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School Boards Rule, Internet No Longer Dangerous
destinyland writes "Good news. The National School Boards Association, which represents 95,000 school board members, just released a report declaring fears of the internet are overblown. In fact, after surveying 1,277 students, "the researchers found exactly one student who reported they'd actually met a stranger from the internet without their parents' permission. (They described this as "0.08 percent of all students.") The report reminds educators that schools initially banned internet use before they'd realized how educational it was. Now instead they're urging schools to include social networks in their curriculum!"
Well, putting aside statistical issues with sample size and whatnot, 1 / 1277 is indeed 0.00078, or as a percentage: 0.078%. Rounding that to 0.08% hardly seems like bad math.
1/1277 = 0.0008
0.0008 would be 0.08%
Remember that the '%' stands for '/100' That's why it's a percent. "Per Centum". So,
0.08% = 0.08/100 = 0.0008
Your answer is a good illustration of what the parent poster was saying. "What's the difference between lossy and lossless compression?" Sheesh, that's exactly the computer equivalent of "Write a report about Sweden". No wonder the dropout rate is at an all time high. How about "Does the Star Trek transporter use lossy or lossless compression? Why?"
Back in the day, we could have typed stuff out of the encyclopedia. Wikipedia and computers has made cheating a little easier, but hasn't enabled anything new.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
The McMartin preschool criminal trial is a better example than the 20/20 episode you mention. In the McMartin case, hundreds of children told investigators they were abused because the children thought that was what the investigators wanted to hear. Apparently, all the abuse allegations turned out to be false:
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials /mcmartin/mcmartin.html