PURPOSE Inadequate physical activity and obesity during adolescence are areas of public health concern. Questions exist about the role of neighborhoods in the etiology of these problems. This research addressed the relationships of perceived and objective reports of neighborhood crime to adolescent physical activity, screen media use, and body mass index (BMI). METHODS Socioeconomically and r...

The rising trends both in drug addiction and crime rates are of major public concern in Germany. Surprisingly, the economic theory of crime seems to ignore the drugs–crime nexus, whereas the criminological literature considers illicit drug use a main reason of criminal activities. This paper provides an econometric assessment of the drugs–crime channel within a Becker–Ehrlich model of crime sup...

Footwear impressions are one of the most frequently secured types of evidence at crime scenes. For the investigation of crime series they are among the major investigative notes. In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised footwear retrieval algorithm that is able to cope with unconstrained noise conditions and is invariant to rigid transformations. A main challenge for the automated impression...

Social sanctions may be a strong deterrent of crime. This paper presents a formal model that relates crime and social sanction to social interaction density. We empirically test the theoretical predictions using a provincial level panel dataset on different crimes in Italy between 1996 and 2003. We exploit detailed demographic and geo-morphological information to develop exogenous measures of s...

The rising trends both in drug addiction and crime rates are of major public concern in Germany. Surprisingly, the economic theory of crime seems to ignore the drugs–crime nexus, whereas the criminological literature considers illicit drug use a main reason of criminal activities. This paper provides an econometric assessment of the drugs–crime channel within a Becker–Ehrlich model of crime sup...

The project has two goals. First, it seeks to explain both the overall trend of rising imprisonment and rising racial disparities in imprisonment, and geographic and temporal differences in these trends. Official data sets on arrests, imprisonment, and social, economic, and demographic factors are merged to create a new longitudinal data set that permits the researchers to control for current a...

Although retrieval systems based on probabilistic models will rank the objects (e.g. documents) being retrieved according to the probability of some matching criterion (e.g. relevance) they rarely yield an actual probability and the scoring function is interpreted to be purely ordinal within a given retrieval task. In this paper it is shown that some scoring functions possess the likelihood pro...

The core function of organized crime is the selling of protection. Protection can be real, against third-party crime, or manufactured by the organized crime groups themselves. Mafias and gangs emerge in areas of weak state control, because of prohibition and geographic, ethnic, or social isolation. Although competition is considered good in economics, in the case of organized crime the predator...