A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. This term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses include traditional culture, business, supplies, agricultural, and traffic censuses. The United Nations defines the essential features of population and housing censuses as "individual enumeration, universality within a defined territory, simultaneity and defined periodicity", and recommends that population censuses be taken at least every ten years. United Nations recommendations also cover census topics to be collected, official definitions, classifications and other useful information to co-ordinate international practices.
DNA profiling is the process of determining an individual's DNA characteristics. DNA analysis intended to identify a species, rather than an individual, is called DNA barcoding.
Sir Alec John Jeffreys, is a British geneticist, who developed techniques for genetic fingerprinting and DNA profiling which are now used worldwide in forensic science to assist police detective work and to resolve paternity and immigration disputes. He is a professor of genetics at the University of Leicester, and he became an honorary freeman of the City of Leicester on 26 November 1992. In 1994, he was knighted for services to genetics.
Forensic science, also known as criminalistics, is the application of science to criminal and civil laws, mainly—on the criminal side—during criminal investigation, as governed by the legal standards of admissible evidence and criminal procedure.
A fingerprint is an impression left by the friction ridges of a human finger. The recovery of partial fingerprints from a crime scene is an important method of forensic science. Moisture and grease on a finger result in fingerprints on surfaces such as glass or metal. Deliberate impressions of entire fingerprints can be obtained by ink or other substances transferred from the peaks of friction ridges on the skin to a smooth surface such as paper. Fingerprint records normally contain impressions from the pad on the last joint of fingers and thumbs, though fingerprint cards also typically record portions of lower joint areas of the fingers.
Biometrics is the technical term for body measurements and calculations. It refers to metrics related to human characteristics. Biometrics authentication is used in computer science as a form of identification and access control. It is also used to identify individuals in groups that are under surveillance.
A canary trap is a method for exposing an information leak by giving different versions of a sensitive document to each of several suspects and seeing which version gets leaked. It could be one false statement, to see whether sensitive information gets out to other people as well. Special attention is paid to the quality of the prose of the unique language, in the hopes that the suspect will repeat it verbatim in the leak, thereby identifying the version of the document.
A crime scene is any location that may be associated with a committed crime. Crime scenes contain physical evidence that is pertinent to a criminal investigation. This evidence is collected by crime scene investigators (CSIs) and law enforcement. The location of a crime scene can be the place where the crime took place or can be any area that contains evidence from the crime itself. Scenes are not only limited to a location, but can be any person, place, or object associated with the criminal behaviours that occurred.
Trace evidence is created when objects make contact. The material is often transferred by heat or induced by contact friction.
The Henry Classification System is a long-standing method by which fingerprints are sorted by physiological characteristics for one-to-many searching. Developed by Sir Hem Chandra Bose, Azizul Haque and Edward Henry in the late 19th century for criminal investigations in British India, it was the basis of modern-day AFIS classification methods up until the 1990s. In recent years, the Henry Classification System has generally been replaced by ridge flow classification approaches.
Gene mapping describes the methods used to identify the locus of a gene and the distances between genes.
Forensic science holds the branch of forensic photography which encompasses documenting both suspected and convicted criminals, and also the crime scenes, victims, and other evidence needed to make a conviction. Although photography was widely acknowledged as the most accurate way to depict and document people and objects, it was not until key developments in the late 19th century that it came to be widely accepted as a forensic means of identification.
In computer security, logging in is the process by which an individual gains access to a computer system by identifying and authenticating themselves. The user credentials are typically some form of "username" and a matching "password", and these credentials themselves are sometimes referred to as a login. In practice, modern secure systems often require a second factor such as email or SMS confirmation for extra security.
Protein mass spectrometry refers to the application of mass spectrometry to the study of proteins. Mass spectrometry is an important method for the accurate mass determination and characterization of proteins, and a variety of methods and instrumentations have been developed for its many uses. Its applications include the identification of proteins and their post-translational modifications, the elucidation of protein complexes, their subunits and functional interactions, as well as the global measurement of proteins in proteomics. It can also be used to localize proteins to the various organelles, and determine the interactions between different proteins as well as with membrane lipids.
In computer science, a fingerprinting algorithm is a procedure that maps an arbitrarily large data item to a much shorter bit string, its fingerprint, that uniquely identifies the original data for all practical purposes just as human fingerprints uniquely identify people for practical purposes. This fingerprint may be used for data deduplication purposes. This is also referred to as file fingerprinting, data fingerprinting, or structured data fingerprinting.
A device fingerprint or machine fingerprint is information collected about the software and hardware of a remote computing device for the purpose of identification. The information is usually assimilated into a brief identifier using a fingerprinting algorithm. A browser fingerprint is information collected specifically by interaction with the web browser of the device.
Body identification is a subfield of forensic science that uses a variety of scientific and non-scientific methods to identify a body. Forensic purposes are served by rigorous scientific forensic identification techniques, but these are generally preceded by formal identification. This involves requesting a family member or friend of the victim to visually identify the body.
Community fingerprinting is a set of molecular biology techniques that can be used to quickly profile the diversity of a microbial community. Rather than directly identifying or counting individual cells in an environmental sample, these techniques show how many variants of a gene are present. In general, it is assumed that each different gene variant represents a different type of microbe. Community fingerprinting is used by microbiologists studying a variety of microbial systems to measure biodiversity or track changes in community structure over time. The method analyzes environmental samples by assaying genomic DNA. This approach offers an alternative to microbial culturing, which is important because most microbes cannot be cultured in the laboratory. Community fingerprinting does not result in identification of individual microbe species; instead, it presents an overall picture of a microbial community. These methods are now largely being replaced by high throughput sequencing, such as targeted microbiome analysis and metagenomics.
Canvas fingerprinting is one of a number of browser fingerprinting techniques for tracking online users that allow websites to identify and track visitors using the HTML5 canvas element instead of browser cookies or other similar means. The technique received wide media coverage in 2014 after researchers from Princeton University and KU Leuven University described it in their paper The Web never forgets.
Forensic firearm examination is the forensic process of examining the characteristics of firearms or bullets left behind at a crime scene. Specialists in this field are tasked with linking bullets to weapons and weapons to individuals. Obliterated serial numbers can be raised and recorded in an attempt to find the registered owner of the weapon. Nitric acid (HNO3) is the most common reagent used for this. Examiners can also look for fingerprints on the weapon and cartridges. Fingerprints are key pieces of evidence. If crime scene investigators find prints at a scene, they will be dusted, photographed, collected, and analyzed both by hand (using comparison microscopes) as well as compared to databases for potential references.
