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Mars Base

'Predictive policing' takes byte out of crime - 0 views

phys.org/...12-07-policing-byte-crime.html

GrabBag PredictingCrime

shared by Mars Base on 29 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Without some of the sci-fi gimmickry, police departments from Santa Cruz, California, to Memphis, Tennessee, and law enforcement agencies from Poland to Britain have adopted these new techniques
  • criminals follow patterns, and with software -- the same kind that retailers like Wal-Mart and Amazon use to determine consumer purchasing trends -- police can determine where the next crime will occur and sometimes prevent it.
  • criminal behavior was not that different from examining other types of behavior like shopping
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • People are creatures of habit
  • could help in cities where tight budgets were forcing patrol reductions.
  • The key to success in predictive policing is getting as much data as possible to determine patterns. This can be especially useful in property crimes like auto theft and burglary, where patterns can be detected
  • factors in attributes like the time of year, whether it is hot and humid or cold and snowy, if it is a payday when people are carrying a lot of cash
  • not saying a crime will occur at a particular time and place
  • can expect a wave of vehicle thefts based one everything we know
  • officials said serious crimes fell 30 percent and violent crimes declined 15 percent since implementing predictive analytics
  • in 2006
  • CRUSH -- Criminal Reduction Utilizing Statistical History
  • targeted certain "hot spots" to allow police to deploy more efficiently
  • "If the data is indicating a hot spot, we are able to immediately deploy resources there
  • beat officers can use their instincts for similar results
  • software could be far more precise, such as predicting burglaries in a small geographic area between 10 pm and 2 am.
  • the software was able to help police break up a group that was committing armed robberies
  • 84 robberies, but we had no idea it was so organized
  • crunching the numbers, police were able to pinpoint the zone and time of likely holdups
  • police officials from as far away as Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro and Estonia have come to review the experience in Memphis
  • In Los Angeles, another program
  • was tested in a single precinct, and resulted in a 12 percent drop in crime while the rest of the city saw a 0.2 percent increase
  • led to the creation of a company called PredPol
  • based on a model from mathematician
  • science that underlies the tool will work anywhere. The question is does the agency maintain a database
  • While
  • helping "smarter" policing, it does raise concerns about Big Brother-like snooping
  • technology could be positive but that it could lower the threshold for constitutional protections on "unreasonable" searches.
  • IBM's Cleverly said the technology can in many cases improve privacy
  • How do you cross-examine a computer
  • If the search is based on a computer algorithm
  • how will this affect reasonable suspicion
  • Mars Base on 29 Jul 12
     
    nd in a lot of instances we are able to make quality arrests because we're in the right area at the right time," he told AFP. Although beat officers can use their instincts for similar results, Williams said the software could be far more precise, such as predicting burglaries in a small geographic area between 10 pm and 2 am. In one case, the software was able to help police break up a group that was committing armed robbe
Mars Base

Australian police get hand-held 3D crime scene laser scanner - 0 views

phys.org/...police-hand-held-3d-crime.html

scibyte121 3D-Scanner

shared by Mars Base on 18 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Police in Queensland Australia have reported
  • that they now have and are using a device
  • hand held and can be used to laser scan a crime scene in just a matter of minutes for creation of a 3D image
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Zebedee scanner
  • The Zebedee is based on technology that has been put to a variety of uses over the past several years
  • LIDAR—a remote sensing technology that works by sending out a laser beam and then reading what is bounced back.
  • Zebedee extends LIDARs capabilities (which are 2D) by affixing it to the top of a spring
  • bouncing (and spinning) the laser around atop the spring, the beam strikes objects in every direction. A computer then connects all the 2D readings together to create a 3D image
  • The police have been using the device to faithfully recreate an entire crime scene in as little as 20 minutes
  • The data captured can be looked at later by investigators or even people sitting in a jury box to get a better sense of what occurred at a crime scene.
  • The Zebedee is not the first such scanner—police in New Mexico have recently begun using a scanner they call the Faro 3D scanner system—it's based on the same basic technology
  • Geologists use a similar scanner to map the insides of caves, and planet scientists have been using it to map the surface of the Earth from satellites.
  • A similar device was also used recently to map the interior of the leaning tower of Pisa to gain a better understanding of its structure or to help in repair should it start to topple.
  • the Zebedee has thus far been most useful for crime scenes that are difficult to access
  • that are having bad weather or at automobile accident scenes, which of course completely disappear once the cars are towed away
  • The next step, he said, is to put a Zebedee on a drone of some sort to allow for recreating scenes from above or from longer distances.
Mars Base

