This is an adaptation of a comment I made at Birther Report.
First, there is no truth whatever in the oft-repeated comment that the so-called anomalies in the President’s PDF birth certificate file pointed out by birthers cannot be recreated in repeatable experiments on real documents with real scanners. It was true at one time, but not any more. These experiments were published by the scientist who did them, and subjected to review. You can read all that here (and other articles on that site):
The blogger Reality Check also made some videos and a series of popular articles on the findings.
Papit, Papa, Zebest, Vogt and the rest have been made irrelevant.
I do have 6 experts, all of whom have the credentials to testify in court. Here is what WorldNetDaily writer Aaron Klein said about 3 of them:
I decided to go to actual, to some of the nation’s foremost forensic graphic analysts, and I don’t mind naming their names: Jim Pex at International Forensic Experts, also John Berryhill the President and COO of Berryhill Computer Forensics, I[v]an Zatkovich at eComputer Consultants, all with years of expert in criminal and civil testimony. They have consulted for graphics forensic expertise for such companies as Citicorp, McGraw Hill, other major publishing firms, online Amazon.com, others. So, they’re incredibly qualified.
Klein went on to say that none of them found fakery. WorldNetDaily refused to release any of these reports, and recently when I tried to mention them in comments on their site, they BANNED me. Here is the transcript of what Aaron Klein said on his WABC radio program:
WorldNetDaily talked about the Zatkovich report, misrepresenting it, forcing Zatkovich to publish it himself. You can read that here:
The 4th expert is Dr. Neal Krawetz, noted security expert, expert on faked images, forensic software author (see his FotoForensics.com site) and frequent speaker at conferences. You can read his comments here:
The 5th is Ken Colburn founder and CEO of Data Doctors Computer Services & Data Forensics Labs appearing in an interview on a Phoenix TV station. Here is what he said after looking at the Cold Case Posse presentation:
When I first saw it it was very convincing until we did our test and saw that, wait a minute, our scanner does the same thing.
Here is a link to the video at USA Today.
My prior 5 experts are good, but the 6th expert is the one that I put the most faith in, because he is an expert in exactly the subject under discussion. Dr. Ricardo de Queiroz was a former research scientist for Xerox, and a patent holder in the very compression technology that has so confused the birthers. He is the author of an academic paper on mixed raster content compression (one that discusses why there are halos, for example), and he informally looked at the Obama PDF and responded that it looked like MRC compression to him. Of all the people commenting, he is the one most qualified to look at the PDF and say what it is. Here’s a copy of his paper in the Journal of Electronic Imaging mentioning halos:
His comments on the Obama PDF are informal, made in an email.
One final remark on Reed Hayes. Being an expert in one thing doesn’t make someone an expert in everything. The reason that I cannot accept any opinion from Reed Hayes as an expert opinion without first reading his report is that I cannot know whether his report is about something he is an expert in, or whether its conclusions are based on something he is not an expert in. Depending on what Hayes says, he may be an expert, or he may not.
Did WND ever give a reason for not releasing the reports? Even a birther would have to find that suspect. What a pathetic excuse for a news site!
The Reed Hayes’ Report is about as useless as the display of Wonder Woman’s invisible jet, currently on display at the Museum of Flight. (One can’t see a thing.)
http://blog.nasm.si.edu/behind-the-scenes/wonder-womans-invisible-jet/
The same reason they redacted the Ah’nee certificate, same reason Zullo won’t release the report, or why birthers edited the interview with Sarah Obama. Any time real research is done it discredits their own claims and they can’t have that.
WND needs no such excuses because it’s not a “news site.” It’s a propaganda nonsense factory.
The Reed Hayes’ Report is about as useless as the display of Wonder Woman’s invisible jet, currently on display at the Museum of Flight. (One can’t see a thing.)
http://blog.nasm.si.edu/behind-the-scenes/wonder-womans-invisible-jet/
I thought it was only display just for the one day. (But then how could you tell?)
Apologies for going off-topic (again!), but thanks to Rockwell Collins helmet technology, F-35 drivers get to find out what it’s like to fly Wonder Woman’s jet:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/magic-helmet-for-f-35-ready-for-delivery/
“In addition to providing the navigational and targeting information typically shown in a combat aircraft’s heads-up display, the HMDS also includes aspects of virtual reality, allowing a pilot to look through the plane. Using a collection of six high-definition video and infrared cameras on the fighter’s exterior called the Distributed Aperture System (DAS), the display extends vision a full 360 degrees around the aircraft from within the cockpit. The helmet is also equipped with night vision capabilities via an infrared sensor that projects imagery inside the facemask.”
Helmet runs a mere $600,000. F-35 sold separately.
Reliable sources confirm that her invisible jet was on display for one day, April 1, 2015. Not so reliable sources confirm that the invisible Reed Hayes’ report also exists, but has never been seen by the Birther faithful. But, they’re convinced it’s a hum dinger of a report that is universe shattering. Talk about faith. 😉
Mara Zebest’s claim to be an expert rests on her having helped edit a book or two on Adobe software. The LFBC PDF was never touched by an Adobe product. It was created by scanning a paper document on a Xerox WorkCentre that has firmware that compresses a bitmap raw scan into a compressed PDF file. It was then opened and saved on a MAC using the PDF viewer module in Mac OS.
It’s still hard to take her seriously as an expert when she couldn’t even work a computer.
Mara Zebest is relevant because she said what the birthers wanted to hear. That qualifies her as a cold case posse expert.
Yep, that is pretty much their criterion for screening experts.
Maybe a highly sophisticated detector could measure the difference in mass (the plane’s just invisible, not massless).
However there’s no way to tell about the Reed Hayes report whose physical weight is much less and whose carried weight is zero.