Comments on: The police station effect http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/ Strategies for Internet citizens Sat, 11 Feb 2012 19:45:11 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Jim http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-123193 Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:23:58 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-123193 Jon,

I know this is late, but I was wondering if you had tried Open Office’s Calc for any of this.

Calc has a number of programming language bridges into it using the UNO system, including on for python called pyuno.

http://udk.openoffice.org/python/python-bridge.html

I don’t have any experience with it yet, but in my own data project that I am just starting (trying to convince my city that they need more efficient bus routing), I think that I will be using it a lot.

]]> By: All Night Coder - Today’s Top Blog Posts on Programming - Powered by SocialRank http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-67209 Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:15:59 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-67209 [...] The police station effect [...]

]]> By: First look at Resolver, an IronPython-based spreadsheet « Jon Udell http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-66526 Thu, 27 Sep 2007 15:23:02 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-66526 [...] Filed under: Uncategorized — Jon Udell @ 10:22 am Last month in an item about working with crime data I [...]

]]> By: markm http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-50042 Thu, 16 Aug 2007 16:10:44 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-50042 Would it be possible to separate the reports by whether the crime was reported by a citizen, or discovered by a police officer witnessing it? There’s no particular surprise in finding that the latter category occurs more often closer to the cop shop – although a difference as steep as your first graph seems to show might indicate commanders are doing a poor job of getting their people spread out and covering the whole town.

Other theories:
- The old police station location was deliberately located where the crime was worst. The new location is far less optimal.

- The presence of a police station somehow causes a neighborhood to deteriorate. I can certainly see how it would concentrate certain undesirables: drunks turned loose in the morning, chronic complainants, relatives of prisoners in the jail with their own criminal proclivities… Would parole and probation officers be located in the police station? It’s possible that this effect would overwhelm the protective effect of having a police station nearby.

]]> By: Tom http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-48539 Sun, 12 Aug 2007 18:43:33 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-48539 I think Stephen (comment 10) nailed the problem with data sifting like this: one can easily find
all kinds of correlations in the world but ascribing cause is much more difficult. It might be
an enlightening exercise to get a couple of smart people in a room and brainstorm some of the
many possible “causes” for your observations. Just off the cuff, for example, are people more
likely to call the cops for minor problems if the police station is “just around the corner”?
Did the police station relocate from a mostly non-residential, urban city center to a more
residential suburb? And so on…

As Stephen says, your interesting observations are just starting points for asking more
focused questions with better methods.

]]> By: Stephen http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45814 Sat, 04 Aug 2007 03:02:25 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45814 A couple of cautionary notes: (1) Computers make it easy to explore enormous numbers of “what if” questions, but conclusions from these explorations are inherently suspect. Hypothesis generating techniques are a good source of starting points for asking questions with better methods. (2) There is a large disparity between the size of the blue zone and the green zone. With an area model, this disparity would be at least a factor of five (if we truncate the green zone at 1.5 miles). Disparities like this can distort actual effects in the data. While an area model may not be appropriate, it is something that should be considered with geographic data in the absence of other models.

]]> By: Jon Udell http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45595 Fri, 03 Aug 2007 13:14:14 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45595 So I checked out Resolver — it’s in private beta, but I’ve signed up. Looks intriguing!

]]> By: David French http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45479 Fri, 03 Aug 2007 05:16:24 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45479 “thinking about ways to meld Python and Excel together more closely”
You might like to try OpenOffice which supports Python directly. Unfortunately the current charting model still lets OpenOffice down.

]]> By: James http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45466 Fri, 03 Aug 2007 04:12:17 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45466 You can use plain Python with the win32 extensions http://python.net/crew/mhammond/win32/ to drive Office (I use it to grab data from Excel, or to munge Word documents). You could even create a Python COM object http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pythonwin32/chapter/ch12.html and call it from your VBA macro, although it’s not going to be particularly pretty. But being able to use Python directly inside Excel would be very cool.

]]> By: leMel http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45444 Fri, 03 Aug 2007 02:49:22 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45444 Doesn’t the prevalence of more officers ‘create’ more crime data points by being there to witness and make an arrest or a report? Wouldn’t the presence of a station have a lensing effect?

]]> By: cthrall http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45374 Thu, 02 Aug 2007 20:47:26 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45374 Sorry, I should have read closer…you already mentioned IPY->Excel in your article.

You probably saw this too:

http://lists.ironpython.com/pipermail/users-ironpython.com/2007-June/005152.html

That obviously isn’t as seamless as being able to call a IPY script from within Excel, though.

]]> By: Michael Bernstein http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45366 Thu, 02 Aug 2007 20:30:05 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45366

I’m also thinking about ways to meld Python and Excel together more closely. So far, I’ve only relied on code generation — that is, using Python to write VBA macros to, for example, define named ranges. There’s also the possibility of outside-in automation, where Python drives Excel through its automation interface. But then I got to wondering: Will there be a role for IronPython (or IronRuby) here, someday, such that you could use these languages inside Excel? That’d be very cool.

Don’t forget the Python-UNO bridge for OpenOffice.

]]> By: cthrall http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45365 Thu, 02 Aug 2007 20:26:56 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45365 http://www.ironpython.info/index.php/Interacting_with_Excel

That looks to be maybe the reverse of what you’re looking for: driving Excel with IronPython. But it does give you access to the object model, so you could conceivably use it to display the data you’ve parsed with Python.

]]> By: Michael Foord http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45359 Thu, 02 Aug 2007 20:05:19 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45359 You should look at Resolver ( http://www.resolversystems.com and http://www.resolverhacks.net ) for processing the data with IronPython and using a spreadsheet interface. :-)

]]> By: stand http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45354 Thu, 02 Aug 2007 19:53:01 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/02/the-police-station-effect/#comment-45354 Jon, regarding your last comment about putting languages inside Excel. That reminded me of a post I saw last week over at Sean McGrath’s place talking about a product called Resolver which seems exactly what you are talking about. It is an IronPython application that exposes the entire spreadsheet as a python script. I spent a few hours looking at it and I really like the concept. Check it out if you haven’t already.

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