Monday, November 27, 2023

Police to trial new forensic footwear process

Forensic experts are taking new steps to identify criminals caught on CCTV using the shoes they are wearing.

STAFFORDSHIRE UNIVERSITY

The new method uses 3D scanning to identify criminal's footwear — IMAGE:
THE NEW METHOD USES 3D SCANNING TO IDENTIFY CRIMINAL'S FOOTWEAR
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CREDIT: STAFFORDSHIRE UNIVERSITY

Forensic experts are taking new steps to identify criminals caught on CCTV using the shoes they are wearing.

Staffordshire University and West Yorkshire Police have teamed up to develop a new system which uses 3D scanning technology to help identify the type of footwear worn by criminals.

While the analysis of footwear impressions left at crime scenes is an established practice in policing, this new approach focuses on the upper part of the shoe to link offenders to a crime.

Claire Gwinnett, Professor of Forensic and Environmental Science, said: “The number of cases in which footage from body worn cameras, CCTV and even phones is used to catch perpetrators has increased. However, criminals often conceal their face and wear dark clothing which means there are few identifying features apart from their shoes.

“The big questions is, how can you identify these shoes and how useful is this as evidence?”

Funded by the Police STAR Fund, the team have devised a fast, effective, and affordable method for capturing data from footwear uppers by creating an interactive 3D image of a shoe under both visible light and infrared light.

“Most CCTV cameras use near infrared light during nighttime recordings, which can make the footwear look completely different than in natural light,” Professor Gwinnett commented. “So, it was important to develop a method that will help police to quickly identify the type of shoe, how common it is, and importantly what it looks like under different lighting conditions.”

Postdoctoral researcher Dr Megan Needham has been trialing the method which uses a photography light box, turntable and camera. She explained: “3D scans, rather than still images, enable users to align the 3D model to the angle of the shoe captured on a CCTV camera.

“We record a video of a shoe on the turntable under each lighting condition, extract the frames and put it into software that stitches it all together to make a 3D model. The idea is that you can set it up and leave it to record then come back when it has finished.”

She added: “It is a quick and simple process, taking around 30 minutes in total. The equipment needed for this process costs less than £500. The aim is for this method to be used by footwear units across the nation, and in the future detention officers in a custody suite to scan a suspect’s shoe.”

Megan is currently refining the optimum settings for the process before it is piloted by different police forces in the new year. In future, it is hoped that this method could be adopted to populate a national database of footwear uppers which could be accessed by police professionals across the country.

Selina Reidy, an Identification Expert from West Yorkshire Police, said: “With the increasing quantity and improving quality of surveillance footage, we are receiving a growing number of requests to identify the make and model of footwear caught on camera. Having access to a searchable database of interactive, 3D models of footwear under both white and near infrared light will greatly improve the accuracy and efficiency of the current process. This work will expand and improve the current evidence base and, with continued development, will provide an additional forensic capability that informs police investigations.”

Staffordshire University will host a workshop for police professionals about the research in March 2023. For further information please contact megan.needham2@staffs.ac.uk.

Making a difference, belonging drives rural festival volunteers and bolsters community development

Peer-Reviewed Publication

IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY

AMES, Iowa — During Orange City’s three-day tulip festival each May, the northwest Iowa town attracts roughly 40,000 visitors, more than six times its population. People come for the blooms and parades, traditional Dutch food and musical theater. For the community, it’s an opportunity to celebrate its cultural heritage and give a boost to local businesses.

Volunteers are essential to the festival’s success, as they are for many rural celebrations across the Midwest. But not a lot of research has examined their motivations. To help fill this gap, researchers surveyed hundreds of volunteers from 12 festivals — including Orange City’s — across Iowa, Michigan and Kansas. All of the festivals were based in communities with 1,000 to 35,000 residents and centered on the arts, culture or film.

SoJung Lee led the study. The associate professor in Iowa State University’s Department of Apparel, Events and Hospitality Management researches rural and sustainable tourism, pop culture tourism and country clubs. She also directs graduate education for hospitality management and the Club Research Lab at Iowa State. Co-authors include Linda Niehm, professor and interim department chair of AESHM, whose expertise includes rural retailing and small family businesses; associate professor MiRan Kim at Michigan State University; and associate professor Jichul Jang at Kansas State University.

"Festivals have become significant drivers of economic development that benefit rural communities, but they depend on volunteers who give up their time,” says Lee. “In this study, we wanted to better understand their motivations and focused on psychological ownership. How important is it for volunteers, and how does it affect community involvement and support?”

