Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Chris C]

"In essence, in the view of the Court, Raffaele Sollecito’s habit of carrying in his pocket a small boxcutter would be enough to deduce that he used it to strike the victim, and it is for the defence, if anyone, to prove otherwise.
It is important to note that not only does there not exist a single element to link the murder with a boxcutter of Sollecito’s, but even the representatives of the prosecution have never drawn attention to this theory." (page 75)

The authors of the appeal used bolding, not I. The logic is compelling, and platonov is wrong (again).

Halides, the boxcutter remark has always confused me. I thought the boxcutter could only make the 1 wound that the prosecution attributed to the GIANT knife they said Knox was carrying in her purse. Or could the boxcutter have made the other 2 wounds that the Kitchen knife couldn't have made. I have a few boxcutter knives, my company has banned all types of knives but boxcutters. So I know what kinda wounds they can make. Stabbing with a boxcutter knife at best with most boxcutter knives will only make a wound of around 1/2 inch to 1 inch depending on angle of stab.

 

[katy_did]

Kevin Lowe's calculation is correct based on his assumptions. At the risk of lecturing a short course on statistics and probabilities follows:

Thanks Onofarar. Very interesting, even if it does make my head hurt! (in a good way).

 

[odeed]

The question of whether the police took the three suspects on a parade through the old town of Perugia arose a few days ago. Several posters expressed doubt over the veracity of the account in Candace Dempsey’s book, Murder in Italy. I have provided some of statements made by posters here with the comment number and page number in parenthesis. Kermit also commented, but I left his out, as well as some of odeed’s in the interest of brevity.

....

Let’s start by reconsidering the DailyMail account,

snipped..quoted it below

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/a...dence-Meredith-murder-case.html#ixzz16GGpTUEv

I surmise that the word “approach” should be changed to “leave.” Odeed seems to believe that the account above refers to Mr. Lumumba’s arrival at the police station. Yet Mr. Lumumba was arrested near dawn, and there would not have been a reason for crowds to be gathering as he was brought in. Moreover, the video clip looks like broad daylight to me, not sunrise.

Changing the word "approach" to "leave" is dishonest, and as for the crowd of photographers you would have to be naive the press attention that this got, and you only have to watch similar high profile cases of how the press (UK press in particular) cover cases.

What we have above are claims of what Candace Dempsey’s sources are, claims without support. In fact Ms. Dempsey’s sources included a cameraman who took footage of the parade and Elio Bertoldi, a journalist with Corriere Dell'Umbria who attended the press conference. Frank was not a source and did not at first believe that the police honked their horns until he saw the tape. Thus the claims above are flat out wrong. The sequence of events was,

1. Patrick arrested, Amanda arrested, Raffaele arrested.
2. Perp walk for all 3, captured on film. One sees them taken one-by-one and put into their own personal patrol cars. That means 3 cars.
3. All 3 cars begin the parade, loudly honking their horns, while reporters chase after them. You can hear the horns on the press videos.
4. Press conference led by DeFelice. "The motive is sexual," he says.
5. Mignini, Giobbi and all the other big shots etc. seen leaving the Questura together.

1. Knox and Solecito were arrested at the police station, Lumumba was arrested at his home in the morning and brought in for questioning.

2. No idea what the perp walk has to do with the supposed parade, but this is not something new or confined to Italy.

3. Three cars seen leaving an area (possibly the police station), honking their horns as they try to get through photographers, and turning off to a motorway, where they go after that is not clear.

4. What has that got to do with claim they were paraded around Perugia.

5. What has that got to do with claim they were paraded around Perugia.

I'll quote your post from http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=5947215&postcount=12869 and repeated several times

Candace Dempsey described the morning of 6 November 2007 in Murder in Italy, p. 159, after Amanda, Patrick, and Raffaele had been arrested,
“Once the doors slammed on the last prisoner, a celebration began. Police wanted to send a message, to the townspeople that they had the killers in custody, detectives had finally solved the Meredith mystery, and Perugia could finally sleep well again. So they lined up the vehicles, switched on the headlights, and honked the horns in jubiliation. Instead of driving directly to prison, they headed uphill into the old town, horns blaring. ’I have seen police behave like this only once before, and that was when they arrested one of the country’s most notorious mafia dons,’ a startled local told the Daily Mail.”

and compare it to the news articles

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/a...dence-Meredith-murder-case.html#ixzz16GGpTUEv

It is November 6, four days after Meredith's body was discovered, and a ten-strong convoy of police cars, sirens blaring, blasts through the winding streets of Perugia.

