I would expect the opposite - a test that must be 100% free of anything that might be specific to a subset of the audience would be harder to write if it could be taken by 360 million people vs. 3,600 (for example), just as it is much harder to write 100% portable code that really will run absolutely anywhere without modification (be it an Android, an iPad, a PC or a Cray supercomputer) that will also do something useful. For exactly the same reason.
In programming, nobody tries to write something that is utterly generic to all environments. There just aren't enough common denominators to make it worthwhile. (Not all systems have GUIs or, indeed, any user. Not all systems have storage devices. Not all systems have network access. What, exactly, does that leave you with for your generic program to do?) You write for a much more restricted set.
It's no good saying that people who have learned the syllabus are the equivalent of that restricted set, they're not. Education is about learning methods, procedures and tools, specialties are about learning the specifics of that field, and the programming equivalent of those two are libraries and programming languages respectively. Since real-life education doesn't mean your home will magically acquire a chip fab plant, a chemistry lab and a synchrotron radiation ring, the programming equivalent cannot give you any additional hardware either.
In programming, we work in as specific a niche as we can get away with - specific systems (or classes of system), specific problems, specific specifications, etc, generalizing where it won't hurt more than we can afford, but never more so.
Education and exams should ergo follow the same strategy - custom-fit education tailored to smaller groups of individuals to get the most out of them and the most into them, then custom-fit exams to establish how well this is achieved. Production-line education of pre-fab "individuals" will indeed get you the lower variance in quality that production-line pre-fab goods does, but variance != errors.
That depends on whether you want a direct comparison of knowledge. You want to see if they meet the minimum requirements of the course, but after that what matters is surely their raw ability to learn. You don't get that information off a standardized test, you can only get that from specialized testing. Standardized tests only tell you how good the student is at that syllabus, which means that you'll get identical scores for someone who reached that level when they were half the age and have learned vastly more and those who didn't learn it all. Those who are average to mediocre will actually score the highest, but the reason universities have exceptionally high drop-out rates is that average-to-mediocre just won't cut it. Not at that level.
However, what about the gifted kids, the ones who have forgotten more than the rest ever knew? Because they are capable of learning faster and more independently, they are prime university candidates, the IDEAL people to have. Yet they will score average or even below average on any standardized test -- precisely because they know more and therefore answer better than the examiner anticipated.
The correct testing strategy is to ALWAYS have the ones you want most score the most. The ones you want most, above all, are the ones who will be getting first class honors and be continuing on to get their PhDs. It is extremely doubtful that many of those will do well in SATs, which is in part why Oxford and Cambridge traditionally set their own specialized tests (long-answer format, replete with fascinating and bizarre questions) and allowed you to score whatever you wanted in the national standardized exams if you did well at their specialized quizzes. They wanted the people who actually WERE the best, not merely the best at answering multiple-choice tests.
Sweet can be measured objectively. You know the taste buds that register sweetness, so can measure the level at which they are firing and with what intensity. Doesn't matter if they're linked to a part of the brain measuring Donald Duck impressions in some given person. Doesn't even matter if other tastes overwhelm the sweetness in 99.9% of people expressing an opinion. If you register an intensity of X on the sweet-sensing taste buds, then that is an objective measure of a level of X. What registers in the brain is of no value or interest.
Soft can also be measured objectively. The mineral scale is not measuring what "joe average" calls soft, it's measuring what mineralogists consider soft. On the mineral scale, X is softer than Y if Y can permanently scratch X and X can't permanently scratch Y. However, when you measure the softness of a blanket or a petal, you probably aren't trying to see if it will scratch diamond or even a number 2 pencil. (I'd hate to see a blanket that COULD scratch diamond - ok, maybe it would be fascinating in some strange way.) The mineralogist's scale is, however, a perfectly valid way to measure soft for that definition of soft. For most regular people, the meaning is closer to pliable. How pliable something is is also measurable. So that, too, can be quantified. But because these are two different meanings for the word "soft", you should really prefix or suffix "soft" to say what "soft" you are measuring, although by stating units you will usually imply this.
Smell is indeed a function of the nose, and it's perfectly possible to measure the intensity and type of reaction in the nose's nerves (the direct measure of smell) or the measure the intensity and type activity in the brain (the indirect measure of smell). They're both measuring actual smell because they both utilize the nose as the sensing device.
"Most correct answer" should NEVER be de rigour, because you should NEVER be asking questions in a way that requires such a concept. The correct question should have been to ask how you might measure these different characteristics or why you can't (with a score of 0-4 for level of completeness of each answer). "Multiple Guess" questions SHOULD DIE!!!!
