Search Results (7)

As first-hand testimonies and accounts of the Holocaust fade, scholars and artists alike have struggled to depict and contextualize the genocide’s monumental violence. But depicting violence and its aftermath poses several problems, including the question of how to recall loss without artificially filling in or effacing the absence so central to its understanding. In essence, remembering the Holocaust is a paradox: the preservation of an absence. Marianne Hirsch’s influential concept of postmemory addresses this paradox and asks questions about memorial capacity in the twenty-first century. This essay considers Hirsch’s postmemory in the context of W.G. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz, which uses a combination of prose and photography to engage the difficulties inherent in memory work without access to eyewitnesses. Through the interaction of printed text and images, Austerlitz subtly references Lurianic mysticism’s concept of tikkun and Tree of Life (ilanot) diagrams. The result is a depiction of memory that is both process-based and embodies absence. My reading of Austerlitz traces a Jewish heritage within the work of a non-Jewish German author by attending to a tradition of mystical thought embedded in the novel. This situates Sebald’s fiction in a much longer Jewish history that stretches out on either end of the event of the Holocaust. Structurally, Sebald develops a tikkun-like process of (re)creation which relies on gathering material scraps of the past and imaginatively engaging with their absences in the present. Images, just as much as text, are central to this process. Reading Austerlitz in the context of Kabbalah reveals an intellectual and artistic link to a Jewish history that, while predating the Holocaust, nonetheless sheds light on post-Holocaust memories of loss. Full article

Jurors and other legal decision-makers are often required to make judgments about the likely memory accuracy of another person. Legal systems tend to presume that decision-makers are well-placed to make such judgments (at least in the majority of cases) as a result of their own experiences with memory. However, existing research highlights weaknesses in our abilities to assess the memories of others and suggests that these weaknesses are not easily ameliorated through the provision of information. In this work we examine the accuracy of layperson assessments of “real” eyewitness identifications following observation of a mock crime. We examine whether novel instructions, characteristics and beliefs of assessors, and underlying reasoning strategies are associated with improved or impaired judgment accuracy. The results support prior research in demonstrating a tendency towards over-belief in the accuracy of identifications. They suggest that reliance on what witnesses have said rather than attempts to make inferences from their statements (e.g., in relation to the level of detail provided or non-verbal cues in testimony) is associated with greater accuracy in assessments and that some individual differences and beliefs about memory are also associated with greater accuracy. However, there was no evidence that the instructions tested were effective. We discuss the implications of results for procedure surrounding the evaluation of memory in the legal context. Full article

The timely identification of probable causes in aviation incidents is crucial for averting future tragedies and safeguarding passengers. Typically, investigators rely on flight data recorders; however, delays in data retrieval or damage to the devices can impede progress. In such instances, experts resort to supplementary sources like eyewitness testimonies and radar data to construct analytical narratives. Delays in this process have tangible consequences, as evidenced by the Boeing 737 MAX accidents involving Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines, where the same design flaw resulted in catastrophic outcomes. To streamline investigations, scholars advocate for natural language processing (NLP) and topic modelling methodologies, which organize pertinent aviation terms for rapid analysis. However, existing techniques lack a direct mechanism for deducing probable causes. To bridge this gap, this study trains and evaluates the performance of a transformer-based model in predicting the likely causes of aviation incidents based on long-input raw text analysis narratives. Unlike traditional models that classify incidents into predefined categories such as human error, weather conditions, or maintenance issues, the trained model infers and generates the likely cause in a human-like narrative, providing a more interpretable and contextually rich explanation. By training the model on comprehensive aviation incident investigation reports like those from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the proposed approach exhibits promising performance across key evaluation metrics, including BERTScore with Precision: (M = 0.749, SD = 0.109), Recall: (M = 0.772, SD = 0.101), F1-score: (M = 0.758, SD = 0.097), Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) with (M = 0.727, SD = 0.33), Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA similarity) with (M = 0.696, SD = 0.152), and Recall Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE) with a precision, recall and F-measure scores of (M = 0.666, SD = 0.217), (M = 0.610, SD = 0.211), (M = 0.618, SD = 0.192) for rouge-1, (M = 0.488, SD = 0.264), (M = 0.448, SD = 0.257), M = 0.452, SD = 0.248) for rouge-2 and (M = 0.602, SD = 0.241), (M = 0.553, SD = 0.235), (M = 0.5560, SD = 0.220) for rouge-L, respectively. This demonstrates its potential to expedite investigations by promptly identifying probable causes from analysis narratives, thus bolstering aviation safety protocols. Full article

