How Officers Create Guardianship: An Agent‐based Model of Policing

Crime is a complex phenomenon, emerging from the interactions of offenders, victims, and their environment, and in particular from the presence or absence of capable guardians. Researchers have historically struggled to understand how police officers create guardianship. This presents a challenge because, in order to understand how to advise the police, researchers must have an understanding of how the current system works. The work presents an agent‐based model that simulates the movement of police vehicles, using a record of real calls for service and real levels of police staffing in spatially explicit environments to emulate the demands on the police force. The GPS traces of the simulated officers are compared with real officer movement GPS data in order to assess the quality of the generated movement patterns. The model represents an improvement on existing standards of police simulation, and points the way toward more nuanced understandings of how police officers influence the criminological environment.     

Modeling Urban Land Use Changes Using Support Vector Machines

Support Vector Machines (SVM) is a machine learning (ML) algorithm commonly applied to the classification of remotely sensing data and more recently for modeling land use changes. However, in most geospatial applications the current literature does not elaborate on specifications of the SVM method with respect to data sampling, attribute selection and optimal parameters choices. Therefore the main objective of this study is to present and investigate the SVM technique for modeling urban land use change. The SVM model building procedure is presented together with the detailed evaluation of the output results with respect to the choice of datasets, attributes and the change of SVM parameters. Geospatial datasets containing nine land use classes and spatial attributes for the Municipality of Zemun, Republic of Serbia were used for years 2001, 2003, 2007 and 2011. The Correlation‐based Feature Subset method, kappa coefficient, Area Under Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC) and kappa simulation were used to perform the model evaluation and compare the model outputs with the real land use datasets. The obtained results indicate that the SVM‐based models perform better when implementing balanced data sampling, reduced data sets to informative subsets of attributes and properly identify the optimal learning parameters.     

A hybrid approach to modeling territorial control in violent armed conflicts

Territorial control is central to the understanding of violent armed conflicts, yet reliable and valid measures of this concept do not exist. We argue that geospatial analysis provides an important perspective to measure the concept. In particular, measuring territorial control can be seen as an application of calculating service areas around points of control. The modeling challenge is acute for areas with limited road infrastructure, where no complete network is available to perform the analysis, and movements largely occur off road. We present a new geospatial approach that applies network analysis on a hybrid transportation network with both actual road data and hexagon‐fishnet‐based artificial road data representing on‐road and off‐road movements, respectively. Movement speed or restriction can be readily adjusted using various input data. Simulating off‐road movement with hexagon‐fishnet‐based artificial road data has a number of advantages including scalability to small or large study areas and flexibility to allow all‐directional travel. We apply this method to measuring territorial control of armed groups in Sub‐Saharan Africa where inferior transport infrastructure is the norm. Based on the Uppsala Conflict Data Program's (UCDP) Georeferenced Event Data (GED) as well as spatial data on terrain, population locations, and limited transportation networks, we enhance the delineation of the specific areas directly controlled by each warring party during civil wars within a given travel time.     

Geographical impacts on social networks from perspectives of space and place: an empirical study using mobile phone data

Space and place are two fundamental concepts in geography. Geographical factors have long been known as drivers of many aspects of people’s social networks. But whether and how space and place affect social networks differently are still unclear. The widespread use of location-aware devices provides a novel source for distinguishing the mechanisms of their impacts on social networks. Using mobile phone data, this paper explores the effects of space and place on social networks. From the perspective of space, we confirm the distance decay effect in social networks, based on a comparison between synthetic social ties generated by a null model and actual social ties derived from real-world data. From the perspective of place, we introduce several measures to evaluate interactions between individuals and inspect the trio relationship including distance, spatio-temporal co-occurrence, and social ties. We found that people’s interaction is a more important factor than spatial proximity, indicating that the spatial factor has a stronger impact on social networks in place compared to that in space. Furthermore, we verify the hypothesis that interactions play an important role in strengthening friendships.     

Tectonic conditions of sedimentation and source areas of Upper Proterozoic and Lower Paleozoic terrigenous deposits of the Lesser Khingan Terrane of the Central Asian Fold Belt

This work presents the results of geological, geochemical, and Sm-Nd isotopic and geochemical studies of Late Riphean–Cambrian terrigenous rocks of the Khingan Group of the Lesser Khingan Terrane of the Central Asian Fold Belt, as well as the results of U-Pb geochronological (LA-ICP-MS) studies of detrital zircons from these deposits. These deposits are the most ancient in the structure of the terrain. It was found that the deposits of Iginchi and underlying Murandavi formations are attributed to the Late Riphean–Vendian age interval, and the Kimkan sequence, to the Late Cambrian–Early Ordovician. The periods of formation of the Murandavi and Iginchi formations, on one hand, and the Kimkan sequence, on the other hand, are separated by the stage of granitoid magmatism at the turn of the Vendian–Cambrian. Because of this, they cannot be attributed to a unified sedimentary sequence. It is the most probable that the sedimentation of the Iginchi and Murandavi formations and the Kimkan sequence occurred under subduction conditions against the backdrop of magmatic activity.     

Paleogene and Neogene reference sections of Eastern Kamchatka

The available lithological and paleontological data are used to characterize key Cenozoic marine sections in two lithological–facies zones (Kamchatskii Mys Peninsula and southern Valaginskii Range) of the poorly investigated Eastern Kamchatka lithotectonic zone with their correlation and reconstruction of depositional environments at the ocean–continent transition during the Paleogene and Neogene.