The date is set, Friday, February 27, 2015 at 10:00 a.m. in Draper Hall, Room 105. As always, if you feel like sitting in the mail room and flipping through it, it is there! (My crappy picture – I do not have smart phone.)

But if not, here is a pdf copy of the dissertation. If anyone is interested, here are my hacks to get LaTex to conform to SUNY Albany’s dissertation guidelines.

The title is What we can learn from small units of analysis, and here is my abstract:

The dissertation is aimed at advancing knowledge of the correlates of crime at small geographic units of analysis. I begin by detailing what motivates examining crime at small places, and focus on how aggregation creates confounds that limit causal inference. Local and spatial effects are confounded when using aggregate units, so to the extent the researcher wishes to distinguish between these two types of effects it should guide what unit of analysis is chosen. To illustrate these differences, I examine local, spatial and contextual effects for bars, broken windows and crime using publicly available data from Washington, D.C.