Regarding sex estimation on human skeletal remains, the current trend in forensic anthropology is towards creating national standards, as population-specificity of discriminant functions is now a known fact. Also, over the last period of time, discriminant function analysis of osteometric data has become the method of choice in forensic anthropology, as it renders high accuracy results, superior to those obtained by visual shape assessment or direct metric comparison. We have conducted a study on 200 adult crania (100 males, 100 females) from a modern Romanian population sample (Rainer collection, Bucharest). Based on 11 cranial measurements, we have calculated population-specific discriminant functions for intact crania, cranial vault and facial region measurements, as well as single-variable DF. The results point to a pronounced craniometric sexual dimorphism in Romanian population, similar to other European populations: sexing accuracies of 88% on intact crania, 81% on cranial vault measurements and 83.5% on facial measurements respectively, with 83.5% correctly assigned by facial breadth alone discriminant function. Discussions on the results, as well as comparisons with similar studies are presented below.
In a forensic anthropology context, the mandible represents a reliable skeletal element with increased resistance to environmental factors. Sexual dimorphism assessment is most accurately obtained on population-specific computed discriminant functions. A previous study on 100 Romanian population mandibles has provided a discriminant function with an accuracy of 86% based on 7 measurements. The main purpose of the present study is to evaluate whether or not an increase in the sample number (200 mandibles) can produce a different discriminant function that will allow similar accuracy rates, but with fewer measurements. We have used 3 measurements (chin height, bigonial width and bicondylar breadth) that provided a discriminant function with an overall accuracy of determination of 84%, equal for male and female groups. The most dimorphic singular measurement was bigonial width, which provided a discriminant function with 80.5% accuracy when used alone. We concluded that a larger study sample allows similar accuracies of sex determination with fewer measurements, which in turn can improve the assessment of sexual dimorphism by using a time-efficient method.
Road accidents are often caused by an accumulation of elements which belong largely to four major classes of conditions: the human factor, infrastructure, vehicles and weather conditions. In Romania the number of fatal road accidents per capita is among the highest in Europe. In order to limit the number of directly fatal road accidents, it is essential to know the contributing factors that lead to their increase. The purpose of this study is to synthetically analyze the conditions related to human and environmental factors that contribute to directly fatal road accidents on a representative sample of cases. Our study has identified as major risk factors for fatal road accidents: male gender, age between 30 and 39 years old, low educational level, darkness, inattention, excessive speed while driving. Therefore the main risk factors for fatal road accidents are similar to those in other countries. The large number of cases (positioning us on the first three places in the EU, together with Lithuania and Croatia) may be decreased by implementing protective measures similar to those in other EU countries, which have been shown to significantly decrease the number of fatal road accidents.
Death in custody is defined as a death taking place in the custody of the police, prison service, involuntary patients in psychiatric institutions or in the custody of other authorities; independent of the cause or manner of death.. In this article we wanted to analyze the main features of the death in custody in Romania. The study was conducted using data obtained from the Romanian National Penitentiary Administration from 2003 to 2008; data was included in, and analyzed using the Microsoft Excel 2007 software. The main results we have obtained are (1) the medium number of prisoners, mortality and morbidity have declined from 2003 to 2008, whilst the mortality and morbidity rates remained almost constant. By analyzing the causes of death we identified a significant decrease in the number of non-violent deaths, whilst the number of violent deaths remained almost constant. The most frequent non-lethal pathologies were respiratory, gastrointestinal and dermatological whilst the most frequently lethal pathologies were cardiovascular and neoplastic. A violent manner of death was identified in a minority of cases, and was usually represented by suicides (by hanging). In conclusion, the matter of death in penitentiaries in Romania is mostly non-violent, with cardiovascular and neoplastic disorders being the most frequent lethal pathologies. The relative number of violent deaths has increased in the last years, suggesting the need for more strict rules and regulations.
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