Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
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.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
If nothing else, it at least makes people that would have been otherwise unaware of some aspects of science aware of it.
One shortcoming (other than "infinite resolution") is that they rarely have a case where there isn't a clear offender or group of offenders - so people aren't used to the more "muddied" reality of the world we live in. That said, no clear offender reduces the enjoyment of watching a bit.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't notice too much that's way out in left field on CSI. Not the spinoffs, mind you; I don't watch those. The characters don't click, and you have too much stuff like the wireless router thing you mentiond.
CSI shows all of the latest and greatest equipment with everything at their fingertips. Real crime labs aren't that fortunate. Example: I was watching The First 48 on A&E and they were using the superglue method to get fingerprints off a knife. Hey, I've seen that on CSI all the time, right? The difference: the real crime lab was using a hotplate in a shoebox, whereas CSI showed a nifty (probably expensive) machine that did the same thing.
They also operate in some kind of hypertime. They have their own state of the art DNA lab and get those kind of results faster than a not so well funded real world department. Cases get sloved (or almost solved) quickly, but not always. It's real enough that I can forgive the inaccuracies for the sake of a one hour drama. I've been impressed with CSI in how they handle computer-related things. The other two, Miami and NY, I tried, saw they sucked, and haven't bothered since.
this is my sig
I only saw the first two episodes of CSI:New York and just couldn't take it anymore. I mean, is it set like 10 years in the future or something because they're using technology that doesn't exist yet. And I guess the NYPD has one of the most sophisticated computer systems in the world! In one episode they were trying to triangulate the location of where a photograph was taken. They scanned in the photo of this girl with the skyline behind them. They simply clicked on the Empire State building and it gave them the exact hight, then they clicked on another building and the same thing happened, then they input the height of the girl and with a complete detailed 3D model of Manhattan they flew/zoomed to the exact address of where the photo was taken. Amazing. I hate crap like that.
I mean, wouldn't it have been more interesting/dramatic if they looked at the photo, saw the skyline and one of the cops opens a book with the heights of buildings and does some writing on a scrap of paper and then looks at a wall map. One of the other cops could have said "what are you doing, how can you find her like that?" and the other cop could say "didn't you ever take Trig in high school?". Believable and real. Also, another episode they were able to track a rat that swallowed a bullet with a hand held scanner ala Total Recall....I shit you not...
Now, the original CSI doesn't seem to do as much of this. Granted it has a little, but it's more believable.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Star Trek: The Next Generation a modern geek show to rule modern geek shows.
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
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.
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.
If you have no data, there's nothing to enhance...
Recent work is enhancing still shots by processing differences in video frames... so you can get stills higher than 320x200 from a 320x200 video clip.
I can't watch the show, if it screws up the stuff I know, it will just fill my head with crap over the stuff I don't.
If I were a professor in a forensics class, I'd be sure to put some CSI-plots in with the multiple-choice questions.
Interestingly enough, there were a couple CSI episodes that argued both sides of debate about police screwups, malicious or otherwise.
One episode follows Catherine Willows' discovery that a detective planted a suspect's blood on evidence to "help the evidence along along." The moral? Malicious tampering is possible.
Another episode dealt with a hollywood-actor-now-suspect paying to have his own guy in the CSI labs, watching and documenting every step, looking for screwups and ways to discredit CSIs and the evidence they processed. The moral? Nobody's perfect. If you look hard enough, you'll find mistakes in anyone's work.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
You're 100% correct (of course). But try playing with some of the best software out there sometime.
It is really amazing just how much information is in the low-res source file, encoded as slight changes in colour values. And the best software does an unbelieveable job of extracting that (making huge guesses along the way). Sure, the guesses do mean it will get it totally wrong occasionally and show things that were never there, but most of the time they're right.
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?
I recall in at least one episode of the original CSI, Warrick wanted to use some nifty "electronic nose" device that was on loan from some company. Grissom made him do it the "old-fashioned" way for budget reasons.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
This bugs me too. Sure, you can get some decent enhancement if you have a lot of low resolution samples, but from one frame? No Way!
