The dynamic evidence page
It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.
Thursday, August 04, 2011
Computable Document Format in the Courtroom or the Law School Classroom?
I have written now and then about the possibility of using visual aids and crutches to make probabilistic evidence more intelligible to judges, lawyers, law teachers, law students, and jurors. I see that Wolfram has now created a type of document called computable document format. These are (clever!) interactive documents that allow the reader, or user, to manipulate mathematical relationships, expressions, equations, and the like. The mathematical and quantitative relationships etc. are depicted and manipulated visually. I wonder if CDFs might be used to enlighten or educate non-mathematicians. The CDF documents I have sampled are aimed mostly or exclusively at mathematicians and scientists: The accompanying prose is not easy to follow. But I wonder if the accompanying explanatory prose might sometimes be "dumbed down" (without distortion) for non-scientists and non-mathematicians.
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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.
The dynamic evidence page
It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.
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2 comments:
I encountered your blog as a result of googling "computable document format" "paper submission" (5 hits) to see if any journal was accepting papers submitted in cdf format. So far, apparently, none. But why restrict your question to the use of changing images computable in Mathematica? There certainly exist other forms of computed animated images that could maybe be used in a courtroom and certainly have been are are being used in classrooms. We often had animated filmstrips shown to us in schoolrooms in the 1950s. Today, YouTube videos are used in many classrooms. Could an animation be introduced as evidence in a courtroom to prove or disprove a reconstruction of an event (accident, crime, etc.)?
Bill, Animations of various kinds have been admitted in trials for quite a while now. They must be relevant, not unduly prejudicial, etc., but if hurdles such as this are satisfied, computer-generated animations are admissible. Law school academics are far behind the trial lawyers in this respect; most Evidence teachers, alas, pay little attention to the use of moving visual images in trials. I think this is most unfortunate. As you surely know, visual images are often the most efficient way -- and sometimes perhaps the only effective way -- to convey important information and concepts.
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