When it was found that the British GCSE examiners were marking salt as something you couldn't melt, it was considered a national disaster and the media ripped the examining authorities a new one.
In Florida, marking something that scientists test everyday as untestable is more likely to get you a promotion and a hefty bonus.
Standardized exams are EVIL and worthless (exams should be tailored to as small a group as practical and should test that group's ability to acquire and understand knowledge, it's the only way you can establish anything of value) but standardized exams that are also factually wrong should be burned at the stake. There is no excuse for them. Ever.
It doesn't matter what the examiner "expects" the students to know. A "C" grade should be what you "expect" the students to know. "A" should be reserved for people who know things you DIDN'T expect them to know. If you run out of grade letters, as the UK's A-level group did when they added A* to the mix, then that's for people who know things you didn't even know yourself.
If you restrict people to boxes, expect them to have boxes for brains when they leave school. Maybe that works "just fine" in everglade country in the middle of a recession, but it should still not be acceptable. Anywhere. Ever.
The chemistry kit, like I said, likely wouldn't fit or survive the journey, even if you had some guarantee it would be applicable (which you don't). Since I've already said that, it would be stupid of you to be complaining about the very problems I said it had.
The GPR can certainly fit in that space, no problem, and be absolutely flawless. Battery is taken care of, since you DON'T have to run the thing for months - a GPR is something you only use for a few seconds every month, and you can certainly recharge the batteries off solar power in that time. But I already said that, so that would have been obvious to anyone bothering to read. GPR is nothing more than a very sophisticated stopwatch with multiple counters - I've simply ramped up the number of said counters and had them count very slightly different things. Mala's kit, which uses 64 receivers (as opposed to my 5), already fits in something the size of a beer cooler, so something 1/13th the complexity is hardly going to be a headache.
As for the ICBM stuff, GPR and LADAR is already being done by orbiters around Mars, so we know that the kit can survive the journey.
Guidance technology from the 60s was capable of hitting something the size of a quarter on the Moon from Earth. Even the Russian ICBMs from that era are good enough to be aimed through the posts of a US football field from a distance of 12,000 miles. Something the size of a bullseye from a paltry 4000 meters? Child's play (relatively-speaking). You're looking at this as though someone (a) ignorant of electronics, (b) ignorant of rocketry and (c) with no money were doing this sort of work. NASA is none of the above.
For chrissakes, look at what they could get the Pioneer and Voyager probes to hit, given that they had almost nothing in the way of in-flight guidance. Pioneer 11 managed successfully to target not just Saturn but a specific distance from it to within a kilometer or so from a range of 1.4 billion kilometers. That was launched in 1973, so you're looking at late 1960s technology in the probe for anything it did in-flight. Dunno how good you might be at electronics, but anyone who can start with an accuracy of 1:1.4 billion damn well aught to be better than that 50 years later.
Also look at their instrumentation - vastly more sophisticated than carting around five bloody stopwatches, but had to survive the incredibly harsh conditions of space for many decades AND the fantastic walloping of radiation from skimming the gas giants. In comparison, Mars IS a piece of cake.
Assuming that to be true (it isn't) then half is still not zero. If you're going to calculate cost as "sum of all fractions of pipe consumed end-to-end", that would be fair and neutral -- if it was done for everyone by the same metric, even it ended up biasing one source over another. (Neutral simply means that everyone has the same rule applied equally - ie: it is equitable - it does NOT mean all providers are equal. Just as in science or in news, equitability and equal standards are FAR more important than equal share.)
Comcast isn't being equal OR equitable. It's making sources you buy from it essentially zero network cost and all other sources much more expensive. It's leveraging the (rather obvious) monopoly it has over its network to create a second, independent monopoly in the completely different field of content delivery. That's not ok. That's actually blatantly illegal. It also knows that in an election year where markets are jittery and unemployment is high, nobody is going to do a damn thing about it.
Assuming that any given material is relatively uniform (or can be approximated as such), you can treat the problem as a set of unknowns in a set of linear equations. You need one linear equation per unknown in order to solve for all unknowns. In my example, five receivers "should" solve five unknowns for one transmission - though not really, since you're drawing lines through media you can't guarantee being the same. So you'd want to perform a number of tests at differing places in order to know how many unknowns you are actually dealing with, which ones match up with which from which receiver on which run, etc.
(You're not going to be able to solve for all unknowns, but that's ok. I explain later in this post.)
