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Is The 'CSI Phenomenon' Good For Science?
Tycoon Guy writes "With CSI: Crime Scene Investigation airing its 100th episode this week, I wonder, how do Slashdot readers feel about the show, and its two spinoffs? On the one hand, they've caused a boom in the popularity of forensic science college courses, and they glamorize geeks bent over microscopes, rather than smarmy lawyers. On the other hand, they may also promote an inaccurate view of science: prosecutors throughout the country now worry about juries that refuse to accept eyewitness accounts or even outright confessions, and instead exclusively demand the kind of forensic evidence they see on CSI. But of course, in the real world, you don't get a test like that in mere seconds - or without spending a substantial amount of money. So where does CSI rate on the geek scale for you?"
I have not watched much of the show, but I don't much care for shows that wrap everything up in a neat little box and make people think that all crimes are solved in an hour, give or take commercials. There is some cool technology, however.
I hate sigs.
remember...tv never lies.
Um, I don't watch it. Futurama is my standard for geek shows.
It's just a TV SHOW!
Yes. No. Maybe. I stand behind my answer..s.
vampirical
watching a CSI episode you notice the box of Diamond Evolution One gloves on the bench and think "good choice, those are my favorites, as well..."
I love the CSI, although I came to in way late. Nice thing is that Spike TV shows 2 reruns back to back at 7 each night.
Television influencing people into having twisted world-views!? Never!
higher than Law and Order with its absolutely out-of-the-ass convoluted links to the criminals, but still way below spike TV's MXC.
Does anyone else *love* infinite resolution? I want a 320x200 security camera that can zoom in on someone's drivers license from 200 yards.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I enjoy the show, although they all seem to follow the same recipe, that is everyone denies everything untill they have a minute info, then they give in a little, then spill the beans at the end of the show.
As for forensic in a jury, What a juror must understand is more about it, and truths from the popular show. Jurors are human too, so they will relate, or be swayed by personal oppinions, like strong family bonds, or a strong bond to their children.
It's in between Blind Date and Joe Millionaire.
I say we just grow up, be adults and die.
I think the show is good for science, but as you stated can be bad for the judiciary system. Is it ever a bad thing to have the populice become enamored with knowledge?
Your concerns about the judiciary system are warrented though but I wonder if that will ever be too big of an issue that we have to deal with.
Its good to have the public have some knowledge of forensics. The OJ jury didn't believe overwelming forensics and set him free. Juries should also be smart enough to know hen to believe eyewitness accounts. oops, hoping for to much, why should I expect juries to be smart
"brxref
Sure, there is a lot of junk science, but I think anything that stimulates interest in the justice system, and that helps to reduce the stigma surrounding jury duty, should help to grow the pool of willing potential jurors. Otherwise, the only people you get on juries are the ones too stupid to figure out a good excuse to get out of jury duty.
For years, jury duty has been seen as a nuisance to get out of however possible. Now, there is a real trend toward seeing jury duty as your civic responsibility, and taking it seriously, and even getting excited about it. I think overall this is good for the criminal justice system.
I tried watching it once but didn't really get in to it. It's no X-Files.....
1) anything that promotes interest in science (no matter how glamourized and unrealistic) is a boon.
2) Jury instruction should be enough of a factor. Also, your reliance on the veracity of eye witness testimony is amusing, considering how unreliable IT is.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Its the prosecuter's job to outline exactly how much evidense is required in order to convict, isn't it? Besides... CSI rarely goes to court...
Ever since I saw an episode where a guy looks at a dead body on the street looks up and says "This guy didn't jump, jumpers take off their glasses." I cannot take this show seriously in anyway shape or form, I see it as true to life as Mission:Impossible is to real FBI/CIA agents.
I watched ten minutes of an episode of CSI before I had to switch the channel because I started to get a craving for pork rinds. I HATE PORK RINDS! Seriously, if you want to see forensics investigators at work, CourtTV, The Science Channel, Discovery and TLC have a number of shows that can tickle your itch and won't treat you like a complete doofus.
Network TV - you can always count on us..... TO SCREW IT UP!
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1)revealing or marked by a smug, ingratiating, or false earnestness (a tone of smarmy self-satisfaction -- New Yorker)
2)of low sleazy taste or quality (smarmy eroticism)
Jesus I'm stupid.
They get the science and technology wrong as often as right. It seems like every other episode where they enhance three pixels of an image to get a recognizable face in a reflection. Or there was the CSI:Miami where they got a saved email off of the wireless router that the person had connected through. At least when they got image data out of the NTSC overscan, they were using a real concept, even if the amount of overscan they recovered was vastly exaggerated.
they may also promote an inaccurate view of science
Unlike Alias. Or Star Trek. Or (insert name of favorite show).
Isn't CSI just a darker "Quincy, M.E."? Or am I showing my age?
EricReading C Declarations: A Guide for the Mystified (speaking of showing your age)
Eyewitness reports are really shoddy. People *think* they have a good memory, but in fact they often don't. It's oft studied and little understood. People put too much faith in eyewitnesses.
Like the quote goes, "In the absence of science, opinion prevails." It's about time juries got with the program.
Jurys expecting the physical evidence to match up with false testimony and coerced confessions...just imagine the horror.
I think of Jurassic Park where the little girl is staring at the computer with some 3D file system view and says, "This is a UNIX system, I know this" and I realize that most shows are not very accurate. I imagine CSI's view of forensics is about as accurate as Jurassic Park's snapshot of UNIX. But it is entertaining anyway.
On one hand, it's not good for our judicial system if juries come to expect a preponderance of forensic evidence pointing straight toward (or away from) the defendent. Obviously, that doesn't happen often in real life.
As for juries not trusting eye-witnesses, I am not so sure that that is a bad thing. Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable for the simple fact that it's painfully easy for laywers and cops to implant or modify memories in the process of normal questioning.
This navy study
and here, and again.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
A population that loves Sci-Fi that includes a solution for everything byr eversing polarities.
My buddy is a prop guy on CSI. For the most part the stuff they use is real, and he is trained on it... and then David Caruso is told how to use it by him.
We can't start worrying about a little creative license when trying to tell a story... the point is made that smart can be exciting, even sexy without having to worry about following the instruction manual to the T.
Kids will be inspired to learn about these things, investigate, solve puzzles either way.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Forensic evidence is one of the most powerful tools available to law enforcement because it is relatively irrefutable.
While things may not work like they do in "CSI" in real life, the sway towards the forensic can only help ensure that the proper people get sent to jail.
The popularity may also help increase funding for CSI departments nationwide. Most CSI departments are woefully underfunded and undermanned.
Besides, just imagine if they had been able to get O.J.'s DNA or fingerprints off of the inside of those gloves...
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As for the submitter's question, eyewitness accounts are usually the absolute worst forms of evidence. It's especially bad when the witness doesn't actually know the defendant.
And I would say relevations regarding the liberties taken by cops with the Bill of Rights and Miranda have shaken faith in confessions more than shows like CSI have.
I'd say that having juries full of self-styled experts based on TV knowledge ain't great. But it's better than it was in the 90's, when you could snow over a jury with science evidence debate they don't understand. Used to be an easy way to get reasonable doubt.
All in all, I don't think education is a bad thing, and as I said CSI doesn't do a bad job. As long as the juries don't think they're experts, it should be OK.
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... but they overglamourize the job. The CSI people don't do the detective work... they do the crime scene work.
For an even worse example of something similar, look at the show "Crossing Jordan" where a medical examiner is doing detective work (umm... your job is looking at and studying corpses).
Maybe if the show had a detective, an ADA, and dedicated most of its time with the CSI team and showed how they interact with the other two, it would work better... think "Law & Order" with just a focus on CSI...
Actually, Navy NCIS does a good job. Good combo of detective work and their medical examiner and CSI are both big parts of the show. Very nerdy aspects... not a lot of junk science.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Maybe there are some good shows on, but I've learnt to limit myself to Comedy Central (Southpark, John Stewart), G4TechTV (Screensavers), Scifi (occasional Star Trek TOS), and Discovery (Mythbusters, BIG!), after being barraged by commercials about these "popular" TV shows that Joe and Jane Sixpack wait to watch all week.
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Is the amount of inaccuracies/flaws within what's shown. I end up giving my better half a running commentary of dodgy science as we watch.... (eg, computer enhancement of a car reg plate taken by a security camera to far away to catch anything of detail)
What the series needs are a couple of lab technicians working with the director to real in the impossible.
Tony
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I just recently discovered the original CSI (Vegas) show and have been watching it a lot. I haven't watched any of the spinoffs.
Do police departments really have the budget for the kinds of things this show depicts, though?
I mean, is it really necessary to sacrifice a pig every other show to demonstrate some arcane principle?
And why do none of the CSI techs never wear headcover while leaning over a crime scene looking for evidence; hairs, dandruff, etc?
As a faculty member at a small college, I cannot believe how many prospective and first year students approach me and tell me they are interested in forensic psychology, criminal profiling, etc.. How many of these jobs are actually out there? Aren't there only a few criminal profilers in the entire FBI? Is there any reason to expect that the number of job opportunities in this area are going to increase in the coming years? Fortunately college-level chemistry courses have a way of weeding out students quite quickly... If I had a penny for every poor pre-med student who took organic chemistry and then showed up in my office to ask me about psychology as a possible major... Heck, the only reason I went into Psychlogy was because of the old Bob Newhart show. I thought it would be great to be married to Suzanne Pleshette and live in downtown Chicago...
So where does CSI rate on the geek scale for you?
If their representation of forensic science is anything like their representation of computer hardware and software, then not very high.
"As you can see from this animated, 3 dimensional representation of the crime scene recreated 20 minutes after digitizing the surveillance tapes, and shown of the movie theater sized flat panel display on the wall, it's clear that the butler did it."
That said, I do watch CSI Miami just for David Caruso's over the top acting.
As for prosecutors worrying about CSI making juries expect TV-like evidence, the judge sets the jury's expectations. In general, juries in the United States are seriously flawed due to the exemptions provided to most educated professionals. The bigger picture issues are more important than whether jurors are expecting to see CSI-style evidence.
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I actually used to work for a lab that did a lot of work for the coroner's office, metro, Parole & Probation, etc. in Las Vegas. A few of my coworkers became CSI's. The main thing that cracks me up is how nice, shiny, and new the labs are on TV (and how good-looking the agents are).
Most of the people that I know in the field are kind of homely and not nearly so bright (sorry, Brad & Dori).
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It all depends on the "reason level" of the individual. If we're talking about a resonable person who just didn't know about forensics, it can make them a better jury. Otherwise, they wouldn't be a good jury anyway, interested in forensics or not...
I sometimes watch it, and it's not bad. Once in a while something too stupid comes up, but generally it is above average in science matters.
I ve watched CSI from episode 1, to about episode 5. After that, every case seemed to be similar. It's a genius concept for the people who make money off the show, because the stories are based on acutal events, to an extent. It takes less creativity to come up with scientific plots, so the writers can focus on character plot. Another reason it is interesting to me is that many of the cases are similar, yet the show has regular fans. I find it boring. As for the science, I think it's great that people are interested in forensics, and are learning something, even though the shows are fairly fictional, and some of the evidence tests and processing is invented. CSI is good for the science, but boring as a weekly show.
I'm not trying to kill the mood here, but I rate CSI at -zero- for Irrelevant. It's neither good nor bad, it's meaningless. Is the world any different after however many years of L.A. Law? Not that I've noticed. Same deal.
In the O.J. trial, it seems people overlooked hard physical evidence. In the Peterson [sp?] trial, it seems people needed absolutely no physical evidence at all. If CSI makes people trust physical evidence, and want more of it... perhaps that would be a GOOD thing?
I must have Video Games on the brain after taking 2 days off to play HL2 but..
I read "RPG" and thought "Shouldn't a rocket propelled grenade have a bad name already?"
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There are actual cases where somebody at the police station on ordinary business got "volunteered" to be in a line-up, the victim chose him, and he ended up convicted despite all physical evidence to the contrary. Eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable, but juries are inclined to believe it over anything else. Many lawyers like it just for that reason, prosecutors and defenders alike.
When I do notice huge technical issues (not the little ones like instant DNA and computerized fingerprint/palmprint searches), it makes me wonder how many people believe this stuff. Even worse, it makes me wonder what I've picked up from shows in other subjects and assumed to be based on fact. I catch things on CSI, but I don't know enough about medicine or law to know what's made up. How much of my perception of law is completely fictional?
Just for fun, here are a couple of my favorite CSI science facts:
- NTSC overscans allow you to see footage that takes place 30% outside the normal video
- If you zoom in on a photo of a person, you can find a reflection in their eye. Zoom in on the reflection, and you can see facial features on the people standing behind the photographer.
The original CSI is my favorite, as I can't stand David Caruso from the Miami show, and CSI: NY it too new to form an opinion (which is slipping to dislike right now). My one wish is that they would do more theft type episodes and move away from all murder. Case in point was an episode last season that involved the theft of some priceless antiques. Awesome episode. Not a drop of blood, but the process of how the determined who was the thief was fascinating.
That said, the CSI craze has caused an outbreak of stupidity. Recently, a friend received a stolen check where she works. Since she is the general manager of the store, she had to go to the bank and work out the details. The bank teller (besides being an ass) made the comment that my friend shouldn't "touch the check too often as they might get her fingerprints" and she would get in trouble. Honest truth, those were the bank teller's words. My friend responded with "CSI fan, eh?"
I have another friend that can't stand the show on the grounds of how unrealistic it portraits criminal investigation. Being he was a prosecutor for numerous years, his main beef is that the CSI officers are never involved with the interrogation of the suspects and that the usually hand over their evidence to the investigating office. He then does all the foot work. He also says that the CSI folks don't carry firearms, but he concedes that might vary from office to office. He really dislikes the Miami show since the Caruso character is ordering police officers around all the time, which he says never happens.