Mental reconstruction (MRC) and Free Recall (FR) have been recognized for enhancing the quality of witness statements. However, the mechanisms underlying this association remain insufficiently understood. This study explores how the time allocated to MRC and FR and variations in educational level influence the quality of eyewitness testimonies. Testimony quality is evaluated based on manually annotated content information provided by experts in testimony assessment, which measures adherence to the events. This is further complemented by fine-grained linguistic features, automatically extracted using linguistic analysis tools, to capture stylistic aspects. As a proof of concept, the analysis is performed on a corpus of 96 testimonies in Spanish describing two robbery cases. The results suggest that both mental reconstruction and narration times positively impact the accuracy of testimonies, as inaccuracies predominantly involve peripheral details. Furthermore, while the study confirms that educational level affects testimony quality, no significant differences were observed in the frequency of erroneous reports. This study contributes to the understanding of the relationship between cognitive strategies and the accuracy of witness statements, proposing an analysis approach applicable to forensic psychology for witness assessment. Full article

Historically, hand-drawn face sketches have been commonly used by Indonesia’s police force, especially to quickly describe a person’s facial features in searching for fugitives based on eyewitness testimony. Several studies have been performed, aiming to increase the effectiveness of the method, such as comparing the facial sketch with the all-points bulletin (DPO in Indonesian terminology) or generating a facial composite. However, making facial composites using an application takes quite a long time. Moreover, when these composites are directly compared to the DPO, the accuracy is insufficient, and thus, the technique requires further development. This study applies a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) to convert a face sketch image into a color face photo with an additional Total Variation (TV) term in the loss function to improve the visual quality of the resulting image. Furthermore, we apply a color correction to adjust the resulting skin tone similar to that of the ground truth. The face image dataset was collected from various sources matching Indonesian skin tone and facial features. We aim to provide a method for Indonesian face sketch-to-photo generation to visualize the facial features more accurately than the conventional method. This approach produces visually realistic photos from face sketches, as well as true skin tones. Full article

The popularity of dogs as human companions explains why these pets regularly come into focus in forensic cases such as bite attacks or accidents. Canine evidence, e.g., dog hairs, can also act as a link between the victim and suspect in a crime case due to the close contact between dogs and their owners. In line with human DNA identification, dog individualization from crime scene evidence is mainly based on the analysis of short tandem repeat (STR) markers. However, when the DNA profile does not match a reference, additional information regarding the appearance of the dog may provide substantial intelligence value. Key features of the dog’s appearance, such as the body size and coat colour are well-recognizable and easy to describe even to non-dog experts, including most investigating officers and eyewitnesses. Therefore, it is reasonable to complement eyewitnesses’ testimonies with externally visible traits predicted from associated canine DNA samples. Here, the feasibility and suitability of canine DNA phenotyping is explored from scratch in the form of a proof of concept study. To predict the overall appearance of an unknown dog from its DNA as accurately as possible, the following six traits were chosen: (1) coat colour, (2) coat pattern, (3) coat structure, (4) body size, (5) ear shape, and (6) tail length. A total of 21 genetic markers known for high predicting values for these traits were selected from previously published datasets, comprising 15 SNPs and six INDELS. Three of them belonged to SINE insertions. The experiments were designed in three phases. In the first two stages, the performance of the markers was tested on DNA samples from dogs with well-documented physical characteristics from different breeds. The final blind test, including dogs with initially withheld appearance information, showed that the majority of the selected markers allowed to develop composite sketches, providing a realistic impression of the tested dogs. We regard this study as the first attempt to evaluate the possibilities and limitations of forensic canine DNA phenotyping. Full article

In this paper, we investigate the mysterious tsunami fires that occurred at Aonae Harbor on Okushiri Island during the 1993 Hokkaido Nansei-Oki earthquake. Specifically, five fishing boats moored separately from each other in the harbor suddenly caught fire and burned nearly simultaneously with the arrival of the first tsunami wave. However, the ignition mechanism of those fires has, until now, remained largely unknown. At the time the earthquake occurred, an NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation, Tokyo, Japan) crew that was on the island to report on its scenic natural attractions just happened to capture video footage of those tsunami-related fires. Using that NHK video footage in combination with eyewitness accounts, this study investigates the spatio-temporal process leading to those tsunami-related fires. For example, one witness said, "There was whitish bubbling in the offshore area and I saw five burning fishing boats moored on the seawall being blown about by the strong winds. The burning boats were swept ashore with the tsunami and ignited the gasoline of a car that was rolling in the waves. The fire eventually spread to the center of the Aonae District." The NHK video footage confirmed flames arising from the five fishing boats almost simultaneously and the shimmering white color of the tsunami waters striking the seawall, which were consistent with the eyewitness testimony. Based on these spatio-temporal data, we propose the following hypothetical model for the origin of tsunami fires. Combustible methane gas released from the seabed by the earthquake rose toward the surface, where it became diffused into the seawater and took the form of whitish bubbles. The tsunami strike on the Aonae Harbor seawall resulted in the generation of large electrical potential differences within the seawater mist, which quickly developed sufficient electrical energy to ignite the methane electrostatically. The burning methane bubbles accumulated on the boat decks, which then burned violently. Full article