Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Electrical network frequency analysis

Electrical network frequency analysis

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No Reliable Sources. The sources given are The Register and a non-Peer Reviewed self published paper by the technique's inventor ... hosted by the company who will sell you the software for $1499. There are few google hits, and these normally refer back to the Register article. Springnuts (talk) 06:42, 5 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Rather than being a hoax; it does seem to me that this is a genuine stub on a perfectly valid subject - although it clearly needs a lot of work and fleshing out with information from reliable sources - or perhaps merged as a section on forensic applications in the utility frequency article.

Following through on the clues from the article in The Register (one of the only two sources cited), there is certainly a Dr Alan Cooper who works in the field of digital forensics with the Metropolitan Police in London and who not only submitted a PhD Thesis on the subject of Detection of Copies of Digital Audio Recordings for Forensic Purposes, but was also awarded a PhD for that in August 2006.

Dr Cooper's PhD on the subject is certainly from a credible university and his thesis is linked to from the university's website.

The Royal Holloway also lists Alan Cooper as an MSc graduate in Information Security (2002-2003) and lists him as being in the employ of the Metropolitan Police Service .. as does the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society's reporting on the 33rd AES Conference, in 2008 (J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 56, No. 9, 2008 September) which lists him as part of a specialist panel on How to run an audio forensics laboratory and also very specifically mentions a paper he presented on his work on automatic extraction and matching of Electrical Network Frequency and Authentication (ENF) data (the very subject of the article in question here):

"Alan Cooper of the London Metropolitan Police presented his work on automatic extraction and matching of ENF data ..........."

The J. Audio Eng. Soc. article also mentions papers on ENF presented by two other people.

Google searches would also seem to indicate that there is also seem to be a Dr Catalin Grigoras working with the Romanian Ministry of Justice's National Institute of Forensic Expertise.

There also seems to be plenty of Google hits if you modify the search term slightly:

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL) navlebeskuelse (talk) 09:36, 5 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I would regard the Reg as a reliable source in this particular context: most of their coverage is serious journalism, albeit mixed in with (generally clearly signalled) joke stories and provocations. This does not seem to be either of the latter. On review of the above: I agree that this should be merged to a "forensic applications" section in the utility frequency article. -- The Anome (talk) 15:54, 5 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Technology-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 16:32, 5 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]