MarshalPlan on the Web

After much struggle, I have succeeded in making MarshalPlan -- my evidence marshaling software --, I have succeeded in making this software available for your viewing pleasure in your browser. (But Chrome will not work for some reason. Firefox is a sure bet. Internet Explorer? I don't know.)

Click here to see how this gizmo works.

This software is not technically snazzy. It is technically crude. (Some buttons [links] don't even work. But most of them do.) But though technically crude, MarshalPlan is theoretically sophisticated. And it is, in principle, very useful to folks such as trial lawyers and investigators. Or so I think.

This software has had a long gestation period and it has gone through many iterations. One person who played a very large part in the development of the concept -- and, to some extent, the technology -- of MarshalPlan was David A. Schum. But I don't know if David wants to take any credit or blame for the thing I have managed to cobble together over a weekend -- and over many years.

Comments are very welcome.

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The dynamic evidence page

It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.

Looking Backward at the Birth of a New Science of Evidence

P. Tillers, Webs of Things in the Mind: A New Science of Evidence (essay reviewing work of David Schum), 87 Michigan Law Review 1225 (1989):

[snip, snip]

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The dynamic evidence page

It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.

A Forty Years War

See Roger C. Park, Hastings College of the Law; Peter Tillers, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law; Frederick Crawford Moss (emeritus); D. Michael Risinger, Seton Hall University School of Law; David H. Kaye, The Pennsylvania State University; Ronald J. Allen, Northwestern University Law School; Samuel R. Gross, University of Michigan Law School; Bruce L. Hay, Harvard Law School; Michael S. Pardo, University of Alabama School of Law & Paul F. Kirgis, St. John's University School of Law Bayes Wars Redivivus - An Exchange

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The dynamic evidence page

It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.

New research on the mathematical analysis of fingerprint evidence

Sindya N. Bhanoo, Calculating the Rarity of a Fingerprint NYTimes (December 10, 2010):

Researchers have found a way to mathematically calculate the rarity of a fingerprint.

Although fingerprints are unique to every individual, crime scene prints are usually incomplete patterns taken off doorknobs or glass.

Knowing the rarity of a partial print could be useful to forensic scientists who are trying to determine how valuable a fingerprint is as evidence, said Sargur Srihari, a computer scientist at the University at Buffalo who is leading the research.

... Dr. Srihari and his graduate student Chang Su say they have done the same for fingerprints [used the rarity of fingerprints to evaluate fingerprint evidence].

“It’s purely mathematical,” Dr. Srihari said. “We’re simply saying, ‘We just found something that is unusual, and that makes it an important piece of evidence.’ ”

To do the research, the scientists defined fingerprints as a series of points, composed of the endings of ridges and ridge bifurcations.

They then pulled from a database of 4,000 fingerprints kept on file at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and created a computer system that can read fingerprint patterns. Based on a print’s points, the system can mathematically determine its rarity.

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The research was presented this week in Vancouver, British Columbia, at the annual Neural Information Processing Systems conference.

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The dynamic evidence page

It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.