Officers have spent the previous night interviewing their three prime suspects, Knox, Sollecito and bar owner Patrick Lumumba.

As they approach the police station, they extend their arms through the open windows and wave their fists in triumph at the crowd.

'It was an incredible sight,' said someone present on the day.

'I have seen the police behave like this only once before, and that was when they arrested one of the country's most notorious Mafia dons. They were celebrating, saying: "Look at us, look at what we have achieved."'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...737900/Amanda-Knox-guilty...-but-of-what.html

On November 6, 2007 – just four days after Meredith’s body was discovered – a 10-strong convoy of police cars, sirens blaring, blasted through the winding streets of Perugia. The night before, officers had spent hours interviewing Knox and her boyfriend as well as Patrick Lumumba – a local bar-owner whom Knox placed at the scene but who has since been exonerated. As the convoy approached the police station, officers gave the crowds outside a triumphant thumbs-up sign: they were confident they had nailed their killers. Knox had confessed. ‘‘Case closed,’’ as one officer was to say.

http://seattlest.com/2007/11/07/from_the_papers.php

They were taken to the central police station in a ten-car convoy with sirens blaring. A short time later a press conference was called and an officer at the gates declared 'caso chiuso', which means case closed.

and an interview with Lumumba http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-Lumumba-reveals-framed-Merediths-murder.html

At 6.30am on Tuesday, November 6, the bell to his fourth-floor flat in the town buzzed insistently and a woman's voice outside demanded he opened the door. He had barely had time to do so when the woman, assisted by, Patrick estimates, 15 to 20 others, barged their way in.

"They were wearing normal clothes and carrying guns," he says. "I thought it must be some sort of armed gang about to kill me. I was terrified.

"They hit me over the head and yelled 'dirty black'. Then they put handcuffs on me and shoved me out of the door, as Aleksandra pulled Davide away, screaming."

He was greeted outside by a convoy of seven police cars, sirens blazing, and driven to Perugia's police station, where he was subjected to a ten-hour interrogation.

In all those news articles, it is "approached", "driven to", or "taken to" the police station with "sirens blaring" from Perugia on the 6 November, and most likely after arresting Lumumba, but Dempsey's version it becomes a parade from the police station to Perugia old town on the morning of 6 November.

Also if the last article is true about the ten hour interrogation, that would be from sunrise to sunset in Italy on 6 November.

 

[platonov]

While I thoroughly agree that trawling through Massei for any sort of logical and coherent argument with regard to the second knife would be an utter waste of your time, I'm still not quite sure what kind of link you're looking for. Do you mean to the defence appeal documents? If so, I believe they're on the IIP site. The Massei report is on PMF, of course.

The defence are raising a legal point: the right of the accused to be tried for offences he or she has been given fair notice of, and for which they can then prepare a defence. If the judge starts arbitrarily introducing new offences after the trial is over, in a document which is supposed to explain the reasons for the conviction, how can the defendant possibly defend themselves against that? This is the argument which is being put forward in the appeal, backed by the appropriate legal references.

The fully translated docs, really?? I wasn't aware - why didn't halides1 or you post a link.

Or are they more along the lines of halides1 earlier FOAK link to the 'gift'.

.

 

[katy_did]

Halides, the boxcutter remark has always confused me. I thought the boxcutter could only make the 1 wound that the prosecution attributed to the GIANT knife they said Knox was carrying in her purse. Or could the boxcutter have made the other 2 wounds that the Kitchen knife couldn't have made. I have a few boxcutter knives, my company has banned all types of knives but boxcutters. So I know what kinda wounds they can make. Stabbing with a boxcutter knife at best with most boxcutter knives will only make a wound of around 1/2 inch to 1 inch depending on angle of stab.

