one emphasizing ongoing politicization ‘from below’.     

城市犯罪的移动空间盲区及其综合治理

移动空间的依托——公共交通工具,是城市人的活动发生空间位移时的主要运载体,对其犯罪盲区实施科学的综合治理是防控城市公共交通载体犯罪的有效途径.移动空间是一种很特殊的空间实体,存在许多犯罪盲区的致盲因素.对移动空间盲区实施综合治理,既要注重对所有类型移动空间盲区的共性对策,也要注重不同类型移动空间盲区的综合治理各有侧重.     

Regional Technological Differences: The Case of Southern European Union

This paper examines the spatial spillover effects and the productivity rate of patents in southern European Union. It provides a systematic analysis of the relationship between productivity of patents and the factors that generate economically useful new technological knowledge. An applied spatial econometric framework is employed since this approach is particularly useful in the study of the spatial patterns of patents productivity, at the lowest possible levels of spatial aggregation.     

Mind the gap: How party–voter incongruence fuels the entry and support of new parties

This article examines to what extent ideological incongruence (i.e., mismatch between policy positions of voters and parties) increases the entry of new parties in national parliamentary elections and their individual-level electoral support. Current empirical research on party entry and new party support either neglects the role of party–voter incongruence, or it only examines its effect on the entry and support of specific new parties or party families. This article fills this lacuna. Based on spatial theory, we hypothesise that parties are more likely to enter when ideological incongruence between voters and parties is higher (Study 1) and that voters are more likely to vote for new parties if these stand closer to them than established parties (Study 2). Together our two studies span 17 countries between 1996 and 2016. Time-series analyses support both hypotheses. This has important implications for spatial models of elections and empirical research on party entry and new party support.     

Local Expenditure Interaction in Italian Municipalities: Do Local Council Partnerships Make a Difference?

This paper investigates interdependence among local councils in Italy in their public spending and distinguishes between possible sources of this interdependence. We find significant positive interaction among neighbouring local councils in regard to both spending at the level of total expenditure and spending on different sub-categories. Attempts to identify the source of this horizontal interaction seem to reject the yardstick competition hypothesis. Addressing the role that local council partnerships may play in internalising fiscal externalities, we suggest that expenditure interaction may be driven by spill-over.     

On The Application of Fuzzy Clustering for Crime Hot Spot Detection

   One of the fundamental challenges in crime mapping and analysis is pattern recognition. Efforts and methods to detect crime hot-spots, or geographic areas of elevated criminal activity, are wide ranging. For aggregate data, such as total crime events in a census tract(s), measures of spatial autocorrelation have proven useful. For disaggregate data (i.e. individual crime events), kernel density smoothing and non-hierarchical cluster analysis (e.g. k-means), are widely used. Non-hierarchical techniques are particularly effective in delineating geographic space into areas of higher or lower crime concentrations, because each observation is assigned to one and only one cluster. The resulting set of partitions provides clear-cut spatial boundaries that can be used for hot-spot evaluation and interpretation. However, the strength of non-hierarchical methods can also be viewed as a weakness. Although the hard-clustering of observations into a set of discrete clusters is helpful, there are many cases where ambiguity exists in the data. In such cases, a more generalized approach for hot-spot detection would be helpful. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of a generalized partitioning method known as fuzzy clustering for hot-spot detection. Functional and visual comparisons of fuzzy clustering and two hard-clustering approaches (medoid and k-means), across a range of cluster values are analyzed. The empirical results suggest that a fuzzy clustering approach is better equipped to handle intermediate cases and spatial outliers.

犯罪热点研究的空间分析方法

随着犯罪的频繁发生,犯罪热点受到越来越多相关部门的关注。在此,应用不同的空间分析方法,研究犯罪热点的分布,提出预防犯罪的措施,以期为社会稳定提供参考。