The tactical methods of overcoming the false testimony Abstract The objective of this thesis is to describe and analyse the false testimony at interrogation, its recognition and follow-up overcoming by means of tactical interrogation methods and other techniques. In the introductory part of the thesis, the elemental concepts such as the phenomenon of lie, interrogation and testimony are defined in order to gain some insight, without which it would not be well possible to dedicate to the research of detection of lie and its overcoming. The following part deals with the lie detection in crime investigation in particular, it highlights the importance of correct identification of false testimony and it pursues the lie from perspective of the recipient of lie, whose interest is to reveal the lie. The particularities in this area regarding children are outlined as well. The subsequent part is focused on the false testimony and its detection based on the verbal, nonverbal and paraverbal tokens in conduct of concerned person. I have attempted to capture the differences between intentional communicating of untruthful information, thus lying, and unintentional communicationg of untruthful information caused by natural process of forgetting. In the following part, the overview of tactical interrogation methods applied...

Randomized experiments are regarded as the gold standard for estimating causal effects. Commonly, a single test is performed using a fixed sample size. However, observations may also be observed sequentially and because of economical and ethical reasons, it may be desirable to terminate the trial early. The group sequential design allows for interim analyses and early stopping of a trial without the need for continuous monitoring of the accumulating data. The implementation of a group sequential procedure requires that the sampling distribution of the test statistic observed at each wave of testing to have a known or asymptotically known sampling distribution. This thesis investigates an approach for finding a general approximation to the group sequential bootstrap test for test statistics with unknown or analytically intractable sampling distributions. There is currently no bootstrap version of the group sequential test. The approach implies approximating the covariance structure of the test statistics over time, but not the marginal sampling distribution, with that of a normal test statistic. The evaluation is performed with a Monte Carlo simulation study where the achieved significance level is compared to the nominal. Evidence from the Monte Carlo simulations suggests that the approach performs well for test statistics with sampling distributions close to a normal distribution.

Two projects are presented in this dissertation. First, we investigated the impact of false memories on the original trace and whether recovery of the original is possible. Second, we tested whether mnemonic discrimination for temporal duration is possible. Both projects incorporated fMRI techniques in order to implicate any potential neural correlates of these memory behaviors. Project One. To elicit false memories and study a potential recovery therefrom, thirty-five healthy, young adults performed multiple recognition memory tests where they were induced to make errors in a first test and then participants were tested again in a surprise, second test. These two tests allowed us to determine which memory error would be corrected, if any. Further, fMRI signal associated with the encoding and retrieval processes during the experiment allowed us to implicate the regions associated with false memory correction. We found that false memories do not overwrite the original trace in all instances, as recovery of the original information was possible. Critically, we determined that recovery of the original information was dependent on activity in regions associated with retrieval, saliency attention, and bottom-up attention during the formation of the false memory, and not on processing at the time of encoding or the second test episode. Project Two. We developed a novel paradigm to test episodic memory for temporal duration. Thirty-five healthy, young adults completed a temporal discrimination task that consisted of a continuous-recognition paradigm in which visual objects were presented one at a time for either 1 or 1.5 seconds. Certain items repeated (Targets and Lures) where Targets were presented for the same duration while the duration of Lures was altered by ±0.5 seconds. Participants were asked to identify whether the stimulus duration changed. Whole-brain high-resolution fMRI data were acquired. Behavioral results indicate that participants were sensitive to both increases and decreases in duration. Further, fMRI analyses revealed that the left entorhinal and perirhinal cortices were differentially involved in encoding and retrieval, respectively, of correct duration representations. These findings support the notion of the entorhinal cortex supporting temporal representations in memory as well as the perirhinal cortex representing the conjunction of item and context.

The term "teachable moment" (TM) has been used to describe a life transition or event which motivates an individual to change a behavior or presents an opportunity to intervene to prompt behavior change. We examined whether receipt of a false positive ovarian cancer (OC) screening result may represent a TM. 403 women participating in an OC screening program completed questionnaires assessing demographic, clinical, behavioral, and psychosocial information. The TM was operationalized as expressed interest in receiving health-related information. We hypothesized that among women receiving a false positive screening test result, those women who had experienced greater personal perceived risk for OC as well as distress would be more interested in receiving health-related information than women receiving a normal result. Analyses revealed that women receiving a false positive screening result were less interested in receiving health-related information than women receiving a normal screening result. For women receiving a false positive result, expressed interest in receipt of health-related information was only modestly related to distress and related even less to perceptions of OC risk. Our data do not support viewing a false positive OC screening result as a TM. Potential explanations for the current findings as well as recommendations for future research investigating the TM are discussed.

