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Walk Of Life

by | 10th, July 2006

YOU can tell a lot about someone by the way they walk.

Lifting your legs in the manner of a goose suggests you are either an England football fan having ‘a laugh’ in Nuremburg or a Nazi. Or both.

Striding about the office and saying you are from the Ministry of Silly Walks marks you out as a person of negligible intelligence and even less natural humour. You can count yourself fortunate that one of the goose steppers hasn’t taken you outside and had you shot.

And now calculating what a person’s walk says about them is an exact science. The Times reports that British scientists, backed by the Ministry of Defence to the sum of £500,000, are producing the “automatic gait recognition”, system.

Once designed and perfected, police will be able to look at CCTV footage of suspects walking and decide whether he or she is guilty, innocent or is desperate need of the toilet.

Scientists like Mark Nixon, of Southampton University, think a person’s walk is as distinctive as their DNA or fingerprints. Each of us has an innate walking “style”.

Says he: “Gait recognition could have significant implications for police. In the James Bulger case you could see the boys walking away but not their faces.”

He goes on: “It would have been a pipe dream ten years ago but now computers are faster and memory is a lot cheaper to buy.”

So you have been warmed. And any villain attempting to walk from the scene of the crime should try to disguise not just their face but their walk, too.

And run.



Posted: 10th, July 2006 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink