ExposureBlog

I’ve always believed that it’s important to get as much information about the incident site as possible. In the past that involved videos, photographs, and even 3D photos.  Lately, I’ve been using panorama photography to convey information about the sites.  Combined with the Apple software application QuickTime, the viewer can move the field of view—just as though they were standing at the site.  Pretty cool, and it often beats standard photos for transmitting information about the site.  

But making a panorama isn’t as easy as snapping pictures on the digital camera while turning in a circle.  For one thing, the pivot point must be exactly at the “entrance pupil” or “nodal point” of the camera lens.  Otherwise, the software won’t be able to line things up correctly and the panorama will look strange and broken in places.  There are a number of gadgets available that one can attach to a tripod (essential equipment!) to ensure the camera rotates around the nodal point.  The one I use is a $199 gadget called the “Nodal Ninja.”  It showed up at my door in a beat-up cardboard box with VERY few instructions.  But it works.  And some of its competitors cost a lot more. 

Software

Most consultants doing safety work probably have Photoshop CS2.  It’s a great tool to examine photos up close and to extract almost-invisible information from a scene.  Photoshop CS2 also has a panorama function.  It’s just not something I recommend using.  Photoshop CS2 doesn’t really mind warping the scene a bit to make things fit, and that’s not always a good thing under all circumstances.

There are quite a few dedicated software packages that take separate shots and “stitch” them together to make a panorama.  I’m a registered user of several panoramic software packages, including Smoky City Design’s Panorama Factory, RealViz’s (very expensive) Stitcher 5.0, Hugin, and  PTGui 7.  Basically, the various stitcher software packs all do the same thing: they analyze the photos, then stitch them together to produce a panorama photo—a long, narrow image that you can import to QuickTime (using appropriate software such as PanoQTVR) or just publish as-is. 

Which do I consider the best?  Probably PTGui 7.  It’s easy to use, has a very simple interface, doesn’t hog your system (as RealViz products seem to do) and is very inexpensive.  Last time I looked, PTGui 7 was only $115.  Moreover, the response time on customer service is remarkably fast—in my case about 10 minutes. 

If you’re a safety professional and are considering panorama, you’ll find quite a few resources over a wide range of prices.  All produce workable panoramas; but you should understand that a high price doesn’t necessarily correlate with high quality. 

In this world there are consultants who tell their clients (often lawyers) what the cultural territory is like.  Politically, is the jury pool red or blue?  Wealthy, mid-level or poor?  Do they owe a lot of money?  Do they shop at Target, K-Mart, or. . .well, whatever place the really wealthy shop for Target-quality stuff?  I’ve had the opportunity to read some of the reports these guys churn out and some of it is impressive.  But I’ve also noticed that there is a wide variation in the number of references and end-notes.  I recall one of them obviously read New York Times columnist David Brooks, and probably even read his book, Bobos in Paradise, in which he compared local versions of red vs blue America. 

Apparently a lot of people think he’s a very smart guy and that his book approaches academic quality for the insights it offers.  His books and columns are fun to read and one comes away thinking that they’ve learned a deep truth about American culture.  Except. . .

Some of that stuff was, well, made up.

It seems Philadelphia reporter Sasha Issenberg did a little cookie-jar level fact checking on some of the claims Brooks made and found that the stuff was wrong.  Certainly nothing anyone would want to rely on for, say, jury selection.  When she confronted Brooks about it over the phone, he hemmed, hawed and parsed—even calling Issenberg’s skills as a reporter into question and darkly suggesting (it seemed to me anyway) that confronting David Brooks was not the way to get ahead in the news business. To judge for yourself, read the article here.

While Brooks is a good writer and probably a fun person to hang around with, his work may not be the thing you’d want to rely on either as a consultant studying cultural patterns nor as a lawyer interested in jury selection. 

Since many cases are won or lost on the testimony of eyewitnesses, a recent study cited here should raise some eyebrows.  It concerns the psychological phenomenon known as inattentional blindness, or the inability of some normal individuals  to recognize something when their attention is directed elsewhere.  The phenomenon is well-known in psychology. Visual expert Marc Green has a good article on inattentional blindness and human error,  and there is a book on the subject by Australian researchers Arien Mack and Irvin Rock.

I have read depositions in which the deponent is asked over and over whether he or she saw something take place.  If the response is in the negative the assumption is that the event did not, in fact, occur—or that those who say that it did are not telling the truth.  Well, not so fast.

In the study, conducted by Dr. Seema L. Clifasefi of the University of Washington at Seattle, 47 participants were asked to watch a basketball game and count the number of times a basketball was passed back and forth between teams.  Some were given an alcoholic beverage and others were given an alcohol-free beverage.  During the game, a woman in a gorilla suit appeared on the screen, stood amidst the players, beat her chest and walked away.  When questioned later whether they had seen the gorilla, fully a third of the participants had NOT noticed the gorilla.  Of those not consuming alcohol, only 46% recalled seeing the gorilla.  Of those consuming alcohol, only 18% recalled the gorilla.

It would seem, then that if an eyewitness was engaged in behavior that required his full attention, the odds of noticing details of a specific incident may be less than 50 percent. 

Talking Points Memo blogger Josh Marshall—in his hilarious response to blog critic Lee Siegel, noted that blogs are a “boon for information and an enemy of thought. In most hands it’s more a medium of exchange than reflection.  The technology can leave us too little time to mull and digest.”  Good points to consider when researching that case.

As someone who has both a PC and a Mac, I’ve used Stuffit for years.  Stuffit is a little utility that does two things very well: it compresses files and it decompresses folders and files.  Stuffit is great if you have to send a big group of files to a client—put em all in a folder, compress it with Stuffit and then email.  Very easy.  For years Stuffit was made by a company named Alladin Software.  So I was a little surprised when I received a Stuffit upgrade offer from a company named Allume.  Well, generally, upgrades are a good thing, so I sprung for the $19.95, downloaded the zip file and installed it.  Except. . .I had to first UNinstall my trusted earlier edition. 

