Software Used To Predict Who Might Kill

eldavojohn writes "Richard Berk, a University of Pennsylvania criminologist, has worked with authorities to develop a software tool that predicts who will commit homicide. I could not find any papers published on this topic by Berk, nor any site stating what specific Bayesian / decision tree algorithm / neural net is being implemented." From the article: "The tool works by plugging 30 to 40 variables into a computerized checklist, which in turn produces a score associated with future lethality. 'You can imagine the indicators that might incline someone toward violence: youth; having committed a serious crime at an early age; being a man rather than a woman, and so on. Each, by itself, probably isn't going to make a person pull the trigger. But put them all together and you've got a perfect storm of forces for violence,' Berk said. Asked which, if any, indicators stood out as reliable predicators of homicide, Berk pointed to one in particular: youthful exposure to violence." The software is to enter clinical trials next spring in the Philadelphia probation department. Its intent is to serve as a kind of triage: to let probation caseworkers concentrate most of their effort on the former offenders most likely to be most dangerous.

popcorn

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey I've seen that movie! Tom Cruise survives and gets to have the cute girl!

I believe the answer was...

[macadamia_harold]

I could not find any papers published on this topic by Berk, nor any site stating what specific Bayesian / decision tree algorithm / neural net is being implemented.

Yeah, I think if you ask for it to answer that question, the algorithm responds "I'm sorry dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

Re:

[Umbral Blot]

He is probably just using an SPR (statistical prediction rule), so his program is probably 1 line long, and the real work went into mining the data to determine what the rule should be.

Reference

[Quixote]

This paper was published in the June 2006 issue of "The Journal of Quantitative Criminology".
Here are the pertinent details:
Title: Forecasting Dangerous Inmate Misconduct: An Application of Ensemble Statistical Procedures
Journal: Journal of Quantitative Criminology
Issue: Volume 22, Number 2 / June, 2006
Pages: 131-145

Abstract:
In this paper, we attempt to forecast which prison inmates are likely to engage in very serious misconduct while incarcerated. Such misconduct would usually be a major felony if committed outside of prison: drug trafficking, assault, rape, attempted murder and other crimes. The binary response variable is problematic because it is highly unbalanced. Using data from nearly 10,000 inmates held in facilities operated by the California Department of Corrections, we show that several popular classification procedures do no better than the marginal distribution unless the data are weighted in a fashion that compensates for the lack of balance. Then, random forests performs reasonably well, and better than CART or logistic regression. Although less than 3% of the inmates studied over 24 months were reported for very serious misconduct, we are able to correctly forecast such behavior about half the time.

Unfortunately, you've got to pay $30 to get this paper. Maybe some slashdotter with a school/corp subscription to Springer will put up the text? ;-)

Re:Reference

[Anonymous Coward]

http://download.yousendit.com/CFD415EB623F072C [yousendit.com]

Re:Reference

[dch24]

Thanks! However, reading the paper, it seems that this paper is about the California Department of Corrections, and is not actually about who will commit homicide "on the outside." It's about which prisoners are "likely to engage in serious misconduct while incarcerated" (from the abstract). I don't know if this is the right paper. In fact, I'm going to guess that Berk hasn't published a paper on his new method. This paper may be a similar method, but there's no way to know that.

I also wonder in yousendit.com can handle a slashdotting. I guess we'll know soon!

Re:

[dysk]

I also wonder in yousendit.com can handle a slashdotting. I guess we'll know soon!

On the link I posted below I've only gotten 50 hits, and yousendit has a limit of 100 downloads for unpaid accounts, so I don't think too many people are clicking on the article.

Re:Reference

[dysk]

Interesting stuff. Here's a link to the full text:

http://130.58.240.179:8080/~erek/minorityreport.pd f [130.58.240.179]

Re:

[QuantumG]

Dear god why. You've read the abstract, it's no better than guessing.

Re:Reference

[cluckshot]

Well since I was making Hurricane forecasts by July of 2006 that said the season was essentially over for the USA... (Not bragging just I did) The forecasting of events really isn't a hard or difficult thing. In the case of prisoners, you would do better to give a small reward system for accuracy and do a survey system similar to Iowa Prediction Markets. (do your own lookup) It is often a reality that we can predict who is going to steal the most or who is going to kill and quite accurately.

Having worked in a prison as RN, I know pretty well what is going on with the crime scene. It isn't a mystery. The domestic ignorance of what is causing crime, and how to deal with it is mostly the problem. People really just don't like the factor set being told. So I will just to get some really low moderation (by telling the truth) tell approximately what is the profile of violent criminals.

