Just in Case...

Advice on being an effective crime victim, from Swan Tower, whose bike was stolen. Important points: don't touch anything, pay attention to what's going on so you can tell the story clearly, and keep your receipts.

Unfortunately, the bike has not been recovered, and a lot of stolen property never is, but at least in this case the incident provided material for future writing.

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I Have Discovered Justice

As long as we're on the subject of stolen library books, I couldn't resist this piece on Pharyngula.

Don't worry, the purloined book in question was eventually paid for, so presumably the library was able to purchase another copy.

You can do that, if someone checks out the book before stealing it. I salute PZ Myers for that. It's an honest theft.

When someone just creeps off with a book and you have no idea who it was, it's hard to know where to send the bill.

I keep advocating for a lottery system in which we can just bill someone selected at random from the directory, but it hasn't caught on yet.

Ooh, either that, or we could bill everyone! Go for that "punish the whole group to make them enforce the rules on each other" thing! In college, they billed all the residents of the dormitory for any damage to the common rooms, right? It's perfectly fair and reasonable.

In college they split up the repair bill between the dorm residents, but I think we might as well charge every registered student the full amount. Then we could put any leftover funds towards exciting purchases like that ice cream sundae bar I've been wanting to put in.

Oh yeah, this is going to go over well at the next budget meeting.

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Watch Those Light Fingers

The library where I work serves four schools. The student body of one of those schools has achieved a minor notoriety for stealing textbooks. Their books just vanish. Very mysterious.

It's quite frustrating, because as a library the institution wishes to serve its users by having the books they want to use, but also wishes to not to keep purchasing the same book over and over when it keeps disappearing.

You're tempted to just say "fine, we're not buying you books anymore," but that's obviously hugely unfair to those students who didn't steal a library copy. Those students are certainly the vast majority, and we hate to tell them we don't have a title they need.

On the other hand, we can't just buy replacements indefinitely. Or we could, I suppose, but that would mean not buying various other books. Which, since those other books don't get stolen, might in fact not bother the students terribly. Maybe we should just buy a hundred copies of every title that gets put on Course Reserves, enough for every student to steal one or not, and call it a day in terms of book purchases.

But that's not the direction we've chosen to go in collection development so far.

So what's fairer: to buy no copies of popular texts and make everyone pay for their own, or to buy copies for a couple of people to slip away with and then make everyone else pay for their own once the first ones have disappeared?

Meh. It's not one of the more satisfying questions we consider.

Also, to be fair, I should really try a little study here, to make sure confirmation bias isn't causing us to think that this particular school is really 'losing' a disproportionate quantity of the books in its field (given its representation in the total user population), when the number might really be about the same as for other schools.

Let that be a warning to you, students of schools. Your school gets a reputation, and then gets blamed for everything, with everything being seen as evidence of guilt! Rumors, innuendo...all the libraries whispering about you behind your back...

I need hardly say that any individual student, or group of students in a classroom, is still A-OK with me. I'm not out there giving people dirty looks at the reference desk because Muttonchops Wilkins' Big Book of School-Specific Health Knowledge has turned up missing.

Not unless they look kind of shifty-eyed when I oh-so-casually turn the conversation that way. In that case I'd obviously find out where they lived and then break into their room using super-cool stealth lock picks when they weren't around and search for clues. And if some sort of international travel was involved, I'd be all over that. Creeping over borders with forged passports and such is all in a day's work.

That's how we roll in Tech Services. Dedicated. Also criminal, I suppose, if you want to get picky.

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Think Big Bad Thoughts

New evidence of human irrationality, reported on Bad Science: apparently, people tend to look less kindly on those who injure a few, than on those who injure many.

60 students were given a vignette to read about a case of fraud, where either 3 people or 30 people were defrauded by a financial advisor, but all the other information in the story was kept the same.

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Participants were asked to evaluate the severity of the crime, and recommend a punishment: even though fewer people were affected, participants who read the story with only 3 victims rated the crime as more serious than those who read the exact same story, but with 30 victims.

Further research examined a number of actual cases in which similar crimes injured more or fewer people, and found that this phenomenon is not confined to the lab setting:

[The cases] were all from 2000 to 2009, they were all jury trials, and the researchers’ hypothesis was correct: people who harm larger numbers of people get significantly lower punitive damages than people who harm smaller number of people. Juries punish people less harshly when they harm more people.

The theory here is that it's easier for us to identify with a small number of people than a large number, so harm done to a few feels more real than harm done to many, and therefore more serious.

This actually makes perfect sense when I think about it. I can easily imagine three individual, harmed people, I could put a face to them if they were introduced to me, I can sympathize with them. But 30 people? That's way more people than I could carry on a conversation with at one time. I'm certainly acquainted with that many people, but I wouldn't really want to try interacting with them all at once, I'd lose track of them.

Anything that happens to 30 people is hard to really get a grip on.

I do wonder, if there's a point where empathy fails and gives way to impersonalization, there's also a point where impersonalization fails and gives way to horror at the scale of a crime.

Say, if hurting three people is bad, and hurting 30 people is less bad, is hurting 300 people bad again? Or less bad still because, hey, how much can I really feel bad for 300 strangers?

What about 3,000 people? Or 30,000?

And then, where does horror at the vast scale of a crime become despair at its implacable hugeness, and a disinclination to do anything because there's no way we could make a dent in that? Let's not even bother to try to punish this wrongdoer, what's the use?

I guess from the evidence presented so far, the lesson is if you're going to do wrong, do it big.

I will adjust the scale of my evil plans accordingly.

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Oooog...Blogs...

You know how you take a break in routine, say by going away to Montana for a week, and then when you come back it takes a while to get into the groove again? 

Yeah, so I have 1,000+ (it only counts up to a thousand, so that could be 1,001 or 40,000 for all I know) unread posts in my RSS reader. It's going to take me a while to get caught up here.

In the meantime, until I am reacquainted with my feeds and have health, technical or library-related things to muse about, I'll just note that I found this Boston Globe Magazine article interesting. It's about an increase in female bank robbers in the past several years:

In 2002, according to the FBI, women accounted for approximately 4.9 percent of all bank robbers; in 2003, for 5.4 percent; in 2004, for 5.7 percent; and in 2005, for 6 percent. In 2006, the last year for which the FBI has complete statistics, about 6.2 percent of bank robbers were women - a 25 percent increase since 2002.

The article suggests that as women have come to see themselves as participants in various spheres (law, business, politics) and to take more active roles in public life, they have also come to think of crime as an option as viable for them as for men. 

The piece notes that 80% of crime is still committed by men, and since only 16% of the 110th US congress is female, perhaps gender equality is proceeding a little more quickly in crime than in law. Which I guess could make sense: it's presumably easier to commit crimes than to get elected to public office. (I'm not going to get into the obvious politician jokes there, but feel free to snicker among yourselves.)

Naturally I'm not saying it's a great thing that anyone is robbing banks---that's my money in there too, you know---but I don't think it's any more dreadful that it's women than that it's men. People of both genders are people, and people often do stuff I personally dislike. For some reason, few of them consult me. 

And that, my friends, is just one of the things that is so terribly wrong with this world. Time to sigh dismally and go read other, better blog posts.