Forensic Lab Reflection

What role do multiple observations/experiments play in making god inferences and conclusions in each case?

Making multiple observations/experiences in each lab helped us infer who was the suspect of the case. If we had only had one or two cases we could not have correctly identified who the suspect was because we would not have enough data or the data we had could have been incomplete. For example when doing the soil case, my partner, Kyra and I had to compare and contrast different dirt. We looked all 5 samples (including the actual crime scene sample) when it was dry and wet, we checked the PH and Conductivity of each sample dirt, and we checked the water absorbency. All of these samples helped us better infer where the dirt was from because we had multiple samples to compare to the actual crime scene dirt. What also helped us in the lab was when we tested the samples in many different ways because for example if we had only recorded the water absorbency for the samples it wouldn't give us enough information to correctly infer which one was from the crime scene.

When is it hard to be precise and how does this affect the confidence in your results? What did you do about this?

I think it was very hard to be precise in all of the labs that we did. Anything could have gone wrong and even the smallest things like misreading the information and not correctly recording it, or misunderstanding how to do a procedure. For example, when doing the bullets lab my partner Star and I had some difficulties when doing the lab, we didn't measure the lands and grooves correctly so we had to re-measure every bullet. After that when we had to try and identify the type of gun it could have possibly come from, the measurements wouldn't match up for the types of guns! Luckily that didn't stop us and we kept working hard at the lab. Sometimes when we knew we weren't going to have very accurate measurements, (like when measuring the lands/grooves on the bullets, or the weighing the dirt in the soil lab), we worked to move around the imperfections and used what information we had to better confirm the data we collected. Once we moved around the imperfections, we had more confidence in our results!

When can you rely on "known" data to match up with and when do you need to generate your own? What's the difference?

The only lab that had "known" data was the bullets lab. We used the known data to compare to our own measurements/observations, and from that, we could infer which gun it was from. The other two labs didn't have any known data to compare to, so we had to generate our own data from the crime scene to compare to the test samples. The difference between the two is that "known" data can be more reliable and sometimes more accurate. When you have "known" data it is already certain that it is correct, but when you have to generate your own data there can be varied answers, and you are never completely certain it is correct.