After the vacation period

It has been started again, all apointments, and agendas that seem to fill very fast. The last weeks I spend working on casework, preparing meetings and making plans for 2005 for the budgets. For the union, I am also working in a group for recertification of experts.

I have to be certified again in October, and they had to select five reports for this exam. The reports have to be translated from Dutch in English, since one of the experts can not read Dutch. It is a good experience, however it is not something where you are waiting for... Most colleagues do not really like this process, however some of them are very positive afterwards. The problem is of course that they fear that it does not out well, and that they risk their job. However in practice loosing you job for that reason in Dutch government is protected, so they have to offer you something else.

We were also late in writing the Interpol review paper. Yesterday I looked at the references, and it appeared that some of them where missing. When reading it again, it seemed that it is a wide field. It is however nice to see what happened the last three years in a more structured way, and then we see that there have been many developments in 3D-techniques, image processing and digital video techniques. Not to mention that often the quality of digital images is often worse than of analogue material. This is caused by compression.

This week I was thinking about writing some chapters of books. I am planning to work on Friday at home for publishing. This works best, since working at the lab phone calls and casework will not help in writing an article. I saw in my literature list in the past, that I had most production in writing articles at home. This was also the method for finishing my PhD. I also see that many colleagues do have the same problem, and since I am in editorial boards of several journals, I sometimes ask them to write an article. Most often that does not happen however, and I can't blame them, because I know how difficult it is, since there always seem to be more important things then that.

As secretary of the Engineering Sciences Section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, I also had to review membership applications, and I saw that the schedule for next years scientific presentations has been completely booked, with many interesting papers.

For the European Network of Forensic Science Instititutes (ENFSI) the Forensic IT working group will have a training conference in Krakow. I saw that there was lots of interest for that, and the FIDIS-workshop on Forensic Implications, is also working better. Of course I did several phone calls and emails to look what happened, however I am used that everything has to be organized the last day.

Next week I have to do lots of management tasks, and there will be a new colleague. Furthermore I try to combine this with casework efficiently.