Section 2 of 6
The Limits
Six ways a profile can be right about the cells and wrong about the event. Each entry names what fails, what it produces in the result, and what is done about it.
Entries in this section
What the technique cannot carry. 6 entries.
- Entry 2.01TransferDNA moves — hand to bench, bench to garment, glove to item — so presence establishes contact with the material, not participation in an event.
- Entry 2.02MixturesWhen the peaks stop belonging to one person, interpretation becomes a statistical argument rather than a reading.
- Entry 2.03Low-template DNAPushing sensitivity produces drop-out, drop-in and stutter, and the result becomes partly a property of the method.
- Entry 2.04Probabilistic genotypingSoftware models the ways a mixture could have arisen and reports a likelihood ratio, which moves the argument to the model.
- Entry 2.05ContaminationDocumented laboratory failures are part of the technique's history and are why controls and elimination databases exist.
- Entry 2.06Contextual biasGiving examiners the same mixture and different background information changes the conclusions they reach.
Other sections
Every entry on the site is reachable from the whole register.