Last week of uni

Right, i did my presentation on Jury decision making today. It went quite well i think. It flowed and made sense. I was a bit nervous as my part was quite long and i wanted it to be as concise as possible, i wasn't sure if people fully understood what i was saying it but i hope so. after the presentation we were asked whether we thought membership function is a good way to measure interpretations of reasonable doubt, i didn't get chance to say this, but i think it is because it measures interpretations of reasonable doubt to be around 0.90. This is the closest measurement to what has been found in past research. Unfortunately i did not get to watch the last couple of presentations because i had to leave the class to go to an appointment. Overall i learnt from the experience that a lecturers job is a lot harder than i thought. its difficult to give precise and clear presentations while keeping every1 engaged and sounding interesting. I feel that i gave it my best go though.

I have also just written up a draft of my participation to our last wiki (which is on the same subject but a different paper). My paper is about how accurate people expect jurors to be compared to how they well they actually do. But the part of the paper i have written about (another group member is writing about the second half), is about how jurors should make decisions in court if they wish to maximises the expected utility of their decision. They should do this using three theoretical tools. These involve the utility theory and Bayes' theorem, i do understand their overall concept but i had a lot of difficulty getting my heads around the calculations they involve as algebra is not one of my strong points! I think it is interesting to see how you would calculate a rational and logical verdict (using these calculations), and the complexity of the calculations helped me to see why people often do not make rational decisions, it would be impossible to do these calculations every time you make a decision! However its a scary thought that jurors (the people we trust to keep us safe by convicting criminals and reducing the likelihood of innocent people being convicted), may make a lot more errors than most of us think!

I hope to have my part of the wiki finished as soon as possible, hopefully before Christmas because i have lots of other revising to do!

1st week of the presentations...

I have just attended our second to last lecture of this module. This was the start of the presentations on an article from our wiki's. We only had chance to see 4 out of the 10 groups do a presentation as they were all quite long.
I thought the presentations were really good. The speakers seemed to fully understand their articles and they gave clear summaries. However I felt that some could have been a bit shorter however I guess this would be hard to achieve as all the papers have huge amounts of information in them! I found some of the presentations really interesting, like the one about the fact that people who's body's are less symmetrical have to make more of an effort in life because they are seen as being less attractive!
I’m glad I got to see some other groups perform before we do ours, as I can see what the presentations were like from the audiences’ point of view. I think it’s important that our presentation is concise and as clear as possible. I think the key is to find a balance between makings as much of the article as clear as possible while making it short and snappy.
Next Friday we will be presenting our paper on jury decision making. We have divided it up into 5 equal parts and I will be talking about the findings from the first experiment. In brief these are; that the 3 different methods used to measure peoples interpretation of what reasonable doubt is (Reasonable doubt is really just, how sure a juror has to be that a suspect is guilty in order to convict them), did not show any correlation, i.e. they each showed that people came up with different interpretations of reasonable doubt. Secondly, it was found that all methods were reasonably valid as they all predicted participants verdicts above chance level. Lastly, it was found that interpretations of reasonable doubt vary a lot from person to person. These findings show that jurors may not be as consistent as first thought and should have an effect on future research.
All I need to do now is make the power point slides and i think our group will be meeting up during next week to go over our presentation so its ready for Friday.

Preperation for our presentation in week 11

It is now the end of week nine and i am writing this blog after a meeting with my group, which we did instead of having a lecture this week. We had planned to get started on the reading for our presentation which is on an article by Mandeep K. Dhami: Measuring quantitative Interpretations of reasonable doubt. I had already read through the paper and highlighted the parts i felt were most important. I found that parts were incredibly hard to understand this may be because it is written in a very technical way. In our meeting today David Harman went through it with us, and iv had another read through myself, i now feel happier now with the overall concept, which, when i think about it is rather straight forward and just commonsense. The only thing i have to try and do now is to condense it down into simpler terms for the presentation.
Reasonable doubt is basically the highest probability that the jury would have to feel that the defendant is guilty, in order to convict them. In most cases past research have found that this is normally around 90% probability. Therefore if a jury was 90% sure that the defendant was guilty its more than likely they would convict them.
The question this paper addresses is whether different methods of explaining the standard of reasonable doubt too the jurors leads them to give different verdicts.
It becomes apparent in this paper that describing reasonable doubt in words (qualitatively), rather than explaining in in terms of probability (quantitatively) results in more inter individual variability in their interpretation of reasonable doubt. If this is true then it raises concerns that jurors may find it difficult to reach consensus on a verdict.
Breifly, there were three methods used in experiments 1 & 2 to measure interpretations of reasonable doubt; two direct methods (direct rating and membership function) and one indirect method ( decision theory based). They also analysed these against the different ways the jurors were instructed about reasonable doubt. It was found that the direct and in direct methods did differ in their ability to predict verdicts. They seemed to appear to capture different aspects of the concept of reasonable doubt. Overall, it appears that there is alot of inter and intraindividual variability in jurors, and that their interpretaion of how sure they should be that a person is guilty in order for them to convict them can also vary alot. These finding should have a massive impact on the way jurors are instructed on reasonable doubt and on future researchers choosiong the method when studying standards of proof!
That explanation was rather vague and i feel i need to re-read the paper and read some of the other articals on the subject so that i am happy enough to present it to the class! our goup decided whos doing what, and i am explaining the results of the 1st experiment so i need to look at that part again!
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