Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
With newspapers — and news magazine — cutting staff on an almost weekly basis, some of us in journalism are going to have to reinvent ourselves. One of our tenents of Analytic Journalism is simulation modeling, a methodology and analytic tool we believe will be to the social sciences in the 21st century (and journalism IS a social science) what quantum physics was to the hard sciences in the 20th. So here's an interesting opportunity for someone.
“> The Department of Mathematics as the University of California, Los > Angeles is soliciting applications for a postdoctoral fellowship > position in Mathematical and Computational Social Science. The > qualified applicant will work in the UC Mathematical and Simulation > Modeling of Crime Group (UCMaSC), a collaboration between the UCLA > Department of Mathematics, UCLA Department of Anthropology, UC > Irvine Department of Criminology, Law and Society and the Los > Angeles Police Department to study the dynamics of crime hot spot > formation. The research will center on (1) development of formal > models applicable to the study of interacting particle systems, or > multi-agent systems, (2) simulation of these systems and (3) > directed empirical testing of models using contemporary crime data > from Los Angeles and other Southern Californian cities. > > The initial appointment is for one year, with possible renewal for > up to three years. For information regarding the UCMaSC Group visit > > http://paleo.sscnet.ucla.edu/ucmasc.htm > > DUTIES: Work closely with an interdisciplinary team of > mathematicians, social scientists and law enforcement officials to > develop new mathematical and computational methodologies for > understanding crime hot spot formation, diffusion and dissipation. > Responsibilities include teaching one course in the Department of > Mathematics per year, publication and presentation of research > results. > > REQUIRED: A recent Ph.D. in Mathematics, Physics or a related > field. The qualified applicant is expected to have research > experience in one or more areas that would be relevant to the study > of interacting particle/multi-agent systems including, but not > limited to, mathematical and statistical physics, complex systems, > and partial differential equations modeling. The applicant is also > required to have advanced competency in one or more programming > languages/environments (e.g., C++, Java, Matlab). > > Qualified candidates should e-mail a cover let, CV and the phone > numbers, e-mail addresses, and postal addresses of three > individuals who can provide recommendation to: > > Dr. P. Jeffrey Brantingham > Department of Anthropology > 341 Haines Hall > University of California, Los Angeles > Los Angeles, CA 90095″
A nice bit of AJ done by the folks at the Louisville [Kentucky] Courier-Journal, who analyzed the jury pool and composition in the C-J's home county. Some good thinking and moderate statistical-lifting drives the series.
See http://tinyurl.com/cr98h
People who live in mainly African-American areas are less likely to serve than those from mostly white areas, a Courier-Journal analysis found.
A piece on calling the elections in Detroit:
BY CHRIS CHRISTOFF FREE PRESS LANSING BUREAU CHIEF
November 10, 2005
What was a viewer to believe?
As polls closed Tuesday, WDIV-TV (Channel 4) declared Freman Hendrix winner of Detroit's mayoral race by 10 percentage points.
WXYZ-TV (Channel 7) showed Hendrix ahead by 4 percentage points, statistically too close to call.
But WJBK-TV (Channel 2) got it right, declaring just after 9 p.m. that Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was ahead, 52% to 48%, which turned out to be almost exactly the final 53%-47% outcome declared many hours later.
And it was vote analyst Tim Kiska who nailed it for WJBK, and for WWJ-AM radio, using counts from 28 of 620 Detroit precincts.
Kiska did it with help from Detroit City Clerk Jackie Currie. She allowed a crew that Kiska assembled to collect the precinct tallies shortly after the polls closed at 8 p.m.
Using what he calls a secret formula, Kiska calculated how those 28 precincts would predict the result citywide.
His formula also assumed that absentee voters chose Hendrix over Kilpatrick by a 2-1 ratio.
That's different from the methods of pollsters who got it wrong Tuesday, Steve Mitchell for WDIV and EPIC/MRA's Ed Sarpolus for WXYZ and the Free Press. Both men used telephone polls, calling people at home during the day and evening and asking how they voted.
It's a more standard method of election-day polling, but Tuesday proved treacherous.
Kiska, a former reporter for the Free Press and Detroit News, has done such election-day predictions since 1974, but said he was nervous Tuesday.
“Every time I go into one of these, my nightmare is I might get it wrong,” said Kiska, a WWJ producer. “I had a bad feeling about this going in. I thought there was going to be a Titanic hitting an iceberg and hoping it wouldn't be me.”
Kiska said he especially felt sorry for his friend Mitchell.
Mitchell said he's been one of the state's most accurate political pollsters over 20 years, but said his Tuesday survey of 800 voters turned out to be a bad sample.
He said polling is inherently risky, and that even well-conducted polls can be wrong one out of 20 times. “I hit number 20 this time.”
