Related papers: Response to the Letter to the Editor
The assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) traumatized the nation. In this paper we show that evidence used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed. This paper discusses new compositional analyses of bullets…
Occasionally during the course of the human learning experience we are faced with an anomaly. An aberration of sorts, which try as we might, defies appropriate classification. The recent paper by Spiegelman et al.--Chemical and forensic…
Since the National Academy of Sciences released their report outlining paths for improving reliability, standards, and policies in the forensic sciences NAS (2009), there has been heightened interest in evaluating and improving the…
Forensic firearms identification, the determination by a trained firearms examiner as to whether or not bullets or cartridges came from a common weapon, has long been a mainstay in the criminal courts. Reliability of forensic firearms…
Triggered by a recent interesting New Scientist article on the too frequent incorrect use of probabilistic evidence in courts, I introduce the basic concepts of probabilistic inference with a toy model, and discuss several important issues…
"After reading two different crime stories, an artificial intelligence concludes that in both stories the police has found the murderer just by random." -- To what extend and under which assumptions this is a description of a realistic…
We believe that "all men are created equal". With the rise of the police shootings reported by media, more people in the U.S. think that police use excessive force during law enforcement, especially to a specific group of people. We want to…
Bullets are fired, one per second, with independent speeds sampled uniformly from a discrete set. Collisions result in mutual annihilation. We show that the second fastest bullet survives with positive probability, while a slowest bullet…
When both slits of the double slit experiment are open, closing one paradoxically increases the detection rate at some points on the detection screen. Feynman famously warned that temptation to "understand" such a puzzling feature only…
The finite colliding bullets problem is the following simple problem: consider a gun, whose barrel remains in a fixed direction; let $(V_i)_{1\le i\le n}$ be an i.i.d.\ family of random variables with uniform distribution on $[0,1]$; shoot…
We reply to the Comment made in arXiv:1107.4435v1 [quant-ph] (Phys. Lett. A \textbf{374} (2010) 1097) by noting some erroneous considerations therein resulting in a misleading view of the quantum key distribution protocol in question. We…
The Doomsday Argument (DA) has sparked a variety of opinions. Here I address a key question posed by F. Simpson (2016) that confronts the views of DA proponents and those who, like me, oppose the DA. I agree that typical locations within a…
Whether the fate of our species can be forecast from its past has been the topic of considerable controversy. One refutation of the so-called Doomsday Argument is based on the premise that we are more likely to exist in a universe…
I consider the "Quantum Bayesian" view of quantum theory as expounded in a 2006 paper of Caves, Fuchs, and Schack. I argue that one can accept a generally personalist, decision-theoretic view of probability, including probability as…
The plausibility of uncommon events and miracles based on testimony of such an event has been much discussed. When analyzing the probabilities involved, it has mostly been assumed that the common events can be taken as data in the…
Here I argue that the much-discussed Doomsday Argument (DA) has two flaws. Its mathematical flaw stems from applying frequentist probability or faulty Bayesian inference. Its conceptual flaw is assuming that Copernican uniformity applies to…
In this article we provide a rebuttal against the possible perception that a single number, such as the Likelihood Ratio, can provide an objective, authoritative or definitive weight of evidence. We also illustrate the extent to which…
Following recent shootings in the USA, a debate has erupted, one side favoring stricter gun control, the other promoting protection through more weapons. We provide a scientific foundation to inform this debate, based on mathematical,…
I proposed (8, 1, 3) that p values should be supplemented by an estimate of the false positive risk (FPR). FPR was defined as the probability that, if you claim that there is a real effect on the basis of p value from a single unbiased…
We collect here various conjectures on congruences made by the author in a series of papers, some of which involve binary quadratic forms and other advanced theories. Part A consists of 100 unsolved conjectures of the author while…