NZ Police have recently issued a press release to assure the population that there is nothing wrong with the tasers they are using and that a few unsuccessful discharges are to be expected. In fact, the taser trial involved a 12.5% failure rate (2/16) compared with a 13.3% failure rate in the field (4/30) – comparable figures although perhaps the trial was not the largest n ever seen.

The NZ Police press release was in response to media articles about the inefficiency of tasers including the recent case where a police dog was fatally shot and two police officers were shot and wounded (Taser unsuccessfully discharged).

However, I don’t recall seeing any news items about a case where the use of a taser saved the life of the man the Police were attempting to detain (perhaps I’m wrong and it was headline news but I don’t remember seeing it). On 18 June this year, Waikato Police attended Te Kuiti’s main street just after midnight where ambulance staff had been trying to treat a man who was bleeding heavily and who was also known by the Police to have a history of mental illness. The injured man was subdued by Police with a taser and he was then transported in an ambulance to hospital. It wasn’t until after the subdued man was in the ambulance that everyone realised he had sustained a cut to his artery. Apparently, if the man had not been subdued and therefore treated relatively quickly, he would have bled to death.

Now that’s the sort of story that I think should be reported on the 6 o’clock news – let’s have something positive as well as the usual negative.

I have just returned on a bumpy flight from Nelson following my stint at SciCon 2010, the the biennial conference of the New Zealand Association of Science Educators (NZASE). The theme of SciCon 2010 is ‘Journey to Discovery’ and there are plenty of interesting speakers and workshops (it runs until this Wednesday, 7 July).

Having never attended a scientific educators conference before, I had no idea what to expect and being the opening speaker at a conference means you have no way to gauge what the audience is expecting or what they like to hear.

Knowing that forensic science is taught in many intermediate schools these days, my keynote speech was about the CSI effect and how the spark of interest that has been developed in children around the world, including New Zealand, offers educators an unmissable opportunity to attract students into science.  It also gave me the opportunity to put to rest some of those myths that programs like CSI have created.

For example, it is not possible to determine year and location of manufacture of a shoe using a sole pattern deposited at a crime scene. Even if it were, we wouldn’t be able to do it in New Zealand because there is no national footwear sole pattern database, even though the States has had one since the 1930s and the UK has had one for over 20 years and probably considerably longer (I understand it’s a cost-related issue – a reasonable excuse, do you think?).

It was also a surprise to some that the information gathered by CSIs can equally be used to exclude someone from an investigation as it can to prove their guilt – the science tells a story based on fact. Investigations should be geared by what the information is saying, not focussing the information towards the suspect.

It’s important to remember as well that there are thousands of students the world over wanting to become forensic scientists but it’s highly competitive and there are less jobs than there were. Cuts in casework and evidence submission to laboratories is being driven by cuts in police budgets (that includes NZ); lab budgets are being reduced in an effort to reduce costs. Sometime, somewhere along the line, the justice system is going to fail someone. I just hope that mistakes or lack of analysis get picked up before it’s too late.

I also ran a workshop on Alcohol and Adolescents and how the knowledge I have as a professional Expert Witness specialising in alcohol cases can be used by educators to help adolescents deal with issues around alcohol consumption. It was extremely eye-opening for all concerned, including me, and I think we all learnt from it.  I hope some new collaborations will come of it all.

I found the whole experience very rewarding. Science education has come a long way since I was at school and there is now a whole range of exciting experiments that can be used to demonstrate key aspects of science inexpensively but very effectively.  I hope the people who heard me speak got something from my presentations – the feedback was certainly plentiful and all positive. Which is good, because I was shockingly bad at the pub quiz  – sorry….

I have just returned on a bumpy flight from Nelson following my stint at SciCon 2010, the the biennial conference of the New Zealand Association of Science Educators (NZASE). The theme of SciCon 2010 is ‘Journey to Discovery’ and there are plenty of interesting speakers and workshops (it runs until this Wednesday, 7 July).

Having never attended a scientific educators conference before, I had no idea what to expect and being the opening speaker at a conference means you have no way to gauge what the audience is expecting or what they like to hear.

Knowing that forensic science is taught in many intermediate schools these days, my keynote speech was about the CSI effect and how the spark of interest that has been developed in children around the world, including New Zealand, offers educators an unmissable opportunity to attract students into science.  It also gave me the opportunity to put to rest some of those myths that programs like CSI have created.

For example, it is not possible to determine year and location of manufacture of a shoe using a sole pattern deposited at a crime scene. Even if it were, we wouldn’t be able to do it in New Zealand because there is no national footwear sole pattern database, even though the States has had one since the 1930s and the UK has had one for over 20 years and probably considerably longer (I understand it’s a cost-related issue – a reasonable excuse, do you think?).

It was also a surprise to some that the information gathered by CSIs can equally be used to exclude someone from an investigation as it can to prove their guilt – the science tells a story based on fact. Investigations should be geared by what the information is saying, not focussing the information towards the suspect.

