Proposed Uniform Language for Forensic Serology

The second document listed in the announcement of "Uniform Language" (UL) documents for forensic science is the “ Proposed Unifor...

What Is a "Conservative" Method in Forensic Statistics?

Statistical hypothesis testing involves a "null hypothesis" against an "alternative hypothesis." If data are not well ou...

Beyond the Higgs Boson: The “Prosecutor’s Fallacy” Does Not Explain Why Experimenters Are Cautious About Announcing New Discoveries

A posting of July 6, 2012, " The Probability that the Higgs Boson Has Been Discovered ,"  mentioned the transposition of a p-value...

Latent Fingerprint Identification in Flux?

Two recent articles suggest that seeds of change are taking root in the field of latent fingerprint identification. I. The Emerging Paradigm...

Marching Toward Improved Latent Fingerprint Testimony at the Army's Defense Forensic Science Center

The U.S. Army’s Defense Forensic Science Center (DFSC) has announced a change in its practice of reporting a positive association between a...

Can Forensic Pattern Matching Be Validated?

An article in the latest issue of the International Statistical Review raises (once again) fundamental questions for forensic scientists: ...

SWGDAM Guidelines on "Probabilistic Genotyping Systems" (Part 1)

In June, the Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods (SWGDAM), approved new “Guidelines for the Validation of Probabilistic Genotyp...

First NIST OSAC Forensic Science Standards Up for Public Comment

One of the responses to the 2009 NRC report on forensic science was the creation last year of an Organization of Scientific Area Committees ...

A Probability for Dog DNA

A pet peeve of many statisticians is the transposition fallacy—misconstruing the probability of the data given the hypothesis as the probabi...

Bayes in Our Times

Today's New York Times has an article on "a once obscure field known as Bayesian statistics." 1 / It is an informative piece...

Hazard Ratios and Heart Failure

Today’s big news in medicine is a new drug, designated LCZ696 by its manufacturer, Novartis. According to the New York Times , LCZ696 “has s...

Judge Richard Posner on DNA Evidence: Missing the Trees for the Forest?

In the cornucopia of court opinions, errors in the description of statistical concepts are a dime a dozen. Most never see the light of day. ...