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FORDISC


Before ForDisc, many anthropologists based their studies off of museum skeletal collections such as the Hamann-Todd collection that is housed at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Terry collection housed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. These museum collections house skeletal remains that were amassed from 50 to 100 years ago. Due to the age of these collections, their use in a medico-legal context did not produce accurate determination of the biological profile. ForDisc was forensic anthropologists solution to this problem, and allowed for classification when some measurements are not available.

ForDisc, an interactive discriminant functions program created by Stephen Ousley and Richard Jantz, is widely used by forensic anthropologists to assist in the creation of a decedent's biological profile when only parts of the cranium are available. The use of discriminant function analysis in this program allows the researcher to sort individuals into specific groups that are defined by certain criteria. In this program discriminate function analysis "analyzes specific groups with known membership in discrete categories such as ancestry, language, sex, tribe or ancestry, and provides a basis for the classification of new individuals with unknown group membership." The program compares potential profiles to data contained in a database of skeletal measurements of modern humans.

Using ForDisc, a decedent’s biological profile can be created based on measurements from various areas of bones, along with information about the person's age, height, race, and illnesses. For ancestry ForDisc uses standard anthropometric measurements including maximum length, maximum breadth, bi-zygomatic breadth, orbital breadth and height, maximum alveolar breadth and width, minimum frontal breadth, basion-bregma, basion-prosthion, cranial base length, bi-auricular breadth, upper facial height and breadth, foramen magnum breadth and length, frontal chord, parietal chord, occipital chord, nasal height and breadth, bi-orbital breadth, inter orbital breadth, and mastoid length.

The data behind this software largely originated from the Forensic Data Bank, which is contributed to by the University of Tennessee and other contributing institutions. The Forensic Data Bank was created in 1986, through the use of a National Institute of Justice grant, and has gathered over 3400 cases.The Forensic Data Bank is a currently ongoing effort to record information about modern populations, primarily from forensic cases.


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