Another, very different, non-random method was devised for use by the US Air Force. Details appear in a 170-page paper prepared in 2008 by Michael Schiefer, Albert Robbert, John Crown, Thomas Manacapilli, and Carolyn Wong of the Rand Corporation. But regardless of its merits, this Air Force scheme may be doomed to rejection purely because it has a curious name. The report is called ‘The Weighted Airman Promotion System’.
Pluchino, Alessandro, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo (2010). ‘The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study.’ Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 389 (3): 467–72.
Phelan, Steven E., and Zhiang Lin (2001). ‘Promotion Systems and Organizational Performance: A Contingency Model.’ Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory 7: 207–32.
Schiefer, Michael, Albert A. Robbert, John S. Crown, Thomas Manacapilli, and Carolyn Wong (2008). ‘The Weighted Airman Promotion System. Standardizing Test Scores.’ Rand Corporation report prepared for the US Air Force, http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA485497&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf.
Eleven
For Detectives
May We Recommend
‘Are Full or Empty Beer Bottles Sturdier and Does Their Fracture-Threshold Suffice to Break the Human Skull?’
by S. A. Bolliger, S. Ross, L. Oesterhelweg, M. J. Thali, and B. P. Kneubuehl (published in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, 2009, and honoured with the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize in peace)
Some of what’s in this chapter: Hair, officially and forensically • Toilet graffiti stakeout • Net-trapping bank robbers • One way to eject a hijacker • Old monk breath • Fat criminals • A new look at knifing • Psychotic security guards • O, O, O, O, O • Ethicists who steal books
FBI Agent Hair Guide
Despite its reputation for sporting nearly identical conservative haircuts, the FBI – the Federal Bureau of Investigation, America’s government gumshoes – assembled and published an all-inclusive guide to hair. And despite its reputation for tight-lippedness, it made its guide available to anyone who might have a use or desire for it.
‘Hair Bibliography for the Forensic Scientist’ might make a fine gift for anyone who cares about the sometimes-tangled relationship between hair and crime. You might regard this as completely legal intellectual pornography for those who watch CSI (for: Crime Scene Investigation).
The author, Max Houck of the FBI’s Trace Evidence Unit in Washington, DC, at least pretended that his seventeen-page report, published in 2002 in the journal Forensic Science Communications, would appeal strictly to professionals. ‘It is hoped that this listing will provide some assistance to forensic hair examiners who are seeking information and support for courtroom forensic challenges,’ he wrote.
Some light, even playful, touches suggest that Houck knew his paper would also find its way to amateurs, and even to casual fans of the hair-and-crime game. The list begins coyly with ‘Don’t Miss a Hair’, a seven-pager published in 1976 in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. Next comes more cutesiness: ‘From Bad to Worse: Hair Today, Scorned Tomorrow’, which you can find in a 1997 issue of the journal Science Sleuthing. Then appears a more specific, and mildly grisly, title that’s worded with strange ambiguity: ‘Laboratory Solves Variety of Crimes with Animal Hairs’ (FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, 1960). Then a return to the strictly human, and a higher degree of specificity: ‘Pigmentation in a Central American Tribe with Special Reference to Fair-headedness’ (American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 1953).
One report’s title almost begs you to go and find out how, exactly, its authors, D. L. Exline, F. P. Smith, and S. O. Drexler, gathered their knowledge: ‘Frequency of Pubic Hair Transfer During Sexual Intercourse’, published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, 1998.
The list is dominated by ten items written or co-written by B. D. Gaudette. That’s Barry D. Gaudette, chief scientist for hair and fibre of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Gaudette’s ‘An Attempt at Determining Probabilities in Human Scalp Hair Comparison’, co-written with E. S. Keeping in the Journal of Forensic Sciences in 1974, specifies a rule of thumb that you can use in writing either a crime novel or a mathematics textbook: ‘It is estimated that if one human scalp hair found at the scene of a crime is indistinguishable from at least one of a group of about nine dissimilar hairs from a given source, the probability that it could have originated from another source is very small, about 1 in 4,500. If, instead of one hair, n mutually dissimilar human scalp hairs are found to be indistinguishable from those of a given source, this probability is then estimated to be (1/4,500) to the nth power, which is negligible when n is greater than or equal to three.’
