“The Billy Beane of murder”?

John Hall points to this news article in Businessweek by by Robert Kolker, “Serial Killers Should Fear This Algorithm,” and writes:

I couldn’t help but think that you should get some grad students working on the data set mentioned in the article below.

Meanwhile this story got picked up by the New Yorker, although without any reference to the earlier Businessweek article. This seems weird to me—wouldn’t the New Yorker writer have done a google search on Thomas Hargrove (the subject of the article) and found this earlier story?

In academic writing you’re always supposed to cite what came before and discuss how your work advances the field. I guess journalism is different: there it’s standard practice not to acknowledge related articles published elsewhere.

Anyway, I’d forgotten about this story but then I learned about the New Yorker article, and Michael Maltz and I looked into the story. We’ll publish something on it soon for Slate, or maybe our article has already appeared. (Yes, it did appear.)

In any case, yes, regarding the query above: This does seem like a good project for students to look into.

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