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Papers by Alexander Tedeschi

Final GIS project for Introduction to Geographic Information Systems, using open-source data gath... more Final GIS project for Introduction to Geographic Information Systems, using open-source data gathered by the Project of the Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) Initiative of the National Science Foundation (NSF)

As a social phenomenon, crime has intrinsic geographic qualities. When a crime occurs, it happen... more As a social phenomenon, crime has intrinsic geographic qualities. When a crime occurs, it happens at a specific time and place that is often recorded by the authorities. At the beginning of the 2000s, the city of Boston experienced a significant uptick in crime rates relative to the previous decade. In response to this, the Boston Police Department (BPD) launched the Safe Street Team (STT) strategy in 2007, which addressed violent crime by assigning teams of police officers to 13 crime hot spots. The smart policing initiative was place-based and succeeded in identifying hotspots that remained stable over time. The current study serves to both update and supplement the geographical component of crime analysis in Boston by making use of demographic data from the 2010 U.S. Census and a comprehensive crime incident database published by the City of Boston's Department of Public Safety for the time period 2012-2015. After performing a geostatistical analysis of crime density, and using self-organizing maps (SOMs) to cluster types of crime with demographic statistics such as income level, population density, and race, the city was divided into zones with varying levels of safety. In addition, new hotspots for homicide, burglary, crimes against children, drug-related crimes, and automobile theft were identified and crime risk was interpolated using an ordinary kriging analysis. The authors of this research intend that the results of this study be used to guide any citizens interested in safety and policing, with the aim of targeting communities around crime hot spots.

Bourdieu’s theory of fields perceives the social space as a complex medium of struggle between fi... more Bourdieu’s theory of fields perceives the social space as a complex medium of struggle between fields – religious, literary, artistic, - imbedded in the primary field of power, and agents that take positions relative to each other within a field’s space of possibilities. The past few decades in the Republic of Tatarstan have been characterized by a religious revival in public spaces which can be redrawn as a field of Islamic discourse in which agents seek to utilize various forms of capital to struggle for a dominant position of influence.

Lake Urmia is located in northwestern Iran, traversing the provinces of East Azerbaijan and Wes... more Lake Urmia is located in northwestern Iran, traversing the provinces of East Azerbaijan and West Azerbaijan. At its full extent, it is the sixth largest saltwater lake on earth with a surface area of approximately 5,200 km2. The lake has been shrinking rapidly in the past several decades century due to drought, climate change, and poor water resource management. The objective of the study is to determine the extent of land cover change in the last three decades. To do this, a remote-sensing based analysis of multispectral imagery over an approximately 30-year period between the summer of 1985 and 2014 was performed. Landsat 5 (1984) and Landsat 8 (2014) images acquired from USGS Earth Explorer were analyzed and key features (lake water, lakebed, vegetation, and urban areas) were identified. Spectral bands from the visible and near-infrared range were used to classify features. Change detection analysis of the results highlighted a large surface water decrease and the growth of the lakebed over the
period of analysis. Between 1984 and 2013, water area decreased by 2838 km2 to 2422 km2.

Drafts by Alexander Tedeschi

This study provides a model to rate and visualize the bicycle redistribution of Citi Bike, the bi... more This study provides a model to rate and visualize the bicycle redistribution of Citi Bike, the bikeshare system that operates in New York City. The share of rebalanced bicycles in proportion to total rides sharply decreased in the spring of 2015, which prompted the question as to what impact, if any, this change in operations had on the availability of bikes and the system’s ability to relay bikes to empty stations. In terms of public transit, a bikeshare system is only as effective as its ability to respond to commuter supply and demand. In order to circumvent the absence of data about redistribution routes and times utilized by Citi Bike’s operations team, publicly available trip data was reverse-engineered in order to recreate the rebalancing events over the three years of the bike share’s operation (2013-2015). Pairwise correlation revealed the stations between which bikes are transferred the most. Data on availability per station, derived from an accumulated JSON feed was integrated in order to derive an hourly score per station. The durations of consecutively empty and full stations were analyzed. Finally, a k-means clustering analysis of availability events was performed in order to visualize the spatial patterns of bicycle supply and demand. A negative correlation was found between the amount of rebalanced bicycles and the performance of stations based on indicators such as emptiness, fullness, and deliveries per empty instants.