A violent criminal usually falls either below 85 IQ or above 185 IQ. The frequency of this below IQ 85 is about 85% of the population of such persons with about 13% above IQ 185. Only a tiny fraction falls in the middle. Essentially a person who is violent is one who cannot adapt to their world due to low mental state and who rashly reacts to situations they are unable to handle. The very bright criminals of this type are in fact vicious cunning predators. The unique and common link of both groups is their unwillingness to defer gratification of desires for extended periods of time. The want something now and they demand it now and they get it now. They brush anything out of their way on the way including other human beings. If this profile matches to the behavior of some other groups of people we all know and love (CEO's) It isn't an accident. They fall out of this group as well. Essentially we have a party who is willing to force the system rather than work with it. This profile does have racial components. Certain (Nameless deliberately -- I am not suicidal) racial groups tend to do this more than others by wide margins. You could just as well determine these people by their credit rating. It would be just as accurate or more so than the networks.

Actually the most uniform behavior seen in prison is that the persons are ones who "flunked out of kindergarten." The reality here is that successful anti-crime programs generally teach people to defer gratification and to do things like saying those 3 magic words, "Please" and "Thank you." I know this sound simple. It really is. The Church of Scientology (I am not a member and don't intend to be one) has a very successful program that teaches this sort of stuff. It empties prisons when tried. The reality is that when people are taught how to actually deal with their desires and how to communicate with others and how to handle situations, most of them actually do so. This is a damning statement against our modern public schools who think that such teaching is not their duty. Frankly it is their only duty.

Re:Reference

[btellier]

A violent criminal usually falls either below 85 IQ or above 185 IQ. The frequency of this below IQ 85 is about 85% of the population of such persons with about 13% above IQ 185. Only a tiny fraction falls in the middle.

I defy you to find me a single study which supports this ridiculous claim. According to the IQ bellcurve [geocities.com] only one in 1,000,000 people will have an IQ of 174-200. So what you claim means that there are 300 people in the United States committing 13% of the violent crimes? Nonsense.

Re:

[bshroyer]

You're not getting it.

The behaviour being studied occurs in 3% of the sample population. When predicting which individuals will exhibit this behaviour, a coin flip will have a 97% false positive rate. The model being studied has only a 50% false positive rate. In a population of 100, the model will predict that six individuals will exhibit the behaviour. It will be correct on the three, and incorrect on three more. It will correctly predict the 94 inmates who will not.

Re:Reference

[Etherwalk]

The technique used in the paper breaks prisoners into two groups: about 20% of them are tagged as likely to engage in misconduct, and about 80% of them are tagged as unlikely. Then about 20 people from each group (representing 10% of the misconduct group, but only 2.5% of the unlikely group) wind up doing something especially bad-guy-like in the next two years. So it's much better than flipping a coin, which would put 500 people in each group, and would be more inaccurate and more expensive. (Because higher security for 500 people is more expensive than higher security for 200 people.)

Of course, it kind of sucks for the 180 people who aren't going to do something bad-guy-like who are stuck in the misconduct pool. But that number gets winnowed as technique gets better, which is what this research is about.

So, this system flags someone

[Rix]

Their probation officer pays more attention to them, and they feel trapped in the system. They can't move on and contribute positively, and lash out violently.

Thanks, that helps.

Pretty much.

[Kadin2048]

Their probation officer pays more attention to them, and they feel trapped in the system. They can't move on and contribute positively, and lash out violently.

Alternately, their probation officer ignores them, and they get dumped out on the street, where they're unable to find a job and contribute positively, and turn to crime instead.

It's a real win/win.

Utter BS

[suv4x4]

"Richard Berk, a University of Pennsylvania criminologist, has worked with authorities to develop a software tool that predicts who will commit homicide.

This is utter BS, and a plain simple statistics based profiler.
I'm so pissed off after reading about this "supposed", that I wanna kill someone.

And don't forget, all arabs are terrorists! Don't forget to give them obvious, dirty looks full of awareness of their terroristic descent, when you happen to see one.

Re:

[forgotten_my_nick]

Probably does more then statistics. Reminds me of a story.

This girl and her sister are attending a funeral of their mother who has died of old age. At the funeral the girl meets this guy she never met before, both hit it off big time. However when she gets home she realises that she got no contact information so is unable to speak to him. A few days later the sister is murdered by the girl. Why?

