Is The 'CSI Phenomenon' Good For Science? 815
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?"
Grade (Score:5, Insightful)
Cue William Shatner: (Score:1, Insightful)
I enjoy it. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
No (Score:2, Insightful)
Good for Science, Bad for Law (Score:4, Insightful)
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, look at what happened with OJ (Score:5, Insightful)
Overall, it's good (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Everything is fine. (Score:4, Insightful)
2) Jury instruction should be enough of a factor. Also, your reliance on the veracity of eye witness testimony [colchsfc.ac.uk] is amusing, considering how unreliable IT is.
CSI is terrible (Score:1, Insightful)
Um Forget It (Score:2, Insightful)
This is Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Sway back towards balance... (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Prosecutors have more to worry about (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Infinite Resolution (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good for Science, Bad for Law (Score:4, Insightful)
Scott Peterson was convicted based on circumstantial evidence and just being a bad guy. Forensic evidence did nothing. Prosecutors don't have to worry.
Forensic Files, Cold Case Files, New Detectives... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Infinite Resolution (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Grade (Score:5, Insightful)
See, the CSIs aren't perfect. They miss things. In fact, a few weeks ago, one of the characters' home lives is falling apart because of her dedication to her job. I wouldn't exactly call that glamourising the profession.
Re:CSI is terrible (Score:2, Insightful)
And why are we looking to prime time ratings grabbing programming for accurate science anyway? It's ENTERTAINMENT, for crap's sake.
Re:Its good, look at what happened with OJ (Score:5, Insightful)
CSI is a good show, but it's just that, a show. The photographic close ups are the best. I remember one where they had a photo of a girl, there was a blur in her eye which they managed to extrapolate into a picture of her killer, pin sharp. It just not feasible.
I also love the nice sharp finger prints they take off wood, no hint of wood grain.
A bit more realism would be nice.
Re:Um Forget It (Score:3, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward on 2004-11-17 13:48 (#10846624)
Jesus I'm stupid.
To bad you can't moderate moderations. I mod that one +5 funny.
Re:you know you're a geek when... (Score:3, Insightful)
She's Helgenbooty-licious! [marghelgenberger.net]
Criminals (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Grade (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No Need to throw Insults (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Nicely worded, counselor. That neatly sidesteps the fact that lawyers were the ones who got the laws made so complex that noone but a lawyer can understand it. Convenient. I suppose it all depends on what your definition of 'is' is, or something similar.
Re:Genuine Fractals 3.5 (Score:5, Insightful)
Most zooming algorithms suck, compared to the true content of the image, which is why we can do much better with our eyes. We know that is a "car", so we don't interpolate, say, a tire with jaggy lines, we know it is round.
But ultimately, take a fuzzy, off-true "3" and "5" and zoom out/blur enough, and there is no difference between the two, thus, no way to "backtrack" to the original image. There is a fundamental limit, and CSI routinely passes it.
You can play with contrast and brightness and sometimes retrieve a number or something. But your human eyes are already as good as you can expect at extracting a "3" from an image with suitable brightness and contrast. If you can't already see it, no magic algorithm is going to help. (I'm confident in this case our brains are close enough to optimal on this problem that no significant improvement can be made, even in theory, on still images.)
Glamor forenics or OJ theatrics? (Score:2, Insightful)
CSI is tripe. (Score:1, Insightful)
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!
CSI: the Unrealistic Files (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Its good, look at what happened with OJ (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Only One Good CSI (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:How many of these positions are there? (Score:3, Insightful)
I imagine this would depend on whether the crime rate is rising or falling. Good luck getting a consistent answer to that. Every study will measure it differently, and the results will be used/reported depending on the answers wanted by whomever is quoting them.
Re:This may be nitpicky... (Score:2, Insightful)
Just like sports are over glamorized and look how many kids are dying to get in the NBA/NFL/MLB/NHL.
I would much rather kids go for the science thinking it is cool and then finding out it really is cool!
Re:Infinite Resolution (Score:1, Insightful)
No kidding.. and the databases these people use. Where in the hell do you run a real-time query on every window made for every skyscraper in your city? Gimme a break!
