February 2011

This month will be busy, since there are several deadlines, and of course the conference of the AAFS in Chicago, where I will organize the Forensic Multimedia workshop and give one paper. It is always an excellent event, with good networking and discussion with other forensic scientists.

Last month I received a question for making tweets on forensics, and some people thought I was discussing actual casework. I will never discuss on the blog or anyware in public on casework were I or any of my colleagues am working on, and which are still in the court, without prior permission. Only forensic meetings and events that are public will be discussed, and of course R&D which is open. The advantage of a blog compared to a tweet is that you can add more text to it, so this kind of misunderstanding are less likely to happen here.

On the forens-l list that I host there are some discussions on the NAS report, and it is good to see that many issues are handled there. Since I moderate the list, the posting improve. In the past I started hosting this unmoderated list, and then it appeared that some discussions did not go well. So I started some moderation, and it appears to work better.

January 2011

At the beginning of January I went to Tunesia for one week, since the Sahara climate works well against my astma, which is worst in winter. It was the first time that I experienced employees of the hotel striking and demonstrating for the hotel, against goverment. Later on when visiting the Medina in Sousse and Tunis, we saw some riots, so it appeared the start of the election of a new president and government appeared this week. I hope there will be peace again, and perhaps they can use parts of the Sahara for energy production with solar panels in the future, if possible of course.

Also the start of a new year, gives also new experiences. We had a kaizen meeting from lean six sigma for making our work more efficient. So first we are analysing the process. It appears to work well in forensic laboratories to have less backlog, of course in combination with a Service Level Agreement.

Of course also working on some cases, and it appeared I had a backlog in reviewing papers, so I had to do some work on this. Also new year celebrations of my work, and of course new planning and new ideas.

In February I will attend the American Academy of Forensic Science meeting in Chicago, and chair a workshop, give a presentation, and also be in meetings for the Forensic Science Foundation, and to meetings as Director of the Digital and Multimedia Sciences Section. So also some preparations for this event.