Isegoria

Historically, measuring the effect of police on crime has been difficult, because it’s difficult to tease out cause and effect: areas with a lot of crime have a lot of police.

With ever-changing terror-alert levels though, we have ever-changing police levels not tied to local crime levels. Fom One Possible Cure for the Common Criminal:

The two economists looked at daily crime statistics in Washington from March 12, 2002, to July 30, 2003. During that time, the terror alert level rose and fell four times. ‘On high-alert days,’ they wrote, ‘total crimes decrease by an average of seven crimes per day, or approximately 6.6 percent.’

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To make sure tourists were not just avoiding Washington during high alerts, the economists checked midday subway ridership and hotel vacancy levels, finding no significant difference. Nor did criminals appear to shift from District 1 to other parts of town. Crime was down throughout the city.

A bigger police presence does affect some kinds of crimes more than others. The number of murders, for instance, does not change.

“If you think about what crimes you most expect to be affected by putting more police on the streets, well, it’s street crimes,” Professor Tabarrok said in the interview. “Theft from automobiles and automobile theft are the classic street crimes, and we found that they fell by a whopping 40 percent during these high-alert periods.” Burglaries were also down, by 15 percent.

Policing seems very cost-effective:

Using generally accepted cost estimates, Professor Tabarrok said, every $1 to add officers would reduce the costs of crime by $4. The authors did not identify a point of diminishing returns.

“We estimate that if we had a 10 percent increase in police, crime would go down by about 4 percent,” he said, adding that researchers taking other approaches have come up with similar numbers. Nationally, he said, “that means about 700,000 fewer property crimes and 213,000 fewer violent crimes.”

As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, Professor Klick offered an even more striking suggestion. “It wouldn’t be unreasonable,” he said, “based on our estimates and based on conservative estimates of the costs of crime, to say it would be cost-effective to actually double the number of people working in police forces, which is pretty amazing.”

From Chrysler’s Storied Hemi Motor Helps It Escape Detroit’s Gloom:

The new Hemi engine, which debuted in 2002, takes its name from rounded, or hemispherical, tops of its cylinders, and gives an exhilarating boost to a car’s acceleration. The name and design are based on a legendary engine Chrysler produced in the muscle-car era. After Nascar’s Richard Petty won 27 races in 1964 driving a 426-horsepower Hemi-powered Charger, the racing circuit banned the engine, thinking it gave drivers too much of an edge. After it was allowed back, with some restrictions, the Hemi enabled drivers to hit speeds of over 200 miles per hour.

Every customer who opts for a Hemi adds thousands of dollars to Chrysler’s bottom line. That’s because the Hemi’s simple design makes it no more expensive to build than a smaller, standard V6 engine. A basic Chrysler 300 — the broad-shouldered sedan that has wowed customers from rappers to retirees — lists for $23,370. The Hemi version, called the 300C, sells for almost $10,000 more. While that model includes leather seats and other expensive features, analysts believe most of the difference is pure profit.

Some modern-Hemi technical history:

First, the team chose a decades-old design that was inexpensive to build. Second, they borrowed an idea from auto racing and gave each cylinder two spark plugs instead of one. They rounded the cylinders’ tops to crowd fuel and air into the center where the mixture burned quickly and cleanly. That boosted power and reduced emissions.

To help with fuel consumption — just in case the V8 engine was ever put in a passenger car — they also developed a system for automatically shutting off four of the eight cylinders while cruising on the highway.

In Massively parallel culture, Chris Anderson notes that Anil Dash “hacked” the NYT by wearing a GOATSE t-shirt in a photo shoot, and that many people are not aware of this “retina-scarring shock-pic” — or of many other “popular” geek memes:

But I was amazed to find out that almost none of my staff (and obviously no NYT editors) knew about it. So I tried a few other cultural references that have become clichés in my little world: "All Your Base Are Belong To Us"; "More Cowbell!"; "I for one welcome our new [fill in the blank] overlords", and so on.

Turns out that these snippets of culture that I thought were ubiquitous are actually pretty obscure even in my own office. And when I took an informal poll at a PR conference I was speaking at I found that only about 10% of the audience had heard of any of them, and for each phrase it was a different 10%. My tribe is not always your tribe, even if we work together, play together and otherwise live in the same world; same bed, different dreams.

