Come on. It's for science.

In fact, it's meant to help people.

Researchers at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, put a dead pig in a shark-proof (and octopus-proof, as you'll see) cage and stuck it in the ocean in order to learn more about how human remains decompose underwater. That knowledge will help forensic scientists interpret crime scenes.

Most of the work is done by maggots known as sea lice, but towards the end, after the maggots have eaten the good bits, you can watch some fat, red shrimp move in to pick apart the cartilage.

Read the full story about this research at New Scientist

In 2009, the National Academies of Science published a massive report on forensics. For many Americans, forensics is possibly the most familiar of all the sciences. It's the one we welcome into our living rooms every night, along with TV crime dramas and murder mysteries. But the report's conclusions might surprise you.

For one thing, it's hard to even generalize about the state of forensic science in the United States, because everything from standard practices to accreditation varies widely by sub-discipline, law-enforcement agency, and whether the law enforcement is happening at a local, state, or federal level. Worse, it's not at all clear that some of those sub-disciplines have a sound, scientific basis. For instance, DNA analysis tends to be pretty well-supported by evidence, while fingerprint analysis remains an art, more dependent on the person looking at the fingerprint than on hard laws of anatomy. Of course, the report also found that there simply hasn't been enough research done to determine how scientific most disciplines of forensic science are to begin with. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has allowed trial judges to certify forensic techniques as reliable even though we don't know whether they they are or not — and those decisions have been made in a haphazard, inconsistent way from one judge to the next.

Given how much our legal system relies on this stuff, we should all be feeling more than a little uncomfortable right about now. The state of forensic science, combined with its importance, virtually guarantees that there are innocent people behind bars (or worse) and criminals on the loose.

Tonight, on PBS, NOVA will premier a documentary on the flaws of forensics and how they might be solved. I liked the show and I think it's definitely worth watching. That said, I think NOVA took an angle on this information that made the show less useful (and less important) than it might have been.

The NOVA documentary, "Forensics on Trial", is engaging and fun to watch. The basic structure of the show presents three real-world cases where forensics failed us, explains what went wrong, and introduces us to cutting-edge technologies that might be able to make crime scene investigations more reliable in the future.

For instance, a partial fingerprint on a plastic bag briefly made Brandon Mayfield — an American lawyer and convert to Islam — suspect number one in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. The fingerprint wasn't an exact match (although the FBI claimed at the time that it was) and, in fact, there were 20 people with fingerprints similar enough to the one found in Madrid that the FBI opened investigations on them. Mayfield was held without charge for more than two weeks, until Spanish authorities convinced the FBI that they had other suspects who made more sense as potential bombers, and whose fingerprints more closely matched the one that was found.

So what do we do when one fingerprint could reasonably belong to enough different people that the suspects could play a game of softball against each other while we figure it out?

NOVA suggests improving fingerprinting technology, using a high-tech film that can capture all the lines and ridges and whorls at a much-more-detailed level.

Would the people who do fingerprint analysis like to have more-detailed prints to work from? Probably. But that wouldn't solve the much-more basic problem highlighted in the National Academies report. Techniques like fingerprint analysis — which are based on humans or computers attempting to find and match patterns — are incredibly prone to bias. Not the kind of bias where the analyst has it in for the suspect personally, but the kind that happens when the analyst is thinking about what she's heard about the case from other people; when the analyst knows that other analysts have already called the prints a match; or when the analyst is under pressure to quickly find the dangerous terrorist. Here's a description of a study on this topic, as related in the National Academies report:

Recent research provided additional evidence of this sort of bias through an experiment in which experienced fingerprint examiners were asked to analyze fingerprints that, unknown to them, they had analyzed previously in their careers. For half the examinations, contextual biasing was introduced. For example, the instructions accompanying the latent prints included information such as the “suspect confessed to the crime” or the “suspect was in police custody at the time of the crime.” In 6 of the 24 examinations that included contextual manipulation, the examiners reached conclusions that were consistent with the biasing information and different from the results they had reached when examining the same prints in their daily work.

