Hutch in the 1911 Census?

[Ben]

Fisherman,

Your posting style is very bombastic, and it belies your earlier claim to be a good journalist.

He never phrased it like that, no. What he DID say though, is that it would surprise him if the signatures were not a match.

Yes, but he never said that originally.

So if he's saying that now, he's contradicting himself most grotesquely, since that observation contrasts so markedly with his earlier observation that Toppy "cannot ruled out", and that the differences militate against the similarities. The fact that he changed his mind is indicative that he either radically revised his stance, or meekly succumbed to pressure. The latter would be particularly annoying, since his observations were perfectly reasonable first time around.

Do you think, Ben, do you really, really think that this material does not allow me to say that Leander is of the mind that Toppy was probably the Dorset Street witness?

But you acknowledged posts ago that he was saying no such thing, and I recognised that it bothered you at the time. So what did you do? You went straight back to Leander and got him to "upgrade" his views to make them markedly more Toppy-endorsing than they originally were, and a cursory perusal through Leander's comments suggests that this is precisely what happened. He gradually became more Toppy-happy, and the end result was that his original post bore little to no resemblance to his later stuff.

If I'm to accept Leander as a credible source, I cannot responsibly accept ALL his observations, since they contradict eachother, as reported by you. I will therefore listen to his initial "spontaneous" comment posted on page #126 (post #1255).

You cannot just deny things that are pretty damn obvious, Ben. If a person says that one out of three objects, A, B and C, are red, and adds that A and B are NOT red, then C MUST be the red object. Admittedly, the person in question has never stated "object C is red" - but it goes without saying, Ben

None of that was remotely analogous to anything being discussed here.

Besides, when it comes to Iremonger, you seem very allowing when it comes to how much we can allow ourselves to read in, with no proof and no recorded wording AT ALL.

Several reputable sources attested to the fact that Sue Iremonger compared the signatures and came to the conclusion that Toppy was not the witness. Any reasonable doubt that she did anything other than precisely that must safely be eradicated, unless you wish to paint any of those reputable sources as untrustworthy.

But that does not make him of much use to substantiate what Iremonger saw, does it?

Of course it does, unless you're seriously suggesting that he lied about what occured with the comparison, and that Paul Begg and Bob Hinton were involved in this major conspiracy. Jonathan Menges was astute enough to recognise that their observations would be of great value for the purpose of shedding light on the Iremonger issue, but according to you, his attempts were in vain, since none of the sources referred to therein were "much use".

We have no confirmation of what she saw, only your assertion that she MUST have seen the correct signatures - which, of course she "must" not have. We have no wordings, and no pointing out of any element involved in her judgement.

That's because no reasonable doubt could possibly be entertained that she did precisely as she was reported to have done, which was to compare the signatures after volunteering her professional services. Document examiners will compare originals wherever possible, as Chris Lowe's post attests to, and in this case, it was eminently possible. Thus, the overwhelmingly probable conclusion in that she examined the original documents.

But that conclusion is of extremely poor value until we have some substantiation - that goes beyond your own good will - telling us that she saw the right material.

But we'd only need that if it wasn't overwhelmingly probable that she examined the originals herself and came to the conclusion that they didn't match. But so ridculously nonsensical are the suggestions to the contrary than they can be cast aside as unworthy of consideration. Your "heaps of scepticism" that you delight to cast in her direction obviously belongs in the latter catergory, since there is nothing to be remotely "sceptical" about.

Fisherman

How you can claim that copies are as good as originals - and infer at the same time that therefore Toppy is our man is a mystery to me.

Didn't you see the extracts above my posts of this morning? Or did you just choose to ignore them?

Funny, they would seem to rather go against your self-interested view. Note that they were not posted by myself, by Ben, David, or anyone else so far accused of Anti-Toppy bias.

Accept that your view is faith-based and lets' move on.

[Fisherman]

Hi Richard!

You are too pessimistic! This thread has moved Toppys candidacy into a very compelling reality, just like you have always proposed. Piece after piece has fallen into place; we now have an expert that has examined a lot of the signatures involved, and who says that he would be surprised if Toppy was not the man who signed the police protocol, we have found out that Iremongers verdict lacks all forms of detail and can - and should - be questioned when it comes to what she did and said, and we have material that tells us that photocopies are a very useful material to deduct from, telling us that Leanders verdict is much more viable than what has been hinted at.
It is a very strong material, and arguably much superior to that of the opposing side. So no stalemate! Well, stale perhaps, but not mate ...

I do, however, agree with you that the thread as a whole has been a disgrace, with accusations flying through the air in a very unflattering manner. To me, this has been at least a bit of a surprise, and it goes to show how very hard it is for people to accept wiews and evidence that goes against their convictions. It has meant that the discussion has been of a very unfriendly tone, and that impression has been added to with every surfacing bit that goes against the wiew that Toppy was not our man.
As for the part of hinting about physical violence, it shows much the same thing, and I agree that it is silly, just as I have pointed out at two occasions now. This is a discussion board, and should be used as such.

