David Charlton

Emotional experiences and motivating factors associated with fingerprint analysis.

Abstract:  In this study, we investigated the emotional and motivational factors involved in fingerprint analysis in day‐to‐day routine case work and in significant and harrowing criminal investigations. Thematic analysis was performed on interviews with 13 experienced fingerprint examiners from a variety of law enforcement agencies. The data revealed factors relating to job satisfaction and the use of skill. Individual satisfaction related to catching criminals was observed; this was most notable in solving high profile, serious, or long‐running cases. There were positive emotional effects associated with matching fingerprints and apparent fear of making errors. Finally, we found evidence for a need of cognitive closure in fingerprint examiner decision‐making.

E.T.A. Hoffmann's musical writings : Kreisleriana, The poet and the composer, music criticism

List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Part I. Kreisleriana and The Poet and the Composer: Editors preface to Kreisleriana and The Poet and the Composer Part II. Music Criticism: Sources and suppositive reviews by Frederick Schnapp Appendix Index.

Forensic comparison and matching of fingerprints: using quantitative image measures for estimating error rates through understanding and predicting difficulty.

Latent fingerprint examination is a complex task that, despite advances in image processing, still fundamentally depends on the visual judgments of highly trained human examiners. Fingerprints collected from crime scenes typically contain less information than fingerprints collected under controlled conditions. Specifically, they are often noisy and distorted and may contain only a portion of the total fingerprint area. Expertise in fingerprint comparison, like other forms of perceptual expertise, such as face recognition or aircraft identification, depends on perceptual learning processes that lead to the discovery of features and relations that matter in comparing prints. Relatively little is known about the perceptual processes involved in making comparisons, and even less is known about what characteristics of fingerprint pairs make particular comparisons easy or difficult. We measured expert examiner performance and judgments of difficulty and confidence on a new fingerprint database. We developed a number of quantitative measures of image characteristics and used multiple regression techniques to discover objective predictors of error as well as perceived difficulty and confidence. A number of useful predictors emerged, and these included variables related to image quality metrics, such as intensity and contrast information, as well as measures of information quantity, such as the total fingerprint area. Also included were configural features that fingerprint experts have noted, such as the presence and clarity of global features and fingerprint ridges. Within the constraints of the overall low error rates of experts, a regression model incorporating the derived predictors demonstrated reasonable success in predicting objective difficulty for print pairs, as shown both in goodness of fit measures to the original data set and in a cross validation test. The results indicate the plausibility of using objective image metrics to predict expert performance and subjective assessment of difficulty in fingerprint comparisons.

New Light on the Bouffons in Paris (1752–1754)

Modern writing on the troupe of Eustachio Bambini has encouraged different thinking about the ‘querelle’ and the ‘bouffons’. Andrea Fabiano, in particular, has intimated a fresh view of Bambinis Parisian repertory that aims to understand the various tactics of pamphleteers and free itself from received opinion. Recent writers have taken a harder look at the evidential assumptions that led to a long-held weighting of the bouffon narrative towards Pergolesis La serva padrona on one hand and the departure of the Italian troupe on the other, politicized as this was by outraged reactions to Rousseaus Lettre sur la musique francoise . In the present account, the emphasis is on new evidence, both primary and secondary. It fills in new details concerning the institutional relationship between Bambini and the Paris Opera, alerts us to hitherto unreported performances by the bouffons between Easter 1753 and February 1754 and tells us that a rearguard action for compensation was fought by Jean-Baptiste-Claude Rousselet of Rouen, whose original contract with Bambini had been severed in November 1752. The concluding picture is one of constructive support for Bambini by the Opera; indeed, a creative collaboration between these two had been arranged before the querelle began. Mandated by the king in 1749 to recognize a public-interest function in running the Opera, its directeur (Bernage de Saint-Maurice) may well have wanted to continue some form of binary programming between the two traditions, French and Italian, at the point when Rousseaus Lettre made it impossible. Box-office takings rose during the early success of his initiatives, especially before Easter 1753; after this juncture the extant financial records are not adequate to judge such profitability.

Etienne-Nicolas Mehul and Opera: Source and Archival Studies of Lyric Theatre during the French Revolution, Consulate and Empire (review)

throughout the period, and it seems strange that Stadler’s ‘Musick-Plan’, a view of eighteenthcentury musical life and training from 1799, is not used in this context. It is indeed a rare privilege to be able to read the pragmatic advice of a virtuoso whose own clarinet was described as having ‘so soft and lovely a tone that no one with a heart can resist it’. Reeds, instrument repair, and a well-specified toolkit take their place within Stadler’s curriculum for students, alongside a number of more philosophical questions relating to the art of music. Emphasizing the importance of a good general education, Stadler observed that anyone wanting to understand music must know the whole of worldly wisdom and mathematics, poetry, education, art, and many languages. If the spirit of such sentiments had inspired Rice’s book to a greater degree, the Classical clarinet in theory and practice might have been illuminated more richly than his somewhat narrow yet impressively documented focus allows. COLIN LAWSON doi:10.1093/ml/gci043