I think Massei was talking about the sort of pocket knives that Raffaele carried, whatever the appropriate term for those is! (I have no idea).

As for which wounds it's supposed to have have made, I'm pretty sure Massei is saying the pocket knife could have made the smaller wounds that couldn't have been made by the larger knife.

 

[samba]

Before I waste time looking thru Massei
.

This is where we agree. It was a total waste of time. I guess I shouldn't say that. It did convince me of their innocence.

 

[Machiavelli]

Kevin Lowe's calculation is correct based on his assumptions. At the risk of lecturing a short course on statistics and probabilities follows:

To arrive at the probability of a series of events happening you must multiply them together - the more events the more items to multiply and the lower overall probability. Thus the odds of heads occurring two times in a row are 25% (0.5 x 0.5). (Accounting for all the possibilities: 25% - two heads, 25% - two tails, and 50% one each).

Now, let's put some real (unreal?) possibilities to Kevin's abstract example - Let's assign events that may have occurred to each variable:
X = Amanda bought/stole bleach on the morning of Nov 2nd.
Y = Amada and Raffaele were at the basketball court at 9:30 PM on Nov 1st
Z = Amanda carried a large knife from RS's kitchen in her bag for protection.

Further, Kevin conservatively assigned 60% probablility to each event actually happening - which is a generous hypothetical which I understood to be the probability equivalent of "more likely than not".
Thus the probability that ALL THREE happened is 0.6 x 0.6 x 0.6 = .213 or 21.3%. BTW - assuming 100% certitude for one event (which I don't) only increases the probability to 0.36 or 36%.
Machiavelli, reversed the calculation as follows: 0.4 x 0.4 x 0.4 = 0.064
AND he subratcted that result from 1.00 to get = 0.936 or 93.6%.
But that answers a different question than Kevin posed. Kevin is saying there is only a 21%+ chance that all three events occurred whereas Machiavelli calculates the chance that NONE of them occurred at all. I think he wants us to believe that such a high probability means no reasonable doubt.

I think it is obvious which calculation actually reveals probable doubt.

BTW - generally statistical certitude for probabilities is generally accepted to be 2 or 3 standard deviations. Given a traditional bell curve distribution 2 SD = 95% or 3 SD = 99%. Thus, Machiavelli's calculation even if you accept its logical underpinnings does not meet the statistical minimum of 5% (the inverse of 95%) let alone the 3 sd standard.
How do 2 SD and 3 SD apply to justice? A 2 SD system considers it acceptable that 5% of all trials convict innocent people. A 3 SD system accepts only 1%.

The result 93,6% doesn't mean no reasonable doubt. This is just an hypothetical example based on the abstract figure of three issues of findings (not trhee events) X Y and Z, each of which is deemd to imply a 60% certainity that the event Q (like: defendant's guilt) is true.
The 60% figure - I assume - means: the assessment that it is slightly more slightly likely in one way, slightly less likely in the other.

The result 93,6% corresponds to the odds that the results X Y Z are not casual. If a finding is defined as having only 40% odds to be random, and 60% probability to be correlated, the finding of three results of this kind means there are only 6,4% odds the results are random.

Machiavelli does not mean to calculate the chances that none of them happens: the aim is to indicate the chances that the findings are random, versus non random. The missing chances for the combination (93,6%) can be defined as non random results.

The process is the reverse as calculating the odds that a combination comes out on a slot machine starting from probabilities of each single cards. If you already have a combination, you may calculate how likely this combination is to come out just randomly, in contrast with the missing chances.

 

[katy_did]

The fully translated docs, really?? I wasn't aware - why didn't halides1 or you post a link.

Or are they more along the lines of halides1 earlier FOAK link to the 'gift'.

.

Hmmm... Are you the type who goes on holiday to a foreign country and complains that no one can speak English? It seems a bit unreasonable to expect the Italian Courts to publish their legal documents in English for the benefit of curious foreigners.