Why Teenagers Are So Impulsive | Science/AAAS | News - 0 views

news.sciencemag.org/...why-teenagers-are-so-impulsive

scibyte110

shared by Mars Base on 16 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • When teenagers successfully resist an urge in a common test of impulsivity, they show increased activation in a brain region associated with restraint
  • suggesting that their brains have to work harder to avoid acting on the impulse
  • Why do teens—especially adolescent males—commit crimes more frequently than adults
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • One explanation may be that as a group, teenagers react more impulsively to threatening situations than do children or adults
  • likely because their brains have to work harder to rein in their behavior
  • teenagers have a reputation for courting danger that is often attributed to immaturity or poor decision-making
  • If immaturity or lack of judgment were the only problem, however, one would expect that children, whose brains are at an even earlier stage of development
  • younger children tend to be more cautious than teenagers, suggesting that there is something unique about adolescent brain development that lures them to danger
  • It's hard to generalize about teenage impulsivity
  • some adolescents clearly have more self-control than many adults
  • a growing body of evidence suggests that, in general, teens specifically struggle to keep their cool in social situations
  • many crimes committed during adolescence involve emotionally fraught social situations
  • to test whether teens perform badly on a common impulsivity task when faced with social cues of threat
  • recruited 83 people, ranging in age from 6 to 29, to perform a simple "Go/No-Go" task
  • they watched a series of faces making neutral or threatening facial expressions flicker past on a computer screen
  • Each time the participants saw a neutral face, they were instructed to hit a button
  • They were also told to hold back from pressing the button when they saw a threatening face
  • As the participants performed the task, the researchers monitored their brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging.
  • teenagers made about 15% more errors than adults and children when attempting to stop themselves from pressing the button when they saw the threatening facial expression
  • Males performed worse than females, suggesting a sex difference that fits with the disproportionate number of crimes that male teens commit,
  • adolescents who did manage to restrain themselves showed significantly higher activity in a brain region called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which is involved in top-down control of behavior
  • think of it as the break
  • the teenage brain might need to work a little harder to hold that response back
Mars Base

Teenagers play detectives on Interpol's new website - 0 views

phys.org/...eenagers-interpol-website.html

scibyte49 Interpol crime

shared by Mars Base on 30 May 12 - No Cached
  • Global police agency Interpol Tuesday launched a website to educate teenagers about crimes that can be committed over the Internet and tell them how they can protect themselves from the dangers
  • website also aims to teach teenagers about the 190-country-member organisation
  • focal point of the new site is a game "Interpol Junior Officer -- the Case of the Black Tattoo," in which players assume the role of an Interpol officer who travels worldwide, gathering clues to help local police track down an international gang involved in smuggling.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • launched in English and will eventually have Arabic, French and Spanish versions.
Mars Base

Supermassive Black Hole Swallows Star | Hungry Black Holes | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/-black-hole-swallows-star.html

