crime 3.cri.1 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Math as a tool for tracking down criminals has never been as precise as the TV show Numb3rs depicts. But mathematicians are developing better ways to at least estimate where a person on a crime spree might live. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

Using information about the layout of a city, such as the location of similar crimes during the past few years, beefed up mathematical tools could improve estimates of where a criminal lives based on where he or she commits crimes, according to new research presented January 7 at the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings.

"I feel like I'm in a gold mine and I'm the only one who knows what gold looks like," says Mike O'Leary, an applied mathematician at Towson University in Maryland who performed the new research. "There are so many good mathematical problems in this field" of criminology. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

A well established principle of criminology is that perpetrators will tend to commit more crimes close to their homes simply because of convenience and the realities of transportation. So older techniques estimate where a criminal lives based on the locations of a string of unsolved crimes that are all attributed to that criminal.

But those techniques ignore the actual geography of a city, assuming instead that the likelihood of a criminal striking near his or her home drops off evenly in all directions regardless of geography.

"They don't have any way to incorporate yet data about geography," O'Leary says. "Mathematically they just don't have the tools for it."

To find the perpetrator of a type of crime, such as robbing a convenience store, O'Leary's methods would use historical records of incidences of similar crimes to generate a likelihood distribution for that crime for the whole city. This distribution inherently contains geographic information such as where the major roads are located and where easy targets are located. The analysis also folds in census data about neighborhood demographics, as well as a mathematical analysis of how far from home criminals of different ages typically strike. Younger criminals tend to commit crimes closer to home.

Other researchers have also developed software tools in recent years that attempt to incorporate geographic information. However, "Up until now the majority of the research has been done by social scientists such as myself," comments Ned Levine, a geographical researcher at Ned Levine & Associates in Houston who developed crime-analysis software called CrimeStat. O'Leary has "added some insights into the mathematics that previously we were struggling with,” he says. “He's really cleaning up the mathematics."

At their best, such analyses, including O’Leary’s, are prone to error and only give police a starting point — perhaps for checking whether people previously convicted of the same crime live in the area identified by the techniques. O'Leary is working on computer software that performs his analysis. The code for the software will be made freely available, and the complete software package will be free for police departments to use.

"It's a lot of fun," O'Leary says. "I can't wait until this goes and does something." Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

jets 3.jet.004005 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The two top toymakers in the United States posted disappointing third-quarter results yesterday and softened expectations for the crucial holiday season, citing a wobbly economy and cautious retailers. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.

The No. 1 toy maker, Mattel Inc., said third-quarter earnings slid 5 percent from a year earlier, with overall sales down 2 percent. Sales of Barbie dolls in the United States fell 26 percent. Mattel said it was struggling to hang on to shelf space at retailers. http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com

The other toy maker, Hasbro Inc., posted higher third-quarter earnings as it cut costs, but the results were weaker than expected, with revenue down 2 percent as sales of its once-hot Beyblade battling tops continued falling. http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com

Hasbro shares slipped 6.5 percent to $17.26, while Mattel shares were down 2.6 percent at $17.50. Both toymakers said the retail environment remained challenging.

"We are currently dealing with broad consumer uncertainty related to higher gasoline prices and a lackluster employment picture, which translates into uninspiring consumer confidence levels," Robert A. Eckert, the chief executive of Mattel, said.

On a conference call, Mr. Eckert said most retailers were allocating shelf space based on past performance and would rather "chase demand" than buy goods early.

Sean McGowan, an analyst at Harris Nesbitt, said: "Both companies are facing the fact that some of their products are declining. I don't think anybody's not buying a particular toy because it costs more to drive to the toy store or Wal-Mart."

Roughly 50 percent of toy sales are in the fourth quarter, according to the NPD Group, a market information company. Adding to the dismal retail landscape, Toys "R" Us Inc., the No. 2 toy seller after Wal-Mart Stores Inc., is evaluating its business and analysts have estimated the company will close 100 to 200 stores in 2005.

