There’s a study that has tracked the moves of Banksy so as to provide proof of his / her identity. But, Banksy’s lawyers were afraid of how the paper’s release would be promoted and so the paper, although released online, was placed on media-frenzy hold so as to re-word some aspects of the press release.

The study tests the method of geographical profiling, “a statistical technique that originated in criminology but has recently proved its value in other fields, from tracing infectious disease outbreaks to locating the roosts of wild bats.”

It takes a large set of locations – whether crime scenes, disease cases or bat feeding sites – and runs through various groupings of those locations to find “hot spots” that could be jumping-off points for whatever activity is being mapped.

The hot spots can be used to concentrate a subsequent search, or to whittle down a long list of suspects.

Putting the method to work on a list of Banksy artwork locations in London and Bristol, the study resulted in a “geoprofile” that was a good match for an obvious candidate: Robin Gunningham, who has long been suspected of being the real Banksy.

Addresses connected to Robin Gunningham, such as places he has lived or frequented, scored highly on the geoprofile in both cities.

Basically, the study was done “to see whether it (geoprofiling) would work”, said a scientist who was a part of the study:

What I thought I would do is pull out the 10 most likely suspects, evaluate all of them and not name any… But it rapidly became apparent that there is only one serious suspect, and everyone knows who it is.

If you Google Banksy and Gunningham you get something like 43,500 hits.

I’d be surprised if it’s not [Gunningham], even without our analysis, but it’s interesting that the analysis offers additional support for it.

You sort of default to the terminology from criminology, where you’re talking about suspects and crime sites, but that doesn’t imply any moral judgment – that these are actually crimes, or to be deplored, or whatever.

That’s even more important in disease biology, of course.

Personally, I think this is a load of bullshit – but I guess we’ll get a full break down once the paper has been “released”.

[source: bbc]