In their paper, the researchers break psychological ownership into four parts: self-efficacy, accountability, belongingness and self-identity. Self-efficacy relates to an individual’s confidence that they can make a difference. Accountability is the likelihood that someone would speak up if something wasn’t done correctly or if the event or organization was criticized. Belongingness refers to feeling included while self-identity is the idea that someone’s success or identity is connected to the event.

On-site and online survey results from 373 participants indicate people are more likely to volunteer and support community development if they have a strong sense of psychological ownership. This is bolstered when they perceive an event as personally important and relevant, feel needed and find social connection with other volunteers and attendees.

The researchers say tapping into these values can help attract and retain volunteers in the long run. They recommend reaching out to community members before planning a festival or event to gauge interest. Once in motion, festival planners and organizers should find ways to engage volunteers, perhaps by giving them opportunities to make decisions or take on leadership roles. Organizing social events for volunteers can help them build relationships and feel appreciated, as well.

In addition to analyzing motivations, the researchers looked at demographic data provided by the survey participants and how much they volunteered:

82% of the volunteers were local residents
75% were women
80% were over 40 years old; 58 was the average age
55% were employed; 40% were retired; 5% were unemployed or full-time students
53% volunteered between one to four hours per day at the festival; the rest volunteered five or more hours per day
45% of people volunteered at the festival between one and five years; 22% had volunteered between six and ten years; 33% had volunteered for 11 or more years
More than 90% had some college or higher education degrees
Average household income was $75,000

The researchers say the high percentage of women and average age align with other studies about rural volunteerism and community engagement.

In the paper, they emphasize their findings offer “practical implications [that] will be useful to not only festival organizers but also economic and community developers, Extension program specialists, business consultants, and others who provide support to rural towns and their residents.”

“As we visited these festivals, we could really see that they brought out a lot of community pride and economic support. Often, generations of families came back for these events. These festivals can add a lot to communities, including the optimism and mindset of the people who live there,” says Niehm.

“Volunteers are direct resources to communities. Taking care of them by providing enough breaks and food, being open to their input, showing appreciation and fostering social connections can have larger ripple effects on community development and growth,” adds Lee.

The co-authors say future research could explore trends by surveying volunteers at the same festivals over a long period of time. Different settings, urban vs. rural, and other factors, like the size of the event and cultural background, could be studied as well.

Funding for this study came from the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development.

Rural festivals that participated:

Adel Sweet Corn Festival, IA
Celebrate Freedom in Wamego, KS
Clay County Fair, IA
Columbus Day Festival, KS
Great Akron Scarecrow Festival, IA
Orange City Tulip Festival, IA
Kalona Fall Festival, IA
Marshalltown Art Festival, IA
Mount Vernon-Lisbon Community, IA
Traverses City Film Festival, MI
Tulip Time Festival, MI
Wamego Tulip Festival, KS

JOURNAL

Current Issues in Tourism

DOI

10.1080/13683500.2023.2280163

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

The role of festival volunteers in supporting rural community development: a psychological ownership perspective

An illustrated map of the Midwest depicts the locations and variety of festivals involved in a study to understand what motivates volunteers.

Researchers surveyed hundreds of volunteers from 12 festivals across Iowa, Michigan and Kansas for their study.
CREDIT
Graphic created by Deb Berger/Iowa State University

WVU researchers aim to cut through radio interference that obscures signal detection

Grant and Award Announcement

WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY

GreenBankTelescope — IMAGE:
WVU RESEARCHERS ARE DEVELOPING WAYS TO REMOVE HUMAN-MADE RADIO INTERFERENCE THAT CAN BLOCK THE DETECTION OF RADIO SIGNALS BY ASTRONOMERS AT PLACES LIKE THE GREEN BANK OBSERVATORY IN POCAHONTAS COUNTY.
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CREDIT: (WVU PHOTO)

A West Virginia University research team is working on ways to eliminate the rampant human-made radio interference from cell phones, televisions and radar systems that can block the detection of radio signals by astronomers.

With $510,000 in funding support from the National Science Foundation, team members will develop new algorithms and hardware with potentially broad applications.

“As radio astronomy instruments continue to become more sophisticated, human-made signals need to be removed in real time before the information from the sky is reduced for astronomical interpretation,” said Kevin Bandura, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering.

New methods driven by the project’s results will be made freely available to the astronomical community and could also be used in other fields such as radar imaging, satellite communication, sound navigation ranging and other sensor applications. Although each of the mentioned imaging modalities relies upon different sensory environments, new interference detection methods will be easily generalizable to those fields, said Natalia Schmid, professor at the WVU Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, who is leading the effort.

