911 How can I help?

This is another video link from youtube where I can't find any videos for embedding.

4yr call 911 for help.

Snowball Effect

Grown up at a place wherenever seen snow before, we treat it as a miracle happens. While others had been with snow ever since they are in their childhood age, they will pick up a handful chunk of snow, packed them tightly and throw at someone else.

Therefore, we get what ever kind of reports about people thrown by snowballs, and even snowballs (a large one) was left on the centre of the road blocking the way etc.

Man attacked after snowball row.

Boy injured in snowball accident.

Giant snowball cause road block.

Snowballs prompt 500 calls to 999.

and lastly, we have The etiquette of snowball fights.

Well, we all know that snowball fights will occur when snow comes, but we don't know that we may be charged for "Assault" on somebody if we throw one at them, don't we?? Offences Against the Person Act 1861, Section 42 Common Assault and Battery says so. By the time the "evidence" of the assault which is the snowball is brought to the court, if the police or SOCO knew which snowball it is used, it will already melted away.

Links from BBC.

Deionised Water

Just a short talk about this one, before we start our labs, we have to fill in a form given by the lecturer, just to let us know and remind ourselves what the chemical hazards are, considered as one of the assignments during Christmas break. One of the chemical is "Deionised Water", I am able to fill up all other dangerous chemicals, including some very cool long names such as nickel chloride hexahydrate which will be Irritant if you came into contact with it without gloves on, or oxalic acid dihydrate will be Harmful and Corrosive. But after scratching my head for quite some time, I still don't know what kind of hazards Deionised Water has, just for the joke, maybe in a very large amount of Deionised Water, we may be drown by it, or choke on it when we talk while drinking it, but we are not suppose to consume anything in the lab.

Here is the Material Safety Data Sheet from Fisher Scientific about Deionised Water.

Links from Fisher Scientific.

Strict New Rules for Foreign Students from Home Office

Recently had just been so busy on assignments, lab reports and assessment in the last 2 weeks of the term, and Home Office had just came out some new terms and conditions for foreign students coming to UK to study, it's not recently actually but rather came out quite long ago. 

Well, as a foreign student, some of the things I do "support", but yet some I felt it's a little bit too much for me. ID Cards? Well, I came from a country that is compulsory for every citizen to have an ID card with them, just an easier approach to have a correct identification of the person, I had already "given" all my 10 fingerprints to the UK Home Office when I apply for student visa, which also includes my face, considered as Biometric. 

In one of it's conditions, "Students on courses for longer than 12 months will have to show they have sufficient funds to pay their first year of fees, plus £9,600 to cover their first year in the UK. Students wishing to bring their dependants with them will need to show they have a further £535 per month for each person they bring.", what the kell?? International students studying science laboratory course already paying 4 times more than local students, without including the expenses on books, stationaries, food, lodging and traveling. Correct me if I'm wrong, Home Office still want to lurk around our bank accounts and make sure we have enough money, where is our personal lifes anymore? Do you simply tell the numbers in your bank account to your friends?

In another conditions, I'm not sure about it, just word of mouth and from the internet, Home Office requires international student to report to the nearest local reporting centre or something like that, to show that we are still here???  It's gives me a feeling that we are like criminals on police bail, that we will have to report to police station from time to time. So if we missed the reporting, we will face some actions maybe court hearing or sending us back to home country? Well, most office will be open from 9-5, we have lectures on Monday to Friday, so if we purposely miss the lectures and go to report to the centre, we will miss important stuffs, if we miss the reporting and go to lectures, we will expect some actions, can anyone get me a human-splitter?

We are also required to send an e-mail or whatever to the Home Office if we missed a lecture? Does going to the centre and report for prescence requires that? Our university lectures have the responsibilties to take attendance of the international student to the lectures, seminars, workshop or laboratories? As I recalled, attendance taking is only back in secondary schools, now they bring it to Universities?? Am I still a University student? OK, I don't miss any lectures, but is it neccesary? How about local students? I don't think all of them attend at least 95% of lectures? I had once seen some school students wearing their uniforms smoking in the local bus station at noon, I believe at that time they should be in class. I'm not bringing this problem to the local students, but I really felt unfair to the foreign students, what we want to come here is to get a degree, if attendance really to be taken, take them wholely and seriously.