If you’re wondering where “I, for one, welcome our new [fill in the blank] overlords,” came from, this may jog your memory:

Ladies and gentlemen, er, we’ve just lost the picture, but, uh, what we’ve seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has been taken over — “conquered”, if you will — by a master race of giant space ants. It’s difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

From Some College Jocks Find Their Pro Careers Are in the Nascar Pits:

After Bob Dowens finished playing college football, he turned pro. But not in the NFL — in the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing.

Once a defensive back at Fairleigh Dickinson University, the 28-year-old Mr. Dowens is now a professional tire carrier in a Nascar pit crew. At Evernham Motorsports, the stock-car racing team for which Mr. Dowens works, pit-crew members practice five days a week. A pit coach studies videos to hone their footwork and hand speed. A trainer has them lift weights and run sprints.

‘This is a professional sport as far as I’m concerned,’ Mr. Dowens said recently, drenched in sweat after a morning workout. ‘It’s 95 degrees out, and today we were running an obstacle course. Last week, I was so drained, I almost couldn’t eat lunch afterwards. This is as tough as any football practice.’

A beer-belly used to be OK, when the pace was a bit slower:

Twenty years ago, pit crews were doing pretty well to change four tires in less than 30 seconds. Today, taking more than 16 seconds can be disastrous.

College enrollment is up, which means Bad News for Wait-Listed Students:

A number of the nation’s most-selective universities, including Princeton, Yale and Johns Hopkins, aren’t admitting any students at all off their wait lists this spring. And many others are taking only a handful.

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At Princeton and Johns Hopkins, the lack of wait-list admissions is a sharp contrast to last year, when Princeton admitted 99 wait-listed applicants and Hopkins took about 150. Yale took eight last year.

Duke University admitted just 22 students from its list, compared with 86 last year. The University of Chicago says it admitted only 34 students from the wait list, compared with 150 last year. The University of Pennsylvania took 10 students this year, compared with about 30 last year.

From Darwinian Markets: Economist Paul Seabright on how homo sapiens evolved into homo economicus:

It’s precisely because tunnel vision can have dangerous consequences — environmental degradation, spiraling military expenditures — that it’s clearly desirable that people should be thinking out of the box a bit, or at least out of the tunnel. It doesn’t follow from this that all kinds of non-tunnel thinking are constructive. I’m struck by the work of some of the anti-globalization protesters, which I think has been admirably out-of-the-tunnel in terms of motivation, but naively ill-informed about how the world economy works in many other respects. You get people campaigning against investment by multinational companies in some poor countries on the gorunds that they’re only paying $5 a day, when the people they’re employing would otherwise be working at between $1 and $2 a day. Now, you may say “we wish the multinationals paid them $10 a day,” but to say that the multinationals have no business to be there unless they’re paying people $10 a day is a spectacularly stupid and self-defeating campaign platform. You really damage an awful lot of people. There has been evidence that some NGO campaigns against child labor, for instance, have led to children being laid off and left in much worse situations.
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I have friends in the anti-globalization movement who get thrilled when a big demonstration imposes humiliation on some multinational or Starbucks windows get smashed. It’s the thrill of the chase, the thrill of the battle. They’d be completely incapable of explaining why this particular result advances the interests of anybody that they care about. Yes, the fact that it’s hard for us to engage in political activism without the emotional highs and lows of the tribal experience is a big problem.

‘Spiderman’ Scales Hong Kong Skyscraper:

A Frenchman who calls himself ‘Spiderman’ scaled a 62-story skyscraper in Hong Kong using only his bare hands on Saturday.

Alain Robert scrambled up the Cheung Kong Center in about an hour to find police waiting for him at the top.

They checked his passport but did not arrest him, even though he had not sought permission to climb the building.

‘I slipped only once,’ he said. ‘On a scale of one to 10 in terms of difficulty, this would be a five. I really enjoyed the ascent.’

Robert, renowned for climbing without ropes or other equipment, said the building stands 928 feet.

In December, Robert scaled the world’s tallest building, Taiwan’s Taipei 101. It took him nearly four hours to reach the top of the 1,679-foot building because it was raining.

He has also climbed Malaysia’s Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Empire State Building in New York.