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!