Resources
At ForensicsColleges, we want to connect students, prospective students, and professionals to the multitude of resources available online in order to stay up-to-date on recent news and trends within the online forensics community. From national news in the industry, cold cases in kidnapping, and top websites for different areas of forensic study, you can always find what you’re looking for here in our resources section.
Further your forensic knowledge and help continue the advancement of forensic research today. For additional information and up-to-date news, follow us on Twitter at @ForensicsEd.
A Quick History of Forensic Science: Fingerprints, DNA & Beyond
Forensics is an exciting field no matter the era in which it’s practiced; there’s always a little more than meets the eye. To get a quick look at the history of forensics and the crimes it solved as well as committed, read on.
Forensic Genealogy: How In-Home DNA Tests Can Help Law Enforcement
Forensic genealogy is the most powerful tool that investigators have gained in the 21st century, but its quick adoption and lack of oversight have led to some serious debates around privacy and due process.
Cognitive Forensics: Battling Biases in Forensics Analysis
Cognitive science has already been integrated with several other high-risk fields such as medicine, air traffic control, and nuclear power. But a series of failures within the forensic community—many of which came into view with the advent of DNA profiling—have now demonstrated the need for cognitive research into forensic practices, too.
Why Are More Than 100,000 Rape Kits Still Untested?
As a society, we wave off these low conviction rates as cold cases, but often, the victim’s rape kit was never tested in the first place. According to the Joyful Heart Foundation’s “End the Backlog” team, there is a backlog of untested rape kits in the hundreds of thousands that are sitting in police and crime lab storage facilities across the country.
Today, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), which are trained on millions of face images from thousands of people, can recognize faces in highly-variable, low-quality images. But modern facial forensics won’t become an equitable and acceptable practice until the tech, and the people behind the tech, acknowledge their shortcomings head-on.
In order to catch tomorrow’s killers and to protect the innocent, forensics experts will need to look for critical evidence in the places it’s now most likely to be found: a stray email address, a grainy clip of surveillance footage, a single incriminating IP address pulled from a list of countless others.
Five Companies with Their Own Digital Forensics Labs
The hardware and skills of the digital forensics discipline are constantly evolving, requiring vigilant upkeep. As a result, many public sector laboratories are overburdened, and it’s creating a serious backlog. The private sector may have the answer.
Forensics Casefile: Catching the BTK Strangler
When BTK resumed his communication with the media in 2004, he overlooked a critical fact: this was now the 21st century, and law enforcement officers were becoming increasingly adept at forensic science.
