Double Loop Podcast

In this episode, Glenn and Eric start with a quick game of “A Truth, A Lie, and a Mandella Effect”. Then they pose a question from a listener regarding interest in a forum where listeners can go and discuss the episodes of the show, ask questions, and chat “amongst themselves”. Finally they get to the long awaited Noblis/FBI study “Black Box 2” latent fingerprint error rate study. This is a re-do of the 2011 black box study for latent fingerprint performance. This study “Accuracy and reproducibility of latent print decisions on comparisons from searches of an automated fingerprint identification system” by Hicklin, Richetelli, Taylor and Buscaglia (For Sci Intl, 370 (2025), 112457), reported the performance of 156 U.S. latent print examiner participants each reviewing about 100 latent prints/comparisons resulting in over 14,000 trials. The study reports numerous statistics of performance such as sensitivity (63%), specificity (70%), false positive error rate (0.2%), and false negative error rate (4.2%).