Re:

[suv4x4]

This girl and her sister are attending a funeral of their mother who has died of old age. At the funeral the girl meets this guy she never met before, both hit it off big time. However when she gets home she realises that she got no contact information so is unable to speak to him. A few days later the sister is murdered by the girl. Why?

I'll tell you if you guess my age which is three times what it was X years ago and 5 times it was Y years ago, and somehow manages to be a prime number, and contain square

Re:

[suv4x4]

This girl and her sister are attending a funeral of their mother who has died of old age. At the funeral the girl meets this guy she never met before, both hit it off big time. However when she gets home she realises that she got no contact information so is unable to speak to him. A few days later the sister is murdered by the girl. Why?

BTW, if this was The Real World, I wouldn't really suspect she did it to meet the guy at the funeral, but because her mother left everything to her sister, and the guy has

Re:

[Petersson]

This girl and her sister are attending a funeral of their mother who has died of old age. At the funeral the girl meets this guy she never met before, both hit it off big time. However when she gets home she realises that she got no contact information so is unable to speak to him. A few days later the sister is murdered by the girl. Why?

Hey, that's a psychological classics. If the reply is 'I have no idea, there must be something missing in the story' the person asked have thinking homicidal deviations.

Re:

[suv4x4]

Hey, that's a psychological classics. If the reply is 'I have no idea, there must be something missing in the story' the person asked have thinking homicidal deviations.

However if the first thing that comes to her/his mind is 'It's clear, she killed her sister in order to be at another funeral so she could meet the guy again' then there is higher possibility that there could be something wrong with the asked person.

Wait, both answers demonstrate "thinking homicidal deviations", so what is the answer that me

Re:

[DarkSarin]

Fortunately, most of the real psych out there isn't as looney as the pop-psych stuff like this. Note I said most. There are still a few moonbats, but most are safely hidden away where they can't do much real damage.

(Pet psychology indeed! Don't get me started!)

(Oh, did I mention that I am in an Applied Psych PhD program? Yeah, well, okay, now I have, but I still like what my dad told me when I asked him why he switched majors away from psych-"Too many cooks" (as in loonies!).)

Re:

[Zaphod2016]

Don't leave me hanging...does this have a "right" answer?

Is this the ole' "do you resent the accusation, or assess the evidence against you" trick question? I.e. Did you kill your cousin?

Innocent response: what the hell is the matter with you?

Guilty response: what makes you think I did?

Re:

[forgotten_my_nick]

> Don't leave me hanging...does this have a "right" answer?

No right answer, 1 wrong answer. :) Answered in the other replies.

Re:

[suv4x4]

Is this the ole' "do you resent the accusation, or assess the evidence against you" trick question?

[Person1:] I.e. Did you kill your cousin?

[Person2:] But he's alive...

[Person1:] Oh.. well then.. Hmmmmm..... Wanna go for a drink in the pub nearby?

[Person2:] Sure.

[Person1:] Did you kill your mom?

[Person2:] Dude, something's definitely wrong with you, I tell ya.

Re:

[tomjen]

do you resent the accusation, or assess the evidence against you

I will go fetch a dictionary

Re:

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Clearly, the girl was on fire.

Re:

[suv4x4]

Hes a killer!

I'm so sorry, but he doesn't meet the minimum system requirements for a killer.

Minimum system requirements:
- 1 civil victim or better

Recommended system requirements:
- 1 police force victim or better
- 10 civil victims or better

Re:

[krotkruton]

That was my first thought on this article as well, until I read the last line: "to let probation caseworkers concentrate most of their effort on the former offenders most likely to be most dangerous."

If this is only used in that manner, then it seems like a good idea to me. However, that's a huge if, and I don't believe for a second that it will only be used by probation officers against convicted criminals.

Re:Utter BS

[Llywelyn]

1) Convicted criminals are the only ones that concern probation officers.

2) Convicted criminals are the only ones they are likely to have the data to fill most of the fields for.

3) Probation officers have a job to do that does not involve tracking random citizens.

Thus, it seems unlikely it could be used for anything *but* the intended purpose without a fairly serious rework.

Re:

[krotkruton]

Initially, I wasn't thinking about tracking random citizens as much as I was thinking about it being used during sentencing. I can just picture a first time assault offender having this used against him to send him to jail because "he is likely to do it again". I can't give an in depth example of how that would work and IANAL, but I've read about enough obscure cases to know that some lawyers are good at their jobs and can do things that I wouldn't ever think would fly.

In another example, picture a viole

Re:

[mgblst]

That was my first thought on this article as well, until I read the last line: "to let probation caseworkers concentrate most of their effort on the former offenders most likely to be most dangerous."

