Looking back to 2005

Just finishing work and cleaning up the administration. This year has been a year with a wide variety of issues. The organization of conferences, doing some casework, several research initiatives and chairing the ENFSI-FIT group and the AAFS Engineering Sciences Section. I look back to nice conferences from ENFSI, IAFS and AAFS this year, and hope the cooperation in 2006 will be even better.

We see that the Internet is evolving and initiatives as the wikipedia are a good example how book publishers have a real problem to survive with their current marketing situation. I also have to write several contributions, however it appears to be more difficult, since information is not as fast as on the Internet. The valuable reviews are of course important, however for the reviewer it is getting more complicated to do an in-depth review. It is for example when I started in forensic science feasible to do some review of source code of software. Also this gets more complicated, since we have to take into account that also the operating systems upgrade very fast, and it is in theory possible that a certain program will work different on a different version of the OS with a bugfix. Having said that, we certainly should put effort in validating and reviewing the information in a prompt and proper way as is feasible.

What did I learn further this year ? As always projects tend to take more time then expected. I have some backlog with several projects. In contrary there are also projects that work better then expected, since not all things are predictable. It is the same with casework. It is nice to think that in some ways we are working in a casino-society as some people call it. The forecasts influence the results, and in this way many processes become inpredictable.

Also this year we did some step forward with the Bayesian conclusions in our report. The readability is still a problem :

In the past we had conclusions as probable etc. Now we have conclusions as there is support for a certain conclusion. This year we had discussions to modify it to from the examination results hypothesis 1 is more probable then hypothesis 2. We will see what happens, however the form of this conclusion might also change.