I've surfed through Facebook and found theses groups, of all the topics, this is the one I liked the most! 

Campaign against unfair Home Office regulations for international students!

Stop Home Office discrimination against International Students!

And lastly, the new rule from Home Office.

Crimewatch: Behind the Scenes of Forensic Science

I've just watched Crimewatch: Behind the Scenes of Forensic Science, it is some interviews with the experts about what they do in Forensic Science, so if you guys are interested, here are the links.

Peter Lamb talks through the Forensic analysis of Blood.

Peter Lamb talks through the Forensic analysis of Fibres.

Simon Monk talks through the Forensic analysis of Drugs.

DI Grant Johnson: Specialist Crime Directorate.

Dr Glenn Wilson on Serial Attackers.

Links from BBC, Crime Watch.

Wasting Prefect's Time

I just watched PC David Copperfield's program in BBC Panaroma because when the program shows up, I'm still in my home country cherishing every moment I could with someone special. As the video runs through, there are so many similarities with what I had when I was a Prefect in my school. Paperwork (as usual), chasing targets, catching criminals (which in this case is students that had offences), patrols etc, which made me a feeling of "Hey! We are not so different after all!!!" Yes, well, of course I cannot compare what I had with the real world police, which they had to deal with much more serious offences than I had faced back in school. 

Just for some sharing, like the usual bobbys, they report for duty, same with me, reporting for duty wherever I had been assigned to the area in the early morning, doing the normal patroling around the school, and if I found some students that look suspicious (which due to my intuition that he will be having some stuffs that is prohibited in school), I can stop and search him, it's just that I doesn't need to fill in a "Stop and Search form", but if I do found something prohibited item, I can remove the item from his possession, give him a slip which consist of my name, his name, date and the item description, less than 2 minutes and I'm on my way back to prefect room and look for the Group members that is responsible for prohibited items to file in the item I had, they will just put the item into a plastic bag, fill up the similar slip I just gave to the student, and I'm on my way back to my duty place.

Chasing targets, yes we do have targets to chase as well. You people must be having your jaws open, Prefects in school have targets to chase?? What world am I in?? We have a certain target to chase for in our personal notebook, which we had to hand in every friday, if we don't meet the targets, the group that is responsible for Demerit System will come looking for you, and which resulting something not really good happened, some Prefects actually fake up some names and offences to meet the targets, that happens when I'm no longer a Prefect so I don't know how the Board dealt with them. But er, what targets used for?? It only made Prefects or Bobbys a hard time.

Paperwork?? We do have, but not full with MG1-MGXX (I forgotten how many Manual of Guidance are there as now I only deal with MG11). Whenever something happened, which is something really bad happened including a fight, a fight with prefects etc, we will be spending some time in the prefect room, sitting at a corner and filling up Serious Offence Form, and will be handing the form to discipline teacher for further actions, and we still need to get the form back for photocopies and then hand the original form back to the discipline teacher, why don't photocopy it at the first place? Well, I can't because there is a column where the teacher need to fill in what he/she had done to the student and signature.

Now, enough of flashing back and had to get back to my work.

Links from PC David Copperfield that is enjoying his work in Canada and BBC.

Evidence Bag & Caffeine, do not mix.

Here are some pics of my lab session in examinations of samples collected and bagging them into evidence bags. I'll let the pics to do the talking this time. One of my sample is a piece of wood that had been suffered from various cuttings, strikings, grippings and pryings, and I have to place some Mikrosil on it, cast it and bag it. And it doesn't ends there like any other CSI you seen in telly, I still need to fill in the form in front of the bag, yes it's considered as paperwork, and I'm just another lad that got into the world of paperwork.