I've told you which section it is that deals with the 'second knife' (Section X of Raffaele's appeal) and given you a summary of it. It's hardly my fault if you can't read the original...

 

[platonov]

You cant provide a link so its my fault ?

Originally Posted by platonov

Originally Posted by katy_did

<snip>
I'm still not quite sure what kind of link you're looking for. Do you mean to the defence appeal documents? If so, I believe they're on the IIP site. The Massei report is on PMF, of course.
<snip>

The fully translated docs, really?? I wasn't aware - why didn't halides1 or you post a link.

Or are they more along the lines of halides1 earlier FOAK link to the 'gift'.

Hmmm... Are you the type who goes on holiday to a foreign country and complains that no one can speak English? It seems a bit unreasonable to expect the Italian Courts to publish their legal documents in English for the benefit of curious foreigners.

I've told you which section it is that deals with the 'second knife' (Section X of Raffaele's appeal) and given you a summary of it. It's hardly my fault if you can't read the original...

I see

The Lipstadt ref is even more applicable here.

ETA Where did halides1 get his from - is he translating on the fly ?
.

 

[Chris C]

No, it's a fair deal more complicated than that to work out the statistical probabilities in this case. It's not simply a case of multiplying the individual probabilities. If it were, then you'd get the anomalous result that one piece of evidence that was 99% "proof of guilt" was massively better proof than 200 pieces of evidence that each were 99% "proof of guilt" - 0.99^200 = 13.4%.

Instead, this is a case of nested conditional probabilities. If we say that A = guilt, and the three pieces of evidence are x, y and z, then, statistically, what is being expressed is the probability of A given x - P(A given x), which is (arbitrarily) given as 0.6 in this instance. And, similarly, P(A given y) and P(A given z) are both also 0.6.

The question then becomes, if P(A given x), P(A given y) and P(A given z) each equal 0.6, then what is P(A given x,y,z)?

This is a complex statistical puzzle. And it's most definitely not answered by multiplying together the three original conditional probabilities. So I'd be extremely interested to see Machiavelli's working behind his 93.6% answer.

ETA I just realised that you'd provided Machiavelli's calculations for him within this post. And he's performing a thoroughly bogus calculation to reach his answer as well (if indeed this is the way he calculated his answer). But I'd still be interested in hearing more of his statistical acumen....

I don't buy into this whole probability when trying to apply math to human behavior.

We once had a discussion in college about how to build a better artificial intelligence. The problem came down to 1's and 0's. Basicly the human brain doesn't work on 1's and 0's. It works on 2's, 1's, and 0's. Yes, No and Maybe. So when trying to add probabilites to human behavior your ignoring maybe. So when you try to reason probabilites of any given action happening on any given day you neglect maybe.

 

[Kaosium]

Do you have any evidence that any of this led to the convictions?

Well, there's the numerous misstatements attributed to police throughout the case, some of which are probably just errors, others which may have been misunderstood by the press, and still others that are neither which are most curious. There's also Mignini's trial and subsequent conviction on abuse of power charges, to go along with a whole new host of extraneous charges in this case, some of them quite bizarre. Then there's 'Foxy Knoxy,' and having missed this part of the drama initially due to total disinterest at the time, it's quite fascinating to go back and look and see how many people once believed this comics super villainess actually existed. One page I read is dedicated to showing the pictures that caught her in 'sinister' poses which apparently caused some to believe she truly was this vaguely satanic vestige capable of killing for pizza.

There's quite a bit of evidence of why this occurred out there, and I imagine people will be talking about it for a long time trying to figure out which was the most responsible for the conviction. My mind is still open on the subject.

The following are the reasons why I think they are guilty. I think everything else can be disregarded. Yes, most of these are circumstantial but then Scott Peterson was convicted on circumstantial evidence and I don’t think anyone here is going to argue that he is not guilty.

1. The timeline - I think it was very short (9:05 to 10:00) so it’s much more likely that there was multiple attackers considering the extensive wounds on Meredith’s body and everything else we know that happened.