This is definitely not an easy problem. There are GPRs that purport to give a 3D scan (Mala sells 64-receiver systems for quarter of a million a pop) but none of them make any effort to do a true 3D analysis based on the data (something I believe should be possible, if you've enough readings to satisfy the requirements for solving unknowns - especially on Mars where conditions are much more limited). I don't expect a rover to have the compute power needed, but it can be crunched on Earth and decisions based on the results transmitted back.
Obviously, tracing N rays through a structure isn't the same thing as getting a neat slice then performing tomographic reconstruction. However, I know of nobody who has achieved "ground penetrating tomography" even on Earth where replacing batteries is a good deal easier. I do believe that you can approximate to that (versus the current rather incomprehensible echo maps currently produced) but again the sort of GPR I envisage being capable of "approximated tomography" are well beyond what a Mars mission can carry. I do think I can beat Mala's quarter million price tag, though.
For a Mars mission, you're going to be much more limited, even if all the computing takes place on Earth. I picture something that can be better than a conventional single-receiver GPR in terms of data collection (and infinitely better in terms of compute resources) but still miles away from what I would love to actually build on Earth for terrestrial work. (First, though, I have to move out of the US, since civilian GPR research in the US is restricted well beyond merely not having signals interfering with anything important. If it's not military or corporate, the FCC doesn't believe you've any business doing it.)
Now, some of the "unknowns" can be considered knowns. Like I said, we know some of the Martian minerals, so we know their absolute values for signal propagation (and therefore the relative values in relation to one another). If the on-board camera shows the surface to be a known mineral, we plug that value in. Since we're wanting to isolate unknown minerals, we then want to look for sub-surface knowns which are behind sub-surface unknowns part of the time. As problems go, this is a lot simpler than trying to solve for absolutely everything.
Since the purpose of the triage is to locate and isolate unknowns, that's all we need do. Of course, it doesn't hurt if we can calculate the transmission speed through the unknown. We should be able to, since you will get a reflection per transition between media and know the propagation speed for all the knowns AND we know what the refractive index of the unknown is. Since there's presumably a fair-sized database of these kinds of properties by now, a sensible prediction of what the unknown is aught to be possible.
You can then also prioritize unknowns, running from those which are almost certainly X, those that are probably X and those which have a profile not in any such database, where the last of these is obviously the most interesting. It will probably be a well-known mineral that nobody thought to write the numbers down for, but since Mars offers the potential for some really weird chemistry, those are the samples that have the best chance of telling you more about what the weird chemistry was.
Triage is more complex but doable. Different materials allow radio through at different velocities and refract at different angles, so a simple system is to use a GPR setup with multiple receivers. If you know the difference in time it takes to transmit a signal from A to B through one medium versus another, plus what appears to be behind what when you look at one point versus another, then you know enough. (This is because we can reproduce the minerals we do know are on Mars and can therefore know what those look like using such technology in advance. The stuff you'd want to triage is stuff that doesn't fit with behaviours we'd expect to see.)
But GPR is energy-intensive. No big deal - if it's a triage, you know the general area, you're wanting specifics. Since moving to a location is going to take days by rover, you can afford to triage by any process that consumes as much power as your solar cells can gather in that time. You can afford for it to be wasteful, because you don't have to carry more than one target area's worth of power at any one time and can recharge the batteries between runs.
The original scans have to be a lot more conservative, since you need to perform an unknown amount of surveying and therefore cannot use more power than you can gather in the same amount of time, but isolating a point out of a fixed, small area is going to be a brief, infrequent task. The quality therefore matters far more than the power requirements, when you're working that way round.
Identifying organics will be hard without some sort of spectral analysis. The detection of methane in the past is only significant if that methane was produced by biochemical process rather than an inorganic process, and that is currently unknown. Further, it's only important if the organic found is ALSO an organic relating to such methane production. Terrestrial biochemistry is highly diverse, so there's no such guarantee. Assuming you were looking for those specific organisms, however, life operates with a negative feedback system. Thus, if a process produces X then as the concentration of X increases the production must decrease. X will eventually become toxic to the process. Since we've seen methane and the Viking landers saw CO2 production, you might want to take methane and CO2 along. By repeating the Viking experiment with differing, controlled levels of initial CO2 and methane, you should determine if a negative feedback loop exists. If you saturate, run the experiment then return to a known previous unsaturated state an inorganic system -might- produce the same response as it did in that same state previously. An organic system is guaranteed not to, since you created an environment that was toxic.
