Forensic Apps for First Responders

Law Enforcement Training and Resource Group LLC., (www.letrg.com) has come out with a new suite of applications for all smart phones. The suite is built around the needs of the first responder’s response to services calls. This suite is available for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry smart phones and should be used with those phones with at least a 5 megapixel camera (for best results). The suite of more than a dozen different applications comes complete. The applications are divided into: tools, calculators, and evidence. Tools include a caliper, level (in degrees and percentage of slope), audio officer notes, field contact report, DOA notes, and References files. The three calculators included are Skid Mark Calculator (for minimum speed, Yaw, and friction factor), pictorial blood spatter trajectory calculator, and a pictorial digital dimension calculator. The evidence applications include two for photos (pre-scaled and scaled photo sets),...

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Big Tokyo earthquake likely 'within the next few years'

The chance of a big earthquake hitting the Japanese capital in the next few years is much greater than official predictions suggest, researchers say. The team, from the University of Tokyo, said there was a 75% probability that a magnitude seven quake would strike the region in the next four years. The government says the chances of such an event are 70% in the next 30 years. The warning comes less than a year after a massive earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan's north-eastern coast. The last time Tokyo was hit by a big earthquake was in 1923, when a 7.9 magnitude quake killed more than 100,000 people, many of them in fires. Researchers at the University of Tokyo's earthquake research institute based their figures on data from the growing number of tremors in the capital since the 11 March 2011 quake. They say that compared with normal years, there has been a five-fold increase in the number of quakes in the Tokyo metropolitan...

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