Donating to Wikipedia

As a professional writer, I depend on Wikipedia as a first source for framing information. This week, I sent them $50. I last gave $20 in 2012. So, it has been a while. I have been working steadily this year, and I got a check for a freelance article just as they were posting their pleas. Giving was easy. 

When I was a substitute teacher in Albuquerque in 2002-2003, the school board advisors warned us not to accept Wikipedia or other citations to online references. Even in 2014, one of my co-workers in the Texas Military Department warned me against Wikipedia because "anyone can write it." In reply, I told him about my experierence with the Encyclopedia Britannica.

In 1995, the American Numismatic Association granted me their George Heath Literary Award for an article I wrote on the origins of coinage. Inspired by Carl Sagan's Cosmos episode "Backbone of the Night" I was collecting ancient Greek coins from the towns and times of philosphers. I wrote an article about the origins of coinage and sent it to The Classical Numismatic Review. It was rejected. I called the editor (something I would not normally do) and asked how I could fix it for him. Kerry Wetterstrom (later the editor of The Celator), asked me about my research. I told him of the books from the MSU Library. He replied that they were out of date. He sent me a list of books and articles to read. I re-wrote the article for him and he published it. He also suggested expanding it and sending it to the American Numismatic Association of which I was a new member. They rejected it because it contradicted all the standard references on the editor's shelf. Kerry recommended that I ask that they submit it to their museum curator, Robert Hoge. He endorsed it. 

The problem is that the Encyclopedia Britannica for many decades carried an article on Money written by Charles Seltman. Seltman's own theory was that coins were invented by Greek merchants who sought to avoid re-weighing bullion bits. Everyone looked to the EB as the authority. Collectors today still repeat the old say-so. But it just ain't true. Even in Seltman's time, there were several competing theories on the origins of coinage. He ignored them all. Just for one example, German archaeologist Ernst Curtius pointed to the Temple of Juno Moneta and the fact that temples receive votive offerings. The "Temple Theory" was supported ten years after Curtius's death when the oldest coins yet discovered were found at the excavation of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Writing 20 years after that, Seltman was more than remiss in not mentioning it. 

In 1999-2000, I was the international editor for Coin World newspaper. I was assigned an article about banknotes featuring naval battles. I found the $100 gold note from 1875 with the Battle of Lake Erie as a vignette. I then researched the battle from the EB and the Grolier American Encyclopedia. Whether it was just rum go, a sticky wicket, and a bit of bad luck or hearty crews of plucky Yankees depends on who you ask. 

Later, I researched the Spanish Armada, again from the EB, but also from the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia. The story is pretty much the same, the facts being what they are, but the nuances are colored very differently. 

In summary, whatever deficiencies Wikipedia suffers are in the fabric of all research and reporting. Wikipedia does not carry advertising. They survive solely on contributions. I am not endorsing that as a business model for everyone, but it works for them. Their annual report, balance sheet, and statement is audited by KPMG. You can read it on their website here https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
Knowlege Maps
Visualizing Complex Data
Why Evidence is Not Enough
Contradictions in the Patentability of Numbers

Newton versus the Counterfeiter

Intended for a general readership, this book rests on an extraordinary foundation of careful scholarship.  Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009).

Thomas Levenson teaches science journalism at MIT. He has been granted special recognition for his Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentaries. Among those is a Westinghouse award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which he shared with co-producer Paula Apsell, for the 1992 PBS “Nova” presentation, Eclipse of the Century. In 2005, the National Academies honored Levenson with a Communications Award for his PBS mini-series production, “Origins: Back to the Beginning,” about evidence for the ontology of life. He knows science; and he knows how to present its difficult facts and complex theories.

            This lively historical narrative of criminology and jurisprudence animates Sir Isaac Newton’s career as a detective and prosecutor. Levenson delivers to print the videographer’s impact of sight and sound. Levenson introduces us to Newton in a series of establishing shots, pan-and-zoom vignettes that sketch and detail the events spotlighting the intellectual and emotional development of the man easily nominated as the greatest scientist. You walk down the alleys and into the pubs where Sir Isaac Newton investigated crimes against the British Royal Mint which he served as warden and master.

            Levenson opens the book by outlining Newton’s intellectual and emotional development. Complementing his work in mathematics, astronomy and optics, Newton also experimented with alchemy, performing purifications and alloys of metals. Emotionally, Newton’s isolation was rooted in self-abnegation. The hint of a homosexual dalliance comes as an instantaneous action, the lifelong reaction to which only distanced his social relations to ethereal planes. You could get no closer to Newton the man than you could to the Man in the Moon. Thus, this combination of unflinching pursuit of difficult theoretical and empirical truths, bulwarked by a stellar disregard for other people’s feelings made Newton the perfect prosecutor.

