Mark Leipnik (PhD, 1995) is a Professor of Geography and Geology at Sam Houston State University who specializes in applications of GIS in environmental and water resource management, law enforcement, marketing, and the oil and gas industries, as well as geodemographics and GIS production and visualization. He also has a knack for employing highly unusual, not to mention productive, teaching methods. But let Professor Leipnik speak for himself:
I do a field studies class that concentrates on GPS but has a series of application areas including forestry, surveying, hydrology, soil science, and urban planning. Furthermore, as this university has the largest criminal justice program in the USA, I also have 2 weeks of law enforcement-related lectures and fieldwork, one on transportation planning and auto accident issues which includes the field sobriety test, etc. and another on crime scene investigation that has two parts: one a presentation by a homicide expert and the other a forensic anthropology and GPR demo. The homicide expert does finger printing, ballistics, blood stain, fiber evidence, and footprint casts and has a lot of pictures of crime scenes he has worked over several decades. Anyway, it is interesting. I try to have subject matter experts cover the surveying and forestry, although I do the soils module myself; unfortunately, the university-owned pasture that had 5 soil orders on it is now a golf course, so I have to visit 3 other sites to find 4 soil orders represented.
For 15 years, I have been giving every student a GPS unit in my field studies class and recently have been having them geocache using the units. In my geospatial technologies class for the last 5 years I have been giving each student a vehicle navigation system, and they have to find 50 errors in the data of various types. I also do a few interesting things in conjunction with law enforcement applications like having a crime scene officer make a presentation for the last 15 years; currently, I have a homicide detective come in who was a crime scene officer since he deals with a wider range of issues.
For 15 years, I have annually subjected myself to a field sobriety test (FST) as part of a field studies module where we see demonstrations of laser and radar speed enforcement and visit locations of fatal vehicle accidents. For the FST, I ingest 130 ml of 100 proof vodka from a graduated cylinder on an empty stomach (in a single swallow) in order to achieve about a 0.12 blood alcohol content (50% above the legal limit). Then, after about 25 minutes during which class gets to see radar and laser gun demonstrations, I undergo the test with a careful explanation of the various steps and scoring (I usually fail all 4 major parts and 12 of 13 components) – I do correctly follow directions by the officer who tends to be the most experienced traffic officer in the local police department.
I have also included in the last two years a demonstration of ground penetrating radar (GPR). Our university has a “body farm” where corpses are allowed to decompose for studies of forensic entomology and to provide bones for anthropology studies. Three bodies are now at the facility, buried at 1.5, 2.5 and 3.5 meters. We use the GPR pulled by groups of students over the area of the burials to detect the number and depth of bodies. Unlike conventional burials, these bodies are not in coffins. We are about to add three more wrapped in materials used in disposal of bodies after homicides, probably in rugs, sheets, and plastic bags, although a large cooler is an option.
The body farm is a little odd since there are usually four to six bodies on the surface in various states of decay. The facility is about ½ acre, so the students who do not want to get too close to dead bodies tend to move to the other corner of the facility. However, there is a junked car over there which probably will soon have a body in the trunk – so we will see what happens this spring. I just learned today that the shallowest body had the chest cavity fall in, so there is now a hole above it, and the GPR cart could get stuck there. So, I need to decide if we should add some more soil—it makes the potential for research on the GPR signature changes in buried bodies harder but the demonstration easier – sort of a conundrum…
I was concerned originally that that might happen, so, in response to the very odd email from the director, “how deep do you want your bodies buried?” I opted for different depths, but not too deep, insofar as shallow graves are exactly that – plus, the GPR signal attenuates. Anyway I think this is the only field studies class doing either type of activity, and the use of the vehicle navigation system is somewhat innovative, especially the emphasis on errors and understanding the sources of those errors. The good thing is that many rural areas in East Texas have very poor data in Navteq or Teleatlas (now Tom Tom data sets).