Houck, Max (2002). ‘Hair Bibliography for the Forensic Scientist.’ Forensic Science Communications 4 (10): http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/lab/forensic-science-communications/fsc/jan2002/houck.htm/.
Gaudette, B. D., and E. S. Keeping (1974). ‘An Attempt at Determining Probabilities in Human Scalp Hair Comparison.’ Journal of Forensic Sciences 19 (3): 599–606.
Exline, D. L., F. P. Smith, and S. O. Drexler (1998). ‘Frequency of Pubic Hair Transfer During Sexual Intercourse.’ Journal of Forensic Sciences 43 (3): 505–8.
The Watch on the Loo
In 1992 a professor named T. Steuart Watson discovered a completely effective way to prevent people from writing on public toilet walls. Then at Mississippi State University and now a professor at Miami University of Ohio, Watson published his report in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. In it, he describes both his method and the relentless manner in which he tested it.
He carried out the experiment in three men’s toilets. Each chamber had a history writ large, and small, in many different hands. The study states that ‘during the preceding months, each of the walls had been repainted numerous times due to the proliferation of graffiti’.
Each day, Watson and his minions meticulously counted how many marks were on each wall. They tallied each letter, number, or piece of punctuation. Other shapes called for special assessment. The study describes one typically difficult example: ‘A drawing of a happy face was counted as five marks (one for each eye, one for the nose, one for the mouth, and one for the circle depicting the head).’
The investigators employed professional stealth. ‘During observations,’ the report stipulates, ‘only one observer entered the restroom at a time, and if another person entered to use the facilities, the observer discontinued counting and waited until the bathroom was empty before resuming counting.’
New graffiti popped up every day, in every one of the bathrooms.
But ‘after treatment was implemented’, Watson reveals, ‘no marking occurred on any of the walls, and they remained free of graffiti at 3-month follow-up’. No marking at all. None. Not a jot. Cleanliness uninterrupted. This was complete, utter success.
The treatment was simple: ‘Taping a sign on the wall that read, “A local licensed doctor has agreed to donate a set amount of money to the local chapter of the United Way [a heavily publicized American charity organization] for each day this wall remains free of any writing, drawing, or other markings”.’
‘The doctor’, reveals the study, ‘was the author, a licensed psychologist, and the amount of money donated was 5 cents per day per bathroom.’
The study lasted fifty days. Thus, with three public bathrooms in play, the maximum total potential payoff for charity was $2.50 (£2.30) per location – an aggregate $7.50 if no one ever made a mark on any wall in any of them.
Why was the treatment so very – nay, completely – effective? Watson speculates that ‘prior to posting the signs, bare walls appeared to function as discriminative stimuli for graffiti, perhaps because it was not apparent that anyone cared. Posting the signs was evidence that a prominent citizen (a doctor) was prepared to pay for results.’
‘An alternative explanation,’ he says, ‘is that the presence of the observers prompted restroom users to refrain from writing on walls.’
Watso
n, T. Steuart (1996). ‘A Prompt Plus Delayed Contingency Procedure for Reducing Bathroom Graffiti.’ Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis 29 (1): 121–24.
Crosswords and Lineups
Crossword puzzles are a threat to the criminal justice system. Indeed, they may have been doing damage for decades, causing guilty persons to be set free and innocent ones to become enmeshed in hellish entanglements with the courts and jails. A 2006 study by Michael B. Lewis, a senior lecturer at Cardiff University, published in the journal Perception, reveals that the danger comes mostly from one variety of crossword puzzle.
Lewis has no qualms identifying the culprit. Beware, he warns, of the so-called cryptic crossword puzzle. Accordingly, the study is called ‘Eye-witnesses Should Not Do Cryptic Crosswords Prior to Identity Parades’.
Once you know what to look for, cryptic crosswords are easy to recognize. The regular, or ‘literal’, crossword, Lewis writes, ‘is a task where words must be filled within a grid where the clues to these words are literal definitions’. Cryptic crosswords ‘use a similar grid but the clues involve double meanings and sometimes involve anagrams or uncommon ways of thinking about words’.