If this is only used in that manner, then it seems like a good idea to me. However, that's a huge if, and I don't believe for a second that it will only be used by probation officers against convicted criminals.

Sure, everything is presented in a good light, to get funding. The A bomb was written as a w

Re:

[Mr2cents]

And don't forget, all arabs are terrorists! Don't forget to give them obvious, dirty looks full of awareness of their terroristic descent, when you happen to see one.

Is it hate week already? Great!

Not Utter BS

[Dragon Bait]

And don't forget, all arabs are terrorists! Don't forget to give them obvious, dirty looks full of awareness of their terroristic descent, when you happen to see one.

There are scientific reasons behind human behavior. Elevated testosterone will tend to elevate violent behavior. Raised in an abusive home raises the likelihood of being an abuser. Raised in a racist home raises the likelihood of violence against other races. Raised with a religion of violence, one is more likely to be violent.

Given eno

A bit uneasy?

[sqrt(2)]

This sounds like a really BAD idea to me. Either it works really well and then people will start asking why it isn't being used on the general population or it wont work and we'll be focusing our attention on the wrong people. What's the indicator of success? A reduction in homicide rates among people singled out? Our justice system is based on dealing with people AFTER they break the law, everyone, even people at "high risk" to commit crime have to actually do something wrong before you can take action. It may just be used to focus rehabilitation and surveillance efforts on high risk people, but the profiling potential for this must be obvious to the people who designed it, then all it takes is for a little public exposure of how this system could have saved some children if it had been used more aggressively. I'm a bit uneasy about any technology or system that seeks to punish people retroactively. The way the article describes it as working seems harmless now, but the potential of abuse is there. Definitely something to keep an eye on.

Re:

[Lemmy Caution]

It simply needs to work better than the current methods to be useful. Something to keep an eye on, but it's a lot better than racial profiling. A lot better.

Guys we have a problem

[suv4x4]

Excerpt from the test:

...

21. Ever killed or tortured small animals?

22. If yes, did you often think they enjoyed it and wanted more?

23. Are you a minority?

24. Do you read Slashdot?

25. Regularly?

26. Would you punch a guy with glasses in the face?

27. Would you punch a clown in the balls?

...

Re:Guys we have a problem

[smcn]

[quote]26. Would you punch a guy with glasses in the face?[/quote]
I don't know, having glasses in his face would be pretty painful already.

Re:

[jamesh]

24a. Do you post to Slashdot?

ultranova [slashdot.org] they're coming to get you for those threats of violence you made against me!

The system works!!! :)

Does not apply outside the prison system?

[Salvance]

This study was done on incarcerated criminals. Even attempting to apply the findings to people outside prisons would be a HUGE mistake. Now if they conducted a similar set of questions on a few thousand randomly selected members of the public and were able to show the same high correlations, that would be a different story entirely.

Re:

[Telvin_3d]

God, can you imagine the liability from that?

"well, we were fairly sure he was going to kill someone, but if we hadn't let it happen we wouldn't know if the test was valid"

heh

Web version?

[8ball629]

I'd like to beta test this on myself ;).

Also, how long will it be before myspace users have this survey on their webpages or is it already there?

Re:

[__aaclcg7560]

Batman would automatically be considered a psychopath [wikipedia.org] since he defies the political norms of being a survivor instead of being victim, taking the law into his own hands instead of waiting for the wheels of justice to grind slowly, and acting where others would do nothing. If I recall one comic correctly, the psychological establishment declared the Joker more saner than Batman. Go figure.

Interesting

[suv4x4]

You can imagine the indicators that might incline someone toward violence: youth; having committed a serious crime at an early age; being a man rather than a woman, and so on. Each, by itself, probably isn't going to make a person pull the trigger. But put them all together and you've got a perfect storm of forces for violence

Is Berk implying that a checklist of questions can make someone pull the trigger?

Well in this case I suppose we have no choice but TO KILL THOSE PEOPLE IN ADVANCE I think! Oops. Well w

Be careful....

[djupedal]

"Do you make up these questions, Mr. Holden? Or do they write 'em down for you?"

"The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping."

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN, I'M NOT HELPING?"

"I mean you're not helping! Why is that, Leon?"

Re:

[MichaelSmith]

If the test in TFA indicated that I could murder would it at least prove that I was human?

OTH you wouldn't want a person to sit down with a prison inmate and ask them these questions face to face, particularly if the interviewee in question had a handgun under the table, which I suppose is your point.