There you go, the $0.02 from some guy off the street.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
I have two beefs. 1. Time compression. No you can't do most of those tests that quickly or, even, that accurately. 2. Junk Science. A lot of what they show is just not there yet (or is just plain discredited. See: determining race from bone structure), especially some of the forensic anthropology techniques. All and all, anything that displays what science can do (esp good things) is never all bad! I am in the middle of National Geography Awareness Week. Interfacing with kids about world music (this year's theme) and such might not seem like science to most, but it opens their eyes to what is possible in academia and, in a way, in science.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I personally can't stand CSI. Between the forensic experts interviewing witnesses, making arrests, and being uber-cops, I tend to just get mad. I saw only two or three episodes. After the guy took a plastic pool, a model boat, and a table fan and used it to predict where a boat drifted... I just couldn't stand to watch anymore. Watched my first episode of Crossing Jordan the other day. That seemed a bit more accurate. There seem to be many other geeky-type quality shows. "House" last night looked like it might end up being interesting as well. Even Law and Order seems more realistic to me than CSI.
The biggest issue with CSI is that it is so unbelivable it may as well be a comedy. If you watch the show as a comedy its rather amusinc realising that the guy can see gun powder residue on a towel at 200meters always amazes me.
Maybe its the cool computer animations that accelerate his eyesight.. maybe the xfiles can investigate the guys eyesite as another conspiracy.
I watched the show twice. The first time, it was kind of cool, the second it was glaringly apparent that the show would always be some convoluted mystery.
As for the science, people would be better off watching The New Dectives/Cold Case Files/FBI Files/etc if they want to learn about the science of forensics.
As for Law & Order, the original - that show rocks, I have been watching it since day 1.
I prefer the "real" forensic science shows on Discovery, TLC, and A&E. They tend to focus more on the hard work and real science involved in the forensic process than in the neat-hour-long drama. These shows usually have interviews with the actual detectives and scientists who work cases which I find interesting. CSI is boring; heavy on the drama, light on the science.
I cringe whenever the hi-tech forensics teams come onstage ... IP addresses that start with 400, magic trace-back of e-mail to physical locations, and (of course) those 320-by-200 pixel security cameras that can zoom in tightly enough to grab the reflection of the suspect's face off the victim's cornea really make my teeth itch. (And then there are those red-hot CSIs and coroners who wear low-cut tank tops while gathering evidence ... but that's all totally real, right?)
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I love watching CSI as it is one of the more interesting crime shows, as well as the fact that it puts "science" in a more exciting role than "mad scientist", or crazy experiments.
However, the one thing that bothers me the most about the show above all others, is the fact that they like to do autopsies in the dark. They have the autopsy theatre in the basement with no lights on except for a dim bulb hanging over the body. How do they expect to see any markings on the body that way?
When I used to work as a researcher doing autopsies, we had a insanely bright room with white walls and lights that were brighter than the sun. Also, over the body we had a giant fume hood to take the smell away. And for forensic autopsies (which I have only observed), they usually have hoses washing over the bodies to keep the maggots from climbing over the area you are trying to examine.
Other than that, I love the show.
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Original - Good, data driven to get to answer. Cops in control when taking down a suspect, CSI guys carry, but seldom pull out guns.
Miami - Seems more like CSI with a 70's cop show worked in. Very different from original in flavor and how it works. The CSI guys draw their guns all the time and direct the cops in the field. I don't watch this one much.
NY - Haven't had a chance to review.
We can only hope. A key lesson I took away from law school is that the unreliability of eyewitness testimony and the relatively high rate of coerced and/or false confessions present huge problems to the fair administration of criminal justice. Most of the cases of people exonerated by DNA evidence after serving years in prison were originally put away on faulty eyewitness testimony or coerced confessions.
Of course prosecutors don't like forensic technology! Their job isn't to be fair, it's to convict at all costs. (Doesn't matter if it's the wrong person, as long as *someone* was convicted of the crime.)
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Back in May of this year, NPR did a story on the popularity of CSI, and how the show compares to the way investigations are carried out in reality. The differences are pretty stark, but the excuse is that reality doesn't make for a gripping crime drama.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Get sequestered for a year, then tell me how good you feel about the prosecution.
It's easy to criticize someone else for not doing what you think you would do.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
i've seen an episode or two, and the show seems to be not much more than a glitzed up version of scooby doo.
The first time I watched the show I thought it was about psychic detectives. It wasn't until later that I realized they didn't have any special powers.
The show is so fake that it makes me sick at times. Unfortunately my wife loves it and I end up watching it more than I would otherwise (read: at all).
It's not about believing evidence, it's about having reasonable doubt.
Lawyers must be about to go through what us PC techs have been going through for years:
Lawyer: And here we have security camera photos of the man entering...yes?
Juror #2: Did you find any hair samples from him on the premisis?
Lawyer: Um...No...Seeing as we have photographic proof, we didn't really feel...
Juror #2: What about mud from his shoes? Can it be traced back to mud from the suspects garden using spectral analysis of the chemical compounds?
Lawyer: What the hell are you talking about? You can see him on the video tape right here!
Juror #2: Yeah, but how do you know he was really there?
In the tech support world, this same exchange goes something like this: Tech: Looks like your hard drive has crashed. We'll have to replace it, and...yes?
Guy Who Watches Too Much TechTV: Are you sure it couldn't be the video card?
Tech: No, it's the hard drive. You hear that clanking? That's the sound of a spindle dying a slow death.
GWWTMTTV: What about if we tried to run WindowsUpdate? Maybe SP2 will have some hidden fix that Microsoft doesn't document?
I count at leat 4 spinoffs:
CSI: Caruso
CSI: NY
NCIS (yea, it's pilot was an episode of JAG, but the show clearly has a CSI driven approach to it's stories and production)
CSI: NBC (aka Medical Investigation)
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
What bothers me about the CSI show is that they consistantly screw up scientific facts they are presenting. I can deal with simplification for the TV audience but things like giving acceleration as a velocity and occasionaly downright false statements about DNA or chemistry isn't right.
I really love the show but it would only take one guy with an undergrad in science to watch the show and correct the bad impressions they send.
On a more subtle level the show does give the impression that many of the types of evidence are completly relibale, e.g. fingerprints when new scientific evidence is actually showing they occasionally lead to incorrect results.
Also, I don't like the fact that they always seem to critisize sexually deviant communities they investigate. I appreciate the titalation factor in investigating wifeswapping or other subcultures. However, I dislike the fact that they often seem to critisize the culture in these areas (of course none of the CSIs do this) while they don't take a similar attitude with churchgoing or other 'normal' activities.
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Many CSI episodes end when the suspect confesses under wilting questioning by the CSIs, just like in most (all?) Perry Mason episodes.
I doubt this happens that much in real life.
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The trend in TV/Movies is to show violence and how seemingly 'normal' violence is and then gloss over the consequences of committing crime. In fact, consequences of criminal actions portrayed by Hollywood are minimalized at every turn. You punch somebody in the movies, you are cool; after all, it didn't seriously hurt the guy. He got back up and five minutes later didn't even have a bruise. In reality you assault someone and the damage doesn't go away for several days/weeks/months, you get arrested and if convicted go to jail, usually as a felon. After you serve your time and get out the consequences continue. You can't vote the rest of your life, can't own a gun, will certainly be barred from certain occupations, and will have a hard time with employment and anything else where background checks are used. So taking that into context, I think it's kind of cool to see a show that flips that scene around, and makes it look like slick geeks with microscopes can track your ass down (easily) and let consequences run their course.
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Ask a married couple for the story of how they met. I've yet to find one where both partners agree on even the major details.
"Ah, yes, I remember it well"
I like the show (except the closeups of dead bodies), but it's just entertainment--not education. I don't know enough about the science in the show to be offended when they present theory, out dated or just plain wrong info as fact. Anyone who goes into forensics b/c they think it's like the show will quickly drop out. And yeah, there's enough stupid people that believe everything they see on TV that a jury could be contaiminated--but they'll probably get really confused when the case isn't over in an hour.
Ardente veritate incendite tenebras mundi
worry about juries that refuse to accept eyewitness accounts
Eyewitness accounts are notoriously innacurate and misleading. A number of studies have found that people who witness criminal situations (and hence are under stress) cannot remember (and can even "invent" specifics about) the incidents.
or even outright confessions,
Confessions are also not reliable. Once again, under stress, an individual can be suggested to confess to thing he or she has not done (which is why you should take advantage of your rights and stay silent until your lawyer is present). A number of the cases that have recently been overturned by DNA evidence involved confessions. Yet years later we can prove these people are innocent.
If these CSI-educated juries are prone to be more cautious in making decisions about guilt, then IMO it's probably a good thing.
I think that while it has stimulated the interest in forensics and the like, there are two major problems that help to explain the lawyers' fear of a jury demanding forensics. 1. The cases that CSI handles are the cases that require forensic evidence to prove or overturn, and the fact that these are the only cases that many people are exposed to presents a skewed perspective on the usefulness of forensics. Sure forensics can help to determine just what the hell happened to the burned body found by joggers, but if there are multiple, credible eyewitnesses, you really don't need to swab the fingers and spend half an hour over a microscope to solve the crime. 2. This highlighting of one aspect of how our criminal justice system works puts into perspective just how little the average American knows about the criminal justice system, and how much influence television can have on the believed expertise of that American. They believe that just because they watch a tv show, they are experts on the legal system, and I'm sure this isn't just limited to CSI, as I would bet a large amount of money on the theory that more than once an individual's defense or objection to a courtroom occurence was based on something they saw on Law & Order. While I hate to say it, and I'm afraid hell will freeze over if it ever comes into being, CSI: Law&Order may be what's needed to put into perspective the different facets of law enforcement, from the cops on the street, to the forensics experts, to the judge and lawyers in the courtroom.
Since then, I've written a letter a week to CBS demanding my 10 seconds back. All they've sent me so far is a CSI lunchbox.
On the bright side, the thermos has a picture of William L. Petersen in a speedo.
"Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car."
Eyewitness testimony should be backed up with evidence when you're trying to send someone to prison.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
The show is nice in that it portrays a group of scientists as the main protagonists, but most of the "science" that is shown is absolute junk. How many times have they "enhanced" something that realistically couldn't be enhanced. Sometimes I laugh out loud at it.
I also take issue with how the treatment of the "facts" presented by the evidence is apparently for people with very short attention spans. One moment, they can be absolutely certain that things happened a certain way, five minutes later it's a different way, then fifteen minutes later, it's something else that is the complete opposite of the original certainty. The show always seems to take a rigid interpretation of the evidence which they find, which leads to jumping to conclusions.
The show is fun to watch as long as you don't try to think for yourself. I believe that that is referred to as the suspension of disbelief. It's pure fantasy for entertainment purposes.
prosecutors throughout the country now worry about juries that refuse to accept eyewitness accounts or even outright confessions, and instead exclusively demand the kind of forensic evidence they see on CSI. But of course, in the real world, you don't get a test like that in mere seconds - or without spending a substantial amount of money. So where does CSI rate on the geek scale for you
That's A Good Thing(tm) in my opinion. There have been numerous studies showing how eye-witness testimony is unreliable. From identifications from photo line-ups, to the simple relaying of events which occurred. Convicting someone based entirely on circumstantial evidence and an eye-witness identification is a questionable practise.
The only thing bad for science are idiots who think everything in a television programme must be real. If expectations are based on the fiction of TV, than you have bigger problems than jury trials.
National TV sometimes come into our lab to interview researchers about health concerns, etc... Invariably, the cameraman insists to film us doing stupid stuff totally unrelated to actual science, because it looks 'scientific'. Pipetting colored solutions (bonus points if you have a big flame nearby), racking tips, checking plates (with no bacteria on them), etc. It is extremely annoying, but I guess it reflects how the public view science... fancy looking stuff they don't understand. So no, I don't think this kind of TV program is good to increase the public's scientific knowledge. But it's not their goal anyway... it's entertainment. I hope.
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Totally lacks any sence of plausable reality...
including CSI
Maybe focus your scientific whining or shows like Joan of Arcadia.
You are picking the worst example to attack... CSI does a relatively good job of representing the basic gist of some technologies without sounding like a manual, and still managing to entertain. Thats what a TV show does, and if it inspires, that's good.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
I'm an analytical chemist. I do stuff that is among the top of what science can do for detection and analysis of chemicals. A lot of what goes on in CSI is possible, but not given a real caseload. It would take months or years to complete the studies that they demonstrate being completed in hours.
It must be nice to be able to plant the evidence, and choose the technique for analyzing it, so that the plot can be flushed out. Too bad real life doesn't permit that (ok, in some cases of corruption, investigators also do this... but I'm speaking generally ;).
My brother watches CSI, and tells me about how the police can now catch people so easily. He thinks that forensics labs everywhere are equipped for doing any test conceivable.
While it's nice that CSI promotes usefulness of science and technology, it's definitely giving people a very misleading idea of the state of our techniques. In reality very little of what is shown could be done so quickly.
I can only imagine how angry people must be when a crime is committed against them, and they find out that the only analysis most police will do is take a statement. I'd love to see much higher technology involved, but chances are strong that forensics as CSI portrays will never touch most of our lives.
I go there. I don't study anthropology for grad school but I know some who do. But so many kids want to be forensic anthropologists because of Bill Bass and the Body Farm that they have to tell them the cold hard facts: There are no jobs in the real world. Tennessee has less than 20 state forensic anthropologists working at any one time in a population of 5+ million. UT now trains cops to do the work at a summer academy. Academics do the research and develop the techniques and the cops implement them.
Confessions can be, and are, coerced. People trying to protect a loved one often confess with little or no prodding. More simple people, or people not used to the system, can be bullied into confessing to crimes they aren't guilty of, whether they are completely innocent, or just guilty of a lesser crime.
Eyewitnesses are very rarely accurate or dependable. A lot of investigators have been quoted as saying they hate more than 1 eye witness. Not that 1 eyewitness is better, but they only get 1 story.
It is really hard to defend yourself against something you didn't do, when there is no real evidence to support or refute. I can not prove that I did not do something. I might be able to prove I wasn't there, or that the crime would have been tremendously hard for me to have comitted, but I can't prove I did not do it.
If I can be convicted with no real evidence against me, which I can be, what is going to stop corrupt cops from destroying evidence that doesn't support their case.
"Network TV - you can always count on us..... TO SCREW IT UP!"
Well I guess that's why they call it...ENTERTAINMENT!!
I must say I don't really like the show, mostly because it is set in "modern times", and yet they can blow up an image 150x and "enhance" it so its crisp as day. Now, I think I need to be calling Adobe and asking them why MY Photoshop didn't come with that feature. Not only does it have preposterous technology, but the show strings viewers along as if they were stupid. With this mass technology it would cause juries to overestimate our capabilities.
