Wait a minute, uncertainty! Ok let say instead of error rate, which is used by the court, we use the word uncertainty. The synonyms for uncertainty are as follows, distrust, distrustfulness, doubt, dubiety, dubitation, mistrust, query, reservation, skepticism, and suspicion. Remember the results will be presented in court that could be the bases for someone going to jail or losing their payments from an insurance company. I ask anyone reading this to consider is you are the excused would you want the trier of fact to accept the results as fact.

Another problem with this not being an error rate is that one of the developers of the CFIcalculator has testified that the mathematical formular he used in determining heat transfer from the source of the heat to the target object had a 20-30% error rate. Are you saying his testimony was incorrect?

For the test I it is my understanding that the data put in was the same for both models and for the hand method, yet not one of them agreed with the other. This may be because of the formular used by each, but then the question is which one is correct. These tests did not deal with the uncertainly of the input variables and the uncertainly associated with the measured variables. It may be the way the model and the hand method compute the input data and the fact that they may use different mathematical formulars. I will agree there is an uncertainty as to the final results based on these experiments.

Jim Mazerat
Forensic Investigations Group