Genome-wide studies are prone to false positives due to inherently low priors and statistical power. One approach to ameliorate this problem is to seek validation of reported candidate genes across independent studies: genes with repeatedly discovered effects are less likely to be false positives. Inversely, genes reported only as many times as expected by chance alone, while possibly representing novel discoveries, are also more likely to be false positives. We show that, across over 30 genome-wide studies that reported Drosophila and Daphnia genes with possible roles in thermal adaptation, the combined lists of candidate genes and orthologous groups are rapidly approaching the total number of genes and orthologous groups in the respective genomes. This is consistent with the expectation of high frequency of false positives. The majority of these spurious candidates have been identified by one or a few studies, as expected by chance alone. In contrast, a noticeable minority of genes have been identified by numerous studies with the probabilities of such discoveries occurring by chance alone being exceedingly small. For this subset of genes, different studies are in agreement with each other despite differences in the ecological settings, genomic tools and methodology, and reporting thresholds. We provide a reference set of presumed true positives among Drosophila candidate genes and orthologous groups involved in response to changes in temperature, suitable for cross-validation purposes. Despite this approach being prone to false negatives, this list of presumed true positives includes several hundred genes, consistent with the “omnigenic” concept of genetic architecture of complex traits.

Alarm fatigue is a practice problem that applies to hospitalized patients and the nurses who care for them. Addressing alarm fatigue is important to promote alarm safety and to decrease the risk of patient harm or death. The purpose of this study was to decrease alarm fatigue and improve alarm safety in a regional neonatal intensive care unit (RNICU). Guided by the conceptual model for alarm fatigue and alarm safety, this study addressed whether or not alarm management protocols designed to decrease false and nuisance alarms in the physiological monitoring of neonates improve alarm safety via decreased alarm burden and alarm fatigue as evidenced by statistically significant reductions in false and nuisance alarms. A quantitative, time series quasi-experimental design was used with 4 waves of data collection. One wave was baseline data collected preintervention, and 3 waves of data were postprotocol implementation to obtain an initial indication of sustainability. Alarm observation data collection sheets were developed and used to track numbers and types of alarms pre- and post-protocol implementation. The data analysis showed statistically significant decreases in both false alarms and nuisance alarms related to the physiological monitoring protocol and lead changing protocol. Overall, high protocol adherence was noted, and the total number of alarms per hour per bed was reduced by 42% (p < .001), 46% (p < .001), and 50% (p < .001) from baseline at Weeks 2, 4, and 6, respectively. Implications from this study include impact on practice and policy, direction for future study, and a call for social change to promote alarm safety in the care of neonates.

False confessions are the most difficult type of confession to detect. Because the Reid interview and interrogation technique is the global gold standard for interviews, interrogations, and confessions, it is used to obtain confessions from suspects. However, the Reid method has been untested in regard to if it can detect false confessions to potentially eliminate wrongful convictions. The purpose of this qualitative study was to perform a content analysis of videos of confessions using several models that make up the Reid interview and interrogation technique. Utilizing attribution theory as a framework, these models were qualitatively assessed for their ability to detect false confessions in comparison with the legal casebook analysis and linguistic analysis. The key research questions addressed how interviewers attribute identification of false confessions through the assessment of the various models and the complete Reid interview and interrogation technique. An additional research question concerned how interviewers identify attribution error in false confessions through the assessment of the various models and the complete Reid interview and interrogation technique. Data were collected from 6 videos and subjected to content analysis, triangulated with discourse analysis and conversation analysis. The results of this study showed that the models applied to the confessions could distinguish between true and false confessions. A social change could occur if some or all of these models are applied to all interrogations to detect false confessions, which would provide law enforcement and the intelligence professions the tools to assess confessions in order to potentially stop wrongful convictions and intelligence failures in interviews and interrogations.