The best, Richard!
Fisherman

[richardnunweek]

Hi Guys,
This thread is getting silly, only about one in twenty posts make any layman sense.
We may as well go back to the days when this thread was unborn, and accept that only one person on casebook, who occasionally brought up the subject of Topping, and was always rejected,.. was myself.
I could live with that then , and i could live with that now, but all this twaddle, page after page, which now mostly consists of, my expert is better then your expert, and now the intimidation of, i am 6 foot plus. and over 17st, but i will only contain you, which reminds me of the childhood sayings 'my dads a policeman, or my dads bigger then yours.
All part of a thread which in my opinion, and incidently i am not alone , has reached a ...lets shake hands STALEMATE.
Regards Richard.

[Fisherman]

Just noticed that this thread has run up 2026 posts. Myself, I have totally posted to Casebook 2010 times after the crash.
Somehow, it feels as if those posts all went to this thread...

Fisherman

[Fisherman]

Crystal writes:

"I have already said -
A copy is a copy
An original is an original
They are not comparable. One is derived from the other.
A document is not 2 dimensional. It is a 3 dimensional object. That applies whether it is an original, or a copy.
Nevertheless, a copy, however good, 'flattens' the images contained therein, obscuring detail which might otherwise be telling. A copy is not the same document, therefore, signs of its use, and of wear will be absent. "

Okay! Chris Lowe posted this snippet of an investigation that is very telling when it comes to the subject of photocopied signatures and document investigations. It is called ”Investigating forensic document examiners´skill relating to opinions on photocopied signatures”, and was published in ”Science and justice”, volume 45, No 4, 2005, p 199.

”Many forensic document examiners are hesitant to express authorship opinions on photocopied handwriting as the photocopying process results in less feature information than original writing. This study aimed to test the accuracy of 15 examiners´opinions regarding whether photocopied questioned signatures were genuine or simulated. Each examiner received the same set of eighty questioned photocopied signatures comprising of genuine and simulated signatures. The overall misleading (error) rate for the grouped examiners´opinion was 0,9 % providing strong evidence that examiners can make accurate observations regarding the authorship of non-original handwriting.”

Now, did I go to the authors and ”bombard” them until they sided with me? Nope – it was written five years ago.
Did I distort it? Nope – if it is distorted, it must be Chris´doing (sorry, Chris, but you will take the point...!)

And what does it tell us? It tells us that photocopied signatures are quite enough for the examiners to work with! Which is EXACTLY the point Sam has been pressing, while being castigated for doing so.
And please weigh in that this investigation dealt with genuine AND simulated handwriting, that is – forgery! Without seeing the originals, the examiners were able to pin 99,1 per cent of the origins. That is an almighty overweight.
And in our case, we are NOT dealing with a signature that is deliberately trying to look like another. Our case is much simpler.


The best, all!
Fisherman

ARE they, though, Ben? And, if they are, did Sue Iremonger actually use them?

It really is not good enough assuming that she did. Not good enough at all

Yes, they ARE. And barring flood, fire, or possibly Alien Abduction, they are likely to remain so for some time.

It may suit to believe that Iremonger did not look at the originals - as you wish, but neither has Leander, so that being the case, nobody has, have they?

So therefore, Leander's view is no better than Iremongers and we can all go home.

Agreed? No?

Originals vs Copies

Right then

I have already said -

A copy is a copy

An original is an original

They are not comparable. One is derived from the other.

A document is not 2 dimensional. It is a 3 dimensional object. That applies whether it is an original, or a copy.

Nevertheless, a copy, however good, 'flattens' the images contained therein, obscuring detail which might otherwise be telling. A copy is not the same document, therefore, signs of its use, and of wear will be absent.

I will not know, for example, how a document has been kept by looking at a copy - at least, not nearly to the same extent. I will not know if those marks on it are ink, blood, or some other residue. I will not be able to see any evidence of pressure - from leaning on the document to write. And so on.

An example - make of it what you will;

I recently examined a foundation charter of Queen Anne. Huge thing, it was, bigger than me. It, apart from the text and the Royal Seal at the bottom, had a highly decorated border, floriated, containing little blokes and birds and what have you - all very fashionable for 1705.

Now then, I know that prior to fairly recent times - in some cases up to the 1950's, most official documents were handwritten - and in a case such as this - hand-drawn. I know this from experience of looking at such documents dating from the 7th Century onward. Pretty much always, up to the 19th Century at least, the construction lines for the placing of the text in a document, and for any decoration, can be seen, sometimes with the naked eye, or if not, under magnification.

