Judging the educators: The forensic evaluation of academic judgment

There has recently been a significant spate of cases of educational institutions being sued by dissatisfied students. For decades there was an established arena of professional negligence litigation into which physicians and even lawyers were dragged as defendants (and sometimes ruined), but where, hitherto, teachers and lecturers have hardly ever been summoned. Increasingly, academic judgment is becoming a justiciable issue. Additionally, lawyers are being increasingly brought into the educational arena's domestic hearings. This article gives a critical analysis of the emerging litigational phenomenon

Forensic Evaluation of Compacted Soils using RAMCODES

Unexpected failure of compacted soils was explained using design curves of the Rational Methodology for Compacted Geomaterial’s Density and Strength Analysis (RAMCODES).  Forensic geotechnical evaluation, applied to a compacted soil used at a construction site, demonstrated that the bearing capacity of the soil was influenced by the water content and the dry unit weight. At the construction site, the only criterion used for quality control of the compacted soil was the minimum compaction percentage; the maximum dry unit weight (achieved using the standard Proctor test) was used when the soil was compacted with light equipment, and the maximum dry unit weight (achieved using the modified Proctor test) was used when it was compacted with heavy equipment. After changing water content conditions, the soil compacted with heavy equipment and the soil compacted with light equipment exhibited changes in bearing capacity; the soil compacted with light equipment showed a failure, whereas the soil compacted with heavy equipment did not. The causes of failure were evaluated from samples of soil analyzed in the laboratory; analysis was performed using design curves obtained through a factorial experimental design. Our analysis revealed that the criterion of minimum compaction percentage was not adequate to determine the actual mechanical performance of the soil. We sought to determine why the soil compacted with light equipment did not satisfy the bearing capacity expected after compaction, and what other actions should performed at a construction site to avoid failure of soils compacted with light equipment.

Attachment, Forgiveness, and Generativity in Midlife

Current literature suggests secure attachment and forgiveness are positively correlated. However, to date, the relationship of adult attachment, forgiveness, and generativity has not been explored. In this current study, middle-aged adults, ages 45-80 from the George Fox University Alumni were surveyed to explore attachment (anxious and avoidant), generativity, and forgiveness. Since generativity is a prosocial trait, synonymous with altruism, suggesting one’s selfless service and concern for the well-being for others, it is predicted that generativity will have a positive relationship with forgiveness, and secure attachment. Further, multiple regression statistics were used to explore which of the independent variables (anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, and generativity) has the greatest effect on the dependent variable of trait forgiveness. Results indicated that there was a medium positive relationship between forgiveness and secure attachment, between generativity and secure attachment, and between forgiveness and generativity. Multiple regression found that each of the independent variables (anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, and generativity) were significant predictors of forgiveness with anxious attachment being the strongest predictor of forgiveness

Valoración médico legal de lesiones y muerte por fulguración

La fulguración es una de las causas de muerte más frecuentes por fenómenos naturales. En el presente trabajo se hace una revisión de los hallazgos más frecuentes en los casos de lesiones y muerte por fulguración así como su valoración médico forense.Lighting strike is one of the most frequent causes of death due to natural phenomena. In the present paper we review the most common findings in cases of injury and death by lightning strike and also forensic evaluation

Non-frontal model based approach to forensic face recognition

In this paper, we propose a non-frontal model based approach which ensures that a face recognition system always gets to compare images having similar view (or pose). This requires a virtual suspect reference set that consists of non-frontal suspect images having pose similar to the surveillance view trace image. We apply the 3D model reconstruction followed by image synthesis approach to the frontal view mug shot images in the suspect reference set in order to create such a virtual suspect reference set. This strategy not only ensures a stable 3D face model reconstruction because of the relatively good quality mug shot suspect images but also provides a practical solution for forensic cases where the trace is often of very low quality. For most face recognition algorithms, the relative pose difference between the test and reference image is one of the major causes of severe degradation in recognition performance. Moreover, given appropriate training, comparing a pair of non-frontal images is no more difficult that comparing frontal view images

Professional Practice Guidelines for Occupationally Mandated Psychological Evaluations

Psychological evaluations are relied on by employers, professional licensing boards, and civil service commissions to make hiring and employment decisions affecting individuals, orga- nizations, and the public. To promote best practices, these professional practice guidelines were developed for use by psychologists who perform clinical evaluations of individuals for occupational purposes, regardless of whether the evaluation is intended to obtain employ- ment, to achieve licensure/certification, or to maintain either. These guidelines were created by the Committee on Professional Practice and Standards (COPPS) to educate and inform the practice of psychologists who conduct occupationally mandated psychological evaluations (OMPEs), as well as to stimulate debate and research in this important area