Extraction of Caffeine from tea bags!

Separation of caffeine from the tea sample using solvent extraction.
Then the photos skipped for a few steps, whoa la! Out came the Caffeine in 50ml of tea, quite a lot of amount of caffeine I drank each day huh?? Same as you actually. Fancy a cuppa??

Links from CSIequipment.com . You can get whatever stuffs you like to play as a CSI or SOCO at this website.

Home Office Scientific Development Branch

Recently I came across this news from the Home Office Scientific Development Branch, they are organising their yearly HOSDB Exhibition. But unfortunately it is only for visitors from the Police Service, Government Departments and Law Enforcement agencies, looking over and over again of the visitor registration form, dissapointingly I do not fall into neither one of it's categories. Just have to say it's a shame, I'm not a Police Special or PCSO, but just another wannabe.

Links from www.homeoffice.gov.uk .

Blues on two, I was walking today after lectures, and an rapid response ambulance with blue lights and siren was rushing through the traffic, when it came beside the road I was walking, the car in front of the ambulance was in the fast lane, suddenly stopped. If you can't drive a car and give way to the emergency response services, then don't drive and consider taking a bus or bicycle or walk, if the driver of the ambulance did not react fast enough and had made a mistake, I might be one of the consequences and lying on the bed in hospital or maybe mortuary right now waiting for post mortem.

Of ESDA and Ninhydrin on white paper

Just came back from an assessment of my newly learnt skills of Forensic test, I was given a piece of white paper as evidence, and asked me to recover the sample from it. Everybody like me had been in the lab for the past few weeks, will know what we can get from a piece of white paper, writing indentations and fingerprints is the most common.

So here it goes, i used White Crime-Lite and scanned through the surface, well I do saw some indentations but couldn't find any fingerprints. Then this comes to me, if I used Ninhydrin first to recover fingerprints (if there are any), I risked the writings destroyed by the solution, or maybe distorted the whole writing indentation, if I used ESDA to recover the indentations, I may risked the fingerprints destroyed due to "bulk" handling. Amino acids on paper, I really don't know the handling during ESDA will destroy the prints or not. Eventually, I used ESDA first as I totally had no idea where the prints are or they are present or not.

Anyway, had just finished "Perverting the Course of Justice", and a new book had just arrived and started to read it. About the book? Will talk about it in the next post.

Links from www.fosterfreeman.co.uk .

Two-nil to decency

Recently the plastic fuzz blogged about when she had finished one of her PCSO training and was on the way home on a bus. It is One-nil to decency.

Well, today when I was on a bus full of people on the way to my Uni, there was 3 young lads sitting on the upper rear deck, one was them was younger than 12 years old (i think), the other 2 was just around 15 or 16, there was like screaming, shouting, talking loudly, and totally pretend that the other 3o+ people on the upper deck is either invisible or does not present. It's quite irritating to me, I was hoping that there is really a police at that time to shut them up. But a 60+ man sitting next to them, warned them straight away, the conversation are more likely the same but he's not a police officer. The 3 young lads eventually shut up, and the passengers in front are smiling and nodding their heads, many of us turn our heads back and stare at those idiots. When the bus reaches my Uni and waits for us to disembark and continues it's journey, the man warns them not to creates any problems anymore and doesn't want to hear a sound from them, and he and his wife went to the lower deck. I smile and thanked the man.

At the comments of PCSO blog's, there is another PCSO said nobody actually do anything when similar things happen. When this incident happen in the bus today, I was thinking, if I went to intervene, what will happen? Youngsters these days carries knifes with them, maybe because he is an old man and they might give some "respect" to him, but I'm just another young lad, I'm no good to anobody dead or injured. Youngsters carries knife not because police is useless in unable to arrest them and charged them, but it's just their so-called "cool".

Until now, I'm still amazed on the man, Thank You. So it's considered Two-nil to decency, right?