Mattel said third-quarter earnings fell to $255.9 million, or 61 cents a share, from $270 million, or 61 cents, while sales fell 2 percent, to $1.67 billion. http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com

Hasbro, based in Pawtucket, R.I., said third-quarter net income rose to $88.7 million from $85.8 million, while earnings fell to 45 cents a share from 48 cents.

Analysts, on average, estimated profit of 51 cents a share from Hasbro, according to Reuters Estimates.

Hasbro's revenue fell 2 percent, to $947.3 million. The chief executive, Alfred J. Verrecchia, said the company was confident that it could increase earnings as it cut costs and achieved its operating margin goal of 12 percent or better by 2005. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

bright 4.bri.000203 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Progressively larger brains evolved in primates of all stripes, not just humans. We can thank a common capacity for solving a broad range of problems, from coordinating social alliances to inventing tools, according to a new study.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

This conclusion challenges a popular theory that big, smart brains arose primarily because they afforded advantages when it came to negotiating complex social situations during human evolution.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

"The ability to learn from others, invent new behaviors, and use tools may have [also] played pivotal roles in primate-brain evolution," say Simon M. Reader of McGill University in Montreal and Kevin N. Laland of the University of Cambridge in England. In an upcoming report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the two zoologists chronicle links between an array of intelligent behaviors and enhanced brain size in primates.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

Reader and Laland examined approximately 1,000 scientific studies of behavior in 116 of the world's 203 known primate species. They identified 553 instances of animals discovering new solutions to survival-related problems, 445 observations of individuals learning skills and acquiring information from others, and 607 episodes of tool use.

The researchers then consulted previously obtained data on brain size relative to body size in different primates. In particular, they focused on the volume of the structures that make up what scientists call the executive brain, a frontal region thought to be crucial for complex thinking.

Species that have the proportionately largest executive brains are the ones that most often innovate, learn from others, and use tools, Reader and Laland contend. These three facets of intelligence vary together as primate brains enlarge, they say. There's no evidence in any species of an evolutionary trade-off between these traits, such as an increase in innovation accompanying a decline in social learning.

A related report by neuroscientist Barbara L. Finlay of Cornell University and her colleagues concluded that different brain regions in mammals enlarged all together during mammalian evolution, not in piecemeal fashion related to specific functions. Whole-brain evolution was driven by changes in the timing of early brain development in individuals, says Finlay. In all species, late-generated structures�including the executive brain�have grown the largest, Finlay's team asserted in the April 2001 Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Reader and Laland provide "important new evidence" that wide-ranging thinking skills shared by many primate species encouraged the evolution of large brains, comment psychologist Robert M. Seyfarth and biologist Dorothy L. Cheney, both of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, in a comment published with the new report.

They suggest that intellectual accomplishments unique to people, such as language use, may have playe

face 6.fac.000200 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Something strange recently happened to me in Tennessee. I wasn’t actually in Tennessee when it happened. The strangeness emanated from there–actually, from one spot in Tennessee–and eventually reached me here up in New England.

It started with a column I wrote in the October issue of Discover, about the evolution of the human face. Sometimes people write letters to the magazine about my pieces. My editors dropped a note to let me know that all at once they got 40 60 letters about my column. All from the outskirts of Memphis.http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com All pretty much identical in style and substance. Some had been written on a computer, but some were written by hand–young hands, judging from their appearance.

Here’s a sample…

“I enjoyed reading your article and was interested in the research done on how the face and its muscles work to make expressions. I however believe that the brain and facial expressions are not a byproduct of years of evolution but instead a fingerprint of intelligent design. You claim in your article, that the muscles of the face are the result of the transition of life from land to water, but where is the fossil record for the jump? None have been found. There is no proof of the evolution of water to land creatures.”

And a second…

“I would like to show you what I think may have happened. First off, there is the law of entropy. This law states that everything is in a state of going deeper into chaos. The brain could not have formed going from a blob of amino acid to a highly complex organ that is capable of generating the power that is does. That is going into a state of unity and order. According to natural laws, this is impossible. Only a creator is capable of doing this.”

