• Security incident: ISF was recently accessed by intruders. Please change your password, and change it anywhere else you used it. Read more

Continuation Part 2 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

Status
Not open for further replies.
Hi all,
so far noone came up with the right solution. Chris C took the easy way out and CDHost came up with some correct answers, but couldn`t figure out the whole problem yet. Could the others please post a solution process and not just naked numbers?
But no reproach, the question was asked to the "experts" Kevin_Lowe and komponisto, so I`m awaiting their responses.
Unfortunately I`m off for the weekend, but I promise, I`ll post the solution on sunday.
 
Hi all,
so far noone came up with the right solution. Chris C took the easy way out and CDHost came up with some correct answers, but couldn`t figure out the whole problem yet. Could the others please post a solution process and not just naked numbers?
But no reproach, the question was asked to the "experts" Kevin_Lowe and komponisto, so I`m awaiting their responses.
Unfortunately I`m off for the weekend, but I promise, I`ll post the solution on sunday.

What's the goal here, LiamG? Suppose for the sake of discussion that I get it wrong. What then?

If the plan is to argue "Well you got this one maths problem wrong, so you are wrong about Knox's guilt!" that's obviously silly.

If the plan is to argue "Well you got this one maths problem wrong, so you aren't infallible!" then that's equally obviously silly. The only people who have ever attributed to me a belief in my own infallibility are the more egregious scumbags at perugiamurderfile.org who had to come up with some kind of caricature of me to attack because they couldn't respond to my actual arguments. As I have said from the beginning, only the argument matters. The arguer is immaterial and I am eminently replaceable.

Yes, I'm scientifically and mathematically literate enough to read a scientific paper that's not too abstruse and understand what it actually says. Yes, this puts me way ahead of the perugiamurderfile.org community because the flailing-about, misunderstandings and leaps of logic that ensued when they tried to engage with the scientific literature regarding the time at which food begins to move from the stomach to the duodenum were spectacular and educational. That's not saying much at all though - that's a bar an awful lot of educated people can comfortably get over.

I get problems wrong from time to time which is why if a problem matters I work it out in text, share my work with people bright enough to spot errors, check my facts and amend my views if necessary.

If I did get your problem wrong, all it would prove is that I sometimes get problems wrong, and I can tell you for free that I do so sometimes. Much as I would wish to be an error-free calculator I'm not.

Anyway I'm going to go clean up some flood damage. Enjoy your weekend.
 
Thank you for the complement regarding arguments. Do you have a site?

No, I like to go out to eat. I'm more interested in what other people think, being as I know what I do already.

As far as PMF, it was really odd. You would think PMF wouldn't come on quite so strong. I was quite literally getting cursed at, before I showed up. The moderaters were like "how dare you claim to be an authority on the author's intent of stuff you wrote". It was a nutsy experience for a blog that wants to maintain itself as the premie intellectual source on this case. Disciplining churches are frequently destructive cults so I'm used to that sort of "stick your fingers in your ears and scream" reaction though more often than not I don't get that when I'm doing interviews and such. That being the case TJMK and PMF are functionally hate blogs and the tone does seem like what you would find on blogs run by Christian Identify and those sorts of groups. I did have a lengthy conversation with Peter Quinn on IMDB (yes really) so I've kinda got a feel for what they have to say which is bluster and threats and insults and .....

I've just posted on that elsewhere on this site within the last day or so, and being as it looks to me like the mods are getting rather tired of those arguments in here I will demur on the main question.

I also followed your discussion with FastPete on IMDB as that's kind of a favorite site and I've been watching to see when the new message board for the movie (not Hayden's) finally gets defiled. I expected it weeks ago when I dug up the new title for Pilot_Padron, but as of a couple days ago it's still almost virgin pure!


Anyway my current feelings about PMF is that while the site has some very good data, it is massively biased in which data. For example, I noticed that they didn't bother to translate the defense's arguments regarding the state of digestion of food in Meredith's stomach not matching the prosecution's time line. Because.... who cares if the physical evidence doesn't match the findings I guess???? So use but use with caution.