Re:

[djupedal]

"...you wouldn't want a person to sit down with a prison inmate and ask them these questions face to face"

Inmate, machine, human, whomever - the point is, just be sure to check under the table! :)

These types of profile-determination exams always entertain me. I was with a group of ruffians one night, minding our business as it were, when a pair of local Sheriffs came 'round to see if any of us warranted their interest. They lined all ten of us up and went down the line, one by one...

Cop #1 to Ruff

Re:

[djupedal]

Want me to push it back one more level? Where profiling is revealed as the pointless effort it is, and you simply straighten up or you die...?

"There must be security for all, or no one is secure. Now, this does not mean giving up any freedom, except the freedom to act irresponsibly. Your ancestors knew this when they made laws to govern themselves and hired policemen to enforce them. We, of the other planets, have long accepted this principle. We have an organization for the mutual protection of all plan

SpamAssassin

[nacturation]

So SpamAssassin works this way. Any one criteria (such as from a dynamic IP address) generally isn't enough to consider email spam. You need to have a number of factors contribute both positively and negatively to the final score, after which it's considered spam. But this is for humans. Maybe the software is called PeopleAssassin?
 

The Ying tastes good but not the Yang

[icecow]

"70% confident this man will commit murder" = 30% are definately not murderers who will be discriminated against as being a high risk murderer.

"95% confident this man will commit murder" = 5% are definately not murderers who will be discriminated against as being an EXTREMELY high risk murderer.

OK, turn it loose on...

[Guy Harris]

...these people. [malevole.com]

And yet again

[TCM]

...the attempt to solve with technology what can't be solved by technology.

How about having social workers that deserve that job title? Do we soon replace all judgment on humans and human interaction with computers'?

It is this very dehumanization that causes violence among humans in the first place. How long until someone is flagged by this and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because he feels trapped?

This whole anti-social project shouldn't even have started. What a waste.

Re:

[inviolet]

Take care to maintain context here. This project is not about individual judgments of other individuals. This project operates on the macro level, directing limited resources where they are most likely to have the greatest benefit. Only after all the likelihoods have been maximized do we re-introduce individual attention and individual treatment. (How else would you apportion too few workers to too many cases?)

And don't worry, just because you're predictable, doesn't mean you don't have free will. You

Before you commit a homicide

[suv4x4]

has worked with authorities to develop a software tool that predicts who will commit homicide.

Don't forget the best practices for committing a homicide:

1. Commit often and early, to prevent victim escape.

2. Copycat homicide is cheap, so don't be afraid to branch existing homicides, if you feel you need to.

3. While committing a homicide, always write down a full log of what happened, and put it with it with body (or bodies). This won't just help the cops get oriented, but also to yourself when you come back

This already happens....

[robot5x]

actually there are many tools like this already in existence... modern probation work has been scientificalised and statisticalised to the extent that you can't do anything with an offender until you know what their various scores are. In the UK the risk of general reconviction is calculated statistically in the OGRS programme based on age, conviction, prison sentences etc. (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/probation1.html [homeoffice.gov.uk]) . This also produces a level of risk that that person will commit a violent offence. There are other specialist tools for domestic violence - the Spousal Assault Risk Assessment which is a 20 item checklist. Also, for sex offenders their risk of reconviction is assessed by using the Thornton Risk Matrix 2000. Every offender who comes into the probation system also has an OASys assessment completed on them - which asks the assessor to score factors from 14 different areas such as accommodation, lifestyle, substance misuse etc. (http://www.probation.homeoffice.gov.uk/files/pdf/ Info%20for%20sentencers%203.pdf [homeoffice.gov.uk]).

Probation: People are missing something here...

[Llywelyn]

"This will help stratify our caseload and target our resources to the most dangerous people," probation department director of research Ellen Kurtz said

Emphasis added.

This is being used by people who have already been tried, convicted, and sentenced and are being monitored and required to check in anyways. The model, further, was derived from the probation system (not from those already in jail):

"Using probation department cases entered into the system between 2002 and 2004, Berk and his colleagues performed a two-year follow-up study - enough time, they theorized, for a person to reoffend if he was going to."

This is just being used to help parole officers decide how to allocate their caseload. That's a Good Thing(TM). No one seems to be talking about applying it to society in a minority report fashion, and while such a harebrained scheme may eventually be table, it needs to be evaluated independently of whether it is a good idea for parole officers deciding how to allocate limited resources.