WASTE - The Secure P2P
Ohhhh that show is so painful to watch. The diaglog is painfully painfull to listen to. The science is dumbed down to such a painfully painfully painful level that it too becomes painful. I think I'm in pain just thinking about it.
Arrrrrgggggg!!!!!
All your attention are belong to my old internet meme.
I think the worst part in these shows is when the computer geek in lab enhances the hell out of a grainy surveillance tape. In some cases, he can even do a 3d rotate (ala Matrix) from a single video camera. I do image processing for a medical device company, and one day the CFO came up to me and said he was a fan of Law & Order and he wondered if it was possible to "enhance" the image like they do on TV. No. No. No. You can't grab a license plate 50 feet away from a wide-angle shot on a grainy 100x100 pixel area...
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
1) Eyewitness testimony and confessions are close to the top of the list of unreliable evidence.
Memory is not a photograph; it is a fluid image that is constantly being rewritten. If the eyewitness contradicts the physical evidence, I'd go with the physical evidence. If the eyewitness is the only evidence, then the case is probably being put in front of a jury for political reasons.
If I was on a jury, a confession would almost guarantee my vote to acquit. Why a confession but not a guilty plea? Basically cops and prosecutors have proven time and time again they should not be trusted.
2) I was really into CSI up til episode where the cheerleader smoked a joint and became a cannibal. Not a ritualized murder or Dahmer-like serial killing, but just some girl going all werewolf on somebody and tearing them apart with her teeth. Because she smoked a joint.
Forensic science is cool and all, but folks who get into it because of CSI make good scientists like folks to med school after watching Scrubs make good doctors.
Geek quotient: Poseur
I doubt this will have any real effect good or bad on our Judicial system. The jury members must be agreed upon by both the prosecutors and defendents lawyers. As a result, any person choosen as a jury member will be someone BOTH sides think can be PERSUADED with their ARGUEMENTS. Evidence has NO place in the courtroom because if a potential jurer makes a decision based ONLY on the evidence then one side would see that the evidence is against him and not allow that person on the jury. ANY jury trial is decided COMPLETELY by the skill of lawyers. This is the very fundamental flaw in our Court Systems.
I think CSI is good, it gives people a chance to see another side to crime solving. In the course of my work I have been called in by local law enforcement agencies to perform forensic work with computers. This is an area the show completely misrepresents. They show the investigators just sitting down and start digging through the target system. Not so much! There is a lot of work that must be done to prevent damaging any evidence. I wish they would go into more detail with this angle like they do with blood work on the show. I will be lecturing at a nearby university in December on computer forensics, and they are developing a course on the subject for next fall. I am also working on a Gentoo based foresic toolkit if anyone is interested.
I'm for anything that convinces a jury to be skeptical of an eyewitness account as they *are* notoriously unreliable.
When my wife (then girlfriend) and I were undergrads, she used me as an experiment for one of her classes (she majored in criminal investigative psychology). She had me walk through one of her classes unannounced and nonchalantly, then, after I had left, asked the rest of the class to write down a description of me.
Of the 40 or 50 or so students in the class, most weren't even in the ballpark (in a huge blow to my masculinity, some didn't even get the sex right!) and only a very few would have been usable descriptions. So, anything that makes them understand how useless they are is a good thing.
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
Of course it's good for science.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
When you hear something like that, how am I supposed to buy into the biochem stuff (an area I am not too familiar with) they toss around?
My issue with shows like CSI and even Crossing Jordan is that they make everything look so slick and cool. Like the "programmer" in Swordfish.
Reality just ain't like that.
What the hell is CSI?
I protest the bias against "smarmy lawyers."
Lawyers put criminals in jail far more often than the guilty go free.
Lawyers make the law more clear. Things can be simple or fair but not both.
Lawyers help you navigate complex deals, interract with the diverse laws of states and nations, and can keep your rights from being overrun by the RIAA.
If, after all that you still dislike them, then the next time you're in jail - call your doctor.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
prosecutors throughout the country now worry about juries that refuse to accept eyewitness accounts or even outright confessions
So prosecutors are worried that juries will not be ignorant and give them easy guilty pleas when the accused might be innocent.
Instead, the juries will be more intelligent and demand a better level of proof. Of course prosecutors are against that, it forces them to actually do their job instead of BS and hide the facts. For the rest of use this sounds like a very good thing.
Witnesses lie, confessions can be forced.
Jason
ProfQuotes
What I really want to know is when will Grissom finally get laid...
When is CSI: San Andreas coming out? I hear that is a violent town and in need of some law enforcement!
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
See, they're trying to send a message. They want all of the stupid criminals out there to be deterred by forensic science's supposed capabilities. They aren't trying to be real, they're trying to protect YOU! :-)
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
I don't watch the show. However, I have read some of the literature on eyewitness testimony and am convinced that eyewitness testimony can be easily manipulated by the manner in which the lawyer phrases the questions or other, subtler prompts. It doesn't matter how certain the witness is that their memory is accurate.
The biggest name in this niche is Elizabeth Loftus, who has written at least one book on the topic: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LOFEYE.html
If a show like this can help to chance the public perception of the value of eyewitness testimony, so much the better.
?/o
I always thought it was dumb how they have plasma screens all over the place. Of course it is for the cool factor they have it on there. I eventually didn't pay attention to it much, but there was a CSI:Miami episode where they have a inmate cleaning the crime lab cuz of "budget cuts", who ends up destroying evidence. But then later in the show the main guy (who I can't stand so much I don't watch the show anymore) is drivin around in his Hummer, then goes back to his lab full of plasma screens for pointless reasons.
I need the software they have that makes 2d images 3 dimensional and gets reflections off of peoples eyeballs. I heard crossover is coming out with a plugin for it.
There is a photoshop plugin that works with images for resizing and it seems to be really good. Genuine Fractals 3.5 seems like it would be able to zoom any picture without loss of data. I'm not sure, however, if any text data would be legible, however.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I sure have cleaned up my evidence-leaving ways, seeing all the good tips on these reality shows.
Heck, if the witness-relocation program didn't keep moving me about, I'd be caught by now, for sure!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I only watched one show all the way through and while I appreciate the entertainment value, I was appalled at hearing something so wrong as "Terminal velocity is 9.8 meters per second squared"
Maybe those kinds of mistakes aren't common with the show, but it gave me a very bad first impression.
if the popularity of CSI and similar shows makes it harder for people to be convicted of crimes using only circumstantial evidence, then I'm all for it. more educated juries means less faulty convictions.
:)
perhaps watching a CSI marathon should be mandatory for jury duty?
This article at CSIFiles reminds me of what my criminal justice professors said. People watch CSI and then expect to be handled the same way when the police come to investigate.
My professor (an excop) said that he knows officers now who are being asked to check for prints and DNA and bring in all the fancy gadgetry (which they don't have) to try to solve the crime. When the police cannot comply with these requests (due to time, money, resources) the victims feel that the police are not taking the crime seriously and are resentful.
The issue is manpower and priority. Law enforcement does not have the time to look for the people who stole your bike and TV or urinated against your house when there are more serious crimes to be dealt with.
Even high priority crimes will only receive the resource that a particular department has. Very few locales have a zillion dollar crimelab.
.
Faith: Belief in Truth. Superstition: Belief in Falsehood.
I am actually more interested in how many criminals are getting way better at hiding their tracks, like the woman in the article.
Like most Slashdotters, I read a lot of fiction and watch a lot of movies. There is so much out there about how to do a crime, do it right, and do it without a trace, that I really wish law-enforcement agencies the best of luck--because they desperately need the best of luck.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
All that, and the characters are fairly annoying and shallow. Expecially the main guy and his one liners: "Speed kills". It's like a licensed game, you figure you've got the name, so why spend time on effort, in this case, writers.
My wife likes the show, so I've seen a lot of half-episodes.
What I don't like about it is that it depicts police as honest and hard-working, and our justice system as competently run and fair.
Too many people are unable to differentiate between reality and fiction, so the popularity of this show is generating a lot of false faith in our system, which is chronically corrupt, incompetent, oppressive, and unfair.
-- TTK
So I guess this kind of stuff is good, if you want to flood the science industry with the same kind of people who are just chasing after whatever false or misleading promises the show offers.
But of course there are some beneficial effects, namely making us geeks sexier, which I'm always down for. Plus it gives people more appreciation for some of those jobs out there that nobody really knew about but were pretty cool.
But if I had to choose either good or bad, I'd say in the long run this is bad, and will get worse the more popular the show gets and the longer it goes on.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
You know, it is cool that people are getting into science because of these shows, but this does give people a little bit of a skewed view of science. Yes, there are some scientists with jobs that are really that interesting. Also, there are some very capable scientists out there. There even are a few geeky-science types that are as good looking and cool as the ones on TV. The fact of the matter, though is that most scientists are underpaid, underappreciated, overworked, and aren't out there doing groundbreaking work. Yes, I like science and am about to finish up a dual BS in Chemistry & Biology, but I'm doing this because I like it and am good at it. Going into any profession because it seems "cool" and exciting is a bad idea. All the glamour in the world can't make a job fun.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
1. Discover body. 2. Discover second body. 3. Gather puzzling evidence, begin to find suspects 4. Discover smarmy suspect who looks quilty 5. Discover other suspect or suspects who may be guilty but remain elusive. 6. In the third reel, exonerate smarmy suspect with additional evidence, and grab second suspect at a suspenseful moment. 7. Repeat three times a week. Profit. Oh God, where are the great cop shows like Crime Story???
Have only seen a few episodes but as a geek, I can say the geek chicks with their hint of kink would trivialize the science even if it weren't crap!
The science can't be all bad though. The referenced time article says that criminals are improving their craft with knowledge gained via CSI time.
As for jourors, as a scientist myself, am I not at a disadvantage if tried by a jury of my peers? I feel kind of cheated by society as it appears that fat dumb and lazy pays after all?
It also appears that for a significant portion of the USA population, life is high school and TeeVee.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
If anyone knows a producer let me know. I've got a great idea for an geek show that everyone would love. The show would be called Extreme Coders. It would be totally unique, at the beginning of each show a manager would come into the coders microscopic cubicle covered with Dilbert comics, old Coke cans, and roach fodder. The manager would ask for some type of outrageous project (e.g. fix all the security holes in Windows ASAP!). Then the coder would start to work... as the show progressed requirements would change, the system would crash, bugs would have to be chased down. You can see how exciting this could be...a nd then... but you ask, what's the extreme part? The entire show would be shot over the programer's shoulder, as if you, the viewer, were his XP coding partner reviewing his code. It's sure fire winner.
The good news is that once Extreme Coders is successful, there is plenty of room for spin-offs. Extreme Coders: India would be the first spin-off.
Most of the scientific feats on CSI are possible with the greatest discrepancy being the time frame. As a chemist, I wish there was one machine to which I could introduce samples and have instant indentification. In the real world, it takes several different machines and days to determine structure.
I have another friend that can't stand the show on the grounds of how unrealistic it portraits criminal investigation. Being he was a prosecutor for numerous years, his main beef is that the CSI officers are never involved with the interrogation of the suspects and that the usually hand over their evidence to the investigating office. He then does all the foot work. He also says that the CSI folks don't carry firearms, but he concedes that might vary from office to office. He really dislikes the Miami show since the Caruso character is ordering police officers around all the time, which he says never happens.
My wife is a pathologist and as part of her training she had to take a death investigators course. According to her, death investigators do nothing but gather evidence. No more, no less. Their job is not to solve the crime but to make sure all the evidence is recorded, catalogued, transported to the appropriate labs as needed, etc. They are not permitted (in general) to try to make conclusions from the data; that's the job of the detective assigned to the case. You are right that firearms are generally not carried, they definitely don't order the cops around and they certainly don't drive around in brand new Hummers!
Apparently applications for forensic examiners & assistant positions are up something like 100X in the last few years. Like JAG, Law & Order, ER and a bunch of other shows, CSI glamorizes a job that really isn't all that glamorous. I don't think it's entirely a bad thing, we do need people in those jobs but it isn't exactly giving people realistic expectations.
Geeez, the show is developed for entertainment, not forensic accuracy. I don't think it's plausible to nail any particular science in the course of a situational drama.
Honestly my main beef with the show is that there are no asian characters. Come ON, people! Are we expected to believe that all CSIs are white and african-american runway models? Where is the guy from New Delhi or Shanghai?
Let's try and reflect the demographics of the profession.
Hey, that's great news. Do any cursory reading on eyewitnesses and you will find out how utterly untrustworthy eyeswitness accounts are. I think the only reason we have them are legal tradition, and the naive belief many people hold that eyewitness accounts are more reliable. As for confessions, they are easily coerced out of people in exchange for lighter sentencing, or to stop the beating, etc.
Remember, prosecutors build careers out of delivering justice, i.e. finding a bad guy to scape goat. They really don't care wether or not that person actually is guilty. If someone confesses, or a decent eyewitness says "that's the man", no prosecutor will question it. That way it looks like they are doing their job and justice is served, as long as someone is punished for the crime.
I'll take a jury that puts more stock in scientific evidence than someone's story anyday.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
can I have some of their image enhancement software? That stuff rocks! Well done the producers for keeping it real.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I agree wholeheartedly, those are indeed the best gloves. But when David Caruso strokes his face while wearing them, I cringe. I was trained in a Human Genetics lab, which means any contamination was a major headache, and we used nasty chemicals all the time. So he was either contaminating evidence, or giving himself cancer.
CSI is Awesome. I love it to bits. I'm not as fond of the spin-offs.
Having a friend who majored in this during part of his college education, it is more dramatic than accurate.
Of course, that doesn't change the fun of watching him 'correct' the characters on things.
"No, no. You don't do it like that!"
Atomic batteries to power! Turbines to speed!
Based on scientific realism and the quality of the show in general:
CSI: 8
Miami: 4 (maybe 5)
NY: 6 (too early to tell).
Overall I think CSI is generally accurate with it's science but obviously makes it seem like things happen a lot faster and easier than in reality. They also seem to have a horseshoe up their ass when it comes to finding evidence.
Interestingly enough I have a friend in forensics in Vancouver who tells me the LV private lab the show is about is, in fact, a real lab and one of the best in the world. People from Canada go there for courses and seminars (and probably to gamble).
As for Miami, what a stink fest. A wining combination of bad overacting, bad science and nice boobs. They should rename it CSI: Baywatch.
