Community and crime

This is one of the best social research projects I've ever read. Dr. Felton Earls spent the last 10 years working on "one of the largest, longest and most expensive studies in the history of criminology". The project cost is about $51 million so far with The MacArthur Foundation and The National Institute of Justice as its main backers.

The study focuses on understanding criminal behavior and its causes. One of its critical findings is that neighborhood crime rate will often depend on the involvement of the community in their neighbourhood. The basic premise revolves around "collective efficacy". A cleaning crew can clean up a neighborhood, but it will quickly return to its previous state. If on the other hand the community gets together to clean up its own neighborhood the effects are much more persistant. The idea of a "collective" develops and people in that community are less likely to contribute to its destruction.

Unfortunately this is an older article (January 6th, 2004) and so you'll need to pay in order to read it directly from NYT. A quick Google search found the archive posted on a separate site - enjoy!

On Crime as Science (a Neighbor at a Time)

Donation opportunity?

If you are looking for a good cause to donate money to why not consider the poor whooping crane? Your donation can help a couple adventurous people teach whooping cranes how to migrate. They will fly an ultralight plane and wear crane-like costumes (to minimize the birds' contact with humans) as they migrate about 340 miles with a flock of cranes.

Surely the whooping crane deserves to live and your dollars can help this noble goal. World poverty, hunger, disease, environment - these are good causes, but the whooping crane is a great one!

Like it wasn't obvious

A number of studies on the background and motivation of suicide bombers have concluded that basically "It's Not Who We Are, It's What We Do". People with common sense already knew that, but actual studies are always a good idea.

This is a really good article which examines terrorist attacks, US foreign policy and discusses possible short term solutions. I especially found interesting Wolfowitz's purported thinking regarding terrorism and Iraq - we should withdraw from Saudi Arabia, but that leaves the region destabilized (especially with Saddam still around). So, we remove Saddam and withdraw from Saudi Arabia into Iraq. Not an ideal solution, but I can see why it was seen as a good/necessary strategic move. A large contingent of US troops will be stationed in Iraq (about as central as you can get in the Middle East) to stabilize this volatile and (my) precious region.

Long term it makes a lot of sense and could justify the short term loss of life. Ah, a controversial statement!! That's what politics is all about though - do we lose a 1,000 lives today to save 100,000 in the long term? The biggest problem, of course, is that we need to lose those 1,000 lives now in order to potentially save 100,000 lives later. Hard decisions, but someone has to make them.

My favorite news story - EVER

Associated Press ran this story on April 7th, 2004. Most of the instances have been taken down by now, but I was able to find a local news site from Pittsburgh that still carried it. "Easter Bunny whipped at church show" is the title and no, this is not an Onion story. I'm thinking the creative director was on LSD or something when he came up with the idea. Or maybe he was just moved by the spirit of the Easter bunny.

And now for my favorite news quote (ever):

"He was crying and asking me why the bunny was being whipped"

Sounds like a good film

"My Son the Fanatic" examines the clash of Western and Muslim cultures in London. Sounds interesting. Considering Netflix actually carries it I'll be seeing it soon. I love that about Netflix - a world of movies at one's fingertips.

Making it...

You know you've made it as a niche group in our society when you get identified as a potential target market.

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The trick to finding peace in hyper-capitalism is to be able to isolate oneself from its influence while enjoying the gifts it provides. If too many people were able to do that the system would collapse, which speaks volumes about the difficulty to extricate oneself from its fold.