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?"
you know you're a geek when... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Forensics for morons. (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
CSI isn't bad (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Overall, it's good (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
How many of these positions are there? (Score:5, Interesting)
Scary Inacuracies (Score:3, Interesting)
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. (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Eyewitness accounts are notoriously innacurate and misleading. A number of studies [truthinjustice.org] 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.
Re:Full of bad science (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Grade (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:My rating (Score:1, Interesting)
More Junk Science (Rant) (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
The Good 'Science' of CSI (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Infinite Resolution (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Its good, look at what happened with OJ (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Genuine Fractals 3.5 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
And what's up with the colorization? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Grade (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How many of these positions are there? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Infinite Resolution (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:Full of bad science (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Genuine Fractals 3.5 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:CSI isn't bad (Score:1, Interesting)
Well as a biochemist, I think the science is just bad enough to be annoying.
What do you think of their magic luminol solution - they've toned it down in later series, but in the first season they were proclaiming that "even washing with bleach won't hide blood from this test". Wow - considering bleach gives a false positive on the standard blood detection with luminol test, that's kinda unforgiveable.
In fact, they rarely mention false positives or limits at all.
They change controls or experimental conditions part way through experiments constantly, and don't seem to realise that's a bad thing.
Greg's basic biochemical skills suck. How hard is it to train someone not to cavitate while pipetting? They do a damn close-up of it every time, so you'd think someone would have noticed by now.
And while we're on it, since when does a trained forensics biochemist like Greg need to be told to wear gloves at a crime scene (informed by Grissom). Give me a break.
Lastly, how about that case with the chimaera. That was the episode I stopped watching. I'm not a forensics biochemist, but I had read about that a couple of years before (Science or Nature I think). For someone in charge of a forensics lab not to know immediately is laughable. Okay it was a kooky plot, but I knew it had to be that just from the ad that was run on tv for the episode.
Sorry for the rant. But it's so many things like the above, usually one or two an episode, that have made this show unwatchable for me. I tried, I really did. But it is getting further away from realism everytime I watch it.
Re:you know you're a geek when... (Score:5, Interesting)
They at least talk about doing real things like Western blots and mass spec- once while flipping channels I caught a minute of Navy NCIS where someone mentioned doing an ELISA. In particular, these shows tend to do a nice job of explaining the principles behind a test while they perform it- occasionally I learn new things, though occasionally there will be something explained where I'm thinking, "um, it's not exactly how you say,"- I'm sure the same is true for medical professionals who watch "ER," cops who watch "NYPD Blue," etc. Now, once again, I say that as a chemist- people in other fields may have more of an issue with how their work is represented on such shows- for one, I'm sure that as is usual for television, the capabilities and use of computers are misrepresented. What personally bugs me more than the science itself on CSI and its ilk is the budget that these crime labs seem to have. If anything, these shows might give people the idea that forensics labs have infinite time, money, and resources to ensure justice is done in each and every case.
It'd be nice, though, if once in a while they'd use a couple of minutes at the end of the show to mention real forensics and the shortcuts they took during the episode- and possibly mention that in reality, sometimes the results are inconclusive, even if everyone did their jobs right.
Oh, and second the parent- Diamond Evolution One are some nice gloves- though I prefer the MicroGrip purple nitriles myself.
It's made life harder for cops... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
inaccurate (Score:2, Interesting)
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...
CSI? MEH. (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Re:Infinite Resolution (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Re:Grade (Score:5, Interesting)
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. [newscientist.com]
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?
Yeah, their tech editors suck (Score:4, Interesting)
Whole picture (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Its good, look at what happened with OJ (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Very few, and most part time (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't always happen (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Re:Grade (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Grade (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Grade (Score:2, Interesting)
This reminds me of radar (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't always happen (Score:2, Interesting)
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.