Something similar

[denoir]

There is a similar thing on this site [peltarion.com] showing how to predict which police cadets would become good cops and which would become bad cops. It's some form of neural net tutorial, but the conclusions are (at least to me) remarkable:

We can with 96.55% confidence say that a graduating cadet will be failing at his job in five years and we can with 99.17% confidence say that a graduating cadet will be performing an adequate job five years in the future.

Re:

[oliverthered]

from my experiance they all turn into bad cops after a while.

I'm actually a probation officer

[goldcd]

and tried a couple of similar package before. They're all snakeoil.
Nothing can replace years of professional practice and the ability to analyze the bumps on a perps skull.

Re:

[BenjyD]

I was thinking that: my gf works for the local probation service and they use a software package that gives them a risk score of some sort based on the offender's history.

Re:

[sharkey]

analyze the bumps on a perps skull.

He was arrested by the LAPD, huh?

In other news lately...

[kan0r]

Scotland Yard agrees:

It looks like Scotland Yard [timesonline.co.uk] is also looking for scary new tactics in fighting crime. The latest idea of Laura Richards, head of analysis of the Metropolitan Police's Homicide Prevention Unit, sounds like a strangely familiar concept to those who have seen Minority Report. She aims to create a database of people who could supposedly commit a crime in the future, based on their psychological profile.

Even though preventing crimes is a noble motivation, this idea raises serious privacy issues.

As a sidemark it should be mentioned that Laura Richard also seems to be part of the team that "revealed" Jack the Ripper's face some time ago.

They shouldn't use software

[bytesex]

They should use the predictive capability of markets instead. Set up a little in-prison pool of money on who might kill; whoever trades highest, is most likely to kill at a given moment. It'll work great !

FAO Mr. Berk:

[Kamineko]

So, Richard, how'd you score?

I'm not worried...

[Nemus]

Typically, when you see this kind of "Behold, this will totally solve {problem X}" type project, its really just an academic trying to get national attention, so that he'll be noticed by someone running for an election at some point, and will thus get a "Vote for me, because I endorse {impossible solution that sounds good in a press byte X}" grant. Very few psychologists of any reputability put too much stock in these magical little Q and A's nowadays...

Redundant?

[necro2607]

"concentrate most of their effort on the former offenders most likely to be most dangerous"

So we already know which are most likely to be dangerous, and we're going to use some simplified-down-to-40-attributes computer software to.... reassure us of what we already suspected? Hmmm..

"Software Used To Predict Who Might Kill"

[suv4x4]

"Software Used To Predict Who Might Kill"... hmmm

You know, the issue with this definition is technically anyone *MIGHT* kill.

Now, make me a software that predicts who *WILL* kill, whom and when, and we're in business :D

Uh-oh...

[The Famous Druid]

From TFA: Asked which, if any, indicators stood out as reliable predicators of homicide, Berk pointed to one in particular: youthful exposure to violence

Seen the news from Iraq lately?

Looks like we're creating a whole generation of homicidal maniacs over there...

Boring. How about ...

[Ihlosi]

... a piece of software that can predict from a 5-minute test game of Quake who's most likely to frag ?

Missing Link

[ajs318]

I was expecting to find an online, multiple-choice questionnaire ..... "Are you a murderer?" sort of thing. What a disappointment!

Unfortunately I have a big programming task ahead of me for today; otherwise I'd do it myself with a few lines of Perl and a MySQL database.

Arlo Guthrie QOTD

[bmo]

And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill."

"I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL!" And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL! KILL!" and he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, "KILL! KILL!" And the sergeant came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall and said, "You're our boy."

--
BMO

10% positive predictive value

[gvc]

If you have the misfortune to be labeled by this method as a potential offender, there's a 10% chance that you are. That's a 90% chance that you aren't.

On the other hand, if you're an offender, there's a 50% chance you'll be labeled. Thats a 50% chance you won't.

Better than chance, I suppose, but a useful predictive tool it is not.

Not really news

[synthespian]

Software such as this is not really new. IIRC, the LAPD has been using a software called MOSAIC, made by an expert in violent behaviour, Mr. Gavin De Baker (and associates).

http://www.mosaicsystem.com/ [mosaicsystem.com]

The software is deployed in, for instance, a setting where a women has been battered by her husband. By feeding some data on the perpretator and the victim, the police department might recomend a women that she not return home, due to a huge statistical chance of her being murdered, according to data compounde

Children?

[nurb432]

So they will adminster this early in childhood so they can weed out potential bad kids?

"sorry, but johnny has been expelled from school beacuse he might, someday, perhaps do bad things somewhere, to someoene"

So, without schooling and unable to find work, he falls in to the world of crime, proving the assumption that he was a bad kid afterall.