Newton portrait
by Enoch Seemar 1726

            The counterfeiter, William Chaloner, was Newton’s opposite. A runaway apprentice whose first lawful skill was making nails, Chaloner found London to be a probabilistic cloud of moral relativity whose potentials suited his self-indulgence. For William Chaloner, counterfeiting coins was only one craft in a wider enterprise. In the language of the day, Chaloner called his swindles “funning”. He funned the Mint with counterfeit coins, and the Bank of England with fake paper, both bank notes and drafts. When his counterfeit notes were discovered, he turned informant, not only avoiding prosecution and prison, but being granted £200 in reward. Accused by informants of counterfeiting, Chaloner won the first courtroom skirmish, humiliating Newton. Consequently, Chaloner erroneously considered himself Newton’s equal; and his complex, long-range plans were but moves in a game designed to give him access to the Mint in order to coin for his own profit.

            Before Newton, the posts of warden and master were only sinecures for the favored who then further stocked their own larders at public expense. They were not exceptions. Married to sisters, the master smelter and the assay master were brothers-in-law, living beyond the limits of their official salaries, inferentially guilty of conspiring to pass debased silver into the official coining operation. The vector that impelled Newton’s trajectory was the sale of dies from the Mint to counterfeiters on the outside.

            Whether Newton’s career as a detective and prosecutor is “unknown” is putative. While most readers here probably know of his Three Laws of Motion, his work at the British Royal Mint is less often taught. Biographer David Berlinksi (Newton’s Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World, New York: The Free Press, 2000) called Newton’s tenure at the mint uninteresting. Numismatists, who study the forms and uses of money, feel differently. 

Levenson acknowledges the works of Sir John Craig. Craig’s book, Newton at the Mint (Cambridge, 1946) is catalogued by the libraries of both the American Numismatic Society and the American Numismatic Association. Levenson also cites two other Craig monographs, "Isaac Newton—Crime Investigator", Nature 182, 149-52; and Isaac Newton and the Counterfeiters, 18 Notes and Records of the Royal Society 2, 136-45 (1963). When I proposed a review of the Levenson book to the Numismatic Bibliomania Society, editor Wayne Homren shot back: “How does it compare to Craig?” Levenson draws on the same sources as Craig: Newton’s papers, the mint archives, court records, a biography of Chaloner, Chaloner’s own petitions and letters. Where numismatist John Craig presented the facts, videographer Thomas Levenson brings them to life.

Merchant Token 1791 Middlesex
1penny; size larger than
US quarter dollar.

            Nonetheless, graphical animation can be dangerous. Of Newton’s meeting in a pub with an informant, Levenson says, “The detective swallowed his irritation.” (P. x.) Did he?  Was that recorded?  “For Newton’s part, this first encounter with Chaloner did not register very deeply.” (P. 157.) The storyteller’s power depends on many such inferences and inventions. The salient question is: Does the poetic license that is extended to creative non-fiction jeopardize the truth? 

            Of course, we have the compiled confessions of the accused and the accusations of informers whom Newton interrogated. Yet, those folios are decidedly incomplete. We know that many were burned. To explain why official records were destroyed, Levenson leaves the main narrative to establish a historical context for the use of torture in interrogation, a subject of some immediacy to us. Newton could not resort to extreme methods, but the actual tactics are lost because the documents were burned according to the reports of Sir Isaac Newton’s secretary.

            Whether William Chaloner was factually guilty may never be known. It is accepted that William Chaloner did not get a fair trial. “Chaloner was sentenced to death, very fairly on his record, unjudicially on the evidence …” (Craig, 1963; P. 143.) Levenson concurs. William Chaloner was accused of crimes committed in London. “And yet Chaloner faced charges brought by a Middlesex grand jury, being heard by a Middlesex trial jury. How could such a court, Chaloner asked, address crimes committed outside its jurisdiction?.” (P. 231.)

            Our modern experience with wrongful convictions throws a harsh light on the testimonies of jailhouse snitches, casting shadows of doubt. Yet, those informants were the only source of Newton’s evidence against Chaloner. Prima facie evidence is easy to accept. Chaloner probably was guilty, but certainly did not get a fair trial by modern standards. Moreover, our sociological context also condemns much else of that time and place. We do not horribly execute counterfeiters. Chaloner was drawn and quartered.

            As a casual read, the book can be enjoyed in a couple of hours. No reference numbers or inline citations encumber the text. The Notes are all in the back with concordance by page number and key words. Some readers will find profitable cause to linger there and reflect.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Forgery and Fraud in Numismatics

Merry Newtonmas (2013)

Harriman's Logical Leap Almost Makes It

Junk Criminology as Pseudo-Science

THE FALLIBILITY OF FINGERPRINTING

The easy truth is that fingerprints are not reliable. The deeper facts are necessarily more complicated. Whether and to what extent fingerprints - or, ultimately DNA, retinal scans, and other biometric identifications - may be putatively "infallible" there remains an underlying desire to segregate good people from bad, to control the latter for the benefit of the former. 

Suspect Identies: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification  
by Simon Cole (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

However, an admittedly unscientific poll by CNN Money in 2004 found that 21% of Americans cheat on their federal income  tax.     A story in the New York Times for May 1, 2010, claimed that 20% to 30% of the wealth in Greece is off the books in undisclosed transactions.   That number might reflect American realities as well.  (Prof. Liqun Cao told our criminology classes that perhaps 20% of the goods on the market have no clear title.)  Furthermore, according to the social taxonomy for "anomie" presented by Robert King Merton, "innovators" are those who seek socially-approved goals in unapproved ways.  You might think that defines robbery (and it does), but it also defines the "pirates of Silicon Valley" who created new computer resources otherwise denied to them: they were hackers before they became inventors.  Even if we could tag everyone, do we want to?  What is achieved by criminalizing young people for thinking outside the box?  