The examination of this document, however, revealed no such construction lines. What was the answer? It had to be, rather surprisingly, that this was a printed document - an 18th Century pro-forma for officialdom. In other words, it is in itself, a copy - in this case, of a lost prototype.

Now, if I had been looking at a copy of the original charter, I still wouldn't have seen construction lines, but I couldn't have told that it was significant that I didn't see them, because they are often faint, and could easily have been lost in translation - as had actually happened between the original prototype and the 18th Century 'Copy', which then became and original Charter.

I wouldn't have known that those construction lines were never there on the Charter to begin with - I wouldn't have reached the conclusions I did.


Information is lost in copy. More information can be obtained from the original. That is why the original is better. It stands to reason. It is utterly logical. It requires no further explanation.

[Fisherman]

Ben, again:

"Ah, but he never said that.
He never once claimed that Toppy was "probably" the Dorset Street witness".

He never phrased it like that, no. What he DID say though, is that it would surprise him if the signatures were not a match. And that I allow myself to clarify by saying that what he actually said at that stage was that he would be surprised if Toppy was not the man who signed the police report back in 1888.

Do you think, Ben, do you really, really think that this material does not allow me to say that Leander is of the mind that Toppy was probably the Dorset Street witness? We know that he would be surprised if that was NOT the case. Don´t you think that that being surprised if that was not the case kind of equals being of the mind that it was probable that it WAS the case?

You are free to deny this, of course. But I would regard such a denial as intellectually corrupt for obvious reasons.

You cannot just deny things that are pretty damn obvious, Ben. If a person says that one out of three objects, A, B and C, are red, and adds that A and B are NOT red, then C MUST be the red object. Admittedly, the person in question has never stated "object C is red" - but it goes without saying, Ben. Besides, when it comes to Iremonger, you seem very allowing when it comes to how much we can allow ourselves to read in, with no proof and no recorded wording AT ALL. You try to substantiate it by telling us that Martin Fido found the lady very nice and reassuring, but what kind of proof is that? You will accept his second-hand judgement on this although he is in no way an expert on handwriting, whereas you call Leander totally unreliable...?

I know Martin Fido slightly. We have a mutual friend, and Martin and I have been drinking beer and strolling through the East end together, discussing the case. He is a very amiable man and a very knowledgeable one, and I liked him thoroughly.
But that does not make him of much use to substantiate what Iremonger saw, does it? The only thing we have left of Iremonger is that it seems quite clear that she, on balance, believed that the signatures she looked at were not written by the same man. But that is ALL we have! We have no confirmation of what she saw, only your assertion that she MUST have seen the correct signatures - which, of course she "must" not have. We have no wordings, and no pointing out of any element involved in her judgement. Therefore, the only thing we can do for you in the Iremonger regard, is to gracefully accept that she reached a negative conclusion on the match she investigated. But that conclusion is of extremely poor value until we have some substantiation - that goes beyond your own good will - telling us that she saw the right material. And after that, we must also be informed what it was that made her opt for her decision.
Until that point, Iremongers verdict must be regarded with heaps of scepticism and barrels of salt - not because we in any way can allow ourselves to judge Iremonger herself, but because we MUST judge the utter incompleteness of the material involved as incredibly damning.

You have, on this thread, said that I do my job as a journalist in a bad way. But this, Ben, is EXACTLY how a journalist works - we do not buy ANYTHING until we have the sources in place and the substantiation at hand. Yo accept Iremonger as it stands, without questioning things at all, would be to dig a journalistic grave.

Fisherman

[truebluedub]

And here's one on using photocopies: http://www.ajarnpat.com/data/seminar_Ex02-Eng.pdf
regards
Chris Lowe

[truebluedub]

Progress on the problem of signature verification has advanced more rapidly in online applications than offline applications, in part because information which can easily be recorded in online environments, such as pen position and velocity, is lost in static offline data. In offline applications, valuable information which can be used to discriminate between genuine and forged signatures is embedded at the stroke level. We present an approach to segmenting strokes into stylistically meaningful segments and establish a local correspondence between a questioned signature and a reference signature to enable the analysis and comparison of stroke features. Questioned signatures which do not conform to the reference signature are identified as random forgeries. Most simple forgeries can also be identified, as they do not conform to the reference signature's invariant properties such as connections between letters. Since we have access to both local and global information, our approach also shows promise for extension to the identification of skilled forgeries.
Index Terms:
handwriting recognition; local correspondence; random forgery detection; signature verification; online applications; offline applications; forged signatures; stroke level; stroke segmentation; stylistically meaningful segments; questioned signature; reference signature; stroke features; random forgeries; invariant properties; skilled forgeries
Citation:
J.K. Guo, D. Doermann, A Rosenfeld, "Local correspondence for detecting random forgeries," icdar, pp.319, Fourth International Conference Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR'97), 1997

kind regards
chris lowe

[Archaic]

RE: Post #2012 FBI STUDY: Interesting that The US Dept of Justice sponsored the Document Examiner Study to see if expertly-trained professional "FBI Document Examiners" were significantly better at examining documents than "College-Educated Non-Experts"! (Does that mean their FBI funding was renewed for another year?)

