| MatC
|
| 285614. Wed Feb 27, 2008 5:47 am |
 |
|
Two million children in Britain have been fingerprinted in the last ten years, mostly for access to school libraries, and often without their parents’ knowledge.
S: Morning Star, 15 Dec 07 |
|
|
|
 |
| Flash
|
| 285890. Wed Feb 27, 2008 11:57 am |
|
|
| There's a school of thought that says that fingerprints aren't as reliable a form of ID as they're supposed to be, isn't there? |
|
|
|
|
| MatC
|
| 285915. Wed Feb 27, 2008 12:19 pm |
|
|
| Yes, I've got a couple of minor clippings on that, which I will dig out tomorrow. |
|
|
|
|
| eggshaped
|
| 286244. Thu Feb 28, 2008 5:57 am |
|
|
| Quote: | | No one disputes that fingerprinting is a valuable and generally reliable police tool, but despite more than a century of use, fingerprinting has never been scientifically validated. |
s: New Scientist, 19 September 2005
| Quote: | | FINGERPRINTS can never be 100% accurate and should not be automatically accepted by juries as proof of guilt, one of Britain's highestranking police officers has admitted. |
s: Sunday Herald 8 July 2001
| Quote: | | But a [2005] study suggests there could be a thousand or more unknown [fingerprint] identification errors a year in the United States. |
http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/050913_fingerprint_mistakes.html |
|
|
|
|
| eggshaped
|
| 286249. Thu Feb 28, 2008 6:00 am |
|
|
Link to FORENSICS (along with what I'm about to post on the "false memory" thread).
Also the fact that one can beat a DNA test by having a bone marrow transplant. |
|
|
|
|
| dr.bob
|
| 286293. Thu Feb 28, 2008 6:26 am |
|
|
| eggshaped wrote: | | Also the fact that one can beat a DNA test by having a bone marrow transplant. |
Pretty extreme way to go about it. A bit tricky to convince your local hospital you need a bone marrow transplant as well, I'd've thought :)
DNA tests are a brilliant example of something that can be made to appear much more reliable than it actually is by asking the right questions.
Imagine there are 6 billion people in the world, among which 7 people have the "same DNA", by which I mean not that they are genetically identical, but that a DNA test would produce the same results (since a DNA test doesn't examine every single base pair, two people with different DNA could conceivably produce the same result).
If you ask the question "Assuming the defendant is innocent, what are the chances of finding that DNA at the crime scene?" then the answer is "1 in a billion" (the defendant wasn't there, but of the other people who might have been there, 6 others would produce the same DNA result, while the other 6 billion (well, 5,999,999,993 if you want to be picky) would produce a different DNA result). This "1 in a billion chance that the guy is really innocent" figure is the kind of thing normally released to the press.
However, looking at it the other way, if you ask "given that we found this DNA result at the scene, what are the odds that the defendant is guilty?" then the answer to that is "1 in 7." A 14.2% chance of being actually guilty suddenly doesn't sound nearly as cut-and-dry as is normally portrayed.
This is why (certainly this used to be the case, and I hope it still is) DNA evidence alone is not enough to convict someone. |
|
|
|
|
| MatC
|
| 286386. Thu Feb 28, 2008 7:24 am |
|
|
| Lots of stuff here http://www.innocent.org.uk/misc/fingerprints.html about the non-infallibility of fingerprint evidence, mostly arising out of the extraordinary case of a Strathclyde DC whose thumb print was identified at the scene of a murder. She always maintained that she had never been in the house in question - an insistence which so outraged her colleagues (who knew for a fact that fingerprints can never be wrong) that she was put on trial for perjury. The police ended up paying her large damages. |
|
|
|
|
| Flash
|
| 286403. Thu Feb 28, 2008 7:34 am |
|
|
| I had to be fingerprinted to get my licence to work in financial services in the US, and they initially turned my application down because they matched my prints to some jailbird in America. They relented when I supplied evidence that I wasn't this bloke and then I used the licence to rob everybody blind, haha. Hopefully the jailbird has now had his parole application turned down because they think he's me. |
|
|
|
|
| Molly Cule
|
|
|
|
|
| eggshaped
|
|
|
|
|
| eggshaped
|
| 288144. Sat Mar 01, 2008 9:48 am |
|
|
| Does everyone already know that you don't have muscles in your fingers? |
|
|
|
|
| MatC
|
| 288159. Sat Mar 01, 2008 10:59 am |
|
|
| That's new to me, egg. How does that work, then? |
|
|
|
|
| Flash
|
| 288182. Sat Mar 01, 2008 12:24 pm |
|
|
| I didn't know that either. Is that why I can't play the guitar? |
|
|
|
|
| eggshaped
|
| 288576. Sun Mar 02, 2008 5:02 am |
|
|
| Oh good, I tried it on Ms Eggshaped and she seemed to think that everyone knew. More to follow... |
|
|
|
|
| dr.bob
|
| 289037. Mon Mar 03, 2008 5:27 am |
|
|
<raises hand>
Oooh. Oooh. Me sir!! I knew.
AIUI all the muscles for controlling your fingers are located in the forearm. Try drumming your fingers (preferably in an exaggerated fashion) and watch the skin on your forearm ripple like one of those horror scenes in a sci-fi movie.
The only thing related to movement you'll actually find in your fingers are the tendons which transmit the motive power of the muscles.
IIRC, the only muscle in your hand is the one to control your thumb, which is that fat, blobby bit at the base of your thumb. Though I'm not a medic, so I could be wrong about that. |
|
|
|
|