There's one catch. This requires spectral analysis and the requirement said you can't do that. True, all chemical responses (organic or inorganic) will also produce a heat signature (2nd Law of Thermodynamics) but ALL the chemistry will be producing heat and you will have NO idea what fraction might be biochemical and therefore NO means of predicting what level of reduction in activity is significant. (If 1% of the activity might be biochemical, you're looking at a very different level of difference being significant than if 90% might be biochemical.) If you can't construct a hypothesis H1 in the first place, you cannot establish how likely it is if what you are seeing is H1 or H0.
There are techniques for extracting proteins in biochemistry. IIRC, you need them to be in a solution, you add various solvents and reagents and then you filter. Then you're just measuring the mass of that part of the filter vs. the expected
If people were more honest (in court or elsewhere), then the government wouldn't have that excuse. And, yes, it is an excuse, but as long as the overwhelming majority keep providing handy pretexts through wanton dishonesty, you will see those pretexts exploited. Why would you expect otherwise?
That doesn't make it right - two wrongs never do that - and it should be called out and confronted. As should the wrongs that lead to it - the first wrong is no less wrong merely because it got added to. But everyone wants special treatment for them and the book thrown at the other guy, so nothing ever changes except for the worse.
Nor is this a new complaint. Waaaay back, before many Slashdotters were born, a little-known two-tone group penned the following lines regarding abuses of this kind by governments and corporations alike:
Why must you record my phone calls? Are you planning a bootleg L.P? Said you've been threatened by gangsters Now it's you that’s threatening me.
Can't fight corruption with con tricks They use the law to commit crime? I dread, dread to think what the future will bring When we’re living in gangster times.
Seems to me that nothing has changed in the intervening years. Things haven't gotten worse, the younger generation is merely seeing the problems that the previous generation did.
Asking them to hand over video evidence is a little unfair (the cop would be spending the day burning CDs) but they should be compelled to show that there is evidence and not simply an opinion. Actually, the ideal would be to ban all opinion-based and eyewitness testimony from courtrooms.
We only have his word that he actually stopped. It would be more correct to say that another car explains why there are multiple scenarios explaining what the officer thought he saw. The only way this really relates to traffic (or other) laws is that western law specifically handles multiple scenarios by stating that the burden of proof is on the accuser to show that the scenario they outlined meets a requisite threshold. Physics is not trumping anything, it merely allows one to illustrate in this case some of those alternatives.
Well, no, because AGW is founded on aspects of planetary science which are well-establised, applied to historical data which is also well-established. The "element of doubt" you speak of simply doesn't exist in the science, it exists only in the minds of people who cannot grasp that a global climatic mean change in some value is NOT equal to a local meteorological instantaneous change in a related but distinct variable.
The body has also evolved to NOT produce certain things that are absolutely essential to human life because they can be readily obtained from meat. Agreed on the "quite a bit less" point, where the "quite a bit less" can be quantified. Meat intake above the point where the need of meat-specific sources of nutrition is satisfied (including the high energy requirements of the brain) is entirely superfluous and meat intake hugely in excess of that is detrimental to human health (which not only means the person is losing from it, but valuable resources are consumed in fixing this self-inflicted damage).
A nutritionally-intelligent diet will thus be environmentally good not only through a lower impact via the food chain but also through lower impacts everywhere else AND greater intellectual capacity to utilize resources elsewhere in life better. Harm tends to have a ripple effect, so the elimination of harm eliminates not only the harm but all indirect consequences.
In the end, what did Ghandi actually achieve? India fragmented, as he feared. Sectarian violence and sectarian terrorism is a major problem, as he feared. There is no true self-rule, as all the fragments are heavily dependent on outside corporate interests and governmental interests - is it really such a big difference that it's outsourced US corporations and a mix of the US and Chinese governments rather than the East India Tea Company and the British government? Outside dictatorial control is, ultimately outside dictatorial control. Who it is doesn't change what it is.
As far as I can see, Ghandi succeeded in very little, since although all the problems he highlighted and addressed were entirely real, they are still there and still real but have become acceptable again.
He did a lot that was good, but so many more people did a lot that was bad that his good was largely obliterated within moments of his assassination.
Ceres is a proto-Planet and recent evidence suggests Vesta is also. My guess is that the KBOs that are larger than Pluto are also proto-Planets, although ones larger than Vesta and smaller than Pluto may or may not be depending on mass and structure.
Everything but the 3D aspect was done in AberMUD (which used a 2D graphical interface in a dedicated client). Basic GUI-driven avatar-based multi-player interactions via specialized clients can be traced back to XTrek at least (XTank didn't use clients per-se, since the server transmitted X protocol commands to the client display), since avatars could directly interact and players could chat via a console.
In terms of 3D interactions, Second Life was hardly the first. Alpha World was earlier and even that was derived from earlier attempts.