Really? They didn't translate the defense's arguments regarding the digestion of food? I wonder why that might have been? Did it say something about food starting into the duodenum and the T(lag) of a healthy young woman who has eaten a small to moderate sized meal with little or no alcohol without stress? I bet there might have been something about 9:10 or so too, 10:00 or thereabouts at the latest? :)

I think they got caught out on that if I can spit out the above by memory, with full disclosure being that when I was taking that killer 5 credit biology nightmare in college I was less interested in the book learning part and more the OJT with my female lab partner. That subject is not my forte, but let's just say I've seen a lot of it in this thread. On the whole though, I've seen those who are not inclined to give the ones who did the translating a whole lot of slack say they did a fine job overall. Can you imagine trying to read Massei through Google translate? There was a movie about that once, I think they called it "Scanners."

I think I might actually recall reading a conversation in some archives long ago about why that didn't get translated, and I think it had to do with just not liking a certain couple of people very much, though that might be my memory playing tricks on me.

Yeah that was bad. I think Peter was just mad. His blog generally is taking cases in the early phases when the police are separating suspects from witnesses not after a complex investigation and lots of details. And his user base is all about good guys and bad guys. My experience is that there aren't good bad guys so much as everything being a situation. People get into situations and often don't handle them right. Think "trading places".

I think you're probably right about his motivation there, and the user base. Ironically his site was about the first one I read when I came back to see if the report had been translated and what was going on in the case. While I'd read excerpts of the e-mail before and thought it rather suspicious, it was just too hard to maintain that with his comments interspersed, they kind of blunted the impact. Thus I do recall him fondly, and with much good-natured mirth, which I feel every single time I re-read that e-mail 'analysis.'

“I don’t think Raffaele killed Meredith, but I think he’s terrified like me. And now he’s trying to find a way out by distancing himself from me”; that is the language of a situation gone wrong not a cold blooded killer.

I personally feel that 'situation' was the interrogation, though if I recall I do believe you said something at one point elsewhere about being convinced of a clean-up attempt reading Massei? I don't recall him convincing me of a clean-up, but trying to tell me the best time to clean the murder room was in the morning--after the blood had dried and all. After all, in the logic of his world it would be nearly impossible for anyone to find the body before that.

Did you mean you thought Amanda and Raffaele were involved in a clean-up outside Meredith's bedroom?
 
Hi all,
so far noone came up with the right solution. Chris C took the easy way out and CDHost came up with some correct answers, but couldn`t figure out the whole problem yet. Could the others please post a solution process and not just naked numbers?
But no reproach, the question was asked to the "experts" Kevin_Lowe and komponisto, so I`m awaiting their responses.
Unfortunately I`m off for the weekend, but I promise, I`ll post the solution on sunday.

I posted a number invisibly, did I have it right? I'm not going to show my bloody work, either the number is right or it's not and it's not like this one needs any Greek seasoning, it's simply algebra.

That is, if I got it right...it's been a while and all I use it for is poker these days.
 
Hi all,
so far noone came up with the right solution. Chris C took the easy way out and CDHost came up with some correct answers, but couldn`t figure out the whole problem yet. Could the others please post a solution process and not just naked numbers?
But no reproach, the question was asked to the "experts" Kevin_Lowe and komponisto, so I`m awaiting their responses.
Unfortunately I`m off for the weekend, but I promise, I`ll post the solution on sunday.

Some of us would also like to know how this little math problem relates to the murder of MK or the guilt or innocence of AK and RS.
 
If you get this. Which board are they talking about? The on-drive controller or the motherboard of the laptop?


The picture of the drive was posted someplace. If I could find what I did with it, I'd be able to tell you the serial number of that drive.

