80:20 Vs 99.99% Certainty : A look at the Malaysian Perception towards "Experts"

Lt Col Frank Slade (Al Pacino) while leaving for his trip in "Scent of A Women" picked up his cat and said

When in doubt.......... FUCK

What do we now dumbass innocent Malaysian bystanders should do?

We have been confronted by two sets of probabilities this past few years

One was by some punky and skanky looking Thai Forensic Doctor on the TBH cause of death by merely looking at the pictures from the comforts of her computer screen....

Now today we hear of a 99.99% Certainty that Mr X is indeed Anwar Ibrahim

US experts confirmed Anwar as man in video, court told

UPDATED @ 03:54:05 PM 24-06-2011

By Clara Chooi

June 24, 2011

KUALA LUMPUR, June 24 — US authorities have identified the man in the controversial sex video screened by “Datuk T” as Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, a magistrate’s court was told this morning.

The point was raised in the facts of the case read out today after the “Datuk T” trio of Datuk Shazryl Eskay Abdullah, Tan Sri Abdul Rahim Thamby Chik and Datuk Shuib Lazim pleaded guilty to their involvement in the screening of the video on March 21.

The Datuk T trio arriving in court today, June 24, 2011. — Picture by Choo Choy May

Abdul Rahim was accused of abetting Shazryl and Shuib in “openly” screening the pornographic material featuring sex acts between a man and a woman at the Carcosa Seri Negara Hotel here on March 21. All three were slapped with fines under section 292 of the Penal Code.

“Results of the analysis by experts from Dartmouth College, Handover, New Hampshire in the US verified the authenticity of the video, that there was no tampering or any act of super-imposing and that it originated from a DVR camcorder taken from Datuk Shazryl,” deputy public prosecutor Kamalluddin Md Said said when reading the facts of the case this morning.

He explained that the police had also obtained a CCTV recording from an apartment in Ampang, where the sex acts took place, and confirmed that both Anwar and Shazryl had been at the lobby of the apartment building on February 21, the same day that the sex video was said to have been recorded.

“Experts from Dartmouth College also carried out a facial recognition analysis on the man in the video and found that it resembled Anwar Ibrahim,” said Kamalluddin.

Abdul Rahim’s lawyer Datuk Seri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah, who also submitted on that point today, told reporters later that according to the experts’ report, they were 99.99 per cent certain that the man in the video is Anwar.

In the June 4 report, prepared by Professor Hany Farid and Professor Lorenzo Torresani, it was stated that the institution had studied a video from a camcorder in a room and copied to a thumbdrive, a video from a surveillance camera taken in a room and extracted directly from a DVR, a video from a second camcorder taken outside an elevator, 320 images of one person named as “Mr X”, 26 images of one person named as “Mr Y” and 4,423 images of “Malaysian people”.

The report concluded that based on the study, “Mr X” is the same man in pictures provided to them by the local authorities, which were of Anwar.

“The conclusion states very clearly that Mr X is Anwar. They cannot say directly that Mr X is Anwar because they do not know him, but they concluded that it is 99.99 per cent certain from their facial recognition analysis that the man in the video is the same as the man in the pictures (of Anwar) shown to them,” said Shafee. More here

So what now?

Lets start with understanding the credibility of the Experts first shall we....

Unlike Porntip who is merely a student and a practitioner of the field....

Hani Farid is the Pioneer of Digital Forensics a subdicipline in Computing

Hany Farid received his undergraduate degree in computer science and applied mathematics from the University of Rochester in 1989. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Following a two-year postdoctoral position in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, he joined the Dartmouth faculty in 1999 and is currently a MacLaughlin Distinguished Professor of Computer Science. He is also affiliated with the Institute for Security Technology Studies at Dartmouth. Mr. Farid is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and a Sloan Fellowship.

From working with federal law enforcement agencies on digital forensics, to the digital reconstruction of Ancient Egyptian tombs, Hany Farid works and plays with digital media at the crossroads of computer science, engineering, mathematics, optics, and psychology.

Read his interview on why he invented the field of study...

. Why did you develop Digital Forensics? In other words, why now? Is it because you can? Because it is possible to create software to protect the professional and the casual viewer from fraud?

A. Ten years ago I stumbled upon a clause in the Federal Rules of Evidence that stated that a 35mm negative and a digital image are equivalent when photographs are introduced as evidence into a court of law. That is, film or digital photos can be introduced as evidence, and they hold equal weight. At the time, I thought that this was a problem, and that it was going to become a bigger problem as digital photography became more ubiquitous. So I started to think about how we could authenticate digital images. After three years of thinking and many dead ends, my graduate students and I started to make progress. And over the past seven years, we have developed a suite of tools for detecting digital tampering. While I was primarily motivated by the issue of photographic evidence in the courts, my hope is that our work will also help the media, among others, contend with the issue of digital manipulation. More here 

Well folks.......you be the judge on how you want to accept the 99.99% Probability.....

Will the 0.01%  be the source of your doubts?

If so........................

Oh sebelum gua lupa....

Ada second camcoder for the elevators?