Forensics

The latest in my ‘Learn Something New Every Day’ series – taken from The Great Courses’ “Trails of Evidence: How Forensic Science Works” (Lecture 27 – Profiling) Offenders get broken down into two main behavioural groups: organised/disorganised Organised offenders are prepared and usually plan their attacks meticulously. Disorganised killers are impulsive: they don’t plan their […]

The latest in my ‘Learn Something New Every Day’ series – taken from The Great Courses’ “Trails of Evidence: How Forensic Science Works” (Lecture 27 – Profiling) Profiling only has one job – to reduce a suspect pool to a more manageable (ie: smaller) size. Trained profilers attempt to identify the characteristics of a perpetrator […]

I’m back (after a short Easter break from the icky stuff) in my ‘Learn Something New Every Day’ series – taken from The Great Courses’ “Trails of Evidence: How Forensic Science Works” (Lecture 26 – Interview & Interrogation) Here’s a good one for the crime writers. What TV gets wrong about Interviews and Interrogations: When […]

The latest in my ‘Learn Something New Every Day’ series – taken from The Great Courses’ “Trails of Evidence: How Forensic Science Works” (Lecture 25 – Police Sketches & Facial Reproduction) This one doesn’t surprise me as much because we’re essentially lazy as a species. We take shortcuts all the time. It makes sense that […]

The latest in my ‘Learn Something New Every Day’ series – taken from The Great Courses’ “Trails of Evidence: How Forensic Science Works” (Lecture 25 – Police Sketches & Facial Reproduction) So…apparently lab tests measuring people’s eye-lines and scanning activity have shown that that modern humans pay more attention to the upper face than the […]

The latest in my ‘Learn Something New Every Day’ series – taken from The Great Courses’ “Trails of Evidence: How Forensic Science Works” (Lecture 25 – Police Sketches & Facial Reproduction) Two biological principles underlie age-progression science. Eyes and teeth. Teeth – both sets of teeth (primary and adult) are fixed in size, and so […]

The latest in my ‘Learn Something New Every Day’ series – taken from The Great Courses’ “Trails of Evidence: How Forensic Science Works” (Lecture 25 – Police Sketches & Facial Reproduction) A forensic artist’s job is essentially to capture how someone’s face is different from the norm, but first they have to know what those […]

The latest in my ‘Learn Something New Every Day’ series – taken from the Great Courses’ “Trails of Evidence: How Forensic Science Works” (Lecture 25 – Police Sketches & Facial Reproduction) The oldest uses of forensic artistry were the old ‘wanted’ posters of the Wild West where a sketch of the wanted person was plastered all […]

The latest in my ‘Learn Something New Every Day’ series… Taken from The Great Courses’ Trails of Evidence – How Forensic Science Works lecture series (Lecture 24 – Teeth and Bite marks) A baby is (generally) born with all its teeth already present in its jaw. They form from, in-utero, from about 6 weeks of […]

The latest in my ‘Learn Something New Every Day’ series… Taken from The Great Courses’ Trails of Evidence – How Forensic Science Works lecture series (Lecture 23 – Forensic Anthropology) Despite all the mysterious woo-woo of what they do on shows like Bones, forensic anthropologists can apparently readily tell the difference between bones that were […]