To make a forensic copy of the drive, it must first be removed from the computer. Then it is attached to another computer through a write-block adaptor (the most common ones are red USB to IDE adaptors with a special firmware that won't allow any write commands through). If it was just a USB thingy, they couldn't have screwed it up. But the Toshiba drive requires twice as much power as USB can provide. The extra power comes from a separate source that plugs into the wall. Evidently this highly sophisticated forensic tool came with a 110 volt only power cube which when plugged into the local 220 volt wall outlet delivered a lethal shock to the drive.


OK I'm not in data recovery but you get my point that doesn't make much sense.


Any idiot can unpack their new toys and and try to use them the first time without reading the instructions. It takes a vey special kind of idiot to proceed to destroy 4 drives in a row before they figure out that they are doing something wrong.


Exactly which means I'm not sure why they focused on the Toshiba BIOS the BIOS doesn't do anything anymore. Their report didn't make any sense.


It sounds like you are reading a news report written for the lame public that might have heard the term BIOS before but couldn't handle it if the reporter started talking about microcode and geometry mapping. BIOS is easy and doesn't need to be explained. It's only a minor issue that it is technically incorrect.
 
I guess I also have a problem with the thread direction going so far away from the case also. I suppose I wouldn't mind this being done on PM, but I don't think it is appropriate for the main thread.
 
Any idiot can unpack their new toys and and try to use them the first time without reading the instructions. It takes a vey special kind of idiot to proceed to destroy 4 drives in a row before they figure out that they are doing something wrong.

It sounds like you are reading a news report written for the lame public that might have heard the term BIOS before but couldn't handle it if the reporter started talking about microcode and geometry mapping. BIOS is easy and doesn't need to be explained. It's only a minor issue that it is technically incorrect.

Dan. The defense consultant report on the computers says:

Only Toshiba’s intervention (by supplying the BIOS’ binary code) could justify another data recovery attempt.
It is truly incomprehensible how all three HDDs, of different brands and from three different computers, can have the same defect.

I am now confused. Does the defense consultant not know what he is talking about?
 
Evidently this highly sophisticated forensic tool came with a 110 volt only power cube which when plugged into the local 220 volt wall outlet delivered a lethal shock to the drive.

Wow, that's what they did? They used the $15 adapter and not the $50 adapter's that make sure to cut the power. Unbelievable. Most 6 year olds that go back and forth between Europe and the USA know not to use cheap adapters on sensitive equipment. Anyway now it makes sense why they thought they needed a laptop. Laptops come with transformers.

Its interesting because when Rose first gave me the data I commented that Encase (the forensic software) was the sort of thing that semi-skilled people used. For example a detective who is "technical"; not the sort of thing that a lab would use. I had concerns about them treating a programmer's machine (Raffaele's) the way you would a typical end user's.

Anyway, where are you getting this information? I was going off a document Rose showed me, you seem to have more detailed information. Is this collected somewhere? I really think we start putting this all together and we have a pretty case for grossly incompetent forensic analysis.

I'm thinking I might actually post this on my company's website so that its usable.
 
....Yeah that was bad. I think Peter was just mad. His blog generally is taking cases in the early phases when the police are separating suspects from witnesses not after a complex investigation and lots of details. And his user base is all about good guys and bad guys. My experience is that there aren't good bad guys so much as everything being a situation. People get into situations and often don't handle them right. Think "trading places"......


One of the overlooked absurdities of "Showers" O'Riley is that if there is anyone in the world who is actually doing the kind of statement analysis he imagines himself doing, it would not be conducted the way he is trying to conduct it.

There is no point in analyzing the statements of a writer whose identity is known; the writer's identity biases the analyst from the start. To make matters worse, O'Riley approaches his analyses already aware of the outcome of the case, and tries to show in retrospect how the writers' words proved they were guilty. Gee, if only he had been around before the crime was solved and they were still trying to figure out whom to suspect.....

If anyone is interested in analyzing the statements of "Showers," a/k/a Peter Hyatt, himself, he has been a prolific, not to say compulsive, reviewer on Amazon.com, having commented on 174 books or products (mostly guitar music, to his credit). A few years ago, he purchased a book titled, I Know You Are Lying by Mark McClish, and then took McClish's course in statement analysis, which he recommends on his website.