Cryptic crosswords enter the picture in seemingly innocuous ways. Police or court officials may – through a toxic mix of good intentions and ignorance – be tempted to introduce them exactly where they can do harm. Lewis explains: ‘The identification of an offender by a witness to a crime often forms an important element of a prosecution’s case. While considerable importance is placed by jurors on the identification of the offender by a witness (such as a suspect being picked out from an identity parade), research tells us that these identifications can often be wrong and sometimes lead to wrongful convictions.’
‘It would be undesirable’, he writes, ‘to have witnesses doing something before an identity parade that would make them worse at picking out the offender ... Consider what witnesses may do before an identity parade. It is possible that they might be doing something to pass the time (eg read or do a puzzle). It is possible that some of these potential activities may lead to a detriment in face processing.’
Determined to determine whether reading or doing a puzzle can lead to a detriment in face processing, Lewis did an experiment. In his words: ‘The tasks tested within the experiment presented here were: reading a passage from Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code; solving a sudoku puzzle; solving a literal crossword; solving a cryptic crossword’.
As featured in Perception vol. 35’s ‘Last But Not Least’
Sixty volunteers took part. They looked at some faces, ‘then engaged in their puzzle or read the passage for 5 minutes’. Lewis then began to test their memory of the faces. ‘Between each test item, however, participants continued with their puzzle or read the text for 30 seconds.’
Sudoku and literal crosswords seemed not to affect how well the volunteers identified the faces. But, according to Lewis, when the volunteers did cryptic crossword puzzles, they became less reliable at recognizing faces: ‘In doing a cryptic crossword, one typically has to suppress the immediately obvious meaning of a word within the clue in favour of less obvious and more cryptic meanings. The suppression of the obvious features of the face, the obvious global letter, or the obvious literal meaning of a word may provide the device by which face-recognition performance is affected. This observation, however, does not explain how such suppression has such a detrimental effect on face recognition. That is, the question of what the mechanism is by which any of these tasks influences the supposedly modular face-recognition system is not addressed here.’
The study hammers home its message: ‘The practical implication of this research is, as the title suggests, that eye-witnesses should not do cryptic crosswords before an identity parade.’
Lewis, Michael B. (2006). ‘Eye-witnesses Should Not Do Cryptic Crosswords Prior to Identity Parades.’ Perception 35: 1433–36.
Drop-of-Net Value
Kuo-cheng Hsieh won the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in economics for patenting a device that catches bank robbers by dropping a net on them. But amid the glamour of the announcement, certain of its charms may have gone unnoticed.
The invention is a nod to ancient methods of capturing animals in a forest, and also to the fanciful adaptation of those techniques in early cops-and-robbers films. Hsieh’s patent sums it up in a terse ninety-four words: ‘A net trapping system for capturing a robber immediately is used in a place of business such as a bank. The device looks like a storing box and is installed above the entrance of the business. When a robbery takes place and the system is activated, an infrared detecting device determines if a robber is in a zone beneath the storing box. A net, a curtain, and a plurality of barriers will drop down immediately and simultaneously. After a lifting motor is activated, the system traps the robber and suspends him above the floor.’
From ‘Net Trapping System for Capturing a Robber Immediately’
Prior to the Ig Nobel ceremony, we were unable to locate Mr Hsieh. Attempts to contact him by telephone, by letter, and even by visits to his home address in the city of Taichung, Taiwan, all failed. Fears arose that maybe the poor man had become trapped inside his own invention.
Happily, newspaper accounts of the ceremony reached him, and he asserted his existence. We learned, via journalists in Taiwan, that Hsieh runs a security company, that he is a former commander of an amphibian frogman unit, that he once set up similar traps underwater to capture swimming Chinese spies, and that he is diligently trying to market his machinery to banks – though so far without consummating a sale.
Hsieh’s patent has had at least one recorded effect: it inspired Zoltan Egeresi in the fight against terrorists.
