Crime Analysis and Crime Mapping
So while I work with police departments regularly, I think it is critically important that technology be used reasonably. While this may be off-putting to some of my clients, I worked with the Institute for Justice as an expert witness in their trial Schmidt v City of Norfolk. (Any opinions herein are my own and [ ]
I have a new app out, VerusCite. With the recent rise in popularity of GenAI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, this has also come along with academics writing slop articles. One of the ways to check that slop is via looking at the articles citations. LLMs have some predictable failure modes in writing papers whole [ ]
One of the recent papers that came across my X feed was a researcher digitizing a corpus of old Sears catalogs to estimate inflation more accurately: The technical skills to do this work are closely related to many of the projects I am working on at Gainwell – large-scale document processing using LLMs. So if [ ]
Just a quick update on a few things. I was interviewed on Jeff Asher s Jeffalytics Podcast, mostly about AI and the current landscape in criminal justice: Using Technology to Improve Crime Analysis with Andy Wheeler by Jeff Asher I don t always link to my recent Crime De-Coder posts (follow the Crime De-Coder RSS feed or [ ]
AI disclosure – this post was entirely written by myself. I know AI writing is still pretty cringey – so I get that people are quite opposed to it. For people like me though (academics promoting their work, more technical oriented) I would like to proffer a slight defense of (even cringey) AI writing. Having [ ]
AI disclosure – I used AI to write this blog post. I figure having an AI blog post is better than not writing it at all. I will always disclose though if I use AI to heavily write any content on this blog. (I use it for minor copy editing all the time.) For the [ ]
Upcoming at the American Society of Evidence Based Policing Conference, I have a talk Thursday morning (9:45-10:00), How long to conduct your experiment. The talk goes over some of the simple metrics I have created to help plan how long to conduct your intervention. Such as how long to evaluate your hot spots intervention, or [ ]
xAI has just released an API to clone your voice. It is pretty simple, read a script, and then an API where you can have text to speech in that voice. Here is the python code after you have cloned your voice. I need to figure out my audio set up a bit better (my [ ]
Many of the initial wave of “AI writing detectors” were quite bad. The biggest issue you need to be concerned about with an AI writing detector is false positives. If you are a professor and want to check students’ writing, it is very bad to falsely accuse a student. The Pangram product, though, is quite [ ]
Quick post this morning I have a survey up gathering input on interest in short, technical courses. Think 2-3 days, potentially in person/synchronous. If you have taken a course with Paul Allison at Horizon s, or an ICPSR summer course, those are similar examples. But, the main difference will be these courses are to prepare [ ]