He shares his motivation for studying statement analysis : "I have always been a person easily deceived by others..." No doubt.

Hyatt is the only person to have reviewed (and possibly to have purchased) McClish's accompanying Statement Analyzer software (currently unavailable). While the software likely has been an enormous help to Showers in running his website, it does not seem to have educated him much on the reality that there is a sucker born every minute.
 
Wow, that's what they did? They used the $15 adapter and not the $50 adapter's that make sure to cut the power. Unbelievable. Most 6 year olds that go back and forth between Europe and the USA know not to use cheap adapters on sensitive equipment. Anyway now it makes sense why they thought they needed a laptop. Laptops come with transformers.

Its interesting because when Rose first gave me the data I commented that Encase (the forensic software) was the sort of thing that semi-skilled people used. For example a detective who is "technical"; not the sort of thing that a lab would use. I had concerns about them treating a programmer's machine (Raffaele's) the way you would a typical end user's.

Anyway, where are you getting this information? I was going off a document Rose showed me, you seem to have more detailed information. Is this collected somewhere? I really think we start putting this all together and we have a pretty case for grossly incompetent forensic analysis.

I'm thinking I might actually post this on my company's website so that its usable.

Dan may have more than I provided you on his SkepticWiki page. Here is a good list of docs provided by Charlie Wilkes:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6676091&postcount=21873

It includes a Google translation of the report as well as the report itself. You may want to compare the Google translation with the one I sent you which I'm thinking was done by a translator at PMF.
 
Dan may have more than I provided you on his SkepticWiki page. Here is a good list of docs provided by Charlie Wilkes:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6676091&postcount=21873

It includes a Google translation of the report as well as the report itself. You may want to compare the Google translation with the one I sent you which I'm thinking was done by a translator at PMF.

Wow what a list of docs! Thanks. That is something to work through.

___

Charlie if you reading this, I think you should give everything in the case. Possibly have a warning before you link to something explicit. One of the arguments is being made is that the court had access to information we didn't and thus we can't question their judgement. In SCO v. IBM which was the first "webified" trial I was involved in, one of things that was most valuable was Groklaw came into existence as a warehouse of all of the evidence submitted to the court. That allowed people who knew anything to comment on conversations they had been present for (i.e. essentially hearsay) which then resulted in primary witnesses getting notified and they ended up deposing themselves.

For example SCO made claims about code in Lion's, Lions on Unix and where he got it. Much to everyone's surprise John Lions was still alive and actually wrote into Groklaw with "BS I got it from....." and there were dozens of examples of this. It was devastating for SCO's case to constantly have their "facts" (really wild guesses) refuted.
 
Assuming we're both correct, I have to say that the problem wasn't all that difficult. I haven't done any serious math in years nor have I ever studied probability, so I doubt Kevin_Low or komponisto would have had much difficulty with it. The trickiest part was determining the probability that an eastern airport heading-man would carry only a suitcase, but even that required nothing more than a little elementary algebra. The only thing needed besides was careful reading (and double-checking of calculations ;)).

Maybe LiamG will explain the significance of this little puzzle now?

I doubt there is one - I think it most likely that he was hoping for a "gotcha" moment to cut and paste if one of us didn't parse a statement correctly, and there was no more to it than that. As others have said it's not even a particularly tricky problem (he said not having looked at it until Dan O. and others had already solved it and posted detailed solutions).

I think this is a lot more interesting if you want do to some maths for fun.

Now back to something that might actually matter, Curatolo.

Various narratives have been proposed here and elsewhere that incorporate the new data points that he was photographed dealing smack several years ago, and that he is only just now being prosecuted. This is a probably incomplete list:

1. Curatolo was being blackmailed by the police to act as an informer and stooge for them. This is why he was a witness in three murder trials, and an important witness in at least two (I do not know about the third, details seem scarce), because the police got him to lie for them. Now he is being scapegoated by the Mignini/Giobbi faction who plan to throw him under the bus and blame him for the Knox conviction.
2. As above, except that he is not being thrown under a bus, Raffaele's family allies in the Carabinieri are charging him to discredit him in the lead-up to the appeal.
3. Curatolo's testimony was entirely unrelated to the police having the dirt on him, and Raffaele's family allies in the Carabinieri are charging him to discredit him in the lead-up to the appeal.
4. As above except that dealing smack from a park bench makes you hyper-vigilant and hence the news that he deals smack makes him an even more reliable witness! Knox is going down!

