New Research Study - participants needed!

[Heidi_Eldridge]

For those who haven't heard, Christophe Champod and I are conducting an NIJ-funded study to establish a discipline-wide error rate estimate for PALM print comparisons. This study is modeled after the FBI/Noblis black box study, but where that study focused on fingerprint (distal phalange) impressions, this one will deal exclusively with palms.

We are seeking participants for our study! If you are interested, please read the informational letter below that answers most questions people have. If you have more specific questions, or would like to sign up, please send an email to LPResearch@rti.org. Your identity will be held confidential and will not be disclosed to the researchers.

Thank you for your attention!
Heidi Eldridge

Dear colleague:

Following is an informational letter to address the most common questions about our study in progress to establish an error rate estimate for palm print comparisons.

The study will be done using a web-based interface, which you will access using a username and password that we will provide. This username will protect your confidentiality as you will communicate using this email address through an intermediary so that the researchers will never know who the usernames belong to. There will also be a background survey that covers demographics, experience, and agency policy before you begin.

Latent print examiners and latent print examiner trainees are eligible to participate. International participants are welcome. Please tell your friends and colleagues.

The study will be comprised of 75 palm comparisons, which will range between no value, very easy, and very challenging. You will have approximately 2 months to complete the trials and you will be able to save your work and come back at any time, so you can do a few comparisons here and there as is convenient for you. Based on the FBI/Noblis study (which had 100 difficult comparisons of distal phalanges and claimed an 8-hour approximate completion time), we are estimating that it will take 8-10 hours total to complete the trials.

We will be accepting participants on a rolling basis and will continue to collect data through the end of the calendar year. For this reason, people who sign up after November 1 will have less than 2 months in which to complete the study.

If you would like to participate, please reply to LPResearch@rti.org and we will send you a username and instructions to get started. If you work at one of the laboratories that donated the marks for the study, please notify us of which one it was when you sign up, so we can assign you a test set that does not include images from your own lab.

[ER]

This is critical and important research that hugely benefits the community. I highly recommend that you sign up soon and start working on these comparisons. They are interesting and fun (as all comparisons are). Start early and tackle 2-3 each day as part of your normal casework so that you have plenty of time to finish by the study deadline.

You'll be using the results from this study for the rest of your career in court. It's even better when you can say that you were one of the participants.