And a third

“If the face is an irreducibly complex machine, which it is, it cannot evolve because the original face would be missing parts, which would make the whole machine non-fuctioning. This rules out the possibility of evolution in human faces.”

I don’t know if all these letters came from a single class or club. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com In any case, the folks at Discover asked me if I’d write something in response. So–to my correspondents from Tennessee:

Thank you all for your letters. I appreciate that you took the time to read my article. While I can’t write to all forty sixty of you individually, I want to respond to the overall gist of your letters.

A number of you stated that there is no evidence that the human face–or even humans, period–evolved. For instance, one writer claimed that there is no fossil record of the transition of life from water to land.

new-tetra600.jpg

Actually, there is a fossil record, and it’s getting more and more detailed every year. The best source of information at the moment is a new review written by three experts on the subject. They explain how paleontologists have found a number of fossils of fish with some–but not all–of the features found in land vertebrates. They’ve also found a lot of early land vertebrates that still had not yet evolved some of the anatomy found on land vertebrates today. The illustration above, from the review, shows just how many fossils of these early land vertebrates and their relatives have been discovered in rocks between 400 and 300 million years ago.

This is what you’d expect if life evolved.

When scientists compare the traits on all those species, they can judge which species are most closely related to each other, and use that information to draw an evolutionary tree. The land vertebrates alive today, including mammals, reptiles, and amphibians are represented by the brown and green arrows. The closest living fish relatives, according to this research, are lungfish and coelacanths (Dipnoi and Actinistia on the tree). As the tree shows, there are 19 different lineages paleontologists have discovered the branched off between our common ancestor with lungfish 410 million years ago, and the common ancestor of all land vertebrates alive today, which lived some 350 million years ago. Those extinct lineages mark the evolution, step by step, of our legs, arms, wrists, ankles, fingers, and toes. Do they mark every generation through this transition? Of course not–but no paleontologist would ever dream of finding fossils of every individual that ever lived. Instead, they judge how well each new fossil fits into the overall picture.

Scientists can also use other lines of evidence to test their hypothesis for how vertebrates came on land. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com The tree I’ve reproduced here makes it clear that our closest living aquatic relatives are lungfish and coelacanths–two very rare lineages that make up a half dozen species or so all told. Recently scientists compared a lot of DNA from from several species of fish–including lungfish–and land vertebrates. They got the same result looking at genes that paleontologists get looking at bones: lungfish are our closest relatives.

The support that comes from different studies gives scientists confidence that they can look at fish to track the evolution of our faces. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com On fossils, they can look at scoops and troughs in bones that mark the places where muscles attached. And they can study muscles in the heads of living fish. A lamprey doesn’t have a dimpled smile, let alone a jaw. But it does have some of the same muscles as we have in our faces. These muscles develop from the same place in the heads of lamprey embryo and a human embryo. More closely related animals share more face muscles with us. Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, have just about every muscle in our own face, and they produce the same expressions when they are stimulated. (See the illustration at the top of the post, from this review of face evolution from fish to humans.)

This is, again, the sort of pattern you’d expect from evolution. So there is, in fact, a lot of evidence documenting the evolution of the face from our fish ancestors–and more coming to light each year.

But many of you also make a different sort of claim: that evolution could not have possibly produced the face.

Let me explain why this is not the case.

One person wrote in that the laws of entropy, which drives the universe to chaos. “The brain could not have formed going from a blob of amino acid to a highly complex organ.”

But think about what happens every time a brain develops from nothing in a human embryo. How can this order emerge, if entropy rules? Because the laws of entropy do not prevent order from arising in a particular place. An embryo takes in energy to form its complex body, and it pumps out heat, increasing the entropy in the environment. Entropy is likewise not a problem for evolution, if there is enough energy to increase local order and a place to push the disorder. And our planet, getting energy from the sun and releasing heat back into space, provides just those conditions.