NY is ok but still not as good as the original. Personally I could do without NY or Miami but I do like CSI a lot.
"Take that Lisa's beliefs!" - Homer Simpson
That can't be good for science.
That can't be good for anybody.
I think CSI is a load of old bollocks, but each to her own. I watched one episode of David Caruso doing an amazing impression of William Shatner and that was enough for me. I bet none of the chicks on CSI are as nerdy and sexy as Scully!
However, if it gets the masses interested in science and the technology that goes with it, more power to it. It's a hell of a lot better than "reality" tv.
But the real question is what shows are now out there for geeks? There's no more Buffy, X-Files, Xena, or Farscape, and I just can't sink to the depths of The Beastmaster or get interested in Stargate.
Thank God for Netflix. I heard Babylon 5 rocked so I'm going to try that to get my geek tv fix.
Audere est Facere
I actually think CSI is relatively good compared to most of the stuff on television, but I do think VGCats' commentary has a bit of a point...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Love the original CSI (Marge Helgenberger is WAY hot). Hate the Miami version (smarmy David Caruso) and the NYC version (Gary Sinise as a cop? Puhleeze).
That said, I think anyone who thinks a TV show represents real life probably shouldn't be on a jury. At least not any jury judging me.
Isn't it somewhat acknowledged in the law enforcement community that eyewitnesses are suspect and can't be trusted? Conflicting versions of what happened, whether for financial gain, fame, or just an overwhelming need to be the center of attention if only for 5 minutes, are common. That means that a prosecutor is going to select the eyewitnesses that follow the police's version of events. Well, what about the other "eyewitnesses"? Seems like grounds for reasonable doubt to me.
I would think a good prosecutor would use the "CSI effect" to their advantage when selecting jurors by dismissing anyone who expected the TV show to equal real life for bias.
I'd say being concerned about the ramifications on forensic science and juries is about the same as being concerned about how people feel about flying on a plane because of Star Wars.
If anything, more informed people coming out of school, inspired by CSI, is a _good_ thing. The frontiers of science & technology will eventually make those tests quicker and cheaper, especially if more people demand it. That is not a bad thing at all.
A realio-trulio lie detector(tm) would definitely be the largest boon to justice anyone could come up with.
Well, that and a complete overhaul of the U.S. 'justice' system.
I really do not like this show, it's all so fake etc'.. why can't they just rerun Miami Vice instead? :)
I can't stand the errors on this show:
1) They have a 12V car battery and a couple of jumper cables throwing 3 foot arcs on a pool.
2) They state that "the iron in his blood conducted the electricity". Yes, and all those polar ions in his blood stood around picking their valence shells, while the iron locked in its nice little hemoglobin cages conducted the electricity.
3) The perennial "zoom in on an image forever" problem others have noticed.
4) "Oooh, we found an omnidirectional transmitter - let's trace the signal back to the reciever!"
Now, I can understand the occasional stretch to make the story interesting, but most of the time the stuff they get horribly wrong they could just as easily gotten right.
And we won't even talk about the fact that these guys spend WAY too much time on each case - like there isn't a backlog of corpses stacked up outside the building because they are tying the whole department for a week on this one case.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Haven't seen too many Vegas shows, but I get caught up in the Miami shows. The only recurring complaint with the Miami show is how overconfident the characters seem. The New York show I watched the first couple of episodes and hated it. The logic was way off on how they solve the crimes in New York. They have the characters jumping to conclusions that the facts just didn't lead to. The writers of the New York show seem to think their audience is stupid. It may not have started that way, but it will end that way.
1.61803398
Show's not too bad (though I don't care to watch it all the time, my wife rarely misses any of the 3). The software they are shown to use on the show makes me cringe though. They could at least try to make it look authentic. Take a low resolution picture, type a bunch of the stuff on the keyboard (why doesn't the software on the show use a mouse? Is typing more exciting for the viewer?), and bam picture resolution somehow increases greatly and they see a key clue in a reflection or something.
"Law and Order vs CSI" flamewars
I cringe!
Personally, I'd rather have juries believe in the forensic sciences, even if they are exaggerated in their portrayal on television... This is a much better state of affairs than having juries exhibiting characteristics of the OJ syndrome where they totally discount science and instead believe "if it doesn't fit they must aquit."
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(
Seriously, it and its ilk don't popularise so much as harm science.
That's because critical thinking is at the core of all good science, and these programs preach the opposite of critical thinking. They're all about using technology as a magic cureall, a social tool, to completely supplant critical thought.
That's bad science. And that's exactly what a generation is being reared on.
It's dogmatic thought - exactly the same tool the Bush Administration is using to destroy whatever science doesn't suit its agenda. Bad! Bad! Bad!
Scritching.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=61
Frankly, I tend to agree.
TFOAE
[P]rosecutors throughout the country now worry about juries that refuse to accept eyewitness accounts or even outright confessions, and instead exclusively demand the kind of forensic evidence they see on CSI.
Great! eyewitness accounts are not something to base a case off of, people can often become convinced of things that have absolutely no grounding in fact. If you put a lineup in front of people and go "which of these people did it" odds are they will feel pressured to pick someone. Confessions can be pretty poor aswell, it isn't really that hard to 'convince' someone to confess to a crime they didn't commit. If prosecuters are relying this sort of stuff to get convictions then they need to go tell the police to start collecting some real evidence.
CSI is at least, if not worse than JAG. Naval attorneys don't go flying combat missions and more than forensic examiners go around busting into perps hideouts yelling "Where's the baby!". The only place that happens in in Patricia Cornwell books (you know, the ones with the super-genius cornoner who is also a world-class SCUBA diver, a crack shot, desired by all men and hated by all women because she's beautiful).
CSI is a great show. I do like Miami, and NY is growing on me. As person of average intelligence, I do realize it's a tv show and it's purpose is to entertain and make the network money. 100 episodes, that's a lot of murders in Las Vegas. Im sure Vegas doesnt have a murder every week. I know it's just a show and it's not 100% accurate.
If I wanted accuracy I would watch 60 Minutes...er..wait a sec.
However, I wonder if anyone who watches the show may think twice before committing a crime because they think that too much evidence may be left behind. Heh..or the other hand, maybe they will try harder not to leave so much evidence.
I think that getting more people interested in the subject is always a good thing. As long as its not law. :D
But I think the question is worded a bit funny. It sounds like it's lumping the legal system in with science, as in, if its bad for the legal system, its bad for science. That is, of course, not necessarily true. I think in this case, it might be bad for the legal system, but I don't see how it would be bad for science.
And as we all know, there were a pretty significant number of people convicted in the past 20 years that have been cleared with the use of forensics (of course, many people will say one person is a significant number in this case), so maybe more reliance on forensics is a good thing. More guilty people might get free, but better than putting an innocent man behind bars.
Blake
I've never watched CSI. I don't really feel motivated to start either. I sorta feel like it rode the X-files' coattails. I don't watch much TV any more either, I get episodes of most shows I'm interested in off the net. I still watch old episodes of the X-files. I think Scrubs is the only "new" show that I've taken to watching.. well that and SG-1 and Andromeda.
Moved sig for GREAT JUSTICE!
Anyone else notice that all the outside scenes in the Miami offshoot are seen through a slightly orangeish filter, and the New York ones pass through a light bluish one?
"However guessing will only get you so far, eventually a level of error will introduce itself and your ability to create "accurate" information is shot."
Isn't that what the human brain does? How much is what the eyes brings in, and how much is what the brain brings to the picture?
You have to be very careful with the context of forensic evidence. I recently watched a show called "masterminds" where a jewel thief in Raleigh made a point of deliberately leaving behind tiny snippets of other people's hair, blood and skin, and tromping around the crime scene in huge boots leaving footprints that were 3 sizes too big, in order to throw off investigators. He was only caught when his fence tried to hawk part of the loot on EBay.
The interpretation of results can be highly subjective. There was a famous case a few years back in Canada where a well known doctor accused of rape willingly drew his own blood sample for investigators, which came up negative. They were sure he was guilty, but couldn't figure out how he had faked the blood test, as they had seen him draw the blood sammple from his arm right in front of them. As it turns out, he later confessed that he had inserted a sealed, plastic surgical tube into his arm from a small (unseen) incision further up his forearm ahead of time that contained a sample of somebody else's blood.
My rights don't need management.
Real geeks watch c++.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
I enjoy the show, but from watching it I now sadly realize that I'm not good-looking enough to be a scientist. I am relieved to know that Las Vegas is the location of such vibrant intellectual activity (since I live there).
My wife turned to me and said, "It looks like they need to update their Anti-Virus"
Right in the center of the really busy screen was the Norton Anti-Virus "Update your Anti-Virus Definitions" window.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Sorry, but I don't want to be on a jury and I love CSI. The thing I don't like about jury duty is that you are constantly being manipluated, either by the prosecution (lawyer), the defense (lawyer) or the Judge (former lawyer). Also, the law doesn't allow the jury to see all the evidence. How many cases have been decided because the jury didn't hear evidence. I live in Florida and in this state many juries don't get the evidence and put folks who are innocent away for years.
Count me out. It's not my civic duty to be manipulated and not given all the facts in order to put someone away in prison.
Civil cases I can handle a little better because usually at least you get to see some kind of contract or such.
I just wish that Florida would go back to only voters being able to be on jurys. I'd drop my voter registration again in a heartbeat.
Call me jaded, but that's how I feel.
On TV and movies investigators frequently take a photograph or video image, scan it in, then blow it up and sharpen it several times to get perfect pictures of the suspect's face. If the data's not there, the data's not there. Computers are not magic.
The only CSI that is watchable is CSI (the original). CSI:NYC and CSI:Miami are horrible for one aspect, the acting sucks. They got all these glamour types that do not in any way fit a person that would be working as a cop or a lab technician or a forensics scientist (none that I have met and I have met many). Personally I am tired of shows with actors/actresses that are nothing but a pretty face/bosy and lack any ability to portray the character they are assigned and even worse do not posses any qualities of the character they are trying to portray.
The original CSI at least tried to add this with unique characters that have flaws, exhibit some geekiness that goes with the territory and can almost pass for some of the roles (against there is evident hollywood factor). The main guy is an ubernerd, has horrible people skills but can name an insect and it's locale by looking at it, has no family, no social life and is very good at what he does. This fits many forensics I know, they all have some odd quirk and some obscure obsession relating to their field (hey this can be said about most scientists). The blond female is a b*tch, may have some peronality skills but extremely pushy and bossy (just like many female cops), a dichotomy of power and feminism. His assistant had a serious gambling problem and is trying to clean up. The lab guy is one of the best characters, he's a geek, anime fan, tries to look cool but has something that screams geek all over him, mentions a bunch of fetishes, always seems horny, sometimes unsuccessfully hits on women and I don't think he has gotten laid yet (a perfect techie type if you ask me). The other 2 are ok, but no defining characteristics for them yet that make them stand out, yet they don't seem too out of place.
As far as accuracy... just remember that people writing this stuff are same english majors that wrote technically accurate movies like War Games, Hackers and a slew of others. Let's just say they are part right on many issues, but they leave the logistics out to spare you the boredom. DNA tests take weeks to run, finding a speciment on the glass lside can take over an hour (getting the dye right, correct light frequency, etc). However there are quick tests for presence of blood and semen that are as easy as spray on or spray and use UV light. So the show has a mix of accurate stuff, somewhat accurate but sped up stuff and some questionable. If they followed detail the show would not fit in the 44 or so minutes they have (plus commercials). Don't blame the makers, it's the networks that impose the timelines.
Nobody ever called them scientists. They both have years of movie special-effects experience. The thing has to be scripted, yeah. Especially if they are true geeks, like slashdotters. Because if they weren't, there would be no conversation. Just explosions.
.... for a steaming pile of shit!
I see tons of posts "Compared to the other shows it's great."
Let's get something straight: dog shit placed beside horse shit smells better, but guess what?
THERE BOTH SHIT.
Now that the tricks of forensic science are more widely known I bet more criminals will think about minimizing their forensic trail.
It is a mystery why so little forensic evidence was found in the Laci Peterson case. Perhaps Scott was keeping notes while watching CSI, Law and Order, etc...
When are they going to start glorifying Engineers again?
Recently, my psychology professor has been talking about how eyewitnesses are unreliable. Most people don't pay attention to or remember much of what happens in a crime. Most of the people who claim to remember what someone looks like or what someone was wearing really only knows part of what they were wearing or what they looked like and is filling in the missing information with things that sound logical. This is called confabulation. If anyone remembers a while back Oprah did a show about eyewitness testimony and how unreliable it is.
There's more truth here than humor. Sitcom-guzzling, tivo-worshipping folks baffle me with the tripe they submit themselves to.
Why are we so stuck on entertaining ourselves, even unto the detriment of our society?
However,
prosecutors throughout the country now worry about juries that refuse to accept eyewitness accounts
n es ses-reliability.shtml
This is not neccesarily a bad thing.
Eyewitnesses are exremely untrustworthy.
I remember this story that I heard in a psych class (prof claims it's true):
Vicky the victim is sitting at home and watching TV, Unammed Man breaks in and assaults her. She tells the cops she knows exactly what the guy looks like, describes him to a 'T' and then proceeds to immediately pick him out of a lineup, no hesitation, she's that sure.
There's only one problem, the guy has an alibi, a pretty good one at that, he was being interviewed on the live news when the break-in happened.
http://www.instant-essays.com/psychology/eyewit
Having juries put more weight on physical evidence, and less on testimony of an eyewitness would be a boon to the wrongly-accused-community of the US
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
During the jury selection process for a murder trial last year, I was first 14 selected to go through voir dire.
The prosecutor asked me if I watched any crime shows on TV. I said I watched Law & Order and CSI. He then asked me what I like about CSI, and I replied with something about enjoying the science or some BS.
The prosecutor then used one of his peremptory challenges to kick me off off the jury.
A week later they found the guy guilty of killing his roomate, but apparenly there wasn't a who lot of physical evidence in the trial. I guess the prosecutor though I might be biased against circumstantial evidence since I watch CSI.
Eh...whatever. At least I didn't have to sit in a jury box that week.