Aha! A graham cracker crumb.. from the database we have lot 434, production run 53, baked in 1957 at the Albonian Graham Cracker Foundry, Ansicily, Albonia.. now..lets check this database to see who could have ordered it.
Physical Anthropology - aka Forensics (Score:2, Insightful)
(for the record I'm a cultural graduate and find physical/forensics to be incredibly dull)
Please repeat after me (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Of course it is. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Grade (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Infinite Resolution (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, practically all image viewers open images that are too big for the screen in a resized mode.
Surely some of their "extrapolations" aren't realistic but I think a good amount of them can be reasonably explained.
Regardless, it's a very fun show.
- shazow
Re:Grade (Score:2, Insightful)
i saw a show where people were eating food. They didn't seem to realize that the food they were eating could have been used more productively to feed starving people
Re:Grade (Score:3, Insightful)
#2 must be visualised searching. If you're trying to match fingerprints (faces, shoes, tire treads, etc), the computer must show each on the screen for a fraction of a second. Like how Google flashes each of its 8,058,044,651 pages every time you do a search... oh wait, real computers don't do that.
#3 is the sound effects computers make. Any event must be accompanied by a beep. When it's searching through those fingerprints, it will beep on each one. CSI:NY has to be the worst offender here. Dwedledledledledle..whip!.. dwedledledle.. whip!..dwedledle...WHOOOOSH! beep beep beep beep! (Well, at least NY's inkjets don't sound like dot matrix printers, as they do in Vegas.) Who was it who decided that TV computers need to make so much noise?
Re:Grade (Score:2, Insightful)
Fetuses are not children, they are potential children--like eggs and sperm, which get flushed down the toilet by the millions every day. Between that potential and the actuality lay several months in the womb of a woman. Whether that happens is up to her, not you. It's not your womb.
However, thanks for Conservative policies, which cut funding for any agencies in the third world with any connections to abortion, and encouraging birth control through 'abstinence', they're killing a lot more babies. Yes, actual babies. With no birth control, no abortions, and enormous stigmas attached to illegitimate birth (including honor killings,) women have the baby in secret, suffocate it, and throw it in a hole. Or just let them starve to death, which is how they handled it in Ireland when the Catholic Church ran the place.
Capital punishment has no deterrent effect on any form of crime. It's not even a particularly good punishment--most serial killers prefer death to life imprisonment. Ted Bundy made sure he got caught in a state that had the death penalty. Which means it isn't even that good for getting revenge; you're doing them a favor. It may save money, by killing people you don't intend to let go again anyway, so you don't have to pay their room and board for 50 years. But actually, it's not even that good as a cost cutting measure--the court costs for a capital case are brutal.
So why is it done? Any eye for an eye? That's Old Testament--even the Jews stopped believing that a long time ago, and it was never part of Christianity. Closure? Damn right--even if they got the wrong guy and find the guy who actually did it, the cops wouldn't dare reopen the case. If the wrong man takes the rap in a capital case, the guilty need never fear justice.
And if someone's name is cleared after sentencing, it's damn hard to pardon them if they're dead.
Re:Grade (Score:3, Insightful)
It's really very simple.
It costs extra money, and they've demonstrated that they don't have to CARE about accuracy or even realism to make money.
I know the perfect way to kill it off though. Start a grass roots fan base referring to it as "Sci-Fi." Have sessions on it at Sci-Fi conventions, really punch up the fact that it's all made up BS, and refer to it not as a cop show but a sci-fi cop show.
Once the masses start thinking of it as Science Fiction instead of a good old cop show, fans will run away in droves, leaving behind the crystallized few who dress like the characters and build mock up of their hyper advanced technology. The network will cancel it, it'll last another couple seasons on the sci-fi channel, and just as the writing and acting takes an upswing it'll be canceled as "Too Expensive".
We can speed up the process by getting in the rags with rumors of a episode in development to "explain" their hyper advanced "20 minutes in the future" technology with an alien subplot. Even start pointing out "hints" of this conspiracy in existing episodes.