What difference in time do you suppose there is between one person killing someone with a knife, compared to two or three? I'd think in any case all the wounds would be inflicted in under a minute, though it would likely take her somewhat longer to die.

Doesn't it bother you that extensive evidence of murder was found for one person, and absolutely nothing for the other two? (one)

2. Amanda’s lamp in Meredith’s room.

I'm afraid I don't understand the significance of this.

3. Inconsistent and contradictory statements in regard to her email back home, her trial testimony and his prison diary (none of which were coerced).

Ah, I'm glad you brought this up. I've been going through these statements lately trying to find evidence of 'lies' and have been having a hell of a time. What inconsistencies do you find suspicious?

4. No alibi.

Would you consider it differently if it were found that there was regular computer usage until late into the night of the murder?

5. Amanda's phone calls on November 2:
- In the 48 minutes between 12:07 – 12:55 she spent a total of only 23 seconds trying to phone Meredith though she stated she was “panicked” as to her whereabouts.
- Amanda was back at her apartment by 12:34. The Postal Police didn’t show up for another 21 minutes with Meredith’s phones. Why didn’t Amanda stand outside Meredith’s door, call her phones and listen for rings?

As I understand it she tried to call four times in that forty-five minutes. I don't understand what's suspicious about that. What behavior would you not find suspicious?

- Both Amanda’s mother and Filomena told Amanda to call the police based on what she told them, she didn’t.

She had had Raffaele call, right? She delegated that necessity to the Italian boyfriend, not an uncommon choice for a young woman who spoke Italian poorly. Perhaps she thought she was serving in a supervisory role regarding the phone call.

6. Raffaelle’s call to the police:
- He told them that nothing taken from Filomena’s room, there was no way he could know that.
- He told the police “there is a lot of blood” when everyone at the scene agreed there was very little blood.
- why would he mention a closed door?

The whole purpose of this was to bring attention to the murder scene and get the cops involved. I don't understand how his impressions and perhaps even good guesses would make him look suspicious. If he saw valuable things out that weren't taken then he might jump to that conclusion, so what? Why would he say anything about it if he was guilty? Why would he be calling the cops at all?

7. Raffaele’s lie in his prison diary regarding the knife.

If he didn't do it, do you suppose he might wonder how it got there? I notice you don't bring the 'murder knife' into the discussion outside this, so do you think it probable that knife was sitting in the drawer the whole night, and if so can you see how Raffaele might be trying to figure out how and why Meredith's DNA got on it? No one has actually disproved this, have they?

8. Amanda’s behavior:
- not flushing the toilet with the crap in it
- not looking in the murder room
- overexplaination regarding the mop

How does the dump in the toilet fit in? Why would Amanda not flush it were she guilty? As for the murder room, perhaps it's the case that outside twelve year-old boys not everyone is all that interested in viewing dead bodies at murder scenes. For instance I have not yet seen anything more than a foot of Meredith at the murder scene and have no intention of seeing any more, and I have seen dead human bodies outside funeral homes.

As for the mop, I think the police were most interested in it, not Amanda.

9. bra clasp – sorry it is Rafaelle’s DNA on it.

Even if it is, then so what? How does a micro-speck with nothing around it suggest presence at a murder scene to you? What makes you think those picograms were deposited during a bloody life and death struggle?

10. evidence of a cleanup:
- the bathmat – FBI guy Steve Moore said no one could have left that room without blood on their shoes yet there are no bloody footprints leading to the bathroom. Moore said he has seen all the crime scene photos from the bedroom so who is anyone to question his analysis?

It appears Rudy did a cursory clean-up to prevent detection of the scene while he established an 'alibi' and left the country, but even the police had to discard the idea that Amanda and Raffaele managed to scrub away their DNA with bleach.

 

[platonov]

Lionel Hutz in a bonnet.

I get the feeling that it's about much more than logic and debate to some people at this point, but that's just my feeling of course....
<snip>

I have to disagree with you emphasis somewhat.