ÕÕ
In just about every episode I've seen of the original, and I must have seen at least 30 or so because of the Spike TV special that was airing on Labour Day week, there's a murder, this murder necessarily gets solved in the span of an hour (sometimes two or three murders get solved in that time), and the perpetrator is one of 3 or so secondary roles that look like they didn't do it at first. When the plot twist becomes expectable the story ceases to be any fun. That said, I was really into it for a few shows.
prosecutors throughout the country now worry about juries that refuse to accept eyewitness accounts or even outright confessions
Given how incredibly unreliable both are, that is a good thing.
Most TV show that suck. CSI sucks too. It is good for a chuckle if you really, really have nothing else to do and are too tired to go play on the internet.
I always get a good laugh out of the magic scanner machine. They rinse a q-tip into a little test tube, put the test tube into a rack, the rack gets roboticaly loaded into a machine, there is a couple of seconds of the sound of a dot matrix printer, and the "tech" says in a serious voice, "It's a piece of rubber from the tire of a 1989 green chevy pickup truck! There were only 1000 of this model produced of which only 17 are still on the road and only one is registered in this state. The owner is the suspects sister!"
At this point they confront the sister who admits that she really was in town after all and she did cut up the body, disolve it in lye, grid up the bones and throw the dust in the Atlantic, "but he was already dead."
Since one of the teeth didn't get ground up all the way they are able to put the tooth back into the magic scanner (cue more dot matrix printer sounds) and show he really died of poisoning on tuesday when the sister said that she saw him alive on wednesday.
They then connect to a national database that tracks the cash purchases of everyone in the country for the last 10 years (here we are treated to the sound of a 9600baud modem, dee,doo,deeeeeeeeee,doooo,dooooooooo!) to show that last August she bought some rat poison when she was in Chicago for a business trip and had an affair with the dead guy.
They confront her again and this time she admits she did it. We get about 20 seconds of the main character finally on a date with the cute scientist from out of town when his pager goes off (no nooky for you) and its time to watch an ad for a new cure for erectile disfunction ( when a quiet time becomes the right time) .
Every wrong attempt discarded is a step forward - T. Edison
I love when they take a pipettor, dip into a large beaker of solution left open on their benchtops and pull back a half-full tip with air bubbles in it, with big droplets hanging off the side, then squirt some of it into an unlabeled test tube. The show is great, but as a biologist, I cringe every time they do that.
Also, if you ever see a M.E. kneeling over my corpse, touching my hair and saying "oh, poor baby, who did this to you?" you have my permission to slap her! Or as David Caruso would say, "You have my permission...[dramatically puts sunglasses on]...to slap her."
Let's talk about how easily and accurately one can estimate the time of death of a corpse, shall we?
If you believe these shows, it's an easy and exact science. In reality, it's neither.
If your 'little forensics training' indicates otherwise, please inform us... but if you really are trained, you'll know that these shows are quite wrong often on this detail.
IMHO, that's a basic enough failing in the "science accuracy" department to make it all quite suspect. These are short TV shows, with TV show hack script writers and limited schedules. Facts are frequently bent to make a better story. Real forensics experts have a hard time watching these shows, they're so full of mistakes.
And I just love the way the investigators get pushy with people and they just roll over. No one ever contests a search warrant, they never get dragged into a hearing by a pissed off business owner, politcal people never burst into the office and start making unreasonable demands.
Yeah, CSI is reality.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Am I supposed to feel sorry for the cops and prosecutors because juries are starting to want to base their decisions on objective scientific data rather than circumstantial evidence and notoriously unreliable eye-witness testimony?
Like most TV, and following the 90% rule (Sturgeon's Law), it's crap. I watched it twice at somebody's house. It was difficult to take. Cardboard characters... Gary Sinise seemed like he could teach Moses a thing or two. Everyone is stoned face as if they're doing ... something... really ... serious, and they lose all humanity in the process.
I don't buy the fake, coincidence-prone revelatory way they make discoveries, I don't buy their Disney like laboratory. I don't buy the occasional hint reminding me that "oh, by the way, it's not perfect here." There are plenty of real stories (5000 years of human history folks) I'd rather see dramatized, or just see a good doumentary about, than sit thru some hollywood hack's contrived detective boogaboo.
I hope to god any jury that ever judges me isn't composed of people who think CSI is anything more than (poor) entertainment.
I used to work in a really horrid section of Atlanta, and luckily, the local police were regular fixtures there. One night, I was talking to two officers when an older woman approached them, in near-hysterics, shrieking about how someone had broken the window to her house.
They told her they'd take a report, but that there was no way to fingerprint glass that had been shattered into very tiny pieces, so the chances of capturing the bad guy were minimal.
She then started screaming about a footprint that she found on the ground below the window and how she, "watches that CSI show" and knows that "they can make a plaster cast of the footprint" and whatnot. By the time she mentioned collecting DNA evidence, they were clearly getting bugged.
Thing is, cops are getting this ALL THE TIME. Everybody, no matter how small the infraction, wants a forensics van and a crack team of government scientists to bring out the big machinery.
More proof that television is rotting our brains.
THE GOOD HUMOR MAN CAN ONLY BE PUSHED SO FAR
Bart Simpson on chalkboard in episode 2F18
One of the standard questions was:
"There are no CSI type evidence submissions in this case. Can you render a verdict based on just testimony and non-scientific evidence?"
Several other potential jurors looked disappointed at not having CSI evidence to examine.
Compared to most of the pap on television, the original CSI is pretty darn good. They at least have some partially geeky characters and though the "science" is still dumbed down (you know, like the fact that they can turn 4 pixels into a clear face shot) it's still good.
The spin-offs on the other hand... are a little too much.
I think it is a major problem that people would take television this seriously. The fact that CSI is so "life-like" certainly helps. But even still, it's only television, a fictional story. If the same principles and techniques were used, but if the show contained aliens or other non-realistic entities, would people still take it seriously? (would they even watch it?)
What does get to me is that they solve every case. I like Law & Order because you see guilty people get off scott free. In CSI, you don't see a lot of unresolved cases, if any. You never see unsolved cases. you never see hunches that lead nowhere. If a detective thinks there's something at the crime scene he missed, he's going to be right, and you end up in the show 3 minutes later with him examining some suspect fiber. What really bothers me is whenever they say 'X happened yesterday' or 'X happened this morning' and I'm like... BULLSHIT! There's no way you just scoured that much area/data/dna and came up with a result in that amount of time. Not unless CSI is the biggest employer in your city.
And guess what... the fingerprint matching device is NOT going to render every last fingerprint it tries to find a match on. God I can't stand those shows.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
"prosecutors throughout the country now worry about juries that refuse to accept eyewitness accounts or even outright confessions"
When called for jury duty, it was made very clear that the 'burden of proof' is set on the prosecution solely. It sounds to me like they are just being too lazy to adapt to a new level of (mis-)awareness.
I watch it every week but to call CSI anywhere near realistic is silly. Apparently in the world of the various CSI series, police officers do not investigate crimes and psychologists do not profile and evaluate suspects. The CSIs apparently do everything but arrest people and try them.
That and I doubt many municipal crime labs have the technology that any of the CSI labs have.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
they may also promote an inaccurate view of science: prosecutors throughout the country now worry about juries that refuse to accept eyewitness accounts or even outright confessions, and instead exclusively demand the kind of forensic evidence they see on CSI.
Hmmm, if our society is at the point where fictional entertainment alters the very nature of the justice process, perhaps the accuracy of CSI doesn't really matter much at all. Some delightful little half-connection in my mind is causing me to think of the bumper sticker out in the parking lot that reads, "Evolution is Science Fiction." Seriously - the quality of the content of any single show is completely meaningless when compared to the fact that a huge chunk of America takes things like television and religion as largely unbiased representations of fact.
Sorry to be a downer, I like CSI. Pretty people pretending to be scientists rock.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
The trick to enjoying CSI is to think of it as taking place in the not too distant future. Right now, DNA tests take a long time, but they are much faster than a few years ago and work is being done to make them much faster still. Pretty much everything on the show is current technology made faster/more accurate, a reasonable extrapolation for the future of any modern technology.
http://notanumber.net/
CSI is great, I don't know about the spin-offs. Grissom is the closest thing to Fox Mulder on TV today. If you haven't watched it I suggest you do so.
Hey, even murderers are using the techniquess used in the show to cover their own tracks(not a good thing, unless you happen to be in the murder industry, those guys TCO(Total Court Orders) are way down!!).
Also it makes the world of forensic science look a lot sexier, but not sexier than programming, I mean give me a keyboard and mouse any day over a swab and a "stained" bed cover, oh and the brains of some poor John Doe. So hopefully it encourages more forensic scientists than murderers.
Knowledge is power!! Unless it's VB knowledge.
Many anthropology programs are already dealing with a glut of students envisioning themselves doing the kind of work they watch on CSI, but it hasn't been that much of a problem since it only takes one class for them to be disabused of the notion. Although I and other anthropology students have found those people to be something of a nuisance, it isn't really a serious issue since anyone who sticks with that major won't be under any illusion that their job will mirror what they've seen on television.
(for the record I'm a cultural graduate and find physical/forensics to be incredibly dull)
You can wavelet and fractalate and vigourously wave your hands in the air
Fractalate!
Fractalate!
How did you know this would be my new favorite word? Honestly, if you had used "wavify" instead of "wavelet", I would have mailed you a ham out of sheer glee.
B: There probably are too little tests done, esp. DNA tests.
Maybe it's time to try to catch the one who actually did it instead of just getting an easy (and cheap) conviction.Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
... it is just a TV show. It is an idealized version of reality. It is not meant to be a literal translation of forensic science. Not all forensic scientists are great looking, not all cases are solved... much less in a couple of days.
If you judge these kind of shows with extreme severity you can also rule out ER, Law and Order and almost anything else. CSI IS NOT A DOCUMENTARY!
These facts don't take away from the fact that it is a great show, with great writers and great actors. They manage to make it fresh everytime and the caracters are very well developed and motivate great empatic responses in the audience.
McGuyver wasn't science fact or reality based either, but we ate it up every week.
Cheers,
Adolfo
After the movie came out, I could remember people wanted to sign up as Navy fighter pilot.
All you need is to show the glamor side of things to get people sign up in droves. What a bunch of sheeps.
Take your life back.
I threw mine out years ago. Get with the times.
And TV shows about doctors convince kids to stay in school.
And TV shows about violence convince kids to stay out of trouble.
And COPS inspires the right people to join law enforcement.
And sex on TV is good for healthy population growth.
And American Media made me the genuine, sincere person I am today.
is that the real world is very much like CSi, the same person runs the test as collects the evidence, which makes the tests a LOT less accurate, and more people end up getting rail-roaded...
I actually am taking a class in Forensic Anthropology this quarter (from a Board Certified Forensic Anthropologist even) and I have to say, while I knew a lot of the stuff on CSI et al was crap, I'm almost getting to the point where I can't watch them anymore. The very first thing my prof told us on the very first day is WE DO NOT SOLVE CASES. It was in huge caps on her slide. As forensic investigators, we gather evidence and provide it to the police. THEY solve the case. For instance, in class we have an assignment where we are given parts of a skeleton and we must analyze them and put our findings in a case report just like our prof would write for her cases. On a rib, I noticed a fracture. My job is to document the fracture, say whether it is ante-, pere- or post- mortum and what kind of injury it is consistant with. It is NOT my job to say that the guy was punched in the ribs by the assalant 'cause he wanted the guy's wife or whatever. My job is to say that I have observed a peremotrum fracture of the left fourth/fifth rib which is consistant with blunt force trauma and then explain why (the pattern of fracture, etc). It bothers me to see these forensic investigators getting all Dragnet everywhere.
My prof actually discourages people from going into forensic sciences because really there aren't that many jobs. And she would know! Yes she's a well known forensic anthropologist working on some high profile cases (including the Peterson case) but she also teaches at a university. Doing case work is not her total bread and butter.
I'll also say that a lot of the people in my class are very influenced by the CSI shows and think that forensic work is all computers and microscopes and pretty things. They don't realize they have to deal with dead and bloated bodies, gunshot trauma, and other things that you shouldn't be seeing in slides at 9:30 in the morning (this morning it was maggots. Needless to say, I didn't have anything with rice for lunch). I don't think CSI will have the dalmation effect for forensic sciences (ie, people saw 101 Dalmations and went out and bought dalmation puppies because they were OH SO CUTE.. only to realize that they couldn't deal with the breed and gave the dogs away), but I will say I have to deal with a lot of tarts in my classes who I'd rather kick to the curb since they just want to wear tight little tshirts look pretty like they do on CSI.
CSI * is the worst piece of shit on TV. I fucking hate it. The smugness of those wankers makes we wish they were all victims of homocide. The police are treated like office monkeys (pat pat theres a good copper).
"The evidence will show the way". BOLLOCKS!!!!!!
"Everything louder than everything else"
This show has a record of being completely inaccurate. I know it is just a TV show and everything, but you have to admit that they are at least trying to uphold the image that this is how real cops solve real crimes.
In a physics class I took in college we watched a few episodes so the professor could point out all the stupid inaccurate references. In one episode some worker fell off of a building and died because his drill shorted out and electrocuted him and he fell over the railing. The cop was talking about how he was falling at a velocity of 9.8m/s squared. He was obviously refering to the acceleration of gravity, or the writers don't know the difference between velocity and acceleration. That is just one example of how they take reality and bend it to make the show interesting and dramatic.
Don't get me wrong though, I think it is interesting and fun to watch. Perhaps it might intrigue others and influence them to learn how things really happen. Either that or someone will copy one of the brutal murders off of the show...
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
But then, I never got into Alias either, so I may not have typical Slashdot tastes. Jennifer Garner's just too hard-faced and bony for my liking...
You must think in Russian.
what aspects of science? I often wonder about factual content of *drama* television. If you talk to real scientists discussing CSI this year on www.RRR.org.au (radio live to web) you would get comments like 'equipment product placement', 'test that take days, weeks are solved in hours', 'people who happen to have expert knowledge in too many areas'. I cant find the exact link to the show but a couple of forensic scientists working in St Vincents Hospital, Melbourne ripped the shreds as to the factual content let alone scient content.
Real science is about discovery, measuring, observing then (the kicker) do some experiments, observe and write it up. The closest I see on television that emulates this is the BBC nature programmes started by David Attenborough. Though Americans may probably be more familiar to that other David, Canadas own David Suzuki.
Watch a show from one of these blokes and you will see the difference b/w the candy-coated hollywood version and the real messy world. Which leads me to my next observation ...