Aha! Yes, Worlds Inc was responsible for Alpha World. That makes sense, and certainly Alpha World has a legitimate claim to being the direct ancestor of WoW, etc, and the platform that developed all of the technology used by Second Life, ad nausium. It's a push for them to claim the sole rights to MMORG Virtual Realities, though.
Since it formed very early on, it's most likely a proto-planet rather than a mature planet. Planetary theory is only designed for mature planets, because statistics doesn't apply to extremely small numbers and extremely small numbers is exactly what you have when dealing with proto-planets. Ergo, the theory cannot be applied sensibly, ergo there is no theory that can be described as being defied.
If your best counter-argument is an insult rather than an intelligent response, "balance" is something that is clearly beyond you.
In science, the simplest explanation that fits the facts is ALWAYS the better solution, but when the facts are themselves unknown you should state so and not arbitrarily go around picking explanations that suit you. Science is EVIDENCE-based. If you do NOT know the evidence, you do NOT state that you do. Science is NOT a religion, it is a methodology and you damn-well better stick to that methodology if you don't want observers ripping you a new one.
Agreed that experiments have independent protocols and agreed that guarding against false positives was important.
However, precisely for those reasons, NASA should have stated that the reasons were ambiguous and contradictory, they should NOT have declared one set of results to randomly supersede the results of another. Furthermore, they DID omit other experiments for detecting life, which would have supplemented the evidence and therefore a "tiebreaker" of sorts.
It is also the case that in the 70s organics were no longer considered a definition of life. True, it would take another decade for James Lovelock's idea that life is better defined in terms of a self-regulating system that utilizes and generates unstable conditions and chemistry. However, even in the 70s biologists were looking at processes and not specific implementations. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen are the most flexible elements to work with, but I know of no organism that exploits superionic water or graphene in any appreciable way so it's reasonable to conclude that life doesn't absolutely require that level of flexibility to exist. (Indeed, in the 70s, it was generally accepted that other chemistries were plausible -- to the point that some of the life experiments not included were designed to handle such contingencies.)
That's because they've changed the strategy for looking for life - away from "pin the tail on the donkey" (blind stabs in the dark like Viking) and towards more basic chemical research. Biological experiments are sexy, but they're meaningless without the proper foundation of knowledge to design them and to interpret their results.
The only generally-accepted basic chemical research that pertains to life also pertains to Lovelock's work since he's the recognized father of planetary life science. However, there has only been one Mars experiment designed to look for unstable chemistry -- which was indeed detected in the form of methane from a vent -- but it was largely ignored at the time (in essence NASA said it could be anything), there have been no follow-up experiments and there are no plans for any such follow-up.
The basic chemistry argument is entirely valid, but only applies if said studies were taking place. Their absence is bothersome, as is the failure to follow up on studies. The ditching of NASA's contribution to the joint venture to Mars is also of deep concern, as that WAS an attempt to follow-up on prior results.
I'm not saying this is a NASA conspiracy. Having worked at NASA myself, I would have to say they're not capable. (They were using rsh and.rhosts in 2000!) Rather, this is a case of what a certain Douglas Noel Adams referred to as "clearly defined regions of doubt and uncertainty". Politics doesn't want any scientific questions answered, as that might upset voters and sponsors. Politics wants the illusion of questions being answered, because illusions upset nobody and are a good deal cheaper. Facts are horribly expensive and can be damned inconvenient at re-election time. Does that make it a political conspiracy? Depends on how you mean. It's not a political conspiracy to hide anything, there's no secret knowledge and no X-Files/Indiana Jones-like warehouse of alien and/or mystical technology. So in that sense, no it isn't. I'm not even sure it's a conscious, deliberate effort to sabotage getting things done, which would be the legal requirement. There aren't too many conscious, deliberate politicians. It feels much more like an emotional-level, subconscious aversion to conclusions where there's a general subconscious consensus to never have enough facts to let them get in the way of a good story.
Can one call an instinctive, irrational, unspoken, emotive consensus a "conspiracy"? It doesn't meet any technical definition of the word, even though it certainly meets the common-sense one since it is indeed a collective action with a common purpose even if that purpose has never been consciously considered by any of the participants.
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I would expect the opposite - a test that must be 100% free of anything that might be specific to a subset of the audience would be harder to write if it could be taken by 360 million people vs. 3,600 (for example), just as it is much harder to write 100% portable code that really will run absolutely anywhere without modification (be it an Android, an iPad, a PC or a Cray supercomputer) that will also do something useful. For exactly the same reason.