Minimising bias in the forensic evaluation of suspicious paediatric injury

In the rules of evidence in all legal jurisdictions, medical experts are required to maintain objectivity when providing opinions. When interpreting medical evidence, doctors must recognise, acknowledge and manage uncertainties to ensure their evidence is reliable to legal decision-makers. Even in the forensic sciences such as DNA analysis, implicit bias has been shown to influence how results are interpreted from cognitive and contextual biases unconsciously operating. In cases involving allegations of child abuse there has been significant exposure in the media, popular magazines, legal journals and in the published medical literature debating the reliability of medical evidence given in these proceedings. In these cases judges have historically been critical of experts they perceived had sacrificed objectivity for advocacy by having an investment in a 'side'. This paper firstly discusses the issue of bias then describes types of cognitive biases identified from psychological research applied to forensic evidence including adversarial bias, context bias, confirmation bias and explains how terminology can influence the communication of opinion. It follows with previously published guidelines of how to reduce the risk of bias compromising objectivity in forensic practices then concludes with my own recommendations of practices that can be used by child protection paediatricians and within an organisation when conducting forensic evaluations of suspicious childhood injury to improve objectivity in formulation of opinion evidence

Bayesian hierarchical modeling for the forensic evaluation of handwritten documents

The analysis of handwritten evidence has been used widely in courts in the United States since the 1930s (Osborn, 1946). Traditional evaluations are conducted by trained forensic examiners. More recently, there has been a movement toward objective and probability-based evaluation of evidence, and a variety of governing bodies have made explicit calls for research to support the scientific underpinnings of the field (National Research Council, 2009; President\u27s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (US), 2016; National Institutes of Standards and Technology). This body of work makes contributions to help satisfy those needs for the evaluation of handwritten documents. We develop a framework to evaluate a questioned writing sample against a finite set of genuine writing samples from known sources. Our approach is fully automated, reducing the opportunity for cognitive biases to enter the analysis pipeline through regular examiner intervention. Our methods are able to handle all writing styles together, and result in estimated probabilities of writership based on parametric modeling. We contribute open-source datasets, code, and algorithms. A document is prepared for the evaluation processed by first being scanned and stored as an image file. The image is processed and the text within is decomposed into a sequence of disjoint graphical structures. The graphs serve as the smallest unit of writing we will consider, and features extracted from them are used as data for modeling. Chapter 2 describes the image processing steps and introduces a distance measure for the graphs. The distance measure is used in a K-means clustering algorithm (Forgy, 1965; Lloyd, 1982; Gan and Ng, 2017), which results in a clustering template with 40 exemplar structures. The primary feature we extract from each graph is a cluster assignment. We do so by comparing each graph to the template and making assignments based on the exemplar to which each graph is most similar in structure. The cluster assignment feature is used for a writer identification exercise using a Bayesian hierarchical model on a small set of 27 writers. In Chapter 3 we incorporate new data sources and a larger number of writers in the clustering algorithm to produce an updated template. A mixture component is added to the hierarchical model and we explore the relationship between a writer\u27s estimated mixing parameter and their writing style. In Chapter 4 we expand the hierarchical model to include other graph-based features, in addition to cluster assignments. We incorporate an angular feature with support on the polar coordinate system into the hierarchical modeling framework using a circular probability density function. The new model is applied and tested in three applications

A framework for forensic face recognition based on recognition performance calibrated for the quality of image pairs

Recently, it has been shown that performance of a face recognition system depends on the quality of both face images participating in the recognition process: the reference and the test image. In the context of forensic face recognition, this observation has two implications: a) the quality of the trace (extracted from CCTV footage) constrains the performance achievable using a particular face recognition system; b) the quality of the suspect reference set (to which the trace is matched against) can be judiciously chosen to approach optimal recognition performance under such a constraint. Motivated by these recent findings, we propose a framework for forensic face recognition that is based on calibrating the recognition performance for the quality of pairs of images. The application of this framework to several mock-up forensic cases, created entirely from the MultiPIE dataset, shows that optimal recognition performance, under such a constraint, can be achieved by matching the quality (pose, illumination, and, imaging device) of the reference set to that of the trace. This improvement in recognition performance helps reduce the rate of misleading interpretation of the evidence