So where does CSI rate on the geek scale for you?inbetween miami vice and the simpsons
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
prosecutors throughout the country now worry about juries that refuse to accept eyewitness accounts or even outright confessions, and instead exclusively demand the kind of forensic evidence [...]
That's a good thing. Eyewitness accounts and outright confessions are among the least reliable "evidence" you can have. If CSI has raised awareness among the public of this fact, it has indeed done a public service.
...say that television is the opiate of the masses.
To heck with CSI:*, watch NYPD Blue (esp. older seasons) to watch how they tie evidence, confessions and eye witnesses to crime in a big city, high anxiety environment.
While it's obvious that the evidence a CSI biofecalneurotoxochemologist can "find" today (and feed to a trusting jury) is very impressive, consider the other side of the sword. Twenty years ago, a criminal did not have the tools of crime scene manipulation and investigator distraction that forensic priorities give them today. For example, leaving a bunch of other people's hair and skin flakes at a crime scene didn't help a criminal very much twenty years ago. Such things probably wouldn't even be noticed, let alone be entered into evidence, get analyzed, waste time and money, and eventually act as confounding theories in court.
A case in Ottawa Canada today illustrates the difference between real life cases and CSI:
"At the trial of an Ottawa pain doctor accused of raping a female patient, court has heard testimony about two sperm found in the woman's vagina after the last alleged rape.
But yesterday, Dr. Martin Gillen's defence lawyer dropped a bomb while cross-examining an RCMP forensic biologist, Steven Pike, who testified intact sperm can last about 18 hours in a woman's vagina.
Before challenging the 18-hour theory, the 52-year-old doctor's lawyer, Brian Green-span, asked if Mr. Pike knew Dr. Gillen had a vasectomy in 1991, and that tests done in 2001 and 2002 showed no sperm in his semen.
"I was not aware of that," Mr. Pike replied.
Mr. Greenspan then showed Mr. Pike a text book on forensic science that said sperm can be found in a vagina up to seven days after intercourse. Mr. Pike said he wasn't familiar with studies showing this.
The woman has testified she had sex with a friend about seven days before the last alleged rape.
The trial resumes today."
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
The AC is obviously a fan of Yoda.
There are no commercials in Star Wars.
Laws are for people with no friends.
This is image compression software, not image enhancement software.
Not losing data is a very different thing from pulling data out of a magic hat.
I enjoyed watching it for a while, until an episode where the characters tried to describe some physics and meteorology... as a meteorologist myself, I could not believe the Jr. High physics and weather information could be so wrong... I know it's cliche to say this, but at that point it went past my disbelief suspension threshold. Now, eeehhh, it's not at well liked as it once was.
I think the biggest danger posed by the CSI series is that laypeople will think that it's perfectly okay to vaporize a few ounces of cyanoacrylate in a plexiglass box and then, once you've found the fingerprints, to just whip the box open with your mouth and nose about 6 inches away from where all of the crazy-glue fumes are coming out.
... can't wait for the next spin-off: "CSI: Pumonary ICU".
...my point here being that just about each of the things they use to solve the crime(s) in a single episode are used in probably 50%-75% of all of the other episodes.
Other than that, I think they're getting pretty close to jumping the shark, because they're just re-using all the old tricks. Oooh... DNA from some stray skin cells... Ooooh, luminol to find blood. Oooh, crazy-glue to find fingerprints... oooh, monochromatic light to find semen.... wow, AFIS.... hey, CODIS, neat.
The name of the killer does change in every episode, though, so I guess it's still riveting.
Maybe "sheer glee" is the jelly-like substance that canned hams are packed in?
If true, it would follow that sheer glee lies somewhere between solid glee and liquid glee. I would pursue this further, but all this talk of ham jelly is making me hungry and/or nauseous.
I suppose you lameasses need to do _something_ since you lost. Mod away!
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Every time they bring up wifi or computers, I wince.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
CSI is not bad for Science, but it can be bad for the gullable and simple-minded.
CSI and ilk represent a type of draw to technical fields that might be positive if the impressionable person is young and has access to solid guidance.
In the case of forensics, I recently spoke with a private contractor who does forensics software development for Scotland Yard. As I'd already suspected, the job growth in forensics is nearly zero, if not negative.
So, CSI isn't bad for science, but if you are making lifelong career decisions based on a shitty TV show, you've got more important problems.
I love how hardly anyone every uses a mouse for anything. Wanna zoom in on a part of an image - a couple of key taps and presto you're there.
In fact searching for anything takes a couple of keyboard taps and then some zippy sound effects and PRESTO you get your answer spewing out of a printer. What a deal!
My sig infringes on the sig patent...darn.
I'm actually a fairly avid CSI fan, at least for the "Las Vegas" series. I don't know about the others, but there have been several times where Las Vegas where an episode ends with the criminal getting away or getting off on technicality. One involves a young female rape victim coming in to finger the suspect in a lineup, and getting killed for it later.
Others involve killers for which there simply isn't enough evidence to track, or to convict. Some involve cases where the prime suspect turns out to be wrong.
Yeah, they generally tend to wrap up in the hour slot, but it's not always a "happy ending" (though most are, otherwise the show wouldn't sell). Keep in mind also that the hour span can entail days or weeks in TV-time
And as for Star Trek, many plotlines run several days, not really as comparable.
If you believe these shows, it's an easy and exact science. In reality, it's neither.
I've never seen the show indicate that time of death is that easy - they tend to use the word "about," and often provide a reasonable window. I've seen tmies where they set it up so the time of death was muddy enough to just let the alibi stand, at which point they had to build a case using other evidence.
If your 'little forensics training' indicates otherwise, please inform us... but if you really are trained, you'll know that these shows are quite wrong often on this detail.
True, some shows better than others. I've found CSI to be a bit better than a lot of shows. I've also seen them explore some interesting research, for example the work derived from the professor at the University of Tennessee who runs the "body farm." They also throw cutting edge intrumentation on the show occasionally, such as an episode solved by an "electronic nose." I can personally say that treatment in particular was dumbed-down and unrealistic, because I develop such devices. But they can't go in depth on the show, for time constraints, so introducing such techniques is a good start.
They are the first popular show that I know of to explain the science of what they're doing. They do sometimes get things wrong, but not usually, and the attempt is a good one. Blood spatter, glass fracture, and ballistics tests are examples of classic analyses they've introduced. Is it as easy as they set it up on the show? No, because you have to make it obvious to the viewer how it works.
These are short TV shows, with TV show hack script writers and limited schedules. Facts are frequently bent to make a better story. Real forensics experts have a hard time watching these shows, they're so full of mistakes.
I'm not saying CSI is a Nova special. I'm saying it's the best of TV fiction. And I think it has a net positive influence on people, if only that CSI has also made other, more informative nonfiction shows that much more popular. Shows that do in fact get the science right. And again, I don't usually see CSI portray time of death estimates as solidly as you suggest.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
yada yada yada......
So where does CSI rate on the geek scale for you?
Somewhere between "complete crap" and "has hot chicks".
Apparently medical examiners all look like fashion models, and work in upscale trendy high-rise offices - filled to the brim with all sorts of super-zowie high-tech gadgetry. The M.E.'s are constantly investigate crime sceens, and interregating suspects.
I had no idea it worked like that.
But I shouldn't be surprised. According to TV and movies, all female scientists and doctors are babes. And they're all single.
...microscope looks at you.
I really don't watch TV anymore, but when I see scientific or medical claims on TV or in movies I think about the (in)acuracy with which they show thinks I DO know something about...like when someone is encrypting/decrypting something and I see some computer graphics gibberish flashing all over the screen that in realy life would just eat up CPU ticks. Or when someone is supposedly getting hacked and again I see fancy graphics on the screen that can't possibly have anything to do with what might plausably be happening. Point being that it's not very accurate at all. I assume that most anything they show is, to be generous, "dramatized."
If the effect is as described, it might not be such a bad thing because "eye witnesses" are notoriously inaccurate and presecutors rely on them too much, because juries have tended to believe them. With death row cases being overturned from DNA evidence (cases that I would like to think recieve more than average scrutiny) demanding more "hard" evidence up front might save a lot of injustice down the road.
I do like the "camera following the wire" effect, though.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
I like CSI and watch it often. I think it is good entertainment and well written although I view it as a work of fiction and know enough to seperate reality from fantasy. I think most people can do this.
I'm not really one of those people who feel that TV, or entertainment in general, have some sort of obligation to provide factual presentations. I'm all for fiction or the mixing of fact and fiction to tell an entertaining story.
Even though I feel that story-telling is a legit purpose, I do sometimes have to wonder if there is some segment of society that is affected differently by all of the gratuitious violence and dark story lines (never mind that the good guy almost always wins).
I won't go so far as to say that TV, movies, music, or entertainment in general are responsible for violent crime (individuals are - period), I can see how some people may become desensitized by the blood, guts, and gore on TV, in movies, and yes, perhaps even in music. I suspect that these people probably have other contributing factors (like abusive parents, alcoholisim, mental illness and so on).
Life itself can be brutal. Earlier this week, I saw a dead body laying on the road, police had a large area taped off waiting for the real CSI & medical examiners. Less than a month ago, an aquaintance of mine was murdered in a convenience store robbery. Would these things have happened if there wasn't so much violence on TV? I don't know, how the hell could I? How can the "experts" quantify this? There are so many variables and each situation is unique.
I do know we aren't living in the 1950's any more. Kids don't live a Beaver Cleaver lifestyle anymore and families aren't like Ozzie and Harriet. But so much has happened in the past fifty years. Vietnam, Kennedy's assination, the war on drugs, Civil Rights, women's lib, Iran, Iraq, Columnbine, Iraq redux and thousands of other things. Isn't is safe to assume that these things may have played into our collective psyches too?
People are so quick to ask: "What is this or that doing to us?" Isn't the obvious answer that we are a collective combination of everything that has touched us? Aren't we responsible for making sense of these things? Then, if that is the case, why ask why? Most of us are capable of seperating fact from fantasy, those us us who aren't need help.
Exactly goddammed right, and the tip-off is simple: Not once have they peeled some guy's jeans and stuff off, and had a character exclaim, "Jeeze, didn't your mom ever tell ya to wear clean undies everyday, just in case?"
I like the original series for many reasons.
The coloring is one feature I like best. There is almost always a blue dark tone to all the scenes. You can really tell that some people at the show love to play with colors.
Las Vegas is the ultimate place for this. Almost all scences play in the dark and there is lots of colored light around (just like in the real Vegas).
Also all the colors used fit very well with each other.
There is a certain style with the actors and the interior of the buildings that corresponds very well with the mentioned colors. The actors also look and dress very stylish. The black guy sometimes even seems to have green eyes.
All in all the series is beautifully made by some very talented and dedicated designers. I also like the plot and other stuff, but the style/design stands out most.
Miami of course has horrible colors that don't fit at all and I haven't seen NY yet.
A couple of weeks ago when I first read about this issue I asked my father about it (he's a former Assistant District Attorney in NYC). He said that the same thing happened with fingerprints. People on the jury always wanted to see fingerprint evidence because that is what they read about in crime novels. He says that it's just one more thing that the prosecution has to explain and that it shouldn't be an issue for a good prosecutor. I think the only difference is the media that is being referenced and after the "newness" dies down it won't be a major issue.
The problem isn't exclusively the domain of CSI. It's with entertainment in general.
What we have is entertainment that mimics bite sized portions of real life. Now, all television shows do this to a degree, but many of them are sitcoms that deal with familial situations, and since these situations are familiar to us, we can discount what we watch on the boob tube.
CSI and other dramas are foreign in nature. We aren't forensic examiners, detectives, or doctors. We don't see all the long hours and the paperwork in these shows. They don't make for good tv. What these shows do is create a crop of new armchair experts who observe processes on an entertainment program and demand that it translate to real life.
This used to be the sole venue for sports fanatics who would berate their coaches and players for perceived lack of execution on the field (and even today, people will judge athletes against ridiculous things like Madden scores instead of production on the field). Then it became political as news coverage of political issues came about. You don't need to know the issues, all you need to do is swallow the slogans. Eventually, it stretched into documentaries, live tv, and then dramas. And so on and so forth.
We've gone to the point where we medicate ourselves based on the commercials we like. Can't get it up but want to throw a ball through a tire? Buy Levitra. Are you too lazy and fat to exercise like a normal human being? Thumb stomach surgery.
Who needs doctors? We have commercials and the Discovery Health network!
This can only be good in the long run, though. Right after I unveil my Red Hot Poker(tm) contact lens remover and Pocket Landmine, that is. All I need is celebrity endorsements. Just ask California!
I am a Libertarian, so I don't follow all the Demo/Republi crap that is spewed. However, it doesn't take Albert Einstein to figure out that if you do not respect life, why should others respect your life.
I think that sig is very Insightful in the way that it highlights the typical democrats stance of being allowed to kill a human while they are babies, yet detest killing a murderer while they are adults and having _full_ control over their actions. A baby has no defense against a doctor with a vacuum trying to kill it.
What disgust me are people that are enamored with being able to kill babies that have committed no offense against society, yet not want to kill real abominations that have committed murder.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
That is, without a doubt, both the funniest and the most correct summary of every CSI:Miami show I've ever seen (both of 'em!)
Give that man a chocolate fish. Hell, a whole box.
(yeah, I know, other people have made similar comments - think of it not as '-1, Redundant', more '+1, giving the dude his props')
if television weren't so bad already.
Tag lost or not installed.
I took a class in forensic anthropology one summer as an elective. The professor had a Master's degree from the University of TN, and was the forensic anthropologist for a huge swath of western NY (at least a few million in population, not to mention lots of lakes a forests for things to be found in). Her day job was as a pathologist's assistant, because she only worked as a forensic anthropologist a few days a month when there was something to be done. Sure there were several full-time so called CSI's but they usually did very boring stuff.
NCIS is in my opinion, the best of the 3. They tend to concentrate as much on character and witty dialogue as the investigation itself (however, all the computer stuff they do is very deeply flawed at best. It always amazes me how much money they invest in making pretty graphics for those scenes but spend $0 researching them for plausibility).
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
You're right. But. If you have low-res video, which gradually and slowly moves around (as in, say, a handheld shot of almost any sort), you should be able to retrieve more information than any one frame has by combining many images which overlap and are offset from one another by sub-pixel amounts. A bit of Googling reveals that substantial work [PDF] has already been done in this area.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
"NCIS is in my opinion, the best of the 3. They tend to concentrate as much on character and witty dialogue as the investigation itself (however, all the computer stuff they do is very deeply flawed at best. It always amazes me how much money they invest in making pretty graphics for those scenes but spend $0 researching them for plausibility)."
