Court rules drug dog barely more accurate than a coin flip is good enough
This article, and in particular the title, is horrible and shows no understanding of the math in play. The facts do not indicate that the dog "is barely more accurate than a coinflip" if 59% of the indications in question turn out to actually have drugs.<p>Out of 1000 samples the dog is positively indicating for 930 of the (93% of the time) of which 549 are true positives and 381 are false positives. Let's be generous and say that all 70 remaining are true negatives.<p>If the dog was subbed out for a coin flip we would have a positive indicator 500 times of which 274 would be true positives and 226 would be false positives. We would then have 275 false negatives and 225 true negatives.<p>So subbing in the dog for a coin catches 275 drug carriers at the expense of an extra 155 false positives. We can argue about whether that is good enough but comparing it to a coinflip makes no sense.