I think there is very little logic to much of the 'debate' - for example some posters here seem less interested in the actual case than with posting irrelevant bumf and attacking posters on some other site, a fixation 'That savors strongly of bitterness'.

.

 

[Chris C]

2. No idea what the perp walk has to do with the supposed parade, but this is not something new or confined to Italy.

3. Three cars seen leaving an area (possibly the police station), honking their horns as they try to get through photographers, and turning off to a motorway, where they go after that is not clear.

I used to think they where paraded around but there is an easier explanation. Unless of course they didn't go from point A to point B.

I mean technically you could say it was a parade. You had huge crowd, convoy, pretty lights, loud noise, cops waiving at the crowd.

You could also have had 3 suspects being loaded into the car. Cops using sirens and flashing lights to warn motorists. Blowing horns at people that are getting to close to the convoy as a warning. Waiving back at people that are waiving at them, which is only the polite thing to do if your law enforcement.

 

[Katody Matrass]

Hello again, Machiavelli! I already addressed your point about Rinaldi's measurements not being challenged adequately, so let me omit that parts of your post.

Vinci chose a different picture, daylight, so with no print visible on it, then (maybe?) he used “points of reference” in order to deduce the measurements of print.
Unfortunately none of us has seen the picture, and none of us can do a check on those points of reference.

I think Vinci actually used the same reference points that you used. There's really no mystery to it. He had a hi-res, raw image, not a smallish jpeg that we must cope with. Even in the pic we have adjusting brightness gives an idea of the tiles pattern. Adjusting exposure on the raw image would be much more revealing.
What's more interesting is how actually was it possible for Rinaldi to got the tile measurements wrong (too big)? And how after making it smaller the print actually got larger for him instead of smaller too, it's against logic!

Then the perspective correction. I considered the tiles short side as 16,3 cm, and I measured with photoshop ruler. Accuracy is not the real point, since cannot be wrong for a centimetre. The point is, as you can see measurement of the tiles are variable.
This implies all sizes obviously require corrections.

Not to the extent that your measurement would suggest. Here's my attempt at tracing the tiles after bumping the brightness:


^{click image to enlarge}
As you see, too of the tile sides close to the prints are by accident of roughly the same length - 105 pixels (which would be 16 cm). True, further to the left they got shortened by perspective rapidly, thus your measurement of 50 (mm?).

The foto below has enhanced contrast to show the tile borders.
My 227 mm figure is obtained by taking the 54 mm (screen) figure, the midway tile, as measurement unit, and making the hypothetical (but incorrect) correspondence with this unit on the visible prints. The assumption that this 54 mm figure can be used as a linear unit is obviously incorrect because the floor surface is not in linear scale with the picture screen.

The print closer to the observer – more close to the 60mm wide tiles – is longer (253mm), while the one more far from the observer is shorter (227mm). But they could be the same. Shapes closer to the 60mm tiles are on a growing scale compared to objects closer to the 50 mm tiles.

Both measurements of 227 and 254 mm taken without correction are forcibly wrong, they are false results. The actual length must be somewhere in the middle: the 54mm = 16,3 cm scale of equivalence is too small for the closer print, and it is too big for the farer one.

As I have shown, it's not that one of the prints is shortened by perspective significantly more than the other. Your choice to measure a section further away, not corresponding to the prints, and base your reasoning on a result skewed in such a way led you to such erroneous conclusion.
Actually I would say your measurement of 23 cm, while generous is still much better then Rinaldi's completely unsupported 244 mm.

In fact once the floor angle is calculated, the correction becomes simple and points of reference on a grid can be shifted accurately to obtain the actual size. I don’t know what the actual size is, but the operation is not complex when you have a software, it is simply the deformation of a grid.

[qimg]http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5204/5207314691_45f21fd296_z.jpg[/qimg]

Indeed, it's simple when you have proper software and knowledge, which Vinci demonstrably had. But we must notice that there are limits to our certainty here. The picture is blurred in the direction of the prints length. The prints are far from being clearly defined. While the left one is very poor and not suitable for any analysis, the right one is only slightly better, as it doesn't seem to be a result of a few prints overlaid, but it still lacks clear edges.
I think that any millimetre precision measurements of it are highly questionable.

