CLPEX Chat Board

Thought this recently published article might be of interest to everyone....

Forensic Comparison and Matching of Fingerprints: Using Quantitative Image Measures for Estimating Error Rates through Understanding and Predicting Difficulty
Authors: Philip J. Kellman, Jennifer L. Mnookin, Gennady Erlikhman, Patrick Garrigan, Tandra Ghose, Everett Mettler, David Charlton, Itiel E. Dror

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Ad ... ne.0094617
If this link does not work - Google - PLOS ONE fingerprint comparison

I must admit I have not read the whole article. It hurt my head too much. Among early inaccuracies I found are these:

The authors quote David Ashbaugh thusly:

ACE-V approach: Analysis, Comparison, Evaluation, and Validation

And all this time I thought I was supposed to have my conclusions "verified." Shame on me!

The authors educate their defense attorney friends in what latent print examiners look for:

Cores can be classified into a limited number of typical patterns such as left- and rightward loops, whorls, tented-arches and arches.

After all these years, I have had the whole pattern thing wrong. Damn!

That was where I quit reading. If these learned psychologists cannot even get those simple details right, how can I put any faith in deeper issues I don't understand?

All these powerful new political task forces and committees will no doubt read this and other articles like it by psychologists and use what they learn to tell us how to do our job. It's time for me to retire when drivel like this is deemed to be an accurate description of what we do and directs those who make fundamental decisions regarding the accuracy of our work.

Maybe somebody should read this whole thing and calculate an error rate for these critics. I daresay it will be much greater than the error rate of latent print examiners anywhere!

Hi Tazman

Too bad you quit when you did. I absolutely LOVED "Figure 2," an inked print with a classic plain vanilla right thumb having an ulnar loop (right slope), labelled as follows:

Figure 2. Various image features commonly identified by expert examiners.

Red circles indicate minutiae (ridge bifurcations or endings); blue circles indicate pores (they appear as small white dots along a ridge); the yellow square indicates the delta; the green rectangle indicates the core, in this case a leftward loop.

Great reading. Too bad the uneducated might take it seriously, as you imply.

But on the other hand, having read the article, I would enjoy a cross examination by opposing counsel who took the article as correct in all aspects.

Cheers,
Pat

Did anyone here participate in the experiment?

I have some follow up questions if yes. I can ask online or offline.

g.