What’s in a name? - avoiding false positives

Technological advances - the Internet, mass storage of information on media such as CD-ROM and DVD and wireless communications – mean that it is now possible to have what seems like an infinite amount of information at one’s fingertips.The obvious advantage is that a quick search can yield results that might have required physical visits and examinations of large quantities of paper as little as ten years ago. A less obvious disadvantage is that the sheer quantity of information available can make it difficult to tell the good from the bad and the relevant from the irrelevant. Old proverbs still ring true, write Patrick Jost and Cliff Knuckey - the needle in the haystack is very much a reality – and never more so than when it comes to tracking terrorists and their financiers.

Two related problems

There are two problems well known to even casual users of data sources. The first is the false negative - failing to find what you were looking for. A common cause for the false positive is the simple fact that what is searched for is not in the database.