December 12, 2018

Good Morning,

Spain is now using the ultimate weapon to combat burglars...and that weapon is...MATH!

Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Math models could help police thwart city burglars --*

Mathematicians in Spain have developed a new model they think more accurately predicts burglary patterns in urban environs.

Previous models, mostly focused on burglaries in suburban environs, have emphasized location and spatial patterns. The linear model developed by researchers Joan Saldaña, Maria Aguareles, Albert Avinyó, Marta Pellicer and Jordi Ripoll places a greater emphasis on timing.

The group of mathematicians and their new model was inspired by age-dependent population models.

"Our model puts the emphasis on when -- rather than where -- the burglaries will take place and on the type of victimized houses, represented by their age," Avinyó said in a news release.

The researchers defined age -- of both burglar and home -- as the amount of time since the burglar last committed a crime and the amount of time since a home was last burglarized.

"Our model focuses on the burglars' dynamics: their propensity to strike, their preference to act in groups, and different strategies to choose targets," Saldaña said. "All of these aspects are linked to the age of a burglar in our formulation."

By emphasizing the role time plays in predicting a burglar's criminality, as well as a home's vulnerability, researchers were able to combine the predictions of a variety of behavioral theories, as well as those of previous models, into their new model.

Researchers think their model is also more flexible, capable of accounting for a wider variety of inputs.

"Contrary to previous models where repeat and near-repeat victimization theories are widely considered, our model is compatible with different scenarios," Ripoll said. "Our age-structured model is a conceptually different approach in comparison with agent-based models where burglars are just seen as 'particles' entering and leaving the system randomly. Less a priori assumptions are needed."

The new model showed the relationship between burglars and vulnerable houses is similar to the predator-prey relationships. The model was also able to estimate the impact of policy behavior on burglary patterns.

Their findings -- published this week in the Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems -- suggest police could do a better job of curtailing property crimes simply by altering their patrol patterns.

"Nowadays many police departments tend to allocate police resources to help citizens feel secure," Ripoll said. "They ask police patrols to move randomly around different areas so that people develop a -- sometimes false -- sense of security. But this has long been observed to be quite an inefficient way to employ police resources."

Simulations showed that when police patrol more in areas where recent burglaries have occurred, the likelihood of another break-in is reduced.

Researchers say their model can be used by police to directly measure the effectiveness of different patrolling strategies.

"Our model is simple enough to provide some explicit formulae for relationships between different aspects of the dynamics," Pellicer said. "These can be contrasted with real data -- for instance, the mean time between two consecutive burglaries of the same house and the mean time between two consecutive offenses committed by the same burglar -- under different police strategies."

*-- Bioplastics aren't all that great for the climate, either, study finds --*

Concerns about the environmental impacts of plastics and other petroleum-based products have inspired an increase in the production of bioplastics. But new research suggests bioplastics are unlikely to aid climate change mitigation.

According to the new study, published this week in the journal Environmental Research Letters, increased production and consumption of bioplastics is likely to encourage cropland expansion, which can lead to an increase in global greenhouse gas emissions.

The warning is similar to the one offered by scientists earlier this year in response to the European Union's decision to designate wood as a low-carbon fuel source -- a move climate scientists said will boost greenhouse gas emissions and decimate forests.

Like biofuels, the production of bioplastics are assumed to be carbon neutral. But some scientists argue that assumption is flawed.

Bioplastics and biofuels release carbon at the end of their lifecycles, but the raw materials that are used to produce bioplastics -- maize, wheat and sugar cane -- absorb carbon as they grow. The problem is maize, wheat and sugar cane require land, acreage that might otherwise host plants and animals that provide valuable ecological services and sequester carbon more efficiently than crops.

"The production of bioplastics in large amounts would change land use globally," Neus Escobar, researcher at the Institute of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Bonn, explained in a news release. "This could potentially lead to an increase in the conversion of forest areas to arable land. However, forests absorb considerably more CO2 than maize or sugar cane annually, if only because of their larger biomass."

Escobar and her colleagues say their study isn't speculation, as previous analyses have identified a direct link between growth in the green energy sector and deforestation. For the latest study, scientists used data collected by previous research efforts to build a model predicting the impacts of varying levels of plastics and bioplastics consumption on global greenhouse gas emissions.

"For our experiment, we assume that the share of bioplastics relative to total plastic consumption increases to 5 percent in Europe, China, Brazil and the USA," Escobar said. "We run two different scenarios: a tax on conventional plastics compared with a subsidy on bioplastics."

The simulations showed both scenarios would have roughly the same impact on the climate. According to the calculations, a tax would decrease in demand for plastics, resulting in the release of 0.08 percent fewer greenhouse gases. Substitutes for traditional plastics, however, would results in the loss of 0.17 percent of forest to crop production.

"According to our calculations, it will take more than 20 years for it to be offset by the savings achieved by fossil substitution," Escobar said.

Researchers think the negative impact of increased bioplastics production could be minimized if agricultural waste and byproducts were used, instead of agricultural products grown specifically for conversion into bioplastics.

"We recommend concentrating research efforts on these advanced bioplastics and bring them to market," Escobar said.


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