Remembering that incorporating a fact into a narrative does not make it evidence, do we have enough information to make rational probability estimates about the likelihood of 1, 2 and 3?

Currently, and this may surprise some people, I don't think we do. I think the possibility of Curatolo perjuring himself because he was threatened with a dealing charge only slightly increases the probability that he perjured himself, because it's always been possible or even likely that he was threatened or bribed in some way and this just suggests a specific mechanism. I've been on the record for some time that I think this is probably what happened, but I don't think this new information adds much weight to that theory. If I'd had to put a number on it before this news broke I'd have said my probability estimate would be 0.7 or so that Curatolo deliberately perjured himself, and I'd only revise that number upward slightly with this news. I have no evidence-based view at all yet on why he is suddenly being prosecuted now.

If prior to this news you believed Curatolo to be a good and upstanding citizen then obviously this news might make you revise your opinion of him, depending on your view of smack dealing.

(I'm not sure where dealing smack fits into the PMF Outrage Scale alongside smoking marijuana, watching animal porn, watching a foursome, calling them scientifically illiterate hate-junkies and other things that they are outraged about... oddly enough in some quarters the rumour that Amanda Knox might have phoned someone who turned out to be a drug dealer is seen as hugely damning evidence of bad character, but in Curatolo's case actually dealing smack himself from a park bench is cast as Curatolo selflessly helping out poor lost junkies dying for a fix out of the kindness of his beautiful Perugian heart - go figure).

The narratives proposed above all fit the facts, and evidence that would allow us to pick a favourite does not currently appear to be available, as far as I can tell. Have I missed anything?
 
Last edited:
I doubt there is one - I think it most likely that he was hoping for a "gotcha" moment to cut and paste if one of us didn't parse a statement correctly, and there was no more to it than that. As others have said it's not even a particularly tricky problem (he said not having looked at it until Dan O. and others had already solved it and posted detailed solutions).

I think this is a lot more interesting if you want do to some maths for fun.

Now back to something that might actually matter, Curatolo.

Various narratives have been proposed here and elsewhere that incorporate the new data points that he was photographed dealing smack several years ago, and that he is only just now being prosecuted. This is a probably incomplete list:

1. Curatolo was being blackmailed by the police to act as an informer and stooge for them. This is why he was a witness in three murder trials, and an important witness in at least two (I do not know about the third, details seem scarce), because the police got him to lie for them. Now he is being scapegoated by the Mignini/Giobbi faction who plan to throw him under the bus and blame him for the Knox conviction.
2. As above, except that he is not being thrown under a bus, Raffaele's family allies in the Carabinieri are charging him to discredit him in the lead-up to the appeal.
3. Curatolo's testimony was entirely unrelated to the police having the dirt on him, and Raffaele's family allies in the Carabinieri are charging him to discredit him in the lead-up to the appeal.
4. As above except that dealing smack from a park bench makes you hyper-vigilant and hence the news that he deals smack makes him an even more reliable witness! Knox is going down!

Remembering that incorporating a fact into a narrative does not make it evidence, do we have enough information to make rational probability estimates about the likelihood of 1, 2 and 3?

Currently, and this may surprise some people, I don't think we do. I think the possibility of Curatolo perjuring himself because he was threatened with a dealing charge only slightly increases the probability that he perjured himself, because it's always been possible or even likely that he was threatened or bribed in some way and this just suggests a specific mechanism. I've been on the record for some time that I think this is probably what happened, but I don't think this new information adds much weight to that theory.