In programming, nobody tries to write something that is utterly generic to all environments. There just aren't enough common denominators to make it worthwhile. (Not all systems have GUIs or, indeed, any user. Not all systems have storage devices. Not all systems have network access. What, exactly, does that leave you with for your generic program to do?) You write for a much more restricted set.
It's no good saying that people who have learned the syllabus are the equivalent of that restricted set, they're not. Education is about learning methods, procedures and tools, specialties are about learning the specifics of that field, and the programming equivalent of those two are libraries and programming languages respectively. Since real-life education doesn't mean your home will magically acquire a chip fab plant, a chemistry lab and a synchrotron radiation ring, the programming equivalent cannot give you any additional hardware either.
In programming, we work in as specific a niche as we can get away with - specific systems (or classes of system), specific problems, specific specifications, etc, generalizing where it won't hurt more than we can afford, but never more so.
Education and exams should ergo follow the same strategy - custom-fit education tailored to smaller groups of individuals to get the most out of them and the most into them, then custom-fit exams to establish how well this is achieved. Production-line education of pre-fab "individuals" will indeed get you the lower variance in quality that production-line pre-fab goods does, but variance != errors.
If they're X-Men-style Rogue, Playboy might be willing to pay you for pics.
That depends on whether you want a direct comparison of knowledge. You want to see if they meet the minimum requirements of the course, but after that what matters is surely their raw ability to learn. You don't get that information off a standardized test, you can only get that from specialized testing. Standardized tests only tell you how good the student is at that syllabus, which means that you'll get identical scores for someone who reached that level when they were half the age and have learned vastly more and those who didn't learn it all. Those who are average to mediocre will actually score the highest, but the reason universities have exceptionally high drop-out rates is that average-to-mediocre just won't cut it. Not at that level.
However, what about the gifted kids, the ones who have forgotten more than the rest ever knew? Because they are capable of learning faster and more independently, they are prime university candidates, the IDEAL people to have. Yet they will score average or even below average on any standardized test -- precisely because they know more and therefore answer better than the examiner anticipated.
The correct testing strategy is to ALWAYS have the ones you want most score the most. The ones you want most, above all, are the ones who will be getting first class honors and be continuing on to get their PhDs. It is extremely doubtful that many of those will do well in SATs, which is in part why Oxford and Cambridge traditionally set their own specialized tests (long-answer format, replete with fascinating and bizarre questions) and allowed you to score whatever you wanted in the national standardized exams if you did well at their specialized quizzes. They wanted the people who actually WERE the best, not merely the best at answering multiple-choice tests.
Sweet can be measured objectively. You know the taste buds that register sweetness, so can measure the level at which they are firing and with what intensity. Doesn't matter if they're linked to a part of the brain measuring Donald Duck impressions in some given person. Doesn't even matter if other tastes overwhelm the sweetness in 99.9% of people expressing an opinion. If you register an intensity of X on the sweet-sensing taste buds, then that is an objective measure of a level of X. What registers in the brain is of no value or interest.
Soft can also be measured objectively. The mineral scale is not measuring what "joe average" calls soft, it's measuring what mineralogists consider soft. On the mineral scale, X is softer than Y if Y can permanently scratch X and X can't permanently scratch Y. However, when you measure the softness of a blanket or a petal, you probably aren't trying to see if it will scratch diamond or even a number 2 pencil. (I'd hate to see a blanket that COULD scratch diamond - ok, maybe it would be fascinating in some strange way.) The mineralogist's scale is, however, a perfectly valid way to measure soft for that definition of soft. For most regular people, the meaning is closer to pliable. How pliable something is is also measurable. So that, too, can be quantified. But because these are two different meanings for the word "soft", you should really prefix or suffix "soft" to say what "soft" you are measuring, although by stating units you will usually imply this.
Smell is indeed a function of the nose, and it's perfectly possible to measure the intensity and type of reaction in the nose's nerves (the direct measure of smell) or the measure the intensity and type activity in the brain (the indirect measure of smell). They're both measuring actual smell because they both utilize the nose as the sensing device.
"Most correct answer" should NEVER be de rigour, because you should NEVER be asking questions in a way that requires such a concept. The correct question should have been to ask how you might measure these different characteristics or why you can't (with a score of 0-4 for level of completeness of each answer). "Multiple Guess" questions SHOULD DIE!!!!
When it was found that the British GCSE examiners were marking salt as something you couldn't melt, it was considered a national disaster and the media ripped the examining authorities a new one.
In Florida, marking something that scientists test everyday as untestable is more likely to get you a promotion and a hefty bonus.
