North Carolina State University has invented a new and improved way of identifying premature skeletal remains. Currently the process of identifying child remains is distorted because researchers were under the impression that a child’s permanent face structure is not fully formed until later on in their life. They would not name a skeletons ethnicity with confidence unless the deceased was at least 18 years in age. Determining the heritage or background of a person through examination of the skull is the most important lead in cases such as missing persons, traumatic accidents, or violent crimes. The inability to identify a child remains ethnicity lead to countless cases going cold. With the research and tools from North Carolina State University identifiers can now determine the heritage and backgrounds of skeletal remains of youths. The research team has currently knocked 4 years off the age of the deceased to determine ethnicity; but they are confident that with more research and a larger sample size they can identify even younger children as well. The North Carolina State University research team is able to come up with this data through a field of study that characterizes and assesses biological forms called, “geometric morphometrics”.
The ability to identify this characteristic will lead not only more solved missing-persons cases but also more solved crimes. Now identifiers can go into ‘cold cases’ and re-examine the child’s bone structure to determine the ethnicity of the deceased. With that information they will be able to rule out far more suspects and narrow their spectrum of search. In the future Geometric Morphometrics is leading to a developed software which identifiers will rely on, rather than using calipers which relied on measurements of adults rather than ratios. In combination with facial reconstruction techniques this tool will advance the forensic science community into solving far more cases than they were able to before. These findings can also help anthropologists advance understandings of how populations have moved or changed over time. They can get an idea of a whole population of a specific area at a time rather than only being able to rely on adult measurements.
I thought this article was great. It did a great job of explaining the issue within the science community and how the North Carolina State University researchers were making strides to fix it. The relevance was extremely clear and I loved how they incorporated the relevance on the anthropology community as well as the relevance of the forensic community. I would have liked if the article went into more depth on the identifying software of Geometric morphometrics and how it worked so that we could get more of a grasp on that.
North Carolina State University. "New forensics research will help identify remains of children." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 14 May 2010. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100513093733.htm>
10 comments:
Lain did a great job in reviewing the article, “Forensics research will help identify remains of children,” which examined the findings of North Carolina State University’s study on correctly identifying the ethnicity of a child based on their bones. One specific part of the review that I believe Lain did an excellent job at was comparing how the identification of children’s remains evolved from being “distorted” because it was under the impression that their skeleton structures fully developed at the age of eighteen to the ability to identify the ethnicities of children who were four years old. Also, Lain mentions how the team is able to collect this data through “geometric morphometrics,” although she does state that the original article did not describe this process in detail, which could have greatly helped readers. Lastly, Lain states that cold cases can be reopened and reexamined with this new finding, which involved young children and their remains. She went deeper into the effects of this study on anthropology, mentioning that anthropologists can understand the movements of a whole population with the inclusion of the remains of the young, not only the adults’ measurements.
Although the review was well written, for some sentences, it was necessary to read again to grasp the full meaning because these sentences could have projected their purpose more clearly. Lain did include a piece of a quote, but, if possible, it would have deepen the review itself if there was a longer quote, maybe from a scientist involved in the research at North Carolina State University. Otherwise, it was a good review that touched on many different topics that revolved around the centered focus of identifying the ethnicities of children’s remains.
Overall, the takeaway of this review was the newfound ability to identify the ethnicities of children as young as four years old. Scientists are aiming for the ability to identify remains that are younger than four years, while before this, they only had the capability to identify bones that were eighteen years old or older.
I enjoyed reading the review of and the article “New forensics research will help identify remains of children,” and liked many aspects. First, I liked how Lain organized her review of the article, the setup of information was orderly and made the reader understand this discovery more. Secondly, I liked how the author of the review gave a background on identifying ethnicity from children’s skulls and how difficult it was and how this discovery can change so much and solve so many cases. This discovery can change the future of forensic science. Also, I liked how she addressed the field study that university obtained its knowledge and information from: geometric morphometrics, and I liked how she referenced that this field study has allowed researchers to knock four years off the age of the deceased to determine ethnicity, but are confident that with more research and larger sample size they can identify even younger children as well.
Although this review presented many good aspects, it also had negative aspects. First, I did not like how the author of the review introduced and talked about this discovery without detail, I still do not know how this new process works and what it involves. It would have been better if I would have had more detail about this discovery. Also, I did not like how there were not any references or examples of to instances where this technology worked, because it may not work all the time. Even though these aspects are important, I still enjoyed the article.
I learned many things when reading this article. First, I learned about the history of identifying deceased children, which I had known nothing about. Learning about the history its difficulties and then learning about this new process really made me think about this. Also, I learned about a field of study called “geometric morphometrics” and that is characterizes and assesses biological forms that helped these researchers in the discovery of this technology. I found that really interesting. Learning about this changed my view on forensic science because it made me more aware of the technology used in investigations and their impacts on forensic cases. Overall, I really enjoyed this article and look forward to learning more about this discovery.
