ben goldacre witters on and on and on about things that are too long to post on twitter and not clever enough to post on his main blog at www.badscience.net
Here's an interesting use of data from Lincoln Social Computing Research Centre, being used as part of a research project.
Welcome to FearSquare! FearSquare is an application which allows FourSquare users in the UK to easily see the official crime statistics for the places where you 'check-in'.
How does it work?
Millions of people currently use FourSquare to ‘check-in’ to locations that they encounter in their daily lives. This allows people to broadcast to their friends the locations of bars, cinemas and cafes that they commonly visit, schools and universities at which they study, etc. Because of FourSquare users’ willingness to record and broadcast their location, we can cross-reference this data with other online databases to show users interesting information about those places.
The FearSquare application takes a list of your ten most recent FourSquare check-ins and cross-references these with the UK Police Crime Statistics database. In this way, we can show people how many crimes were committed, during a recent one-month period, in the locations where they checked-in.
Why is this interesting?
We feel that this application is interesting for a number of reasons. The recent release of street-level crime data by the UK Police drew huge public interest. However, the way in which Police data is represented is aimed purely at places – it does not allow for the fact that people commonly travel through a number of different areas on a daily basis. We do not feel that the way crime data is currently presented allows for an intuitive understanding of the real levels of crime people are exposed to on a daily basis. FearSquare does offer this level of individualization.
This project is also of interest to social psychology researchers. Specifically, this application represents a unique opportunity to evaluate peoples perceptions and fear of crime against the real Police statistics.
I like stats. I'm a doctor. I write about dodgy scientific claims in my spare time.
This isn't my main blog. Find me here:
Blog:
www.badscience.net/
Book:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bad-Science-Ben-Goldacre/dp/000728487X/?tag=bs0b-21
Tweet:
www.twitter.com/bengoldacre
TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science.html
I like stats. I'm a doctor. I write about dodgy scientific claims in my spare time.
This isn't my main blog. Find me here:
Blog:
www.badscience.net/
Book:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bad-Science-Ben-Goldacre/dp/000728487X/?tag=bs0b-21
Tweet:
www.twitter.com/bengoldacre
TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science.html
Theme created for Posterous by Obox
