College Prof in the US, focus areas are Human-Computer Interaction, Cybersecurity, and Machine Learning

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I recently moved and got rid of mine. However, I used to live in a really rough neighborhood. A lot of heavy drug use. Most folks were good people when sober, but when high, they don’t think logically, and bad mixes can cause aggression. Thankfully never had to shoot anyone, but police were called a few times with guns at the ready in case things escalated before police arrived. My mom still lives in that area, so I left her with a 38 special, a 20 guage shotgun, and a habit of calling the police the moment anything feels off in the neighborhood.












  • You can’t measure actual crimes committed. However, you can make a reasonable guess by factoring in your known unknowns. For example, assume we have a significant sample of reported crimes in a city. Let’s pull the number 50/100k people out of our rear end for example purposes.

    As you pointed out, we only have the data from the reports. The total number is known unknown. We could then look at a different data set, like a survey, that says something like 20% of people who are victims of the crime never report it, or 20% of people admit to doing it and not getting caught, whatever the case may be.

    So, we can cross reference those two statistics to estimate that the “real” rate of that crime is closer to 60/100k people. Even though neither study can predict that number individually.