My goodness, why didn't they do the obvious, and test themselves against "College-Educated Non-FBI Document Experts"? Where's the scientific rigor?

[truebluedub]

JSF Volume 47, Issue 5 (September 2002)




ISSN: 0022-1198
Published Online: 1 September 2002
Page Count: 8


Click here to download this paper now for $25

View License Agreement

Forensic handwriting examiners' expertise for signature comparison
Sita, J
Forensic Expertise Profiling Laboratory, School of Human Biosciences, LaTrobe University, Victoria, 3086, Australia.

Found, B
Forensic Expertise Profiling Laboratory, School of Human Biosciences, LaTrobe University, Victoria, 3086, Australia.

Found, B
Document Examination Team, Victoria Forensic Science Centre, ForensicDrive, Macleod, Victoria, 3085, Australia.

Rogers, DK
Forensic Expertise Profiling Laboratory, School of Human Biosciences, LaTrobe University, Victoria, 3086, Australia.


Abstract
This paper reports on the performance of forensic document examiners (FDEs) in a signature comparison task that was designed to address the issue of expertise. The opinions of FDEs regarding 150 genuine and simulated questioned signatures were compared with a control group of non-examiners' opinions.
On the question of expertise, results showed that FDEs were statistically better than the control group at accurately determining the genuineness or non-genuineness of questioned signatures. The FDE group made errors (by calling a genuine signature simulated or by calling a simulated signature genuine) in 3.4% of their opinions while 19.3% of the control group's opinions were erroneous. The FDE group gave significantly more inconclusive opinions than the control group.
Analysis of FDEs' responses showed that more correct opinions were expressed regarding simulated signatures and more inconclusive opinions were made on genuine signatures. Further, when the complexity of a signature was taken into account, FDEs made more correct opinions on high complexity signatures than on signatures of lower complexity. There was a wide range of skill amongst FDEs and no significant relationship was found between the number of years FDEs had been practicing and their correct, inconclusive and error rates.

Keywords:
expertise, forensic science, handwriting, questioned document examination, signature, validation

kind regards
Chris Lowe

[truebluedub]

Automatic signature verification and writer identification — the state of the art
Purchase the full-text article



References and further reading may be available for this article. To view references and further reading you must purchase this article.

Réjean Plamondona and Guy Loretteb

a Laboratoire Scribens, Département de Génie Electrique, Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, C.P. 6079, Succ. “A”, Montréal, Canada, H3C 3A7

b IRISA, Campus de Beaulieu, 35042, Rennes Cedex, France

Received 10 August 1987;
revised 22 March 1988.
Available online 19 May 2003.

Abstract

This paper presents a survey of the literature on automatic signature verification and writer identification by computer, and an overview of achievements in static and dynamic approaches to solving these problems, with a special focus on preprocessing techniques, feature extraction methods, comparison processes and performance evaluation. In addition, for each type of approache special attention is given to requirement analysis, human factors, practical application environments, and appropriate definitions and terminology. Throughout the paper, new research directions are suggested.

Author Keywords: Signature verification; Writer identification; Handwriting
Pattern Recognition
Volume 22, Issue 2, 1989, Pages 107-131

kind regards,
Chris Lowe

[truebluedub]

A statistical model for writer verification
Srihari, S.N. Beal, M.J. Bandi, K. Shah, V. Krishnamurthy, P.
Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., Buffalo Univ., NY, USA;

This paper appears in: Document Analysis and Recognition, 2005. Proceedings. Eighth International Conference on
Publication Date: 29 Aug.-1 Sept. 2005
On page(s): 1105- 1109 Vol. 2
ISSN: 1520-5263
ISBN: 0-7695-2420-6
INSPEC Accession Number: 8732782
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/ICDAR.2005.33
Current Version Published: 2006-01-16
Abstract
A statistical model for determining whether a pair of documents, a known and a questioned, were written by the same individual is proposed. The model has the following four components: (i) discriminating elements, e.g., global features and characters, are extracted from each document; (ii) differences between corresponding elements from each document are computed; (iii) using conditional probability estimates of each difference, the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) is computed for the hypotheses that the documents were written by the same or different writers; the conditional probability estimates themselves are determined from labeled samples using either Gaussian or gamma estimates for the differences assuming their statistical independence; and (iv) distributions of the LLRs for same and different writer LLRs are analyzed to calibrate the strength of evidence into a standard nine-point scale used by questioned document examiners. The model is illustrated with experimental results for a specific set of discriminating elements.

kind regards
Chris Lowe