Abstract
Like so many others, I fell into a “life of crime” by accident. An electrical engineer by training, my first post-postdoc job was with an engineering consulting firm, where I was engaged in doing operations research, mostly for the US Navy. While I was there, in the late 1960s, the firm was commissioned to develop a new management information system for the Boston Police Department, and I was assigned to work on improving the BPD’s communications system.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
It also imbued in us what “linear” means, as used in linear regression, hierarchical linear modeling, and other techniques. And rare are the variables in social science that have a true linear relationship, so I also had a healthy skepticism of many findings based on linear analyses.
- 2.
Case in point: I once reviewed a report for a federal agency in which the data set was so large that every relationship was significant. So the researchers took a 10% sample and were able to reduce the number of such findings to a more reasonable number. But in doing so they discarded 90% of the data, which to me, a data maven, is tantamount to committing a mortal sin.
- 3.
- 4.
An earlier study did try to fit recidivism data to a complete exponential distribution, but it provided a less accurate fit.
- 5.
This was before there were PCs or Macs, let alone the easy-to-use versions of SPSS and SAS, and well before STATA and SYSTAT were created. The university had its own data-handling program, Osiris, into which the data were entered.
- 6.
A few years later, I was asked to perform the same kind of study by the World Bank, which had suspicions of collusion among contractors in bidding for medical-related contracts. I count this study as one of my failures, since they were all but certain that the bidders were colluding, but its traces were not apparent in the bid data that they provided me with. Sometimes data analyses aren’t enough.
- 7.
A recent version is study ICPSR 24801, available at www.icpsr.umich.edu.
- 8.
Besides, cases with many victims and one or more offenders, and cases with many offenders and one or more victims, may be quite different than one-on-ones. Since we were just exploring, I decided that we should start at this point.
- 9.
Note also the input errors in the far left columns. I doubt if there were any 2- or 3-year-old murderers.
- 10.
A 4-digit entry will have twice the ink of a 2-digit entry, so, for the mathematically inclined, the darkness of a cell corresponds to its logarithm to the base 10.
References
Boag, J. W. (1949). Maximum likelihood estimates of the proportion of patients cured by cancer therapy. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 11, 15–53.
Fagan, J. A. (1993). Editor’s introduction. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 30, 381–382.
Maltz, M.D. (1984). Recidivism. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Internet version published in 2001. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/10061829/Recidivism.
Maltz, M. D. (1998). Visualizing homicide: A research note. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 14(4), 397–410.
Maltz, M. D. (2009). Look before you analyze: Visualizing data in criminal justice. In A. R. Piquero & D. Weisburd (Eds.), Handbook of quantitative criminology. New York, NY: Springer.
Maltz, M. D. (2014). Visualizing data: A brief history. In G. Bruinsma & D. Weisburd (Eds.), Encyclopedia of criminology and criminal justice. New York, NY: Springer.
Maltz, M. D., & McCleary, R. (1977, August 3). The mathematics of behavioral change: Recidivism and construct validity. Evaluation Quarterly, 1, 421–438.
Maltz, M. D., & Pollock, S. M. (1980). Analyzing suspected collusion among bidders. In G. Geis & E. Stotland (Eds.), White-collar crime: Theory and practice (pp. 174–198). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Unwin, A., Theus, M., & Hoffman, H. (2006). Graphics of large datasets: Visualizing a million. New York, NY: Springer.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Maltz, M.D. (2015). Sometimes Pictures Tell the Story. In: Maltz, M., Rice, S. (eds) Envisioning Criminology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15868-6_26
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15868-6_26
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-15867-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-15868-6
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)