Using Procedural Justice to Understand, Explain, and Prevent Decision-Making Errors in Forensic Sciences

It has been estimated that in the United States there are 20,000 false felony convictions a year due to deficiencies in the forensic science and criminal justice systems (Koppl, 2010c). As many of these errors can be attributed to flaws in the processes by which forensic science decisions are made, the principles of procedural justice are a useful lens for analyzing these processes and recommending improved practices. In this secondary analysis of current research, decision-making processes in forensic sciences are analyzed using Leventhal’s six criteria for establishing procedural justice. Specifically, we assesses the current state of forensic science, explain how some industry practices may be prone to error and bias, and provide practical suggestions for improving industry practices to better adhere to the principles of procedural justice. In addition, the implications of this analysis for practitioners outside of forensic sciences are discussed

Fast and Simple Compact Hashing via Bucketing

Compact hash tables store a set S of n key-value pairs, where the keys are from the universe U = {0, ..., u - 1}, and the values are v-bit integers, in close to B(u, n) + nv bits of space, where B(u, n) = log2 ((u)(n)) is the information-theoretic lower bound for representing the set of keys in S, and support operations insert, delete and lookup on S. Compact hash tables have received significant attention in recent years, and approaches dating back to Cleary [IEEE T. Comput, 1984], as well as more recent ones have been implemented and used in a number of applications. However, the wins on space usage of these approaches are outweighed by their slowness relative to conventional hash tables. In this paper, we demonstrate that compact hash tables based upon a simple idea of bucketing practically outperform existing compact hash table implementations in terms of memory usage and construction time, and existing fast hash table implementations in terms of memory usage (and sometimes also in terms of construction time), while having competitive query times. A related notion is that of a compact hash ID map, which stores a set (S) over cap of n keys from U, and implicitly associates each key in (S) over cap with a unique value (its ID), chosen by the data structure itself, which is an integer of magnitude O(n), and supports inserts and lookups on S, while using space close to B(u, n) bits. One of our approaches is suitable for use as a compact hash ID map.Peer reviewe

Complex type 4 structure changing dynamics of digital agents: Nash equilibria of a game with arms race in innovations

The new digital economy has renewed interest in how digital agents can innovate. This follows the legacy of John von Neumann dynamical systems theory on complex biological systems as computation. The Gödel-Turing-Post (GTP) logic is shown to be necessary to generate innovation based structure changing Type 4 dynamics of the Wolfram-Chomsky schema. Two syntactic procedures of GTP logic permit digital agents to exit from listable sets of digital technologies to produce novelty and surprises. The first is meta-analyses or offline simulations. The second is a fixed point with a two place encoding of negation or opposition, referred to as the Gödel sentence. It is postulated that in phenomena ranging from the genome to human proteanism, the Gödel sentence is a ubiquitous syntactic construction without which escape from hostile agents qua the Liar is impossible and digital agents become entrained within fixed repertoires. The only recursive best response function of a 2-person adversarial game that can implement strategic innovation in lock-step formation of an arms race is the productive function of the Emil Post [58] set theoretic proof of the Gödel incompleteness result. This overturns the view of game theorists that surprise and innovation cannot be a Nash equilibrium of a game

Economic Analysis of Knowledge: The History of Thought and the Central Themes

Following the development of knowledge economies, there has been a rapid expansion of economic analysis of knowledge, both in the context of technological knowledge in particular and the decision theory in general. This paper surveys this literature by identifying the main themes and contributions and outlines the future prospects of the discipline. The wide scope of knowledge related questions in terms of applicability and alternative approaches has led to the fragmentation of research. Nevertheless, one can identify a continuing tradition which analyses various aspects of the generation, dissemination and use of knowledge in the economy