This is Silly

[eno2001]

I think ANYONE would kill under the right circumstances. Look at war for instance... All soldiers have to kill at one point or another during a war. Whether it's hand to hand combat, pointing a gun and firing or dropping a bomb. It's all killing. You also have crimes of passion where someone loses control and goes over the line. A parent who witnesses something horrific happening to a child will likely lash out in a rage which would certainly cause death under the right cirumstances. The same for a spouse. You can't predict who will or won't kill if you don't know the situation the person is in.

and in a couple of years time ...

[Alain Williams]

this gets applied generally ... to work out who is going to comit some crime, why not round them up before they do it and save us all a lot of bother.

So: what if you know that you have all the contra indicators: black male youth, poor background, divorced parents, ...

Why bother to do anything: you can't get credit (you are going to be a criminal - right ?), you can't get to be an apprentice or into a good college (you are going to be a criminal - right ?), ...

I can see this happening. Be scared, real scared!

If only they'd run this on George Bush...

[Quickening]

...before he was elected. More than 750,000 people might still be alive.

Tag as "precrime"...

[Kadin2048]

Yeah except in Minority Report, they were using psychics to predict who would kill; here it's just an overgrown spam filter.

Re:Games

[__aaclcg7560]

Sure. Once they start plugging in the stats from Halo 2, that will make it obvious as to who is willing to kill or suck the big one.

Is this like computer dating?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Just more pattern matching software. Feed in the criteria and you might get either laid or killed.

If this pattern matching software actually worked, people would use it for some purpose that makes wads of cash.... like the stock market.

Re:

[KlaymenDK]

Normally, I take the stance that kids are perfectly capable of distinguishing games from reality. That is, distinguishing between on one side killing a kraut in a Fokker Dreidekker or an alien on Halo, and on the other side beating up the neighbour's kid at school.

But just now I started to wonder if that will always be the case. I know the old pacman joke[1], but that was back in the glorious days of 4- or 16-color sprites. Now; with ever more realistic video and audio, and with the insidious blurring and m

If kids couldn't tell the difference...

[Belial6]

If kids couldn't tell the difference between pretend and real, we would have never gotten to Pac-Man. Have you ever looked at what kids used to play? They wouldn't look at any graphics on the screen. They would chase down real people tie them to a tree, and physically pretend to cut their scalp off. It is a game that you might have heard of, "Cowboys and Indians". They would pretend to kill each other in cold blood with guns. They would physically act out violent crimes when they would play "Cops and Robbers". If exposure to pretend violence were have any real effect on kids, we wouldn't have made it this far.

Re:If kids couldn't tell the difference...

[Tim C]

Indeed. One of my earliest memories is of happily running around the playground and field at school, lobbing imaginary grenades at my friend, shooting them with my fingers and stabbing them with my empty fist. We called it "war", and we divided up into two teams to blow each other away again and again and again.

Amazingly, I've not grown up to be a mass murderer. (In fact, I've never even so much as had a real fight in my life)

Re:

[Broken scope]

Can you please provide data that backs up your claim of lives saved? I mean really, where has a gun ban caused a long term decrease in violence. More specifically where has it reduced things like crimes of passion and first time offenses involving guns?

It doesn't, premeditated murders do not decrease. Crimes involving firearms sold illegally do not decrease because the law does not affect the illegal sales of firearms, it doesn't stop criminals who can't get a gun legally from getting one. It might caus

I can site obvious and useless statistics too!

[EveLibertine]

It's also true that people who own automobiles cause nearly 100% of vehicular manslaughters in this country. Nevertheless, the vast majority of automobile owners do not cause death or injury with their cars.

The point is that getting rid of cars or guns isn't going to solve the problem of people acting irrationally or irresponsibly. Banning is a useless solution because it only treats the symptom and not the problem, and will not cause a decrease in violent activities. People need to be educated so they can

Re:

[dunkelfalke]

well, many places in europe (with virtually no legal gun ownership) are in fact much safer than the usa. and the cops aren't that trigger happy either.

that disproves your theory.

Oh, stop it.

[Kadin2048]

many places in europe (with virtually no legal gun ownership) are in fact much safer than the usa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_implies_c ausation [wikipedia.org]

I find it amusing that Europeans love to bemoan Americans for thinking, particularly when they travel, that Europe should be just like America; however, whenever a European or Euro-phile analyzes crime in the U.S., the only difference that ever gets brought up between the two places in question is the difference in gun control. Really ... so that's the most significant difference between "many places" in Europe and the U.S.? You don't think there are, just perhaps, some more significant social, economic, and cultural contributors to the difference in crime?

