imported post
Being an engineer and having taken several courses dedicated to mathematical modeling, I'm a firm believer that almost anything can be modeled mathematically. Models may not be 100% accurate, but they should at least be more accurate than normal probabilitistic distributions.
We had several case studies in the classes, including shark population interaction with harvesting and population caps to determine equilibrium points, radioactive isotope decay between multiple elements to determine painting dates, and waterflow control between multiple bodies of water to determine the effect of controlling of pollution.
Being an avid gun carrier, I've always considered what it would be like to attempt to model crime, and how gun control falls into the picture.
Pro-gun people quickly point to Dr. Lott's research. Anti-gun people dispute it and point to their researchers' opposite findings.
I found an interesting article found here:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-80924579.html
that some of you might enjoy reading. The author is neutral on the subject and basically comes to the conclusion that the majority of econometric models published in "scholarly journals" are completely bogus and tweaked to the researcher's likings by manipulating the data sets.
All in all, no one has any clue how gun control affects crime.
Another interesting point that the author didn't cover, to further validate his point, is how inaccurate the data sets really are. People keep pointing to statistics and data to support their models. Yet if you take a wonderful and clean city like Baltimore, if you were to use the publically released crime data, your model would be entirely invalid because Martin O'Malley tweaks crime rates.
Anyways, just something for you to chew on.
Being an engineer and having taken several courses dedicated to mathematical modeling, I'm a firm believer that almost anything can be modeled mathematically. Models may not be 100% accurate, but they should at least be more accurate than normal probabilitistic distributions.
We had several case studies in the classes, including shark population interaction with harvesting and population caps to determine equilibrium points, radioactive isotope decay between multiple elements to determine painting dates, and waterflow control between multiple bodies of water to determine the effect of controlling of pollution.
Being an avid gun carrier, I've always considered what it would be like to attempt to model crime, and how gun control falls into the picture.
Pro-gun people quickly point to Dr. Lott's research. Anti-gun people dispute it and point to their researchers' opposite findings.
I found an interesting article found here:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-80924579.html
that some of you might enjoy reading. The author is neutral on the subject and basically comes to the conclusion that the majority of econometric models published in "scholarly journals" are completely bogus and tweaked to the researcher's likings by manipulating the data sets.
All in all, no one has any clue how gun control affects crime.
Another interesting point that the author didn't cover, to further validate his point, is how inaccurate the data sets really are. People keep pointing to statistics and data to support their models. Yet if you take a wonderful and clean city like Baltimore, if you were to use the publically released crime data, your model would be entirely invalid because Martin O'Malley tweaks crime rates.
Anyways, just something for you to chew on.