I have to agree with Prien715 whole-heartedly on both points. NCIS is definately my favorite of the three, and although a big fan of Gary S. the NY bit hasn't really "excited" me much.
In the research department, I thought that Clint Eastwood's "Bloodwork" was probably the most excellent I've seen. While not particularly technical in nature, the strong Type A personality of (you know the character if you know the movie), and the wealth of Linux and other Open Source stuff on the book shelf over his shoulder were a nice touch. Not hard to suspend disbelief on that one.
more specifically, a feminizing pseudohermaphrodite, like jamie lee curtis
such a person, due to developmental hormonal snafus in the womb, are sent down the wrong sexual development path, so genetically, they are xy, while superficially, they are xx
i really believe that
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
on Discovery is a WAY more realistic show. It's also interesting how they blur out everything related to blood and gore, while CSI goes to the other extreme of showing intricate detail, including the boiling of a man's head to get to the skull to get a print of a tire iron, the wifes, not the husbands.
It is based on real science and forensics and uses real tools, not some science fiction plot.
Oh, and I love how every screen in their computer lab has the same hi-res graphics when they need it. All the monitors hooked up to a single source...
What exactly do you mean by "Don't touch this button?"
XANDER: Not on a regular VCR they don't
According to Buffy, it's still possible to do this kind of crap, just not on a normal VCR.
Technoli
Liberals: Kill children, save murderers.
No, it's actually:
Conservatives: Murderers, who kill women and children.
So far, 100 to 200,000 in Iraq, estimated by Lancet. Or see:
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/
Ignorance is bliss.
As for the show itself, it does make geeks cool, because they're atypical. Greg is a California dude, Nick and Warrick are a bit of a jock, Sara and Catherine are hot. Only Grissom comes off as a geek. He's got his science niche (bugs) and is overly excited by what he does (almost a geek requisite, don't you think?).
In the words of those "Best Week Ever" people, Spin-offs: DOWNGRADE!!
You mean every database in the world isn't interconnected and instantly accessible?
Proverbs 21:19
It would be a little more legitimate if the cameras were using an optical zoom instead of a digital one...but once you're reviewing tapes and just going on the little bit of information on the record, I agree, it's pretty silly.
Unless the cameras have an image sensor with a "fovea", or a higher density of elements in the center, sort of how mammalian eyes work. In that case, two different VCRs could tape the low-res peripheral picture and the high-res fovea picture. Even an ordinary still digicam CCD would work, as it could downsample the whole picture to one video stream and crop it to another.
Now hand me the patent, please :-)
I have a friend who works for the real CSI in Newport Beach, CA. Her biggest peeve of the show is that people believe everything they see on TV. She went into a room to take prints, you know, the old-fashioned way, with dust and tape. One guy looked over her shoulder and asked why she wasn't using the 'green laser' to get the print. She then had to waste her time telling him how stupid he was. sigh.....
I was on set as an extra where Jill Hennessy was one of the stars (Nuremberg). She's, like a babe, even in real life.
A preprocessing step removes fine detail in color, to which the eye is less sensitive than to fine detail in brightness. The cosine transform packs most of the energy of an image block into a few coefficients. The quantizer knows that the human eye is more sensitive to noise in lower spatial frequencies than to noise in higher spatial frequencies, and the higher frequencies often become 0 after elementwise division. A bit of RLE and Huffman coding later, and you have JPEG image compression.
CSI is a show for entertainment purposes, and they take huge liberties with scientific accuracy. Overall, they are not terrible shows (except, perhaps, Miami--that show is the runt of the bunch), but everytime I see a perfect image magically taken from some fuzzy night-time low-res reflected image in seconds, I cringe.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
I've never seen anything as boring as the CSI shows, unless it's the Survivor shows.
Crap like that is why I pulled the plug on my cable service six months ago. Anything I really want to watch I can download. The rest is trash.
With the popularity of CSI, you'd think people never watched any other cable channels. A&E is usually running a forensic science reconstruction show of some sort, as they have for years. Lately the Discovery Channel (at least the Australian version which I get) has crime reconstruction shows it seems like 24 hours/day. TLC has turned in to a cross between Home & Garden and WE. Even TechTV/G4's target audience is 13yo console kiddies, with an occasional insightful show on how to make one's desktop look even more stupid, how to create sigs for e-mails in Outlook Express, or a review of last year's MP3 players. There's hardly any real science/nerdiness left on TV. I wonder if they still show Mr. Wizard on Nick.. at least then I could relearn something interesting, like how to make a "volcano" with a little baking soda, vinegar, and a dash of molten rock. I can't remember.. maybe one of those ingredients wasn't required.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
On a related note, as a graduate student in a biosciences lab, I always chuckle when I see one of the CSI lab techs at a bench - without fail there's a pipettor used in most episodes. Usually dispensing some sort of coloured mystery liquid. Obviously it can't be science without your trusty pipette in hand.
Seriously, any other science geeks get a kick everytime they see a lab coat and pipette?
"Nokia is not a country, it's the capital of Finland!" -Moderated "Informative". Yeesh.
When was the last time you went into a courtroom, sat down and listend to the attrocious orations being displayed as Lawyers in debate?
Perhaps Lawyers are dismayed by the simple fact that jurors aren't as dense as they were in the past?
How about we stop redrafting the laws to make it less and less a requirement to be guilty of committing a crime by real evidence instead of the ever spreading epidemic of circumstantial heresay?
These Court TV cases are battles of illusion by the DAs and the Defense Attorneys. You can't tell me the average person today is smarter than they were fifty years ago. Fewer cases seem to be able to find corroborating evidence but more cases are returning convictions. WIth less cases managing to get real evidence to convict people and one would logically deduce that the juries of today are more easily swayed with the emotional court melodrama and media persecutions.
How about we require real physical forensic evidence before we can bring a heinous crime to trial? It would sure save the taxpayers a lot of money.
How about we fine every attorney who can't articulate in court and require all State Bar exams to revert back to the 50's of 3 days orals and 3 days written? That only seems logical and ethical. Everybody and their dog went into law for the fact it was 'easy money.'
Not to give the shows cudos for its accuracy and for helping Science. However, at least something is making Science prevalent and important in Society, besides building up our advanced technologies in future wars, ala the Internet Pentagon.
In general, people need to realize that prime-time programming is not real life.
_especially_ the reality shows.
Gimme Emily Proctor from Miami any day of the week, and twice on Sundays.
Sure. Soon as I'm done with her.
Get these Crime scene wantabies in the field for a day. Go into a house in Summer to bag a three day old corpse. When you roll it over about 30 seconds of putrid gas boils out the anus and mouth. There's glamor for you. I don't want to do that anymore for any amount of money. Younger people have a morbid fascination with death. As you get older and closer to the inevitable you don't like to think about it as much.
Really, you're debunking stuff that is not even true.
As the grandparent said, on the show they *routinely* use the liver temp. And they *always* note that it is approximate. And yes, 1-2 hours *is* significanty narrowed down - if you are investigating a murder of someone who was discovere din the morning, what you need to know right away is - did this happen recently, or last night? Sure, more accuracy would be nice, but they *never* on the show imply that they know any more accurate than give or take an hour, unless they gte it form some other means, like sweat on the skin that isn't dry yet or something.
Also, they routinly use other means to estimate the time of death from corpses that are very old - yes, even with maggots. One of the people on the show plays an entomologist, and he uses the types and amounts of insect puba casings and larva to estimate the time of death to within a few weeks if the corpse is months old, or to within a few days if it is weeks old.
And yes, as someone with a background in this area this is all perfectly plausable. The show is not perfect, but give it some credit. They obviously have scientific advisors on the writing staff. Your buddys seem to me like the type of people who can't have fun watching a movie without picking it apart to feel superior. Sad.
Or epidermal skin?
CSI has to much tech rubbish, now I am a geek and I love Star Trek and the like , however CSI is ment to be set in the real world and in this world you can't just kept zooming in on a digtial photo from someones mobile phone that is 320 * 200 res 500x like they do, however I recommand that you all wacth Crossing Jordan as they "tend" go to Low tech solution and the storys are better
I think that Law and Order does a good job of psudo-legal TV. I've been a fan of the original show for years. It's only within the last few months that I've gotten into CSI. I remember the premier episode and, for some reason, didn't like it. But with the back-to-back reruns on Spike TV I'm getting into it quite a bit. It still wouldn't replace L&O for me. I do miss Lenny, though he's supposed to be a regular (though not regular) member of some new L&O show coming out soon.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Total crap.
Why do people have such a morbid fascination with murder and mayhem? People that feed off this garbage are mentally ill...
The way these guys use Luminol for making blood glow in the dark, you'd think the toxicity of the chemical would kill them by now...
I think that this bad science could be intentional.
I like the first season most and my guess is that it is the most accurate one. I aslo think that they do have advisor. But this advisor purpose is to hide the real methods of how crime are ivenstigated, so normal criminals won't be able to temper/avoid evidence.
While there is little sense in this, I find it counter productive. People will expect that such things happen in real life and they will judge based on what they have seen.
There is also something that looks very strange for me. The investigaros themself doesn't wear any special clothes, even when they examine a car!. I remember an British serial where the investigators wear chemical like coverall in order to don't contaminate evidence with their DNA, saliva and hair.
I wonder does the real investigators wear casual police uniform?
First of all, the KLT (Karhunen-Loeve Transform) is theoretically most efficient at packing energy, but 1. the basis vectors depend on Markov statistics of the data, and 2. because the KLT isn't as factorable as the FFT or DCT, there is no "fast" algorithm like there are for FFT and DCT. Second, it appears that the KLT with Markov settings from a corpus of actual images closely resembles the DCT, as shown in the figures of these interesting slides.
Proofs exist, but IEEE non-members aren't allowed to view them, and no way am I spending three figures on an annual membership just to argue a point on Slashdot.
Think about it. CSI is getting people into forensic sciences, which just might be a good thing. It follows the lead of shows such as Emergency! which got a lot of people going into fire/medical professions. So why not?
This sig no verb.
what about the fact that they may create a generation of smarter criminals who need only tune in for a regularly schedualed episode to learn about the most common mistakes that their kinsmen make
Get your torrents...
Dunno if you've seen this yet, but it's an interesting attempt to focus attention this issue.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
So where does CSI rate on the geek scale for you? My tinfoil hat told me to tell you, 'what is CSI?'
--
"You've only got one finger left,
and it's pointing at the door."
Since we seem to have some English Nazis here, who else is apalled by the rampant use of, "I ditent do it" on national TV? Is there some regional language defect?
LAPD...we treat you like a King.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
WTF?! Demand? Last time I was on a jury, they didn't exactly ask us what kind evidence we wanted. In fact, I don't remember speaking to, uh, anyone at all, except other jurors.
Is this some new type of court where they ask the jurors for which evidence they like?
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Before that, there was Sherlock Holmes...
Since the top-rating shows like CSI so frequently rely on DNA to solve many of the deaths, I find it curious that many viewers are may not recognise how easily DNA results may be incorrect.
Some aussie Slashdot'ers may have seen a Four Corners episode regarding DNA results putting the wrong people behind bars.
There are many sites on the web which relate to DIY PCR machines (polymerase chain reaction) to 'photocopy' amounts of DNA which can be used to overlay any other DNA at a crime scene.
How long until we see spam mail selling us someone elses DNA for 'evil' purposes?
I love the original. Miami ruined it for me. New York is a disaster.
I still watch the original CSI on SpikeTV every now and then, though. The show just lost its magic when it lost Grisham. He was geekalicious.
"He does look a bit Oompa like, even if his Loompa is a bit off-kilter."
That's like your last ditch suggestion.
Hey, we wanna compress sonar data... but it can't affect any of the displays in post-processing. Yadda yadda.
Me: Hey, why not use a KLT instead of a filterbank?
Them: Hey yeah. Wait, we can't do this in realtime.
Me: Well, then get some more bandwidth. This isn't voodoo magic.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Refocus-it DOES NOT give you extra resolution
Refocus-it can deconvolve blur due to motion or an approxmiately gaussian operator (i.e. a picture out of focus).
But it does not recover "hidden information". A blown up picture of text will look like blurry, sure. But when you go to use refocus-it, you'll get a HORRIBLE mess which will look like the sharpened form of the resampling artifacts. (cubic interpolation is like a very small-windowed convolution) And so you'll get delicious, useless ringing on top of nice graidents... no extra hidden lines or curves or edges.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Can someone create a website, moderated, where we could rate the science of TV shows and films ?
I mean, some things are good, some are bad.
I would like to know how many scientific flaws there is other shows. For example, "Pensacola" seems pretty close to reality in the US air force, and "Planetes" (anime) is pretty accurate for zero-G manuvers (it is good in principle, horribly wrong in the details, but is the best I've seen yet.)
What is pissing me out is that, shows like CSI, look like they are showing the exact reality because of their apparent seriousness even though they are taking liberties with it.
I think I read about that in an article on CSI:Miami. It's just color psychology. Most people don't consciously notice the color cast, they just think the reddish place is getting more direct sunlight and is thus hotter (Miami) and the bluish place is getting more overcast/shade type light, thus colder weather (New York). It gives each show a different "feel". Same thing happens in the photography field. Look up color balance, color psychology and white balance.
You probably don't realize it but a lot of the commercial images and things you see on TV are passed through a slightly reddish filter or white balanced on a slightly blue object (thus subtracting blue, the same as adding red) to "warm them up". It makes skin tones look more vibrant and everything looks more inviting and appealing, psychologically speaking. That's why things on TV often look more "real" than the everyday things you see around you. Apparently the general public doesn't like the drabness of color accurate reality.
...Bush?
Sorry, but I find the "interaction" one of the more annoying parts. The character personalities definately are interesting, as is some of the background, but the interaction seems to take familiar turns such as the "love interest" between Grissom and Sidle is a useless sideline.
I'm sorry, but I'd rather watch CSI for the interesting pseudo-science than watch the cool bug guy hint at his deep feelings for his attractive female co-worker.
Yes, life in prison is great. Rape and AIDS are a breeze!