We can only exclude Raffaele, because the print is much too short.

 

[Machiavelli]

What we have above are claims of what Candace Dempsey’s sources are, claims without support. In fact Ms. Dempsey’s sources included a cameraman who took footage of the parade and Elio Bertoldi, a journalist with Corriere Dell'Umbria who attended the press conference. Frank was not a source and did not at first believe that the police honked their horns until he saw the tape. Thus the claims above are flat out wrong. The sequence of events was,

(...) .

Where are those sources?
Where was this parade? There is nothing about a parade, about anything deviating from what is expected as professional behaviour, except Candace Dempsey personal interpretetation.

 

[Ampulla of Vater]

The result 93,6% doesn't mean no reasonable doubt. This is just an hypothetical example based on the abstract figure of three issues of findings (not trhee events) X Y and Z, each of which is deemd to imply a 60% certainity that the event Q (like: defendant's guilt) is true.
The 60% figure - I assume - means: the assessment that it is slightly more slightly likely in one way, slightly less likely in the other.

The result 93,6% corresponds to the odds that the results X Y Z are not casual. If a finding is defined as having only 40% odds to be random, and 60% probability to be correlated, the finding of three results of this kind means there are only 6,4% odds the results are random.

Machiavelli does not mean to calculate the chances that none of them happens: the aim is to indicate the chances that the findings are random, versus non random. The missing chances for the combination (93,6%) can be defined as non random results.

The process is the reverse as calculating the odds that a combination comes out on a slot machine starting from probabilities of each single cards. If you already have a combination, you may calculate how likely this combination is to come out just randomly, in contrast with the missing chances.

Are you not Machiavelli?

 

[Chris C]

Where are those sources?
Where was this parade? There is nothing about a parade, about anything deviating from what is expected as professional behaviour, except Candace Dempsey personal interpretetation.

Where is your response to the extra dna on the bra clasp. Is it contamination or not?

 

[Chris C]

Are you not Machiavelli?

Hah, so he's not machiavelli or maybe he likes talking about himself in the 3rd person.

 

[Machiavelli]

Hello again, Machiavelli! I already addressed your point about Rinaldi's measurements not being challenged adequately, so let me omit that parts of your post.



I think Vinci actually used the same reference points that you used. There's really no mystery to it. He had a hi-res, raw image, not a smallish jpeg that we must cope with. Even in the pic we have adjusting brightness gives an idea of the tiles pattern. Adjusting exposure on the raw image would be much more revealing.
What's more interesting is how actually was it possible for Rinaldi to got the tile measurements wrong (too big)? And how after making it smaller the print actually got larger for him instead of smaller too, it's against logic!




Not to the extent that your measurement would suggest. Here's my attempt at tracing the tiles after bumping the brightness:

.
(..)

I quite disagree, because the left footprint is definitely protruding into a portion of screen at a larger scale, whilst the other one is protruding into a portion with a lesser scale. Bear in mind that the units (105 pixel or 50 mm) are meraly fictional, they are not units, they are not a linear, not a succession of equally distant unites. But this doesn't matter at all, because the footprint on the left is actually not part of the measurements and not a reference. It doesn't matter how different they are in scale in fact, since measurements are considered only from one of them, the right footprint. The fact is that you cannot asert that 227 mm is good based on the reference point of measurement (50mm), the real size must be necessarily bigger, and an idea of the difference could be roughly assessed by calculating the angle of the floor to the camera. If the size gain after correction is only 3%, the growth would be from 227 to 234. But the degree of correction depends from the angle a on a ratio roughly about C (corrected) = A (apparent)/(cos a). If the angle is 20°, the corrected size would be around 242mm.

 

[Machiavelli]

Are you not Machiavelli?

Sometimes I just like to express the subject. I can cite my posts in 3rd person, after all I am also an author of posts I can cite like any other.