Standardized exams are EVIL and worthless (exams should be tailored to as small a group as practical and should test that group's ability to acquire and understand knowledge, it's the only way you can establish anything of value) but standardized exams that are also factually wrong should be burned at the stake. There is no excuse for them. Ever.
It doesn't matter what the examiner "expects" the students to know. A "C" grade should be what you "expect" the students to know. "A" should be reserved for people who know things you DIDN'T expect them to know. If you run out of grade letters, as the UK's A-level group did when they added A* to the mix, then that's for people who know things you didn't even know yourself.
If you restrict people to boxes, expect them to have boxes for brains when they leave school. Maybe that works "just fine" in everglade country in the middle of a recession, but it should still not be acceptable. Anywhere. Ever.
Hmmm. Clarke's First Law might be closer to Pascal, or maybe Forth. Suggestions, anyone?
No, that would be comparing it to Cobol.
To help people get the right comparison, here's a quick list:
The chemistry kit, like I said, likely wouldn't fit or survive the journey, even if you had some guarantee it would be applicable (which you don't). Since I've already said that, it would be stupid of you to be complaining about the very problems I said it had.
The GPR can certainly fit in that space, no problem, and be absolutely flawless. Battery is taken care of, since you DON'T have to run the thing for months - a GPR is something you only use for a few seconds every month, and you can certainly recharge the batteries off solar power in that time. But I already said that, so that would have been obvious to anyone bothering to read. GPR is nothing more than a very sophisticated stopwatch with multiple counters - I've simply ramped up the number of said counters and had them count very slightly different things. Mala's kit, which uses 64 receivers (as opposed to my 5), already fits in something the size of a beer cooler, so something 1/13th the complexity is hardly going to be a headache.
As for the ICBM stuff, GPR and LADAR is already being done by orbiters around Mars, so we know that the kit can survive the journey.
Guidance technology from the 60s was capable of hitting something the size of a quarter on the Moon from Earth. Even the Russian ICBMs from that era are good enough to be aimed through the posts of a US football field from a distance of 12,000 miles. Something the size of a bullseye from a paltry 4000 meters? Child's play (relatively-speaking). You're looking at this as though someone (a) ignorant of electronics, (b) ignorant of rocketry and (c) with no money were doing this sort of work. NASA is none of the above.
For chrissakes, look at what they could get the Pioneer and Voyager probes to hit, given that they had almost nothing in the way of in-flight guidance. Pioneer 11 managed successfully to target not just Saturn but a specific distance from it to within a kilometer or so from a range of 1.4 billion kilometers. That was launched in 1973, so you're looking at late 1960s technology in the probe for anything it did in-flight. Dunno how good you might be at electronics, but anyone who can start with an accuracy of 1:1.4 billion damn well aught to be better than that 50 years later.
Also look at their instrumentation - vastly more sophisticated than carting around five bloody stopwatches, but had to survive the incredibly harsh conditions of space for many decades AND the fantastic walloping of radiation from skimming the gas giants. In comparison, Mars IS a piece of cake.
Assuming that to be true (it isn't) then half is still not zero. If you're going to calculate cost as "sum of all fractions of pipe consumed end-to-end", that would be fair and neutral -- if it was done for everyone by the same metric, even it ended up biasing one source over another. (Neutral simply means that everyone has the same rule applied equally - ie: it is equitable - it does NOT mean all providers are equal. Just as in science or in news, equitability and equal standards are FAR more important than equal share.)
Comcast isn't being equal OR equitable. It's making sources you buy from it essentially zero network cost and all other sources much more expensive. It's leveraging the (rather obvious) monopoly it has over its network to create a second, independent monopoly in the completely different field of content delivery. That's not ok. That's actually blatantly illegal. It also knows that in an election year where markets are jittery and unemployment is high, nobody is going to do a damn thing about it.
Assuming that any given material is relatively uniform (or can be approximated as such), you can treat the problem as a set of unknowns in a set of linear equations. You need one linear equation per unknown in order to solve for all unknowns. In my example, five receivers "should" solve five unknowns for one transmission - though not really, since you're drawing lines through media you can't guarantee being the same. So you'd want to perform a number of tests at differing places in order to know how many unknowns you are actually dealing with, which ones match up with which from which receiver on which run, etc.
(You're not going to be able to solve for all unknowns, but that's ok. I explain later in this post.)