North Carolina State University. "New forensics research will help identify remains of children." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 14 May 2010.
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100513093733.htm
I enjoyed reading Lain’s review on the article, “Forensics research will help identify remains of children.” First, the article itself was full of information and very interesting to read. This article explored the correct ways to identify a child based on just their bones. Lain did a great job in comparing the process in the past with the way it should be done currently. I liked how Lain related this to anthropology as a whole and connected it to the field. I also liked the general flow that this review was written in. It was very pithy, but contained the necessary amount of information.
It would have been better if Lain could have explained some of the scientific terminology, such as “geometric morphometrics.” I also would have liked to read more quotes from authoritative figures. Maybe some professors who were a part of the study from North Carolina State University could have been quoted to make the review more interesting.
I think it is interesting that a whole new system was introduced to identify skeletal remains for children no younger than four. I hope that further research and practice will allow forensic scientists to not only work on children at a minimum of four years but also children younger than the age of four as well.
Emme Kerj
Current event 18 comment
Lain, you did a really great job leading into the article because you explained the current errors with identifying premature skeletal remains and why it is so important that new techniques are developed. It made it easier to understand why this new technique is such a breakthrough when later on reading about it. You also did a good job explaining the significance of this new technique and what other things this might lead to as well as touched upon possible future research regarding it. I also agree with you that the article should have gone more into depth about how the software works since that is the whole point of the article and I think that many scientific readers would have liked to see that.
I think that you could have brought up how the researchers at the North Carolina State University came up with this new technique since it seemed to have been a very long and tedious process.
One thing that shocked me is the fact that forensic scientists have not been able to completely and confidently determine the ethnicity of remains unless they are over eighteen years old. I would expect that there are some sort of characteristics, even in premature skeletons, so that really surprised me that our skeletons are very similar until we reach a higher age. I also found it interesting how much this new technique will do for the scientific community and it made me happy to read that this might be able to help solve closed cases that were about premature skeletons.
Works cited:
North Carolina State University. "New forensics research will help identify remains of children." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 14 May 2010.
This current event, overall, is pretty well-done already, but one of the things that stood out the most was how much detail Lain Miller put into describing Geometric Morphometrics. She extensively explained how it was used, how it would change the field of forensics, and the importance. This substantiated her claims of the discovery’s significance well and shows her ability to effectively support an argument. It is also impressive how she focuses on one point (instead of lightly touching upon every point of the article) through the description of Geometric Morphometrics because she uses it to build all of her ideas. Miller’s current event is generally a solid representation of her article because it uses details directly from the source and makes sure all those details are relevant to the summary of the article.
There are very few errors within the current event so there is only one suggestion that can be made to make Lain’s current event a little better: please proofread before submitting current events. The content is spotless but occasionally, the lack of punctuation makes it difficult to understand certain sentences. For instance, she writes, “The inability to identify a child remains ethnicity lead to countless cases going cold.” This sentence can be improved by moving around the word order a little, adding some punctuation and changing lead to “leads”. If those corrections are made, the sentence will read as: “The inability to identify the ethnicity of a child’s remains leads to countless [of] cases going cold.” There are very few changes made; yet the sentence is clearer.
Nonetheless, Lain Miller expands upon a vast and important topic appropriately and reacts to it as earnestly as possible through her current event. Her significance and critique paragraphs truly show how innovative this new discovery is and sheds a hopeful light on a rather imperfect discipline. Certainly, she has done the current event justice.
I read the review by Lain Miller of the article, “New Forensics research will help identify remains of children.” Lain did a great job describing the article and details that are important. She explained how North Carolina State University invented a new and improved way of being able to identify a premature skeletal remain. She also did a good job finding the problem. She said that the issue which the article discussed about was that there was an inability to identify a child remains ethnicity which makes a lot of cases go cold. But she said that North Carolina State University scientists had begun to find tools and research ways to figure out the heritage and backgrounds of skeletal remains of children. She also did a good job describing the current process of identifying skeletal child remains. She said that the current process of identifying child remains is distorted because researchers had been under the impression that a child’s permanent face structure did not form until later on in its life. Another thing I thought Lain did well was that she included her own opinion of what she thought about the article that she read. She said how it did a good job explaining the issue within the science community and how NCSU researchers were able to attempt to fix the problem. One area where I thought could be improved was that I wish the article had provided a case where the scientists at North Carolina State University had put their research to use in an actual case and had given us the details of the case they used it in. Another thing that could have been improved was the descriptive details within the article. For example, if Lain was able to describe the identification software of Geometric morphometrics and how it works so we as the reader would have more knowledge of the research that was going on, but in her opinions paragraph, Lain says that the article had not provided that specific information which she hope it did. I chose to read this review because it looked interesting and it had furthered my forensic knowledge which I will be able to use in cases involving skeletal remains.