Radar is an acronym for RAdio Detection And Ranging. In general terms, it is a machine that uses radio waves for object-detection in its near periphery. It transmits radio waves in a known direction, which when intercepted by an obstruction/object are reflected by its surface and are received back at the radar system. The round trip delay time along with the known velocity of radio waves gives an accurate measurement of the distance of the object from the radar system. In a somewhat similar fashion, some radars are even capable of measuring the velocity of this object. Frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar is one such radar system, which is a subclass of continuous wave (CW) radars, where a continuous sinusoidal radio energy is transmitted, reflected, and received back at the radar system. These radar systems are widely used in vehicle automation technologies such as adaptive cruise control (ACC) and collision avoidance systems (CAS) to measure the distance from the nearest vehicles and maintain a safe following distance. But in designing these systems, little attention has been given to security, and these systems have vulnerabilities that are capable of compromising the whole purpose of making such systems. In this work one such vulnerability in FMCW radar was exploited to design an attack that was capable of decreasing the apparent distance, as measured by a radar system. The attack was designed in such a way that there was no tampering with the radar system being attacked. Instead, false distance information was introduced in the return path of the transmitted radio wave by absorbing the original victim transmission and sending out a modified radio wave on the It was shown that the distance could be decreased to alarming values, which at the level of the vehicle automation system results in decreasing the speed of the automobile when actually it should have increased.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This dissertation proposes an approach to reduce the cost of manual inspections for as large a number of false positive warnings that are being reported by Static Code Analysis (SCA) tools as much as possible using Machine Learning (ML) techniques. The proposed approach neither assume to use the particular SCA tools nor depends on the specific programming language used to write the target source code or the application. To reduce the number of false positive warnings we first evaluated a number of SCA tools in terms of software engineering metrics using a highlighted synthetic source code named the Juliet test suite. From this evaluation, we concluded that the SCA tools report plenty of false positive warnings that need a manual inspection. Then we generated a number of datasets from the source code that forced the SCA tool to generate either true positive, false positive, or false negative warnings. The datasets, then, were used to train four of ML classifiers in order to classify the collected warnings from the synthetic source code. From the experimental results of the ML classifiers, we observed that the classifier that built using the Random Forests (RF) technique outperformed the rest of the classifiers. Lastly, using this classifier and an instance-based transfer learning technique, we ranked a number of warnings that were aggregated from various open-source software projects. The experimental results show that the proposed approach to reduce the cost of the manual inspection of the false positive warnings outperformed the random ranking algorithm and was highly correlated with the ranked list that the optimal ranking algorithm generated.

Blood is considered one of the most widely tested biological matrices. The first step in blood identification involves visual examination followed by presumptive testing. Once a positive presumptive result is observed, confirmatory tests are performed to determine that a stain is human blood, thus reducing the time and resources spent on forensically irrelevant samples. When interfering agents are present, this general workflow is hindered as presumptive tests can render false-negative results. General awareness of these interfering agents can help analysts to recognize forensically relevant evidence that may have otherwise been deemed immaterial. The main objective of this study was to understand various interfering agents and their effects on presumptive blood tests such as Kastle Meyer (KM) and Orthotolidine (O-tol) reagents and confirmatory tests such as HemaTrace® and Rapid Stain Identification (RSID™) Blood. Additional experiments explored the effects on downstream DNA analysis. In the first part of the study, bloodstains in varying concentrations were exposed to ten chemical interferents over a period of time to understand how blood dilution, age of the stain, and the chemical nature of the interferent affect presumptive blood test results. Antioxidants, active oxygen, and tannins are known to interrupt the mechanism of presumptive tests. Thus, ten interfering agents (ascorbic acid, chlorogenic acid, catechin, sodium percarbonate, hydrogen peroxide, oxalic acid, proanthocyanidins, quebracho extract, chestnut extract, and theaflavin) were selected based on these characteristics. Six blood dilutions (neat, 1:10, 1:50, 1:100, 1:500, and 1:1000) were exposed to the interferents, and presumptive tests for blood were conducted on six days (day 1, 8, 22, 43, 71, and 106). The second part of the study examined bloodstains deposited on real-world samples (wines, citrus fruit juices, teas, coffee, cleaning agents, and leather products) containing chemical interferents. In addition, confirmatory testing for human blood was conducted with HemaTrace® and RSID™-Blood on day 106 using the 1:500 dilution. Finally, DNA analysis of 1:10 dilution stains was performed on day 150 to study whether downstream DNA analysis was compromised due to the presence of the interferents. The results showed that as blood concentration reduced, more false-negative results were observed when chemical interferents were present. Further, chemical interferents produced frequent atypical color changes in tests with KM and O-tol reagents, while only some atypical color changes were observed with the household products tested. Immunochromatographic assay results indicated both HemaTrace® and RSID™-Blood could detect the presence of blood when interfering agents are present, although the positive result bands with RSID™-Blood were faint and sometimes difficult to visualize. Poor DNA results from the untreated blood sample limited any interpretation of the DNA results obtained from bloodstains deposited on household products. Overall, the data indicates that valuable blood evidence may be overlooked due to faint or false-negative results when these interferents are present. Future studies should focus on how these interferents may affect downstream DNA analysis.