Without also reading the National Academies report, it's easy to come away from the NOVA documentary thinking that all we need to do is lay some improved technology on top of the existing forensic science system. In the notes I took while watching the screener, I wrote, "Is the problem here a lack of adequate technology, a mishandling of technology (bad methods/training/application), or a flawed foundation to begin with?"

NOVA doesn't really provide a clear answer. Meanwhile, the reply from the National Academies report appears to be, "Yes. All of that."

The NOVA documentary did a good job of alerting me to a problem. But it could have done a better job of explaining the true nature of the problem. More importantly, it left a big empty hole in terms of what comes next. If this isn't something that's just going to be solved by incremental improvements in technology (and it seems like that's the case), well then what? Has this report had any impact on the courts since 2009? Have the forensic sciences begun to improve standardization of methods, training, and accreditation? Did Congress appropriate any funds for research that would help us understand whether some of these sub-disciplines can be trusted at all?

And if not, why not?

Maybe this is a job for Frontline. But, from my perspective, leaving those issues less-than-well-addressed knocks "Forensics on Trial" down from a "must-see" to an "interesting way to spend an hour".

Hey, at least it's better than CSI.

• "Forensics on Trial" premiers tonight. Check your local listings.

• Read the full National Academies report on the failures of forensic science.

• Read a 2010 report on how these findings might affect the practice of law.

The memory card’s contents contained a hodgepodge of urban streetscapes, photos of apparent loved ones and random signs. He noticed most of the photos appeared to be in one general area, which he believed to be in one of New York City’s outer boroughs. ... But just two photos served as Noerr’s “holy grail,” a shot of a young woman sitting on a front stoop of a house numbered 327 and a shot taken seconds later of the sky that captured a street sign reading 3rd Street.

"I think I found your camera": Visual clues help man solve mystery [PostStar.com. Photo: John Noerr]]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/06/camera-fished-from-creek-trace.html/feed 14 http://boingboing.net/2012/07/26/forensic-psychologist-says-mas.html http://boingboing.net/2012/07/26/forensic-psychologist-says-mas.html#comments Thu, 26 Jul 2012 19:26:26 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=173265

The story is familiar to us today: Somebody, usually a young man, walks into a public place, kills a bunch of people seemingly at random, and (usually) ends the murder spree with a suicide-by-cop.

But this story—at least, in Western culture—is startlingly new, relatively speaking. In fact, Paul Mullen, a forensic psychologist, says we can pin a date and place on the first time it happened. On September 4, 1913, in the German towns of Degerloch and Mühlhausen an der Enz, Ernst August Wagner killed his wife, his children, and at least nine strangers. He shot more than 20 people and set several fires during his killing spree. He ended up spending the rest of his life in an insane asylum.

But when we try to pin killings like these on mental illness, Mullen says, we're not quite hitting the right point. The people who go on killing sprees are mad, sure. But that's not the same thing as diagnosable, objective, physical mental illness. Only about 10% of the people ever arrested for crimes like this had actual mental illnesses. In fact, Mullen thinks these killings have more to do with culture than brain chemistry. His argument is interesting. And it might sound a little similar to the old "angry music made him do it!" trope. But what Mullen is talking about is different than that. Science journalist David Dobbs tries to explain the distinction:

I’m not saying the movies made Holmes crazy or psychopathic or some such. But the movies are a enormous, constant, heavily influential part of an American culture that fetishizes violence and glamorizes, to the point of ten-year wars, a militarized, let-it-rain approach to conflict resolution. And culture shapes the expression of mental dysfunction — just as it does other traits. This is why, say, relatively ‘simple’ schizophrenia — not the paranoid sort — takes very different forms in Western and some Eastern cultures. On an even simpler level, this is why competitive athleticism is more likely to express itself as football (the real kind) in Britain but as basketball in the U.S. Culture shapes the expression of behavioral traits.