If prior to this news you believed Curatolo to be a good and upstanding citizen then obviously this news might make you revise your opinion of him, depending on your view of smack dealing.

(I'm not sure where dealing smack fits into the PMF Outrage Scale alongside smoking marijuana, watching animal porn, watching a foursome, calling them scientifically illiterate hate-junkies and other things that they are outraged about... oddly enough in some quarters the rumour that Amanda Knox might have phoned someone who turned out to be a drug dealer is seen as hugely damning evidence of bad character, but in Curatolo's case actually dealing smack himself from a park bench is cast as Curatolo selflessly helping out poor lost junkies dying for a fix out of the kindness of his beautiful Perugian heart - go figure).

The narratives proposed above all fit the facts, and evidence that would allow us to pick a favourite does not currently appear to be available, as far as I can tell. Have I missed anything?

My favorite is still:


Quote:
The prosecutor Giuliano Mignini called the homeless "One of the key points and most important of the evidence. Credible credibilissimo absolute trustworthiness and reliability of ... ... proof, full circle, full stop. "

Sorry. LOL. I may post it again in a day or two. I hope somebody asks him if his opinion has changed.
 
My favorite is still:




Sorry. LOL. I may post it again in a day or two. I hope somebody asks him if his opinion has changed.

Yeah, it makes me laugh too. How long has the guilter community placed all that weight on St. Curatolo's testimony.
Now the sudden opinions from the guilter community is:
That his testimony is not needed
He is the victim because he is being charged with selling heroin.
He is being framed.
He still saw them, is reliable and Knox/Sollecito killed Meredith, eventhough he saw masked people, the wrong busses, is a heroin dealer, was reading the newspaper in the dark, his story was found in the gossip newspaper and the times he saw them gives Knox/Sollecito an alibi for not murdering Meredith.
 
Last edited:
Seems like Personal Reflections on the Amanda Knox Thread as a Forum Phenomenon actually turned out to be personal reflections of the moderators about our personal reflections.
 
If I recall they sent it to three different companies to attempt recovery and if this was the only issue, I would think somebody at one of those companies would have tried it. Hopefully, Charlie will take a look at this shortly, if not I will send him a message on this.

The information I have about this is on the FOA site:

http://www.friendsofamanda.org/computer_consultant_report.pdf
http://www.friendsofamanda.org/computer_consultant_report_google_translation.doc

I think the story is as follows: The BIOS to which they refer is not the BIOS on the motherboard, but the ROM flashed onto the drive controller board, which determines how data is organized on the disk. They swapped controller boards and the replacement board on Amanda's drive was close enough to the original so it spun up the drive, but it had a different BIOS, so it screwed up the file table on the disk. Now the data is beyond recovery using ordinary methods. The other drives were recoverable because the replacement controller boards did not work at all, and thus did not corrupt the data.

I have tried to fry a couple of old laptop drives by hooking them up incorrectly to an external IDE caddy. I could not destroy so much as a single byte of data. I have no idea what these idiots over there did, but it wasn't pretty.
 
The information I have about this is on the FOA site:

http://www.friendsofamanda.org/computer_consultant_report.pdf
http://www.friendsofamanda.org/computer_consultant_report_google_translation.doc

I think the story is as follows: The BIOS to which they refer is not the BIOS on the motherboard, but the ROM flashed onto the drive controller board, which determines how data is organized on the disk. They swapped controller boards and the replacement board on Amanda's drive was close enough to the original so it spun up the drive, but it had a different BIOS, so it screwed up the file table on the disk. Now the data is beyond recovery using ordinary methods. The other drives were recoverable because the replacement controller boards did not work at all, and thus did not corrupt the data.

I have tried to fry a couple of old laptop drives by hooking them up incorrectly to an external IDE caddy. I could not destroy so much as a single byte of data. I have no idea what these idiots over there did, but it wasn't pretty.

Try sticking the board in an old microwave.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

ISF - Join now!

Every member here is approved by hand. No bots, no spam, just people who care about evidence and honest debate.

Membership is free!

Create your free account

Back
Top Bottom