Empirical Bases for Decision Making in Home Affairs – is there anything more than national differences in the EU!?

Introduction: Crime as well as fear of crime play a crucial role regarding societal development, public life and individual planning. The legitimacy of democratic society can only be held up if it is the state having the monopoly over violence (executed through police forces), whilst the executive is overseen by parliaments and full access to the legal system for every citizen. However, there is very different cultures in policing and police compe-tences within the European Union. Here, Germany plays a special role. On the one hand Germany’s history of fascism and also communist ruling until 1990 in Eastern Germany might have an impact upon a society highly aware of surveillance.2 On the other hand, in the area of home affairs, German federalism is of a divisive nature, with the main com-petence upon home affairs in the hands of Länder-governments. This creates already on a German scale different cultures of policing and expectations towards the police etc. It is especially the trust in state institutions that is endangered in case of a powerless po-lice and in case of a too far reaching police. This makes it most obvious that decision making in home affairs need a solid empirical base regarding both, the actual nature of crime as well as society’s perception of crime

Art Imitates Life: The Representation (Or Lack Thereof) of Black Women in Video Games

The key focus of this essay is to compare the representation of black women in media, primarily in television and film, to the representation of black female characters in video games. Using black feminist theory, this essay illustrates the treatment of black female characters in gaming. The particular and deliberate methods of writing black female characters in video games are used to highlight white video game characters and their narratives, instead of giving life and dimension to the black female characters themselves. The hostile and unsafe environments in gaming spaces are cultivated through upholding these harmful stereotypes of black women, and they directly harm black women who enjoy gaming

Herausforderungen bei der Messung von Kriminalität

Die mediale Berichterstattung zur Polizeilichen Kriminalstatistik (PKS) kulminiert nach der Veröffentlichung der kommunalen und Landesstatistiken im Frühjahr jeden Jahres mit der Veröffentlichung der bundesweiten Kriminalstatistik. Die Versuche der Sicherheitsbehörden (konkret des Bundeskriminalamts, das die Statistik auf Bundesebene bündelt), die Erwartungen und Deutungsspielräume der PKS aus methodischen Gründen einzugrenzen, laufen dabei jedoch regelmäßig bereits im Rahmen der Erstpräsentation ins Leere. Wir sehen insbesondere beim Fokus auf die bloße Kennzahl ,,Straftaten pro 100.000 Bewohner" zwei zentrale Probleme, auf die im Folgenden eingegangen werden soll: Die problematische statistische Basis der PKS und ihrer Alternativen sowie der gleichwertige Eingang unterschiedlichster Kriminalitätsformen in die Kennzahl - allenthalben werden Häufigkeiten von Mord und Totschlag gesondert berücksichtigt

How to obtain a more accurate picture of crime through crime statistics: Proposals and methods

This report aims to show the distribution of crime in Germany. For this, police crime statistics (polizeiliche Kriminalstatistik - PKS) are treated so that they integrate dark figures (unreported crime) of crime types along with their specific grade of burden. The different treatments are based on own recent survey data. Two major trends are confirmed by both treatment methods: First, there is a northsouth divide, with the northern regions experiencing a far higher risk of crime. Second, rural/urban differences can be accounted for by the higher levels of everyday crime that affect citizens of towns and cities. These slight differences and changes are more evident and meaningful in state-to-state comparisons rather than looking at Germany as a whole

Herausforderungen bei der Messung von Kriminalitätsfurcht

Furcht vor Kriminalität ist ein entscheidender gesellschaftlicher Faktor, der sowohl die individuelle Selbstentfaltung als auch das gesamtgesellschaftliche Klima stark beeinflusst. Kriminalitätsfurcht ist zudem wirtschaftlich relevant: Einerseits kann Kriminalitätsfurcht einen negativen Einfluss auf die gesamtwirtschaftliche Entwicklung ausüben. Sie kann andererseits – über eine veränderte Ausgabenstruktur von Firmen und Privatpersonen – auch zu überdurchschnittlichem Wachstum in einzelnen Wirtschaftsbereichen, etwa der Sicherheitsindustrie, führen. Die Messung der Furcht vor Kriminalität an sich und ihre Erklärung sind seit den 1970er Jahren ein zentrales Forschungsthema.Dabei reichen die Ansätze in der Furchtmessung von unidimensionalen, auf Kriminalität im Allgemeinen bezogenen Einschätzungen, hin zu mehrdimensionalen Erklärungsansätzen

Context-based Normalization of Histological Stains using Deep Convolutional Features

While human observers are able to cope with variations in color and appearance of histological stains, digital pathology algorithms commonly require a well-normalized setting to achieve peak performance, especially when a limited amount of labeled data is available. This work provides a fully automated, end-to-end learning-based setup for normalizing histological stains, which considers the texture context of the tissue. We introduce Feature Aware Normalization, which extends the framework of batch normalization in combination with gating elements from Long Short-Term Memory units for normalization among different spatial regions of interest. By incorporating a pretrained deep neural network as a feature extractor steering a pixelwise processing pipeline, we achieve excellent normalization results and ensure a consistent representation of color and texture. The evaluation comprises a comparison of color histogram deviations, structural similarity and measures the color volume obtained by the different methods.Comment: In: 3rd Workshop on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis (DLMIA 2017