This is an interesting argument and an interesting thing to think about.

Read the rest of David Dobbs' post about the difference between blaming movies for violence and talking about the consequences of violence in culture.

Watch the video of Paul Mullen discussing cultural violence, mental illness, and spree killings

Read a very good post at the Neuroanthropology blog that expands on Paul Mullen's ideas and provides more interesting links

At Poynter, Craig Silverman writes about FourAndSix, a new photo forensics tool now in beta. The idea is to create tools that "sniff out digitally altered images." Two of the people behind it: Kevin Connor, former VP of product management for Adobe Photoshop, and digital image forensics expert Dr. Hany Farid. (via Erin Siegal)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/05/31/its-shopped-this-new-app-wi.html/feed 4 http://boingboing.net/2011/09/14/poison-forensics-and-how-science-protects-us.html http://boingboing.net/2011/09/14/poison-forensics-and-how-science-protects-us.html#comments Wed, 14 Sep 2011 16:21:56 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=117461

Last month, I read Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook , a really fascinating book about poison and murder in the early decades of the 20th century. Primarily, Blum looks at the development of forensic science and how the New York City coroner's office transitioned from being a place to stash political flunkies to being a scientific and effective player in crime solving. But there's another theme to the book as well—without science, there are many crimes that go not just unpunished, but completely unnoticed.

And this isn't just about women offing their husbands or villains chloroforming unsuspecting strangers. As the coroner's office developed standards of research and became an entity that served justice, the people who worked there became increasingly aware of the ways that the powerful profited off poisoning average workers and consumers. From government agents intentionally lacing alcohol with deadly adulterants during Prohibition, to factory owners knowingly exposing their workers to dangerous chemicals, Blum's book is full of examples of public corruption that was only brought to light because coroners took the time to apply the scientific method to investigating and cataloging deaths.

Some of these stories are ones I'd heard before, but had no idea the role that coroners and forensics had played in exposing the crime and providing evidence that ensured the people harmed received justice. For instance, Blum has a couple of posts on her blog right now about tetraethyl lead—the lead in "leaded" gasoline. This additive fixed an obnoxious mechanical problem in car engines, but at the price of sending factory workers to their deaths in straight jackets.

In October of 1924, workers in the TEL building began collapsing, going into convulsions, babbling deliriously. By the end of September, 32 of the 49 TEL workers were in the hospital; five of them died.

In response to the worker health crisis at the Bayway plant, Standard Oil suggested that the problem might simply be overwork. Unimpressed, the state of New Jersey ordered a halt to TEL production. And then the compound was so poorly understood, state health officials asked the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office to find out what had happened.

In 1924, New York had the best forensic toxicology department in the country; in fact, it had one of the few such programs period ... It took Gettler three obsessively focused weeks to figure out how much tetraethyl lead the Standard Oil workers had absorbed before they became ill, or crazy, or dead. “This is one of the most difficult of many difficult investigations of the kind which have been carried on at this laboratory,” Norris said, when releasing the results. “This was the first work of its kind, as far as I know. Dr. Gettler had not only to do the work but to invent a considerable part of the method of doing it.

Working with the first four bodies, then checking his results against the body of the last worker killed, who had died screaming in a straitjacket, Gettler discovered that TEL and its lead byproducts formed a recognizable distribution, concentrated in the lungs, the brain, and the bones. The highest levels were in the lungs suggesting that most of the poison had been inhaled; later tests showed that the types of masks used by Standard Oil did not filter out the lead in TEL vapors.

Ultimately, the reactions to this research didn't go far enough, fast enough—the workers got better safety equipment, but Americans were still being exposed to tetraethyl lead in gasoline though the 1980s. But, without science, there would have been even less protection than there already was. The work of the New York City medical examiners forced government and business to pay attention to something they preferred to ignore.