Thursday Morning Links

* This is an extremely cute personalized book for a little kid and I’m not ashamed to admit I bought two.

* This is not an SF postdoc per se, but Liverpool has a tremendous SF archive and it would be a great opportunity for an SF scholar.

* Some impressive student journalism from Marquette undergrads: “Marquette’s reporting to the federal government misses just less than half of sexual assaults on campus.”

* Really interesting piece on how not to build a Star Wars MMORG. MetaFilter mostly hated it, but I thought the idea of limiting the Jedi to a minigame where you inevitably get hunted down and murdered by Darth Vader was brilliant.

* Louisiana State University on the brink. More here and here. This really is the end of the university system — or at least tenure — in America. I can’t believe it’s happening so quickly.

* I mean, the LSU thing is so terrible I can barely even be bothered to get upset about the ASU MOOCs.

* One of the Original X-Men Is Gay, And It Matters More Than You Think. It’s a nice piece by Rachel Eddidin and a bummer that it’s at playboy.com. I’m amazed that they don’t maintain a SFW skin of their site for prose writing that goes viral.

* Tell Us About the First Time You Realized Dudes Were Checking You Out.

* Fugitive Turns Himself In After 40 Years So He Can Get Health Care.

* The rise of zero-tolerance policies strips school officials of the ability to exercise common sense.

* How to think about the risk of autism.

* Clickhole’s Oral History of Mad Men.

* The disturbing world of bootleg Disney’s Frozen games.

* Star Trek 3 is apparently Star Trek Beyond, and Idris Elba is the villain. I’m okay with the title — I like the ethos if not the continued insistence on reading “trek” as a verb –but wish they could do one that doesn’t have a “villain” for a change.

* The good news is: this civilization is over. And everybody knows it. And the good news is: we can all start building another one, here in the ruins, and out of pieces of the old one. 

* Happy Earth Day, everybody!

* DC is going to try to attract girl readers of comics with a special Super Hero Universe Designed Just For Girls, where, I presume, sex and sexual violence are somewhat less of an overriding focus.

* Good work nerds.

* Pseudoscience in the Witness Box: The FBI faked an entire field of forensic science.

* DID YOU KNOW that academic departments use curricular requirements to encourage enrollment in courses that don’t just automatically fill by themselves? It’s true!

* The Story of Class Struggle, America’s Most Popular Marxist Board Game.

* And from the genius behind the art in Braid and one of my absolute favorite web comics of all time, A Lesson Is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible, comes Zelda pastiche Second Quest. Man I miss that web comic.

 

Forensic "Science"

But criminal forensics has a deeper problem of basic validity. Bite marks, blood-splatter patterns, ballistics, and hair, fiber and handwriting analysis sound compelling in the courtroom, but much of the “science” behind forensic science rests on surprisingly shaky foundations. Many well-established forms of evidence are the product of highly subjective analysis by people with minimal credentials—according to the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors, no advanced degree is required for a career in forensics. And even the most experienced and respected professionals can come to inaccurate conclusions, because the body of research behind the majority of the forensic sciences is incomplete, and the established methodologies are often inexact. “There is no scientific foundation for it,” says Arizona State University law professor Michael Saks. “As you begin to unpack it you find it’s a lot of loosey-goosey stuff.”

Forensic “science”: Popular Mechanics explores the uneasy history of forensic science, developed (as the article’s subhead puts it) “not developed by scientists” but by “cops who were guided by little more than common sense.” Some truly eye-opening anecdotes here:

A 2006 study by the University of Southampton in England asked six veteran fingerprint examiners to study prints taken from actual criminal cases. The experts were not told that they had previously examined the same prints. The researchers’ goal was to determine if contextual information—for example, some prints included a notation that the suspect had already confessed—would affect the results. But the experiment revealed a far more serious problem: The analyses of fingerprint examiners were often inconsistent regardless of context. Only two of the six experts reached the same conclusions on second examination as they had on the first.

Ballistics has similar flaws. A subsection of tool-mark analysis, ballistics matching is predicated on the theory that when a bullet is fired, unique marks are left on the slug by the barrel of the gun. Consequently, two bullets fired from the same gun should bear the identical marks. Yet there are no accepted standards for what constitutes a match between bullets. Juries are left to trust expert witnesses. “‘I know it when I see it’ is often an acceptable response,” says Adina Schwartz, a law professor and ballistics expert with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Via MeFi, where commenters like Optimus Chyme point out the problems go much deeper:

I’m an avid reader of criminology textbooks; the best/most interesting book in my little collection is probably “Practical Homicide Investigation,” 3rd edition. It is extremely detailed and well-researched and much beloved in the field.

And it has a chapter about psychics.

Not “this is bullshit and you should ignore it.” A whole chapter that says, more or less “if you are really stuck, you might want to consult with a psychic.” This is in the definitive homicide investigation handbook for professional law enforcement.

So, uh, no: I’m not very surprised by this.

Solved

German police have solved the mystery of the Phantom of Heilbronn, a female serial killer responsible for six murders as well as petty larcenies and break-ins. It was a cotton swab.