It’s important to remember as well that there are thousands of students the world over wanting to become forensic scientists but it’s highly competitive and there are less jobs than there were. Cuts in casework and evidence submission to laboratories is being driven by cuts in police budgets (that includes NZ); lab budgets are being reduced in an effort to reduce costs. Sometime, somewhere along the line, the justice system is going to fail someone. I just hope that mistakes or lack of analysis get picked up before it’s too late.

I also ran a workshop on Alcohol and Adolescents and how the knowledge I have as a professional Expert Witness specialising in alcohol cases can be used by educators to help adolescents deal with issues around alcohol consumption. It was extremely eye-opening for all concerned, including me, and I think we all learnt from it.  I hope some new collaborations will come of it all.

I found the whole experience very rewarding. Science education has come a long way since I was at school and there is now a whole range of exciting experiments that can be used to demonstrate key aspects of science inexpensively but very effectively.  I hope the people who heard me speak got something from my presentations – the feedback was certainly plentiful and all positive. Which is good, because I was shockingly bad at the pub quiz  – sorry….

It is excellent to see a new AMS radiocarbon dating set-up in New Zealand (NZ scientists fire up $3.4 million mass spectrometer).  When I was working on climate reconstruction I was hugely reliant on the previous 14C (radiocarbon) device to help put Before Present (BP) ages on volcanic ash layers (tephra) that occurred in sections and cores for my PhD and post-doc – we did this by collecting peat samples that were in direct contact with the tephra layers and submitting the peat samples for analysis.
The numerous volcanic eruptions in New Zealand over the past one million years, and particularly over the last 50,000 years within the Auckland Volcanic Field, mean that by using AMS dates (in conjunction with other radioactive dating methods) we have been able to date accurately each volcanic eruption. Because there are so many eruptions and each is chemically different (generally speaking), we can age-correlate sites over wide geographical areas.

By also reconstructing climate using methods such as pollen analysis and particle analysis (to reconstruct vegetation and environmental conditions), we have been able to reconstruct climate change over, for example, the last 1.1 million years for many areas in New Zealand, particularly the North Island. We have also been able to say how volcanic activity affected the local vegetation in the time immediately after the eruption.  That clearly has implications for future planning and mitigation procedures for future eruptions.

The palaeoclimate records that have been established in New Zealand are world-class, partly because of our volcanic history but also in large part to the presence of a radiocarbon dating facility actually being in New Zealand – long may it last.

[Example literature: Sandiford et al, 2003. A 28,000-7,600 cal yr BP pollen record of vegetation and climate change from Pukaki Crater, northern New Zealand. Palaegeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 201, pp. 235-247]

Don’t want burglars stealing your gear?  Smear it with synthetic DNA and help reduce the burglary rate by more than 50%!  A recent product launch in New Zealand is something called SelectaDNA, which is a synthetic DNA material that can be put onto items you don’t want people to steal and then advertising the fact that you’ve smeared your most precious belongings with it.

The product being marketed seems to combine several anti-theft techniques into one:

• Microdots onto which are printed unique identifying numbers (and have been used in the past by James Bond and also in real life for storage of secret or sensitive information).  Microdots have been used by the automobile industry for some time now, with the microdots being printed with vehicle details so that if a car is stolen and broken down for parts, microdots on the parts have details on them that can be used to link back to the original vehicle, thus assisting with determining the origin of a given part and confirming if that part was stolen;
• A SmartWater-type product that glows under UV light and is detectable for weeks or months;
• A synthetic DNA ‘marker’ in each kit. Each sample kit contains a different DNA marker and is therefore unique to that particular kit;
• Stickers and other labeling material to announce to the world that items that could be stolen are marked with this material. This is obviously a critical part of the whole kit because if burglars don’t know about it then it won’t put them off burgling your house or stealing your car.

A trial was recently completed in Manurewa, which saw a 61% reduction in burglaries.  Residents in Martinborough who formed what has been termed a vigilante-type group last year because they were sick of burglaries perhaps should be told about this product, in the hope that they can use a passive method of reducing crime, rather than putting themselves into court.

From a scientific point of view, I’d be interested to know how the synthetic DNA is manufactured, how different each DNA signature is from the rest and how the data is being stored, retrieved and interpreted by the manufacturer. DNA is an extremely powerful evidence type and we all know the powerful impact it has on people’s perceptions of solving crimes. I am interested in the drying time of the product (it is water-based), particularly of the hydrospray – can Police or security services accidentally contaminate things or people around them if they are sprayed or come into contact with surfaces or items? What is the transfer risk once the product has been used to mark an item? Can you transfer the batch number to another person if you sell your marked PS2 on TradeMe?

Although I’m thinking like a forensic scientist, I haven’t tried this product yet but I think I will. If I like it, I know what everyone will be getting for Christmas this year…