The basic problem here, of course, is that such tagging is not reliable.  It does not work.  Experts who study fingerprints know the problems.  Worst of all, they deny, minimize, and obfuscate their different interpretations of the facts in order to present a united front to the world, claming that fingerprints are certain, not probabilistic. Simon Cole's work has a few weak points.  He presents the same information twice, in the absence of giving new data to substantiate a new claim.  With that caveat, it remains that this book is an excellent history of the attempts to measure and identify criminals. 

Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting
and Criminal Identificaion by Simon Cole,
Harvard University Press, 2002, 2009.

Though with several other roots as well - India under British rule in 1858, for instance - "Anthropometry" began in the 1870s with Cesare Lombrosco. Again, both motives were active.  First, criminologists thought that law-breakers were physically different from normal people.  The criminal could be detected by the geometry of his skull and the ratio of his legs to this torso. Calling themselves scientists, they developed complex taxonomies for ear shape.  In theory, if they could measure everyone, they could cull the criminals from society and prevent if not eradicate crime.  Second, the police and courts (and the military) had a large body of repeat offenders. Identifying them would facilitate processing -- and prevent wrongful pleas for mercy from self-defined "first time offenders."  Similarly, the U.S. Army needed to keep out those it threw out but who came back via another recruiter. 

Anthropometry was hard work. Special calipers applied to the unclothed body provided raw numbers for the calculation of ratios and proportions.  And it only worked with males.  In the 19th century, despite hand-wringing over the evils of prostitution, few were willing to measure a woman in the same manner.  And the numerical models were lacking.  Anthropometry had limitations, of course; and Coles tells (pp. 140-142) the famous case of the two William Wests carefully measured and then confused by Leavenworth Prison.  That hallmark case is a classic justification for the reliability of fingerprinting.  It appears in college textbooks for criminal investigations.

Fingerprinting solved a lot of problems, not the least of which was differentiating the two Misters West. Fingerprints are easy to get -- from men or women, living or dead. 

Meticulous cataloguing suggested that no two people had the same set of prints.  That may well be true.  We do not know for sure.  This is an empirical truth only.  Like primitives for whom the sun has always come up in the east, but who have no knowledge of astronomy, we can take all the measurements we want, but we do not know the genomes and alleles for fingerprints; we know the what, but not the why.

We could live with that.  But in a few decades from the 1920s to the 1940s, fingerprinting devolved to the point where trained examiners claimed under oath that a partial print unabiguously identified a perpetrator.  Comparing good "native" prints from each of ten fingers was reduced to accepting claims about partial latent (secondary) prints.

Fingerprint examiners never disagree with each other in court.  They only agree that the prints identify or are "inconclusive."  Coles tells the story (pp. 264-266; 272-274; 282) of experts in disagreement all of whose certifications were revoked because that was the only way for the International Association for Indentification to maintain the fiction that experts do not disagree about fingerprints.  Today, fingerprints are unassailable.

The Numbers Behind NUMB3RS by
Gary Lorden and Keith Devlin,
Plume Books, 2007

The fact remains that fingerprints have been forged by several methods by police and by criminals.  (The FBI first found a forgery by a law enforcement officer in 1925.)  And of course there is politics.  J. Edgar Hoover and New York City Police Commissioner Richard E. Enright both had strong claims that their agency was best suited to be the central clearning house and repository.  Suspect Identities is a dense book that covers a lot of ground in 350 pages, but the index is an exemplary epistemological map to this complex presentation.

The epistemological and methodological problems in fingerprinting are not taught to law enforcement professionals.  After completing a BSc in criminology in 2008, I was watching a rerun of NUMB3RS, the CBS drama series (2005-2010) about mathematician Charlie Eppes and his brother, FBI Special Agent Don.  The first season show Identity Crisis centered on fingerprinting.  Prof. Eppes identified the key difference between DNA and fingerprinting, asking rhetorically, "But prints don't have odds?" A fuller treatment of the problem can be found in The Numbers Behind NUMB3RS by Keith Devlin and Gary Lorden.  (Dr. Devlin teaches at Stanford and is NPR's "Math Guy."  Dr. Lorden teaches at CalTech and was the technical advisor for the series.) 
The case of Brandon Mayfield may become paradigmatic.  You can google him and find the Wikipedia article.  As Mayfield is an attorney, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has an insightful summary on their website.  Mayfield was wrongfully accused of being an Al Qaeda operative, in large part because FBI fingerprint examiners refused to disagree with their boss.  The evidence - such as it was - began with a single latent fingerprint.


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Junk Science in the Courtroom
Eyewitness Testimony: Popper, Wittgenstein, and the Innocence Project
Forgery and Fraud in Numismatics
William Sheldon: Psychologist, Numismatist, Thief
Is Physics a Science?