For Sarpolus, it's the second Detroit mayoral race that confounded his polls. He was the only major pollster in 2001 who indicated Gil Hill would defeat Kilpatrick.
Sarpolus said the pressure to get poll results on the air quickly made it impossible to adjust his results as real vote totals were made public during the late evening.
Of Kiska, Sarpolus said: “You have to give him credit. … But you have to assume all city clerks are willing to cooperate.”
Contact CHRIS CHRISTOFF at 517-372-8660 or christoff@freepress.com.
Simulation modeling is one of the four cornerstone areas of interest to the IAJ. It's a relatively new, and largely unknown, field that can be of great advantage to journalists if we can take the time to learn how it works and then how we can apply it to our field. The best resource to date for journalists is the J-Lab, (http://www.j-lab.org/) at the University of Maryland.
But today along comes this announcement of a rich issue of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation. It's filled with deep thinking and application.
============================================= The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk) published issue 4 of Volume 8 on 31 October 2005. JASSS is an electronic, refereed journal devoted to the exploration and understanding of social processes by means of computer simulation. It is freely available, with no subscription. ================= This issue is our largest ever, with 12 peer-reviewed articles, eight of them forming a special section on Epistemological Perspectives, edited by Ulrich Frank and Klaus Troitzsch. If you would like to volunteer as a referee and have published at least one refereed article in the academic literature, you may do so by completing the form at http://www.epress.ac.uk/JASSS/webforms/new_referee.php
How Can Social Networks Ever Become Complex? Modelling the Emergence of Complex Networks from Local Social Exchanges by Josep M. Pujol, Andreas Flache, Jordi Delgado and Ramon Sanguesa <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/12.html>
Violence and Revenge in Egalitarian Societies by Stephen Younger <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/11.html>
Influence of Local Information on Social Simulations in Small-World Network Models by Chung-Yuan Huang, Chuen-Tsai Sun and Hsun-Cheng Lin <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/8.html>
It Pays to Be Popular: a Study of Civilian Assistance and Guerrilla Warfare by Scott Wheeler <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/9.html>
——————————
Towards Good Social Science by Scott Moss and Bruce Edmonds <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/13.html>
A Framework for Epistemological Perspectives on Simulation by Joerg Becker, Bjoern Niehaves and Karsten Klose <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/1.html>
What is the Truth of Simulation? by Alex Schmid < http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/5.html>
The Logic of the Method of Agent-Based Simulation in the Social Sciences: Empirical and Intentional Adequacy of Computer Programs by Nuno David, Jaime Simao Sichman and Helder Coelho <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/2.html>
Validation of Simulation: Patterns in the Social and Natural Sciences by Guenter Kueppers and Johannes Lenhard <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/3.html>
Stylised Facts and the Contribution of Simulation to the Economic Analysis of Budgeting by Bernd-O. Heine, Matthias Meyer and Oliver Strangfeld <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/4.html>
Does Empirical Embeddedness Matter? Methodological Issues on Agent-Based Models for Analytical Social Science by Riccardo Boero and Flaminio Squazzoni <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/6.html>
Caffe Nero: the Evaluation of Social Simulation by Petra Ahrweiler and Nigel Gilbert <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/14.html>
==============================
Edmund Chattoe reviews: Routines of Decision Making by Betsch, Tilmann and Haberstroh, Susanne (eds.) <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/4/reviews/chattoe.html>
The new issue can be accessed through the JASSS home page: <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk>.
The next issue will be published at the end of January 2006.
Submissions are welcome: see http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/admin/submit.html
______________________________
We've long appreciated Ford Fessenden's forceful analytic journalism at the NYTimes, but a piece he has in today's Week in Review section leaves us yearning for more. In “Where Home Prices Rise Steeply, Bankruptcies Fall,” Ford raises some interesting — and appropriately inconclusive questions — about the relationship between real estate prices and the number of bankruptcies. And we're given a nicely colored map of U.S. counties and their changes in bankruptcy rates, 2000 to 2005. The quartile scale is huge: zero to 35 percent and greater than 35 percent, both up and down. The problem is there are no hard numbers to put the bankruptcies in context related to county population. And one or two counties down in southeastern Arizona have a greater than 35 percent decline in bankruptcies, but we know they have very sparce populations. “OK,” you might say, “there's simply no room to put all those numbers in the newspaper.”
Right, but they surely could be put online in a variety of ways. If there were three bankruptcies in 2005 and two in 2005, that's pretty close to a 35 percent decline, but hardly statistically significant. I'm sure this isn't Ford's fault; he has the data and is probably far more aware of its analytic pitfalls than we are. But editors — Editors! — have to begin thinking of stories as having many fascets, and work to deliver the richest amount of data as possible that is related to the stories and their context.