-Greg
I thought we addressed the issue of killing killers a long time ago. Just look at such films as Clockwork Orange in which the 'poor misunderstood' killer is retrained using new technology. So what if the moral of the movie was 'new technology works but poorly directed is bad' or even ' You can take the killer instinct out of a killer but you cant take it out of society' It still made very valid points. I say "hold their eyes open and play Bach till they scream" then retrain their brains to be servile automatons for the good of society. Serve as a constant reminder to anyone thinking of killing much more than not seen electric chair or non painfull injection.
Babies can be cute (I've got 2) but can sevearly cut into your GTA: San Andreas play time, so I can really SIMpathise with newly pregnant moms wanting to do the right thing and give their foetuses to genetic engineers to help make the next gen of cyborg fighters even better. Who knows, they might even cure a few diseases along the way, and cord blood is really tasty to a kid dying of Leukemia.
Besides dont the kids who grow up not having been wanted as a baby, turn into societys monsters and kill people. So situation 1 affects situation 2 and Vica Versa in many ways, thus continuing the cycle that is life or death as the case may be.
Also, inteligence being predominately passed on the mothers side means that moms who are stupid enough to get unwantedly pregnant are more likely to bring the national average down in the long run. Then you would have societies choosing 4 more years of no brains. Don't talk about brain drain, talk about genetic brain dilution.
My answer is to zombify killers to help work in abortiion clinics & GM labs- Problem solved. Maybe then the trains will run on time.
"Persistance is Fertile" - Me. I can quote myself if I want to.
If David Caruso didn't play such a smarmy git in CSI Miami I'd enjoy it a lot more. And if the shows didn't spell out their train of thought until it's beaten into the heads of even the completely clueless. However, it is a good show revealing what technology can do. With an attractive female cast, many a indecisive male will opt for a science degree knowing it's not full of complete nerds.
He is a fucking actor for bunny's sakes...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I only saw one episode and it was enough to convince me that the show was crap. In search of an abandoned boat on a lake, the investigator placed a small plastic boat in a tub of water and simulated the wind by blowing air over the tub with a fan. Armed with a compass, he watched the boat drift to the edge of the tub and this allowed him to pinpoint the real boat on the lake. Total BS!
- You are being watched, tracked, logged, whenever you go somewhere or do something. Make a phone call, the authorities can get a copy of the audio with little justification.
- Your personal data is stored in huge databases that CSIs can search without a specific warrant.
- Just being in the area where a crime was committed is grounds for suspicion, never mind knowing the criminal: prepare to bend over and provide DNA, fingerprints, and a full personal history.
- Once you pop up on the CSI / police radar, you will be harassed and investigated; your life story, fingerprints and DNA scans will land in multiple Federal, State, and even International databases, even though you are never accused of a crime.
- Next time a crime is committed where you were only remotely or circumstantially involved, expect the police at your door, so keep an alibi in mind at all times.
It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you..!(this is not a
Is when the lead character says (about a guy falling off a building): "Terminal velocity is 9.8 m/s^2", and all the other guys are nodding their heads. I teach engineering, and if one of my students had said something like that, I would have had severe doubts about the effectiveness of our course.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
listen to live streaming audio from the "Savage Nation", hosted by Michael Savage.
That guy is a fucking moron.
Now if I could just find a way to harness the flamebait to resurrect my karma with the two previous posts. Heck, all I gotta do is post a link to the streaming audio and the parent poster might mod me insightful. That, or the liberals might chop my balls off and revoke my ACLU and PETA memberships.
Just kidding. I actually belong to the KKK and NRA.
/and the GNAA for those keeping track
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
Does anyone have a torrent of Caruso v1.0? I would like to upgrade my ability to speak few words, but with melodramatic pauses in between them while simultaneously either donning or removing my sunglasses. I would like the add-on Hummer pack too, if poss. Thx
Funny how they're always dressed up nicely, no
sterile protecting gear.. and when they find a
tiny peice og hair, its always from the
murderer/victim/a witness...
I watched forensic detectives on discovery channel
for a long time before csi came on tv here (to norway),
so when i first saw it at one of my mates houses,
they got pissed off because i sat there telling them all the wrong
things they did.
There was an episode of CSI:Miami where the pivotal piece of identifying evidence was: the front Florida license plate on a car, in a blurry surveillance. It was enhanced & used to track down the killer (I think it was a murder).
My wife was *amazingly* pissed-off when we watched that episode. Why?
Florida only issues a single license plate, which gets attached to the *rear* of the car. No front tag. We're Floridians - we should know.
If you're going to set a show somewhere, try to get the details right.
you find any reputable medical practice that would perform an abortion post, say, 14 weeks.
would you say that a mother-to-be was a murderer, if, for example, she had a glass of wine or sat down too fast and killed off 2 cells that were just starting to split and could have otherwise eventually formed an embryo?
My class and lab were a while ago, so bear with me. Radar sends out a pulse that bounces off of objects and radiates in all directions. That radiation returns to the radar antenna at a greatly reduced level. That level is usually going to be lower than the level of static. With one radar pulse, you would see nothing. If the results from 10 pulses are added together the object in the distance will become very obvious. That's because static will average to 0 theoretically. The return pulse will add up faster than the static. I did a lab on this for which I still have the o-scope images downloaded in a report on a floppy. As well as this method works, it can only help so much. If a return pulse is too low it will not grow faster than the static as it is added up. The lower the return level the more pulses you need to see it.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
(US-centric view; idealist) but aren't we innocent until proven guilty? And we're only proven guilty after all traces of doubt are gone or it's conclusively proven fact?
In the real world things cost money and aren't uber-fast. But as long as the punishments/verdicts are being cast out into that same real world, I think all efforts available should be followed simply because we're required to by the 'innocent until proven guilty' mandate.
prosecutorial and police misconduct I'm all for cold hard scientific evidence. Eyewitlesses be damned, rubber hosed confessions be damned.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Someday Quantum computing will prove David Hilbert right!
About what in particular?
"Wonder, how do Slashdot readers feel about the show, and its two spinoffs?"
Am I the only one yelling kicking and screaming that there are 3 spin-offs? I'm more sick of all the stinking spin-offs than anything else.
First there was CSI (vegas). And it was good.
Then there was CSI Miami. And it was good.
Then there was Navy CSI a spin off of the JAG series, but still a CSI show. And it wasn't bad.
Now there is CSI New York. And it is too much.
Maybe the DOJ is funding the writers of CSI to throw in technology that doesn't exist, and to make CSI budgets look plentiful.
Ever notice how many DNA tests are done in the average CSI episode? The costs of CSI's DNA testing could represent an entire budget for an investigation of a murder.
If people see crimes being stopped on TV maybe they'll stop bugging the government.
Just call me paranoid.
my sig can beat up your
I friend of mine used to do crime scene investigation(no longer he hated the hours)
One thing he did say is that he never ever would have talked to a potential suspect, that was left to the police.
Just in case your didn't know.
Take a computer vision course and you to will learn how to write programs that take many images and create higher resolution or panoramics.
Governments use this to enhance satellite imagery.
Basically, you warp all the images to one viewpoint using something like a projective transformation. It only takes eight corresponding points per image pair [non-planer].
Make sure your up on your linear-matrix algebra fist !
Hmm -
-A dash of conspiracy theory
-Anti-American leftism
-Contempt for a majority of the voting public
-Outdated, disproven socialist ideas
I sense a winning ticket there - for Republicans.
An entire generation has been raised to understand that socialist thinking sucks, whether we refer to unions, entitlement handouts or other forms of government interference in the function of the economy. That same generation also thinks affirmative action sucks, and gay marriage isn't well thought of either.
Beside that, who wants to think of their country in a negative light? That's right, no one except the rabid opposition (this means you). Propagandizing people via the network news worked in Vietnam because people were still trusting of mass media. That trust ran out years ago.
I don't care if everyone that votes Republican has 80 IQs and marries their sister. As long as I can escape my lifespan without being part of some Stalinist 'utopia' that the Democratic party appears aimed for, i'm happy.
Ignoring politics was normal for our parents, but it's certainly not going to afflict me, since ignorance results in turd burglars like Kerry and Gore getting into office. Onward!
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I LOVE CSI...I'm addicted and although it makes you think, gee a crime can be solved in an hour...it's educational and so much better than a lot of TV that's out there right now. My favorite is CSI Miami. It's like the millenium version of Sherlock Holmes. I also think it's awesome that so many more people think it's a great new career field...it's finally getting it's day in the sun!
My big problem with CSI is that it continues to promote the gross misconception that a ballistics test can acertain whether or not a gun was used to fire a particular bullet. This is in fact not possible. You see, every time a bullet is fired through a gun, it passes through the barrel, and the rifling (the grooves in the barrel that make the bullet spin) leave striations on the bullet. However, at the same time, the bullet is producing tremendous friction on the barrel, altering the riflings slightly. Therefore, any subsequent rounds fired will have slightly different striations. So ballistics tests can determine that a gun did NOT fire a bullet (i.e., wrong number of striations (some guns have 4 riflings, some have 5, etc), or totally inconsistent paterns), or that a gun COULD have fired a bullet, but you can never say with certainty that it was THE gun.
I heard CSI was a good show, so I honestly tried to give it a chance... But, in the first few minutes of an episode centering around a body falling from a building, the male lead made a statement similar to: "his terminal velocity was 9.8 meters per second squared."
:-P
For those that aren't snobby elitist physicists like me, that's total bullshit. The show is a drama, and the science they use is only there to fuel the plot. Anyone who thinks that CSI is inspired by real life probably thinks that stealing cars is just like in "Gone in 60 Seconds" or that compromising systems is just like in "Hackers".
The scary thing (for me) is all the people that didn't notice how wrong that line is...
I love CSI but it has a few problems that just irk me 1. All cases are sexy and interesting. I mean how many murders happen in Las Vegas in a given year. And each one is a love triangle or some serial killer. I mean most murders are crime related like with gangs or related to some you know like a husand killing a wife during an argument. Of course doing an hour show of some gang banger getting toasted for driving down the wrong street would be impossible plus could you see the interview with a gang banger swearing and that. 2. Notice that they have the evidence yet they still need a confession to wrap up the story. I mean that what the evidence is for so you do not have to listen to some bs tale of mistaken identity. Actually confessions bother me with a crime dramas like Matlock and CSI. Can this people not keep there mouth shut and wait for there day in court. Yet every time some idiot person tells the police how they did it. 3. Reality of Forensic science is it can be slow and plodding. But in CSI the compress it into a short video clip of the character hard at work with some nice music. WOw that 1 day of work only took 30 seconds.. and with a nice back beat. 4. Why or Why are the CSI people interviewing witnesses isn't that the job of the detective and police. What happened to police procedure. 5. The super cool programs and computers and gadgets. Let us forget how much they cost and how to good to be true they are. I mean I am not idiot when it comes to computers but some of those programs look to intuitive to use. Wow with a push of the button I have a map of the 5 city blocks with a picture of each resident that I suspect. Why have voter registration when you have that program. Yet the programs are connected to 20 different databases with no problem or lag or permission. I need to know which area of the city has a this kind of dirt and wow in ten seconds I have a nice map with all the details I need. But the main question was does this SHOW help put interest into forensic science and science in general. I would put this show like the movie Hackers was years ago. Idiots got interested in computer hacking and did not put the work and time into being actual computer hackers. So yes people get interested but it all ends up for naught and generally wasted peoples time both the wannabees and the all ready theres. Skippy
As long as you are a leftist you're going to continue thinking that. Then when you grow out of it you'll realize you're as much of a dick as I am.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I love crime drama, and the CSI series are no exception. I'm not crazy about CSI: Miami, but I still watch it.
Here's my crime related season passes on Tivo...
3) CSI: NY
4) NCIS
5) CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
6) CSI: Miami
7) Crossing Jordan
8) Law & Order: Criminal Intent
9) Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
12) Monk
14) NYPD Blue
15) Without a Trace
That makes up a good chunk of my 24 total Season Passes...
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
look for djvu .
Tech Public Policy stuff
You're somewhere inbetween marxist me and now.
:-b
I'm not going to attack your pov, I already stated that (pretty much) I don't believe anything I wrote there anymore. There's no reason to belabor it - you'll get to where you are going to go all by yourself without me throwing angst your way. You wake up one day and question things you treated as gospel for years.
In terms of the illegal marijuana usage, I plead the fifth. I didn't inhale!
In terms of wiseass potential - if you are a smartass then what is Cyrano?
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Well, almost. I think my parents would have been shocked if i'd told them what I believed. I got better!
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Forensics is a useful tool to aide an investigation; it's not the investigation itself. I don't see much wrong with the way those dedicated forensics CSI staff members are shown doing their work in the most meticulous way - good role models for any individual/establishment. The accuracy and other detail is, to a large extent, is flawed - like extraction of more information from an image than actually exists - a sheer violation of the laws of image processing (refer the book Digital Image Processing by Gonzalez). Most crime-solving depends on the ingenuinity and intelligence of the cops carrying out the investigation rather than techniques used by forensic experts. Gut feeling, relience on past experience and sheer instincts have no substitute. Crimes are committed by humans after all, not machines, so a huge human factor is involved every step of the way. It's upto the investigators to get into the heads of the criminals whom they do not see or know about. It's upto them to decide where forensic analysis should be used and decipher what it is telling them - effective use the forensic reports is an art as much as forensics itself. Most of the time eyewitness accounts and interviews with the victim's friends and foes prove to provide more conclusive insights into a case. Though forensics is an important tool, using it as conclusive evidence should be done with great wariness. Because many times, what seems to be isn't how it actually is in reality. Reality can be as contorted as it is straightforward. For instance, a forensic investigation may stumble across evidence which is totally unrelated to the case in focus. It's not always easy to tell what's in place and what's out of place, especially when you never have the complete picture. What CSI misses out big time is the Lawyers. It is upto the lawyers to prove the investigative team's conclusions in front of the judiciary. The judiciary itself has an important role to play. Their sophistication, intelligence and ability to decide what to believe and what to throw out of the window is ging to decide the fate of the case. Again, a huge human factor is invloved. The final verdict will depend, after all, on human judgement. Lastly, an important factor which influences the result of any investigation is plain Luck! Getting the right leads, information, the right judge/jury, etc. Shows like CSI are entertainers for the general public - they're not for serious viewers. If you want real accuracy, try Discovery Channel. Fools are confident; the intelligent always doubt.