For my book report for this course I am reading Mind Hunter by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker. In the book, Douglas describes his interviews with criminals in the prison system in order to develop profiles for serial killers as part of a huge research project. This was part of an effort to develop a Psychological Profiling Program, to make it easier for investigators, police, and the FBI to catch criminals faster and easier, by being able to "get inside their heads" and track their next moves. This got me interested in criminal and psychological profiling so I decided to google it. I came across digital physiognomy software and free downloads.
Digital Physiognomy was developed as entertaining software, allowing people to create a portrait of a person and then provide a description of the person's character, traits, preferences, likes and dislikes, etc. You can choose different facial features and put them together, similar to the composite software that we can borrow from Dr. Maclin for our projects and what police use to make sketches of suspects.
Testing out digital physiognomy or composite software gives us a real life account of creating a "picture" of a suspect. I checked out the composite software from Dr. Maclin and found it difficult to do. Difficult for the "witness" to come up with a description and difficult for me to choose accurate features from the extensive list. Of course composites are biased to either the witness's perception or memory and the composite creator's training and expertise; however, both are useful in coming up with a tangible idea of the suspect.
A free demo version is available at http://www.uniphiz.com/. I did not have a chance to download it or see if it works, but I encourage people to check it out and see what it is all about!
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