I read Lain Millers current event on the article, “New Forensics Research will Help Identify Remains of Children.” I think Lain did a good job summarizing the work that North Carolina State University is doing to try and find a better way to identify child remains. She went into detail on how the University is doing research on the process called “geometric morphometrics.” Although the article itself doesn’t going into much detail on the actual process, Lain did a great job bringing up how the process could give forensic analysts a new way to identify the race and age of young skeletal remains. I also think that it was smart of her to bring up how this new process could be a new solution for solving cold cases and as well as ongoing criminal investigations of missing children or remains. I think the review could have been improved if she went into a little detail on the process itself, for instance googling what the process is and explaining how it works. I also think it could have been improved if she discussed cases or forensic analysts that are actually using geometric morphometrics to identify remains. Lastly, I was shocked to learn about how difficult it is to identify young skeletal remains under the age of eighteen. I had no idea that the anthropologists struggled to determine the race and age of remains and from this current event I have hope that that will be made easier soon in the future.
I enjoyed Lain’s critique of the article “New forensics research will help identify remains of children." Her summary was put in an easy to follow manner. She first identified who the researchers were. Next, the process of how children were being identified at the moment was stated, as well as going in depth as to reasons why investigators were very cautious when identifying the bones/skull of a young child. This gave the readers a clear understanding of the problems that investigators are facing. After identifying the problem, Lain went on to talk about how the new technology that researchers at the University of North Carolina have developed called “geometric morphometrics” can help reduce these problems. I liked Lain’s analysis of how this technology can help humanity. As stated earlier, this technology can help reduce the number of problems that investigators have come across when identifying the remains of children. It can help investigators solve previous cases that had gone cold due to the lack of technology. By revisiting these old cases with the geometric morphometrics, perhaps the new information collected could help solve the crime. Lastly, Lain’s review of the article was very informative. It stated both things that the article did well on, as well as things that the article could improve on.
One thing that the article could do to enhance the article is state the number of cases where this technology was useful and played a major role in solving the crime. Although the article went in depth about ways that this technology could benefit forensics scientists, it does not mention how many times it has been successful in identifying child features on a skull (using test runs). I would also have liked it if the article could explain a little more on how the scientists figured out that children retain the features that they will have as an adult. This part seems extremely important because it was this discovery that led to the creation of the geometric morphometric, but was not mentioned much in the article except for a little part in the beginning.
By reading this article, I learned about the problems that investigators faced when trying to identify the remains of a child, and how a new technology has been invented that could help the investigators in that field. Although the technology is still a work in progress, I can see it becoming a useful tool for investigators in the future.
Lain did an excellent job on her review. She thoroughly presented the studies on correctly identifying the ethnicity of a child based on their bones made by North Carolina State University. She also did well by showing how the author explained the ways of identifying ethnicity from children’s skulls and the difficulty of the process in doing so. Moreover, this discovery is so revolutionary that it could help solve so many cases in the near future. Lastly, she didn’t forget to include the information about what inspired the researchers the most during the studies — geometric morphometrics.
While Lain summarized and reviewed the article well, there were a few points to improve upon. I thought the introduction was a little abrupt since it talked about the discovery without much detail. If she could have explained more in depth about the function, it would have been better. I also found that the review was lacking references or examples of the technology; and lastly, the review overall could have organization since her thoughts and explanations are scattered.
I found it fascinating that a new, improved system was introduced to accurately identify skeletal remains for young children. I hope that the research goes on, eventually enabling forensic scientists to not only work on children as little as four, but also children younger than the age of four as well.
Works cited:
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100513093733.htm
North Carolina State University. "New forensics research will help identify remains of children." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 14 May 2010.
North Carolina State University. "New forensics research will help identify remains of children." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 14 May 2010.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100513093733.htm
I thought that Lain's review was fairly well written, and put together in an organized way. I thought that it was cool that she named the researchers involved. I also found it interesting that she explained why the researchers were so cautious about Identifying the remains of young children. This gave the reader a good understanding of some of the finer, yet important details of the article. Although this was a good article, I thought that Lain could have perhaps included a few more quotes from the article, as that would have improved the review greatly. I also thought that she could have also elaborated more on the importance of this technology to forensic science. From, this article, I found out that there are many hurdles to overcome for investigators attempting to identify the remains of a child, and how these hurdles have become less prevalant with the discovery of new technology.
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