Profs. David Kleinbaum and Nancy Barker will present theironline short course “Analysis of Epidemiologic Data” Oct.14 – Nov. 11 at statistics.com. Topics covered in thecourse include: simple analysis of 2×2 tables, control ofextraneous variables (including an introduction to logisticregression), stratified analysis, and matching.
David Kleinbaum, a professor at Emory University's RollinsSchool of Public Health, is internationally known for histextbooks in statistical and epidemiologic methods and asan outstanding teacher. He is the author of “ActiveEpi”and “Epidemiologic Research- Principles and QuantitativeMethods” and has also taught over 150 short courses overthe past 30 years throughout the world.
Nancy Barker is a consulting biostatistician and a co-author of the “ActivEpi Companion Text,” and has over 10years of experience teaching short courses in epidemiologyand biostatistics at Emory University and the Centers forDisease Control and Prevention.
As with all online courses at statistics.com, there are noset hours when you must be online, and you can interactwith the instructor over a period of 4 weeks via a privatediscussion board. We estimate you will need about 10 hoursper week.
Registration: $399 ($299 academic)http://www.statistics.com/content/courses/epi3/index.html
Peter Brucepbruce@statistics.com
P.S. Also coming up – “Clinical Trial Design” Oct. 21 –Nov. 18 with Dr Vance Berger.statistics.com612 N. Jackson St.Arlington, VA 22201USA
Friend Steve Guerin sends this from Santa Fe….
The Disaster Dynamics Project at UCAR looks timely:http://swiki.ucar.edu/dd/2
Check out the Hurricane Landfall gamehttp://swiki.ucar.edu/dd/71The Hurricane Landfall Disaster Dynamics Game is a four-player virtual strategy game about the interaction between natural disasters and urban planning. The game is computerized; it plays like a traditional physical boardgame, but there are simulation components that require significant computation. The game's architecture is client-server, with each player having her own computer.
Individual machines allow moves to be made in parallel and enable players to access private representations of the game state in addition to the public representation. The server is typically run on the instructor's computer, andwill also provide facilitation tools.
Ford Fessenden, of the NYTimes, has yet another strong piece in Thursday's paper, “Health Mystery in New York: Heart Disease.” The lede lays out the perplexing problem in NYC: “Death rates from heart disease in New York City and its suburbs are among the highest recorded in the country, and no one quite knows why.”
But among possible answers — and here especially is where the AJ kicks in — is that there is some “…speculation that doctors in the area may lump deaths with more subtle causes into the heart disease category, making that toll look worse than it actually is.” And “…the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at the health department's request, has sent specialists to determine whether doctors in New York City ascribe causes of death substantially differently.” I know, I know, we're preaching here, but we don't think it can be pointed out too often: journalists and all social scientists cannot simply accept given numbers as a true, valid, honest. We always have to swim up the data-creation stream to determine where, why and from who came the numbers.
We recently enjoyed meeting Stuart Kasdin at a Netlogo workshop. Stuart spent some years in the Peace Corps, then a decade with the OMB (Office of Budget Management). Currently he's working on his doctorate in Poly Sci at UC-Santa Barbara.
Stuart has also been thinking about “performance measurement,” the term-of-art used by auditors and managers of government agencies. (In the private sector, the term often used is “forensic accounting.”) We have generally thought well of performance measurement, especially as a vocabulary and tool journalists should know about to better understand and evalutate the performance of government. Stuart, however, has thought about this in greater depth, and from the perspective of someone inside the government. His paper, “When Do Results Matter? Using Budget Systems to Enhance Program Performance and Agency Management” is worthwhile reading. ABSTRACT: “Managing by results” is a widely used public budgeting approach based on developing performance measures that display the progress of a program toward its stated objectives. This paper considers the complex environment of government budgeting and how to establish budget systems that can successfully encourage improved performance by managers. The paper assesses the limitations in how governments currently apply performance budgeting and suggests ways that it might be made more effective. First, performance measures must be individually tractable and simple, as well as be coherent and revealing in the context of other program performance targets. In addition, performance budgeting must distinguish between program needs based on environmental changes and those based on management related decisions. Finally, the paper argues that multi-task, complex-goal programs will typically result in low-powered incentives for program managers. This outcome results because, even apart from information obstacles, program managers will be rewarded or punished on only a component of the program, representing a small fraction of the total program performance when performance measures as increase. A partial solution is to ensure that the number of policy instruments is not smaller than the number of targets.” Click here to read the Kasdin paper.
We have long-enjoyed — and learned from — Chance News, published by the good folks in the math dept. at some Eastern school in the wilds of the far, far north. The current issue has an interesting link to some paper related to “modeling conflict.” See: http://chance.dartmouth.edu/chancewiki/index.php/Rules_of_engagement_-_modelling_conflict
