I'm going to explain this one more time, Dusty; if you still refuse to acknowledge the contamination, then I'm done with you.
The WTC site was essentially a giant crime scene. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people were crawling all over it in the days immediately following 9/11, collecting samples and examining evidence, because they were aware of one simple fact: EVIDENCE IS USELESS IF IT IS NOT COLLECTED AS SWIFTLY AS POSSIBLE TO AVOID CONTAMINATION OF SAMPLES.
By contrast, earlier in this thread, you yourself admitted that the "sample" you collected was discovered by you over EIGHT YEARS AFTER 9/11. In the intervening time, the likelihood of soil, cigarette ash, various bodily fluids, and samples of material never found within the WTC buildings being found in your sample rises exponentially with every passing hour. Being under an overhang means nothing; wind goes where it will if a particular spot is not hermetically sealed off, and it could easily have brought both minuscule organic and inorganic material to the site, not to mention all the various homeless people who likely found shelter under that overhang at one point or another and, lacking facilities of their own, made use of the corner as a toilet or eating location, adding their own samples to the pile. Because you do not know what exactly was introduced to your sample in the intervening eight+ years before your discovery of it, you have no way of determining anything of use about the mechanism of collapse of the WTC buildings; indeed, you have no way of determining if the sample even CAME from the WTC buildings, or was simply a collection of material blown there over the years from nearby locations. Construction/demolition materials in the area following the cleanup of the site, the dirt that you find easily in city streets, crumbs of food, various contributions both from rodents/insects as well as humans; all of these could have very easily made their way to your collection site in the intervening time, and ALL of them would contaminate any sample of the WTC building materials, if in fact your dust pile WERE from the collapse of those buildings (which, again, you have no way of knowing for sure).
A true forensic researcher knows that the chain of custody of a piece of evidence is crucial to maintaining the capability of said evidence to be introduced in a court of law. They need to know exactly where it came from, down to the actual grid coordinates of the location if need be (barring that, at least knowing it came from the southeast corner of the site, for example); they need to know who handled it before them, and above all, they need to know it was collected in a timely fashion, so they know what else they might need to account for in the sample. Of those three criteria, you meet only one of them; you know where you found the sample. What you don't know is its origin or what might have been introduced to contaminate the sample in the intervening time, and without accounting for either of those factors, your sample is utterly useless. If you cannot acknowledge that, then bragging about your degree or whatever else you've worked on won't save you from being known as the woman who touted a pile of dust of indeterminate origin as being the mechanism by which the WTC towers collapsed. Any competent scientist would literally be rolling on the ground laughing at your shoddy investigation techniques. I'm a layman, and even I'M laughing at them, so that should tell you something.
I don't doubt you've had some success in the past in your chosen field (which, as I recall, is some form of biology), but I'll give you some advice, free of charge; stick to the area you're actually TRAINED in, and leave forensic research to the experts in the future. You might find people would be a lot less inclined to laugh at you if you do.
I used to be responsible for the people who tested human samples, and industry is a pretty big biatch about that kind of thing. I know about samples, and I know about what makes a sample valid or not.