scibyte45 black holes star

shared by Mars Base on 03 May 12 - No Cached
  • star whose death may ultimately provide more clues on the inner workings of the enigmatic gravitational monster that devoured it.
  • In June 2010, the researchers spotted a bright flare from the previously dormant black hole at the center of a galaxy approximately 2.7 billion light-years away.
  • The flare of light reached peak brightness a month after it was detected, then slowly faded over the next 12 months
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • By measuring the rise of the flare's brightness, the scientists calculated the rate at which the star's gas was getting sucked into the black hole
  • helped reveal at what point and time the black hole had begun disrupting the star, revealing how powerful its gravitational field was and thus its mass.
  • estimate the black hole's mass to be 3 million suns
  • like we are gathering evidence from a crime scene
  • analyzed the spectrum of the ejected gas — that is, the specific colors making up its light
  • using data from the Multiple Mirror Telescope Observatory on Mount Hopkins in Arizona
  • and the spectrum of the gas revealed it was mostly helium.
  • unique spectral fingerprint
  • fact there was mostly helium and very little hydrogen in the gas suggests "the slaughtered star had to have been the helium-rich core of a stripped star
  • This likely happened when the star went through the red giant phase, where it expanded to 100 times its original radius
  • it puffed up like that, it became vulnerable to the gravitational tidal forces of the black hole, and it would have been very easy to strip off the tenuous hydrogen envelope
  • the star then had to approach much closer, 100 times closer in, before it was completely disrupted by the black hole
Mars Base

Novel noninvasive therapy prevents breast cancer formation in mice - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...y-breast-cancer-formation.html

scibyte115 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • A novel breast-cancer therapy that partially reverses the cancerous state in cultured breast tumor cells and prevents cancer development in mice
  • a new way to treat early stages of the disease without resorting to surgery, chemotherapy or radiation
  • The therapy emerged from a sophisticated effort to reverse-engineer gene networks to identify genes that drive cancer
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • The same strategy could lead to many new therapies that disable cancer-causing genes no current drugs can stop, and it also can be used to find therapies for other diseases
  • The findings open up the possibility of someday treating patients who have a genetic propensity
  • idea would be start giving it early on and sustain treatment throughout life to prevent cancer development or progression
  • more women than ever are undergoing early tests that reveal precancerous breast tissue
  • early diagnosis could potentially save lives; however, few of those lesions go on to become tumors and doctors have no good way of predicting which ones will
  • many women currently undergo surgery, chemotherapy and radiation who might never develop the disease.
  • some women with a high hereditary risk of breast cancer have chosen to undergo preemptive mastectomies.
  • A therapy that heals rather than kills cancerous tissue could potentially help all these patients, as well as men who develop the disease
  • to date the only way to stop cancer cells has been to kill them.
  • he treatments that accomplish that, including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, often damage healthy tissue, causing harsh side effects
  • First they had to identify the culprit genes among the thousands that are active in a cell at any moment
  • Molecular biologists typically
  • looking for cancer-causing genes, they search for individual genes that become active as cancer develops.
  • But because genes in cells work in complex networks
  • innocent genes being fingered for crimes they did not commit.
  • To improve the odds of finding the real culprits,
  • a systems biology expert who has developed a sophisticated mathematical and computational method to reverse-engineer bacterial gene networks.
  • honed the computational network to work for the first time on the more complex gene networks of mice and humans
  • The refined method helped the scientists spot more than 100 genes that acted suspiciously just before milk-duct cells in the breast begin to overgrow
  • The team narrowed their list down to six genes that turn other genes on or off, and then narrowed it further to a single gene called HoxA1 that had the strongest statistical link to cancer
  • researchers wanted to know if blocking the HoxA1 gene could reverse cancer in lab-grown cells
  • grew healthy mouse or human mammary-gland cells in a nutrient-rich, tissue-friendly gel
  • Healthy cells ensconced in the gel formed hollow spheres of cells akin to a normal milk duct
  • cancerous cells, in contrast, packed together into solid, tumor-like spheres.
  • treated cancerous cells with a short piece of RNA called a small interfering RNA (siRNA) that blocks only the HoxA1 gene
  • The cells reversed their march to malignancy, stopping their runaway growth and forming hollow balls as healthy cells do
  • they specialized as if they were growing in healthy tissue
  • The siRNA treatment also stopped breast cancer in a line of mice genetically engineered to have a gene that causes all of them to develop cancer
  • They packed the siRNA into nanoparticles called lipidoids that allow for genes to be silenced for weeks inside the body
  • they injected these nanoparticles
  • The treated mice remained healthy, while untreated mice developed breast cancer
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