Europe and the U.S. are not the same place, and you'd have to control for a whole lot more variables than "gun control" in order to start comparing something as high-level as per-capita murder rates.

Re:

[dunkelfalke]

so basically you are saying that there is something seriously wrong with usa and an arm race with criminals won't help anyway, right?

Re:Oh, stop it.

[Kadin2048]

There are many things seriously wrong with the U.S., but none of them are easily solvable, nor are they trivial issues. There are thousands of possible inputs which can all have "crime" as one possible output, ranging from the legacies of slavery and discrimination (urban collapse, "white flight"), to drug policy, to basic taboos (sex "education" leading to ridiculously high teen pregnancy rates), to culture (glorification of violence, acceptability of violence in mainstream media). I could literally go on all day. Each one is an incredibly complex issue, in many cases rooted in generations of conflict and bad feelings and issues that people prefer not to discuss. A whole lot of very smart people have worked hard to solve them, and where we are today is the best compromise found so far.

In short, given the existence of fairly high crime rates here anyway, coupled with a well-justified sense of distrust of government and authority, and the extreme symbolic importance of the firearm, it would make little sense and cause great harm to intentionally disarm law-abiding people and remove the means with which they might defend themselves. This is particularly true since there's no convincing evidence showing that disarming law abiding citizens would reduce crime; rather, logically we'd expect to see it increase.

What people in other countries do may well be fine solutions for their needs (although I would probably disagree on fundamental philosophical grounds), but it's foolish to make sweeping cross-cultural comparisons and then blame the resulting difference on a single factor.

Re:

[dunkelfalke]

well, most important downside is that the criminals also arm up.

if i am a criminal and i want to mug you and must assume that you are armed, i just play han solo with you (han shot first, i would too).

Re:

[dunkelfalke]

actually the getting away should be even easier - a cadaver won't talk to the police.

Re:

[dunkelfalke]

shooting rather scares all witnesses, who then never see anything.

has nothing to do with being a criminal mastermind, but with being russian. i just know how all this shit happens.

Re:

[dunkelfalke]

why shouldn't it? people are the same everywhere.
anyway, russia and usa have much more in common than you can imagine - and much more common than any of them has with europe.

Re:

[dunkelfalke]

usa and russia were fed the same propaganda, have pretty much the same level of stupid nationalism, a comparable gap between rich and pood, high crime rates, anything-goes capitalism, and until about two years ago even the same currency.

that's why i live in the eu.

Re:

[AstrumPreliator]

It's also the most statistically inaccurate comment. It's probably more inaccurate statistically than the software we're discussing.

"Of those incidents in which the murder weapon was specified, 70.3 percent of the homicides that occurred in 2004 were committed with firearms. Of those, 77.9 percent involved handguns, 5.4 percent involved shotguns, and 4.2 percent involved rifles. Approximately 12.4 of the murders were committed with other types or unspecified types of firearms. Knives or cutting instruments

Re:

[jrockway]

> If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns...does that somehow make you feel more safe?

Sure! Let's say you are armed and are attacked by an ... armed attacker. You shoot at him, he shoots at you. You both die -- that's two deaths.

If you were unarmed and defenseless, only you would die. So as you can see, banning guns reduces gun fatalaties by 50%!

Edit: Bad Idea.

[SynapseLapse]

I thought Phillip K. Dick already explained why this was a bad idea...

There, I edited that for you buddy.
Let's just leave it at that's what you really intended, because otherwise I'll destroy all of my karma in spewing forth a slur of obscenities about how...
well, let's just leave it at that.

Re:

[Jacer]

if (!had_a_good_family) {? While that is still technically correct, it's needlessly more complex. if(had_a_bad_family){, while saying the same thing, is more concise. I know the two statements are almost identical, and are identical in function, but I've always felt that the shortest, simplest statement that accomplishes my goal is the best. It's all about efficency. I don't know anyone who would say would use negative numbers in equation where non-negatives would accomplish the same thing, just as eas

Re:

[SynapseLapse]

I don't recall any movie.
I do recall an excellent short story. [wikipedia.org]



Actually, I thought the movie, with the exception of the ludicrously stupid eyeball scene, was an excellent adaptation of Phillip K. Dick in general.

Re:Maybe this will be as good as other psychologic

[Dunbal]

3) Do you ever fantasize about murder?

      I don't get it. This would include most married people...