The reference magazine article said that CSI is a problem because criminals have become more concious of evidence. You'd think that the magical cameras might work as a deterrent, but this isn't mentioned in the article. Seeing some of the
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
Anyway, my friends took a lecture series on forensics, and came back after every session talking about how much time each guest speaker put into informing the class of just how wrong CSI is about so very many very basic, important things.
The science on the show is junk. Almost nothing is right- it's wrong way more often than right.
Just one blatant example? It's apparently really, really, really, really difficult to estimate time of death from a body alone. On these shows, they pretend to be able to estimate TOD very accurately. It's a joke, except that it sets up people to expect a real-life forensics expert to do things they can't possibly do.
So, in the final analysis, it's a double-edged sword, but it's more bad than good, just because it spreads soooo much disinformation, without enough warning that "the science in this show is fake, fake, fake; you won't learn anything true; don't believe a thing you see here, this is written by a TV show hack without review for technical validity of any kind". Really, it should have that kind of warning, the science to these shows is so far off.
http://refocus-it.sourceforge.net/
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
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.
ACtually, you'd be surprised at how much you can recover with video footage. Six pixels isn't much, but if it's the image is pixelised slightly differently every frame (say the car is moving...), then, with sufficiently advanced (nearly magic...) _video_ processing filters, one can recover a license plate from a video stream where in any single frame the license plate is only a few pixels...
You can try it yourself, with your brain as the sufficiently advanced filter: find a tiny pixelated video of a moving object, and compare your perception of the object to a single frame from the video. There's more information there. Information that specialist software can recover and reconstruct higher-resolution images from!
Personally, I love crap like that. Because it's cool to demonstrate to people that such software exists today.
Think about it -- how difficult is that software to write? You just described its functional specifications and wrapped them in a single paragraph, including complaints. Sure, it would need to be customized on a city-by-city basis, but for a city the size of New York it wouldn't be impossible.
As a matter of fact, I thought the whole idea was so cool I just now googled for more info. I found searching for the terms AeroTriangulation found a few software vendors who have products that combine maps and photos. Rockware seems to sell a lot of it. And I remembered that in a previous Slashdot story that there's a company performing a photolocation service! Here's the article.
So, isn't it actually even cooler that the technology you reported them using was actually lower tech than the current state of the art in photolocation software? In reality nobody has to click on the Empire State Building, because the software already recognizes it! How cool is that?
John
Every time they bring up wifi or computers, I wince.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
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
The problem is that juries now expect every police department everywhere to have access to the same resources that they see on CSI. The lab they portray is an agglomeration of every interesting technique that has been used anywhere in the world. Maybe, just maybe, the FBI has a lab like that somewhere in Washington, but that is probably it. I had the unfortunate experience of attending the trial for the person who murdered my cousin this year. This was in Austin, TX -- a fair size metropolis with a comparatively well funded police department (given the local conservatism and the fact that it is also the state capital). The prosecutor easily made the case for clear motive (a large and contentious debt to my cousin), had a videotaped and written confession, had a video reenactment performed by the accused himself at the crime scene, and had the murder weapon found in the accused's jacket in his closet. The defense attorney tore apart the homicide detectives for not having DNA tested every last bit of evidence found at the scene (understand they already had the confession and willful reenactment at this point). Thankfully we got the conviction, but there was one point when I was really worried. There was a very detailed ballistics report linking the bullet fragment to the gun. There were sketches and descriptions of every matching striation. HOWEVER, there wasn't any cool side-by-side photograph to show the jury because the department didn't have that type of microscope at the time. I think the jury felt cheated that they didn't get the visuals they get from television.
Yes, a high profile case like OJ's might get an investigation as thorough as what you see on CSI, but I don't think taxpayers are willing to spend that much on the rest of the 17000 murders per year.