The study will likely play a hand in helping detect fast radio bursts, which were co-discovered by Duncan Lorimer, professor of physics and astronomy, who is working with Schmid and Bandura on the project.

“Radio telescopes are powerful tools to explore the cosmos,” Lorimer said. “They allow for the detection of extremely weak galactic signals and the study of the radio transient sky, including fast radio bursts — enigmatic objects of unknown origin that can probe the large-scale structure of the universe.”

Due to the transient nature of fast radio bursts, removing radio interference is vital for survey sensitivity as it can prevent astronomers from observing parts of the universe.

Schmid, Lorimer and Bandura outlined a three-pronged approach to the project. The team will:

• research and develop innovative and efficient, real-time radio frequency interference detection, characterization and flagging signal processing techniques through statistics and theoretical measures,

• develop hardware prototyping of new RFI detection and characterization algorithms, and

• develop metrics of performance tailored to different astronomical observation cases pertinent to scientific occurrences.

The project will also involve graduate and undergraduate students at WVU.

“Projects will be developed which focus on the design and implementation of new statistical and information theoretical tests for the detection of RFI in radio astronomy data,” Schmid said.

These will become part of the existing “Stochastic Systems Theory” and “Digital Signal Processing for Radio Astronomy” graduate courses, as well as supplement undergraduate classes in “Signals and Systems.”

“The course material will be designed to make this technology more accessible to a wide audience and help train the next generation of scientists and engineers,” Schmid said.

Undergraduate students will participate in the research activities through this project and programs such as the Research Apprenticeship Program and the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience.

This project is jointly funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. The estimated end date is fall 2026.

Algorithms, firmware and software developed will be made available for use to the world radio astronomy community through GitHub, a cloud-based platform utilized through summer RFI workshops at the Green Bank Observatory and disseminated through programs run by the NSF’s SpectrumX Center.

“The success of this work will be measured not only by our development of the proposed algorithms, but by their adoption, successful use and expansion by the broader international astronomical community,” Bandura said.

Newborn babies have natural affinity for ‘the beat’

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM

Baby — IMAGE:
BABY
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CREDIT: ISTVÁN WINKLER

Newborn babies can perceive the beat in music, new research has confirmed. The study, carried out by a team of scientists from the University of Amsterdam and the HUN-REN Research Centre for Natural Sciences (TTK) in Hungary, shows that this ability to recognise a beat is not simply due to the statistical learning ability of newborns, but that beat perception is actually a separate cognitive mechanism that is already active at birth. The study was published on 27 November in the scientific journal Cognition.

‘There is still a lot we don't know about how newborn babies perceive, remember and process music,’ says author Henkjan Honing, professor of Music Cognition at the UvA. 'But, in 2009, we found clear indications that babies of just a few days old have the ability to hear a regular pulse in music – the beat – a characteristic that is considered essential for making and appreciating music.’

27 babies
Because the previous research from Honing and his colleagues had so far remained unreplicated and they still had many questions, the UvA and TTK joined forces once again – this time using a new paradigm. In an experiment with 27 newborn babies, researchers manipulated the timing of drum rhythms to see whether babies make a distinction between learning the order of sounds in a drum rhythm (statistical learning) and being able to recognise a beat (beat-induction).

Manipulated timing
The babies were presented with two versions of one drum rhythm through headphones. In the first version, the timing was isochronous: the distance between the sounds was always the same. This allows you to hear a pulse or beat in the rhythm. In the other version, the same drum pattern was presented, but with random timing (jittered). As a result, beat perception was not possible, but the sequence of sounds could be learned. This allowed the researchers to distinguish between beat perception and statistical learning.

Because behavioural responses in newborn babies cannot be observed, the research was done with brain wave measurements (EEG) while the babies were sleeping. This way, the researchers were able to view the brain responses of the babies. These responses showed that the babies heard the beat when the time interval between the beats was always the same. But when the researchers played the same pattern at irregular time intervals, the babies didn't hear a beat.

Not a trivial skill
‘This crucial difference confirms that being able to hear the beat is innate and not simply the result of learned sound sequences,’ said co-author István Winkler, professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology at TTK. 'Our findings suggest that it is a specific skill of newborns and make clear how important baby and nursery rhymes are for the auditory development of young children. More insight into early perception is of great importance for learning more about infant cognition and the role that musical skills may play in early development.'

Honing adds: 'Most people can easily pick up the beat in music and judge whether the music is getting faster or slower – it seems like an inconsequential skill. However, since perceiving regularity in music is what allows us to dance and make music together, it is not a trivial phenomenon. In fact, beat perception can be considered a fundamental human trait that must have played a crucial role in the evolution of our capacity for music.’