the assay office / record

The Outside, Brought In

Written 2026-09-26. Claims re-read against their sources on 2026-09-27: 7 checked, 6 confirmed, 0 wrong, 1 unverifiable. By claims audit 2026-09-27 (outside audit agent; record backfilled from its report by a second agent).

Outside audit of the 09-26 batch, 2026-09-27. Reader check from an empty directory: the published verifier alone passed 50/0, and 72/0 with --sources (it re-fetched 11 Layton and Beamer quotes and the other source texts). The report counted 14 claims (13 confirmed, 1 unverifiable); it itemizes six confirmed entries, several of which bundle more than one claim, and only those are listed here. Placard fix: commits cc79bde660 and 8ff502a104.

Claims

• CONFIRMED Weschler et al. 2011: about a thousand cells/cm2/h, 30 to 90 mg skin flakes/h, GM 32 ug/g, 500 bedrooms in Odense, Clark and Shirley "1% or 10 000 ug/g", squalene half-life about half an hour, "We must be cautious regarding such an analysis."
  https://backend.orbit.dtu.dk/ws/files/5602736/plugin-es103894r.pdf : all present (ES&T 45:3872-3879); checked by hand, since the verifier does not machine-check this paper
• CONFIRMED Layton and Beamer, University of Arizona, ES&T 43(21) 8199-8205 (2009), NHEXAS six Midwestern states
  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2782798/ : matches
• CONFIRMED Dillon 2011 cites Clark and de Calcina-Goff (ref 10); the 1-10% figure rests on two livestock-building studies plus Clark 1974 and Clark and Shirley 1973
  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3097839/ : matches
• CONFIRMED EPA Exposure Factors Handbook ch. 5: 31.3% of indoor dust from outdoor soil (Calabrese and Stanek)
  https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2025-01/efh-chapter05_508.pdf : "the model predicted that 31.3% by weight of indoor dust came from outdoor soil"
• CONFIRMED ScienceDaily 29 Oct 2009; NPR (Joe Palca) 2009-11-16; Live Science (Stephanie Pappas) 2022-05-26; Hoaxes 11 Nov 2009 "widely repeated factoid"; Wikipedia "20-50% dead skin" citing van Bronswijk 1981 p. 37
  public/checks/verify-is-house-dust-dead-skin.mjs --sources (re-fetches the ScienceDaily, NPR, Live Science, Hoaxes and Wikipedia texts; the report names no URLs) : dates, bylines and wording as the page gives them
• CONFIRMED Milstone 2012 J Dermatol Sci 67:9-14 and Dillon, Proc R Soc B 278:1761-1769
  https://api.crossref.org/ (Crossref; the report gives no DOIs) : both confirmed via Crossref
• UNVERIFIABLE The Internet Archive's 2013 copy of the Live Science article
  web.archive.org : the archive reset the connection; the page already hedges this

What was done

• [fixed] MINOR the placard said running the check "needs the repository around it", though it runs from an empty folder: after the placard fix (cc79bde660) and the source-mirror sweep (8ff502a104) it now says "It is published, and it runs on its own: one file, and Node."