It is really a paradox. Most liberals would argue that you can't put a dollar amount on what a man's life is worth, and so defendants should have every possible test completed on the evidence before being sentenced to life in prison or worse, and yet it is the conservative candidates who are most in favor of increasing police funding.
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.
CSI is Scooby Doo for adults. I hate the fact that every single room has mood lighting and every line has to be dramatic. How do they see anything with the lights off?
It started out pretty good. The sets were nice, the hallways looked like a typical government building and they would have those impromptu meetings in the breakroom. It had a much better "workplace" feel to it. Now they work in their decorated offices that are _huge_ and filled with specimens instead of the normal, two guys to an office with white walls and flourescent lights (maybe a fake plant for some greenery).
They are trying to make every moment dramatic with lighting and script. Adding David Caruso to the cast is evidence of this. That guy does not have an off switch. I know nobody who acts like that - even the primadonnas in the lab laugh and spit food and behave like a human being most of the time. I don't watch CSI-Miami for that reason.
I think they should also show it more like how they typically work - with multiple cases going on. The character might have one thats in court, one or two in the lab waiting on results, and a new one that they are getting assigned.
The drama (and plot) should come from the interaction of the characters, not the science. The science should just be an interesting side show. When they started putting the science as the lead character, the show lost its appeal. If I want science, I'll watch Nova. I do not trust Hollywood with scientific accuracy.
Anyway, enough CSI bashing. CSI is on - Gotta go!
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Just because the vast majority of cameras out there are crappy analog stuff does not mean that there are not high quality cameras available. I routinely store large quantities of high quality digital surveillance video from cameras that have high enough resolution to read your licence plate clearly at 25 ft in low light conditions and enough frames per second to catch at least one usable frame of any vehicle passing through.
;-)
Las Vegas has the most well defined standards for legally admissable surveillance footage, and for them 3-5 frames per second is acceptable. We routinely use and store locally 10-18 frames per second. The metric generally goes something like this:
real time feed: 10-30+ fps
local disk storage: 5-18 fps
local internet feed: 5-10 fps with 1-2 sec latency
remote internet feed: 3-5 fps with 5-10 sec latency
remote disk archive: 3-5 fps
Since the high quality stuff is digital and you have multiple frames of relevant data you can also do some fairly interesting processing to enhance image quality by interpolation. And some other nice tricks, some of which work in real time. And once you have digital video on disk there are lots of other interesting things you can do. Which is all i can really say about that.
In any case, the automated video surveillance stuff is improving quite quickly these days.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
It's generally considered possible to read the two most recently erased bit values from a flash memory cell in this way. Of course, this sort of analysis is incredibly difficult and very expensive.
I didn't see that particular show, so I can't verify exactly what sort of deletion was done. Since most digital cameras these days use the FAT filesystem, it's also entirely possible that the data was still all present, with just the directory updated. Because of issues of flash wear, secure deletion is essentially never done on it, so a simple hex editor could read the data back.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
On one hand, this show might prevent potential murderers when they remember how CSI is omniscient. On the other, someone might study the show in preparation to murder another person.
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.
I always got the impression that this is done intentionally, for a variety of reasons:
For instance, finding a small piece of something in a rug with a light on can be fairly hard since your brain has to interpret all that visual information. However, if the area is dark, and you shine light around, the object is much more visible due to the sharp contrast. You'll notice this is why they use flashlights even in well-lit areas at times.
Who knows what's happening when they first get there. All clues and evidence are important, and for all one knows, turning on the lights might disturb something. Granted, this is reaching, buut that's the point. They try not to change the environment as much as possible so they don't contaminate anything. Again, reaching, but what if said killer left a blood spot on the bulb of the lamp in a room with the victim and Joe Schmoe Crime Lab Investigator comes in and snaps on the light... oops.. there goes the DNA sample that just burned up from the heat of the lighting coil in the lamp.
Each one of those reasons alone would be enough for me not to just turn on the light.
- Ghent