I've been asked six times now to help people out in making their CVs better or helping them produce their first CV since leaving university. I quite enjoy doing it and hope my suggestions help people get further in the interview process.

Read full article

http://voteforpolicies.org.uk/

Read full article

In preparation for writing a master thesis we have to write a 3000 word dissertation plan, with at least 8 relevant papers for the literature review. My 4^th your honours project didn't really involve much of a literature review, so the prospect of organising papers and knowing which bits are important is a bit of a daunting task. I spent a long time going through Wikipedia's list of reference managament software hoping to find something useful. Most of them are either not free, for Linux or Mac only or are rather shoddy.  A couple looked promising but ended up just being a sort of address book for PDFs where you had to manually enter in all the data. I was all ready to give up - until I found Mendeley.

Read full article

I was watching a TV show yesterday evening called History of Now - The Story of the Noughties (BBC2 10pm) which mentioned a piece of software called Mosaic invented in the 2000s. Mosaic is a product from Experian that classifies the entire country into 11 main groups of people, with 61 subgroups, and is based primarily on where people live (i.e postcodes). The system helps the media, politicians and shops target certain products/messages at certain groups of people. During elections, for example, it’s vital to know where the undecided voters live and what category they fall into so politicians can target campaigns effectively. Online retailers need to know the best postcode areas to send their catalogues to get maximum profit and supermarkets need to know whether to sell more bumper family packs or microwave meals for 1.

Read full article

Happy New Year! I had my one and only exam for last semester yesterday – Forensic Science Theory 1. It went ok, I definitely think I passed. The exam has very little theory in it compared to previous years surprisingly: no chemical presumptive tests or questions about microscopes or Bayes Theory and likelihood ratios. The questions were also fairly essay-like, i.e. all the marks for answering one question rather than in parts so I really can’t tell if I did alright or very well.

Read full article

This year is my first year spending Christmas the traditional UK way, instead of the Belgian way. In Belgium (or at least in my family) Christmas eve is far more important than Christmas day – which is seen as the more sombre religious day and/or the 8 hour 6-course meal meal with the whole family. I have always opened my presents on Christmas eve at 6pm, followed by a beef fondue and lots of Baileys, port, brandy and whisky.

Read full article

I asked one of my lecturers about doing text visualisation as my masters thesis and he said it sounded great, even emailed me a paper to read! I don't have an exact question yet, but it'll be something along the lines of visualising web browser history. I'm quite excited about it weeee! I'll have to find out from actual forensic investigators how they use browser history and what they search for to see what is best visualised. Might be able to extend it to general log files, depends on what I find out! The result would hopefully be to produce a program (probably a web app with fancy ajax) that visualises the output of Pasco/WebHistorian etc effectively.

Read full article

Ok so it was yesterday, but I only got my parents present in the post today, and OMG my mother is sometimes a genius. She either in this case knows me well, or had a freak moment of buying something truly amazing: behold, the most garish, glittery, pink poodle Christmas decoration in the world!!

Read full article

I am currently reading Digital Evidence and Computer Crime by Eoghan Casey and chapter three - "Technology and Law" has some really interesting cases which really make you think about what is 'privacy'. The main act that gives a right to privacy in the US is the Constitution’s 4th Amendment which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. The couple of cases below (from the book) are all based in the US that affected the law and the 4th Amendment. I know this doesn’t apply in the UK but it makes for an interesting debate!

Read full article

When I first looked at my timetable I thought I'd be in from 10am to 5pm every day, rarely having breaks other than for lunch.  All my classes were in 2 hour blocks with some labs scheduled for 3 hours. It looked like a tough schedule, with little time for private study and coursework – especially since 4 out of 5 of the courses this term are 100% coursework based.

Read full article

Strathclyde have adopted an attendance register for every class and students may get penalised for not attending enough classes. My fellow classmates tell me this also happened in their undergrad universities. Is this normal? Is Edinburgh University weird to allow students completely free choice whether they attend lectures?

Read full article

Number of CSI mentions: 1

Read full article

I met Derren once at the Spiderman 2 premiere in 2004 where he signed my autograph book. He is the only celebrity who didn't just scribble a random scrawl on the paper, instead asked my name and wrote, "Dear Sarah, best wishes, Derren Brown X". He seemed genuinely touched by people screaming his name all over the place, but maybe his wonderful charm was all just an elaborate illusion. Maybe it's a blank piece of paper in my autograph book and I've been under his hypnotic spell ever since!

Read full article

I broke the habit of 3 years by going to Asda today instead of Sainsbury's. Sainsburys and Waitrose are my nearest large stores and I've grown very accustomed to fine goods and well laid out aisles. However Edinburgh has an Asda superstore only 15 minutes further away, and since I wasn't doing anything today I thought I'd pop in and do my shopping there for today. After all, they put crème patisserie in their mille feuilles, not cream.

Read full article

I have redesigned lowmanio.co.uk to be more bloggy, and hopefully I shall actually keep up with my blog this time. I got a little over enthusiastic with blog posts as you can see...I've already blogged 6 times! The topics I will blog about are in the categories to your right. I am starting a masters in Forensics Informatics in September, so will post anything interesting I learn here. I'm also really interested in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and general art and design, and computers in general! Hobbies wise, I own two rabbits called Pixel and Nybble and I love to cook. Both of these will get mentions - hopefully not at the same time (although rabbit meat is delicious). I have also moved my bunny blog which used to live at http://rabbits.lowmanio.co.uk to here.

Read full article

Yesterday I bought my first proper laptop. I have had 2 laptops in the past, one I got on eBay for £90 that ran Windows 98, came with 64MB of RAM and weighed 6 kg, for the purposes of playing DOS games when I was travelling on the train to and from London. It was nicknamed the brick or the craptop. That became a pain and so I bought an Ultra-Mobile PC on eBay for £300 (RRP £900) as I didn't need a full scale laptop at the time (2 years ago). This was the size of a netbook, with a 10inch screen and no keyboard ( did come with a tiny USB keyboard though) - just a touchpad display and some buttons at the side. It came in handy when I needed to make some graphics and had some awesome touch screen games. Again this became annoying as it was just too small to do general computing whilst travelling. I sold the brick for £21 last week, and will eventually get round to selling my UMPC.

Read full article