Deliberate misuse of probabilities has been known to occur where scientific evidence such as DNA testing is involved, such as paternity suits and rape and murder cases. The reason is that, as with the cancer test example, it ignores the initial low prior probability that a person chosen at random is guilty of the crime in question. Instructing the court in the proper use of Bayesian inference was the winning strategy used by American long-distance runner Mary Slaney's lawyers when they succeeded in having her 1996 performance ban overturned. Slaney failed a routine test for performance-enhancing steroids at the 1996 Olympic Games, resulting in the US athletic authorities banning her from future competitions. Her lawyers demonstrated that the test did not take proper account of the prior probability and thus made a tacit initial assumption of guilt.
Chemists use such data to work out the molecular structure of substances they wish to analyze.
The system uses Bayes' formula to combine the new data from the NMR device with existing NMR data, a procedure that can improve the resolution of the data by several orders of magnitude. Other recent uses of Bayesian inference are in the evaluation of new drugs and medical treatments, the analysis of human DNA to identify particular genes, and in analyzing police arrest data to see if any officers have been targeting one particular ethnic group. Devlin's Angle is updated at the beginning of each month.