Monday, September 5, 2016

The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America

The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America.  Barry Latzer


I'm a sucker for fact based evidence and research.  Great science, economics.

Great book about rise and fall of violent crime over the past hundred years or so.  Reads somewhat like a college textbook.  Lots of great references and end notes.  Good fact based read.

Interesting takeaways:

Causes of drops in crime: Young men going off to war, correlation with alcohol abuse (higher abuse == higher violent crime).  Unemployment does not correlate; it's not the case that when there's lots of work available that crime drops.

Longer term trends, crime dips 1935-64, rises 64-95, dips 95.

Rise in 64 attributed to increase in young men (baby boom) exceeding a tipping point, a systemic overload of the criminal justice system and police/courts, and a subculture of black youth violence - swagger as defense against violence - respect and preemptive theft to increase respect.  Came from the southern redneck culture.  See "The Code of the Street".  Crack cocaine epidemic in the 80s also significant source of violent crime.

Social contagion - people commit crimes because their peers are doing it.  Things exceed a tipping point.

Dip in 95 - Cocaine epidemic ran its course.  Younger people saw negative effects on their older siblings, did not want the same fate.  More cops and policing about yes but the clearance rates of reported crimes being solved actually went down.  (But, total amount may have been better but % was worse; was not explored by the author).  (Thought experiment - do we have the expectation that percentage remains fixed as number scale (from a social perspective)?)

Definition of culture - the collective programming of the human mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from the others.

Sources of fear (say of flying or being a crime victim) - likelihood is important but that is tempered by unpredictability of something happening, the inability for us to take precautions, and potentially devastating consequences of the thing happening make all the difference.

Saturday, August 27, 2016

Windows 10 quirks, part 1

Windows 10, loving it.  However, a couple of strange quirks have popped up.  Sharing those here:

ASUS SBW-06D2X-U DVD/BD stopped working.  Had been using this fine.  Used it to install the computer in fact.  Had been working fine under Windows 10 for a few months.  Then mysteriously after a reboot, the device wouldn't show up.  I'd plug it in, get the sound that the device was recognized successfully, but it wouldn't show up on the system.  Looked in the Device Manager, it was seen there (after I elected to show hidden devices, ahem!), however, Windows said it wasn't attached.  Strange.  Googled some posts, lots of stuff about removing ATAPI drivers, IDE base, etc.  Not for me since this is a USB device.  I removed the device from device manager hoping that on next plug-in it would be recognized and new drivers would be installed.  No dice, plugging in got me the same success sound but the device didn't show up.  DANGIT!  Googled some more and found posts (http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-hardware/asus-sbw-06d2x-u-will-not-work-in-windows-10/9865fa58-b14b-4670-94fd-a542cc270051?auth=1) saying that there was another device it was showing up as - INITIO combo device.  On a whim, removed that device, unplugged and replugged in the device, and magic, it all works now.  Yay.

So, strange that this was working, looks like a new(er?) windows device driver showed up and decided it was in control of this device and blocked the ASUS driver from owning the device.