So I did.  Then I discovered that the new Stuffit (version 9), um. . .didn’t really work on my machine.  Given a file to decompress, Stuffit would churn for minutes and minutes and the result was an empty folder.  I tried using it on earlier stuffed files and the same thing happened.  Now, as someone who archives a lot of documents, this was not good. 

I went to the Allume site and discovered that they are actually a company called Smith Micro.  That was both news and a weird coincidence.  Back in the mid-90s there was a great program called Hotline. All it did was catalog phone numbers.  Click on the number and the phone would dial (via the modem.) Very cool and essential to anyone who uses the phone a lot.  When Windows 3.1 showed up, Hotline came out with a Windows version.   Then, for reasons unknown, they vanished off the planet.  The company that made Hotline was named Smith Micro. 

So, did my old friend Smith Micro sell me a copy of Stuffit that didn’t well, unstuff?  Maybe, but not likely.  Regardless, I unloaded the new, helpless version of Stuffit and reinstalled my old version 8–which I had bought at Microcenter a few years ago.

Now, Stuffit 9 might work on some computers, but it didn’t on mine.  And if I hadn’t kept the old CD of version 8. . .well, I guess I would be trolling the “Stuffit 9 help forums” looking for answers.  Not a good way to spend company time.

Couple of morals here: 

1. Just because it’s an upgrade doesn’t mean it’s better,
2. Beware when a software company changes names
3. Beware when there’s no phone number for tech support–only support forums.
4. Always keep an installable copy of your software on a CD.

Several links added today, including Microsoft Academic Search.  According to Microsoft, the site will allow one to search through peer-reviewed science journals for the following subjects: “computer-related, physics, electrical engineering and related subject areas.” I tried it and found an article about the energy consumption of the Apple Macintosh.

Today I’ve added two new links.  One, to the great environmentalchemistry.com site and the other to its related weblog, environmental chemistry.blogspot.com. I used the information found in the environmentalchemistry.com site while researching radionuclides for a future tech book.  The info there is solid and some of the data I was unable to find anywhere else.  You can find Environmentalchemistry.com in the Research category and the related weblog under the Blogrolls.

Here.

I was reading a deposition awhile back in which the expert witness, a smart guy with a few letters behind his name, was asked if he thought something would happen.  His reply: “In all probability, it would.”  The attorney moved on to the next question.

He shouldn’t have. 

Instead, he should have asked Mr. Expert something about those words “in all probability.” Something like. . .”what exactly do you mean when you say those words?” 

I’ve read a lot of depositions and I see those words all the time, coming from people who want the jury to believe the attorney questioning him (or her) Just Doesn’t Get It and statistics (and thus, perhaps, The Almighty) is on their side.  Attorneys on the other hand, are often people who were once liberal arts majors and never, ever took a course in statistics.  Or if they did, it was probably the “statistics for liberal and fine arts majors” course where they learned that the correct term for “average” is “mean.”  Okay. Maybe that’s harsh.

But attorneys really should be on the lookout for buzz words that sound like harbingers of a Foregone Conclusion but in fact may be orphans—standing between the rails as the Statistics Train fades away into the distance.

I always tell my clients to listen for words that suggest throwaway conclusions but in fact are tied to fairly rigorous mathematical procedures.  Lazy experts (yeah, there are a few in this world) like to use them in place of real analysis.  When tagged, they fall back on their voluminous, multifaceted and most importantly, unverifiable experience.  “Based on my experience” these guys intone, “the probability for this to occur is high.”

Well, I’ve probably said something like that myself—but only after an eight-hour deposition and only after my blood sugar level was in the negative numbers.  Nowadays, I know that many probabilities *can* be quantified.  And if an expert is charging his client more than three figures an hour, he should be able to come up with a reasonable probability figure that at least vaguely resembles statistics.  And it should be correct.

If I get the chance to coach a client before deposing some of these experts, I usually recommend listening carefully for the following words: probability, chance and liklihood. All can be quantified, and if the expert is earning his or her keep, then that quantification has been made in terms of *confidence interval.*  In later posts on Safety Gig I’ll discuss how this is done.  But for now, here are the important questions attorneys should ask:

1. You said there is a high probability.  Is that probability greater than 50%?

2. Is it 90%? (remember that science generally requires the confidence interval to be in the 95 percentile.  This is the same as having a probability of 5 percent or less that the relationship is due to chance.)

3. (Pushing a calculator across the table) “Can you show the jury how you made that calculation? 

The last question is a bit unfair, because the actual calculation for probability usually (probably!) involves some pretty intensive mathematical grunt work involving such things as maximums and minimums, iterations, random numbers and such.  Fortunately, there are software packages that do this for the expert, notably Decisioneering’s *Crystal Ball* and Palisade’s *At Risk*. Both are easy to use and reasonably priced. 

Getting back to the questions.  While attorneys must understand the science of the case as well as the experts (some actually know it better than the experts!)—many hate to appear foolish, even in deposition.  Nothing—*nothing* is more fun for an expert than lecturing the opposing counsel on *how* to frame the question.  Yet, the attorney must remember that in this regard they are standing in for the jury—a bunch of decent, hardworking people who probably don’t have the time nor inclination to think much about statistics—yet, may have to use it to decide a case.

All the more reason to make that expert come up with a number—a number that can be defended, explained or attacked.  As I always tell my clients:  make ‘em *quantify* it!  If they cannot, then the proper response should really be: “you don’t know, do you?”

And the honest response under those circumstances, would be. . .

“well. . .no.”