Some of you claimed that the face could not evolve because it is an “irreducibly complex” system. If you take one part away from it, it does not work. But that’s not actually the case. Think about it–chimpanzees and other primates have most of the facial muscles that we do–but not all of them. In other words, they are missing some parts of the human face. But their faces are not “non-functioning” as one letter-writer claimed. They make plenty of faces–although they cannot make as many faces as we can.

You don’t even have to leave our own species to see that our faces are not “irreducibly complex.” Many people are lacking one or more muscles in the face, but their faces work normally. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com Botox paralyzes some muscles in the face–knocking out several parts of this supposedly irreducibly complex face. It may be hard for people with Botox to frown, but they can still smile and produce other facial expressions. That’s hardly non-functional.

The links in my response take you to several scientific papers. Actually, there are many, many more on the topics I’ve discussed. I’d encourage you to take the plunge and learn more about the face and its evolution. I’d hope you’d find it as fascinating as I do.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

ragweed 88.rag.20 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. People with seasonal allergies know that some months can be tougher than others. An unprecedented 15-year study conducted in the New York City area charts how air concentrations of different types of pollen vary throughout an average year.

Ragweed pollen, the most significant cause of allergy, is airborne mainly during August and September, report researchers at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey–New Jersey Medical School in Newark. http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-jmbPCHg9dLPh1gHoZxLG.GpS

By contrast, tree pollen is most abundant during May and is nearly absent from the air after the end of June. Grass-pollen concentrations peak in June and rise again, albeit to a lesser extent, in September.

Contrary to what some people with allergies might think, pollen abundance has decreased—at least in the New York City area—over the past decade.

The new data might help some people avoid unnecessary outdoor exposure at times when their allergies are most likely to be active, Leonard Bielory and his colleagues say in the May Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. They note that seasonal pollen patterns are likely to differ from one region of the country to the next. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

under 99.und.0 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire To protect right whales in the northwest Atlantic—one of the most depleted cetacean populations worldwide—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has proposed seasonal speed limits for large, ocean-going vessels. Currently, ship strikes pose the greatest threat to the population, NOAA says, with at least one or two deaths reported from such collisions each year. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang

Under the new proposal, ships 65 feet and longer could travel no faster than 10 knots in eastern U.S. waters near areas where the whales have been spotted. Normally, such vessels travel at 15 knots or faster. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang

Although protected from hunting since 1935, the species' population off the eastern United States and Canada is around only 300. This population's calving rate has risen in recent years to about 20 annually. Still, it doesn't fully compensate for adult-whale deaths sustained over the past 2 decades, NOAA reported in a June 26 Federal Register announcement of the proposed new rule.

The locations and sizes of go-slow zones will vary by season, and their duration will always be at least 15 days.

Roughly 70 percent of large commercial ships traveling along the East Coast passes through the right whale's critical habitat, researchers reported last year in the July-September Coastal Management. They found that most of those vessels moved at "speed[s] at which large whales may be critically injured." Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

eruptions 4.eru.2 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Volcanologist Andrew McGonigle walks through clouds composed of mist, steam, carbon dioxide (CO2), and sulfur dioxide (SO2) on Vulcano, an active volcanic island off the coast of southern Italy. To predict eruptions, volcanologists typically use distant ultraviolet spectrometers to measure SO2 released by active volcanoes. McGonigle has developed a remote-controlled helicopter called Aerovolc 1 to do it better. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com By accurately measuring CO2, which escapes magma earlier than SO2, scientists could predict eruptions sooner, helping to implement timely evacuations for nearby populations—but measuring CO2 is a challenge. McGonigle’s method requires that sensors capture gases directly above a volcano, a major problem for static instruments, which are easily destroyed by magma. But a remote-controlled helicopter can gather data from a safe distance. McGonigle, who recently won the $100,000 Rolex Award for Enterprise, plans next to outfit a fully automated helicopter, akin to the unmanned aerial vehicles used by the military. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com/