Two years after New York City and Washington, DC, were attacked by hijacked planes, Egeresi, a California inventor, filed a patent application for an ‘anti hijacking system’. In an ingenious commingling of ideas, Egeresi adapted the Hsieh bank-robber-trapping technology as a way to simplify a rather costly anti-hijacker system devised in the early 1970s by Gustano A. Pizzo.
Pizzo’s invention involves some clever, prescient engineering. An area – a little waiting room, really – is partitioned off between the crew cabin and the plane’s passenger section. No mere anteroom this. It’s an anti-hijacking room, with a specially built mechanical floor. A hijacker, finding himself isolated in this lonely space, is at the mercy of its machinery. He will fall prey to – indeed will fall through – specially hinged floor panels. As Pizzo explains it, these pivoting panels ‘are adapted to be dropped for lowering the hijacker into a releasable capsule to which a parachute is attached. Bomb bay doors are provided in the belly of the plane for ejection of the capsule from the aircraft’. The pilots control the action. Safely tucked into the command cabin, they activate an electromechanical latch. The floor panels, unlatched, suddenly give way. The hijacker falls into a small but yawning pit lined with a sturdy net. A draw-cord automatically seals the hijacker inside what is now an ovoid imprisonment capsule. The pilots can, at their leisure, choose an appropriate moment to expunge the encapsulated crook. As the patent describes this moment: ‘The bomb bay doors are opened by air cylinders, permitting the capsule and its parachute to drop therethru.’ At that point, the hijacker or hijackers, neatly packaged, fall into the waiting arms of authorities on the ground.
The mechanics of Egeresi’s Pizzo-ian, Hsieh-ian hybrid invention are simpler and cheaper: ‘When one or more person [sic] is trying to over power the pilots, this anti hijacking system can provide a non-lethal last line of defense. Doors on the cockpit may not be penetration proof. When pilot or flight attendant is confronted with a situation where the pilot’s door is about to be penetrated, a concealed stainless steel net from below the carpet will hoist up all people to the ceiling.’
Egeresi is not alone in taking inspiration from Pizzo’s patent. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York City, sixteen inventors filed patent applications making reference to Pizzo’s earlier work.
Hsieh, K
uo-cheng (2007). ‘Net Trapping System for Capturing a Robber Immediately,’ US Patent no. 6,219,959, 24 April.
Egeresi, Zoltan (2006). ‘Anti Hijacking System.’ US Patent no. 7,014,147, 12 March.
Pizzo, Gustano A. (1972). ‘Anti Hijacking System for Aircraft.’ US Patent no. 3,811,643, 21 May.
The Cost of Beer
A study called ‘Violence-Related Injury and the Price of Beer in England and Wales’ offers support for actions by Her Majesty’s Chancellor of the Exchequer to raise the tax on a pint of beer by one penny.
The study’s authors, based at Cardiff University, in Wales, are scholars of pence and beer. Kent Matthews is the Sir Julian Hodge professor of banking and finance. Jonathan Shepherd, a professor at the dental school and director of that school’s violence research group, has long campaigned for the mandatory use of non-glass ‘glasses’ and bottles in late-night drinking establishments. Shepherd’s colleague Vaseekaran Sivarajasingham also took part.
The question ‘What causes violent behaviour?’ is not simple. The trio relate some insights they gleaned from others’ research. Apparently, people who are frequently drunk are less prone to commit violence than drinkers who are not used to being intoxicated. The study describes this in succinct technical terms: ‘[Those] with the lowest usual involvement with alcohol were subject to a higher elevation in their risk immediately after alcohol consumption compared to those who drank more heavily.’
Matthews, Shepherd, and Sivarajasingham caution that it can be difficult to establish the specific causes of violence. A 1994 study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, which they do not mention, demonstrated this very point. Entitled ‘Impact of Yankee Stadium Bat Day on Blunt Trauma in Northern New York City’, it said: ‘The distribution of 25,000 wooden baseball bats to attendees at Yankee Stadium did not increase the incidence of bat-related trauma in the Bronx and northern Manhattan. There was a positive correlation between daily temperature and the incidence of bat injury. The informal but common impressions of emergency clinicians about the cause-and-effect relationship between Bat Day and bat trauma were unfounded.’
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