MATHEMATICS COLLOQUIUM

 WHEN:
On Wednesday, September 13, 2000 at 2.30PM

WHERE:
Durham Science Center, Room 255

WHAT:

Dr. Dennis W. Roncek
Department of Criminal Justice
University of Nebraska at Omaha

will give a talk on

Abstract:
As criminal justice researchers attempt to enhance their understanding of crime and processes within the criminal justice system, they are becoming more sensitive to the characteristics of their data and in the process seeking more appropriate analytic techniques than used in the past. The proper use of such techniques depends increasingly on understanding and using fundamental mathematics. The presentation will discuss several of the different problems faced in the field and discuss some of the mathematically-based approaches to dealing with these. Criminal Justice data are often integer rather than continuous, often have nonnormal distributions, and related to each other in nonlinear ways. Differential and integral calculus derivations are appearing more commonly in the main journals while differential equations are playing an increasing role in various parts of the field. Concern with the potential value of chaos and catastrophe theories is emerging. Measurement issues abound since perfect measures of crime and criminality do not exist. Among these are the use of data which are ordinal and cannot legitimately be presumed to be either ratio or interval scales. Due to its frequent link with policy, criminal justice has begun to experiment with different types of forecasting including neural nets.