This is definitely not an easy problem. There are GPRs that purport to give a 3D scan (Mala sells 64-receiver systems for quarter of a million a pop) but none of them make any effort to do a true 3D analysis based on the data (something I believe should be possible, if you've enough readings to satisfy the requirements for solving unknowns - especially on Mars where conditions are much more limited). I don't expect a rover to have the compute power needed, but it can be crunched on Earth and decisions based on the results transmitted back.
Obviously, tracing N rays through a structure isn't the same thing as getting a neat slice then performing tomographic reconstruction. However, I know of nobody who has achieved "ground penetrating tomography" even on Earth where replacing batteries is a good deal easier. I do believe that you can approximate to that (versus the current rather incomprehensible echo maps currently produced) but again the sort of GPR I envisage being capable of "approximated tomography" are well beyond what a Mars mission can carry. I do think I can beat Mala's quarter million price tag, though.
For a Mars mission, you're going to be much more limited, even if all the computing takes place on Earth. I picture something that can be better than a conventional single-receiver GPR in terms of data collection (and infinitely better in terms of compute resources) but still miles away from what I would love to actually build on Earth for terrestrial work. (First, though, I have to move out of the US, since civilian GPR research in the US is restricted well beyond merely not having signals interfering with anything important. If it's not military or corporate, the FCC doesn't believe you've any business doing it.)
Now, some of the "unknowns" can be considered knowns. Like I said, we know some of the Martian minerals, so we know their absolute values for signal propagation (and therefore the relative values in relation to one another). If the on-board camera shows the surface to be a known mineral, we plug that value in. Since we're wanting to isolate unknown minerals, we then want to look for sub-surface knowns which are behind sub-surface unknowns part of the time. As problems go, this is a lot simpler than trying to solve for absolutely everything.
Since the purpose of the triage is to locate and isolate unknowns, that's all we need do. Of course, it doesn't hurt if we can calculate the transmission speed through the unknown. We should be able to, since you will get a reflection per transition between media and know the propagation speed for all the knowns AND we know what the refractive index of the unknown is. Since there's presumably a fair-sized database of these kinds of properties by now, a sensible prediction of what the unknown is aught to be possible.
You can then also prioritize unknowns, running from those which are almost certainly X, those that are probably X and those which have a profile not in any such database, where the last of these is obviously the most interesting. It will probably be a well-known mineral that nobody thought to write the numbers down for, but since Mars offers the potential for some really weird chemistry, those are the samples that have the best chance of telling you more about what the weird chemistry was.
(Weird
Surface and sub-surface mapping is easy. LADAR gives you the surface map, thermal imaging (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-13518143 and http://thermal-imaging-blog.com/index.php/2011/06/06/finding-pyramids/#.T4tWe9Xe4tY) gives you subsurface structures and a good idea of what the composition is.
Triage is more complex but doable. Different materials allow radio through at different velocities and refract at different angles, so a simple system is to use a GPR setup with multiple receivers. If you know the difference in time it takes to transmit a signal from A to B through one medium versus another, plus what appears to be behind what when you look at one point versus another, then you know enough. (This is because we can reproduce the minerals we do know are on Mars and can therefore know what those look like using such technology in advance. The stuff you'd want to triage is stuff that doesn't fit with behaviours we'd expect to see.)
But GPR is energy-intensive. No big deal - if it's a triage, you know the general area, you're wanting specifics. Since moving to a location is going to take days by rover, you can afford to triage by any process that consumes as much power as your solar cells can gather in that time. You can afford for it to be wasteful, because you don't have to carry more than one target area's worth of power at any one time and can recharge the batteries between runs.
The original scans have to be a lot more conservative, since you need to perform an unknown amount of surveying and therefore cannot use more power than you can gather in the same amount of time, but isolating a point out of a fixed, small area is going to be a brief, infrequent task. The quality therefore matters far more than the power requirements, when you're working that way round.
Identifying organics will be hard without some sort of spectral analysis. The detection of methane in the past is only significant if that methane was produced by biochemical process rather than an inorganic process, and that is currently unknown. Further, it's only important if the organic found is ALSO an organic relating to such methane production. Terrestrial biochemistry is highly diverse, so there's no such guarantee. Assuming you were looking for those specific organisms, however, life operates with a negative feedback system. Thus, if a process produces X then as the concentration of X increases the production must decrease. X will eventually become toxic to the process. Since we've seen methane and the Viking landers saw CO2 production, you might want to take methane and CO2 along. By repeating the Viking experiment with differing, controlled levels of initial CO2 and methane, you should determine if a negative feedback loop exists. If you saturate, run the experiment then return to a known previous unsaturated state an inorganic system -might- produce the same response as it did in that same state previously. An organic system is guaranteed not to, since you created an environment that was toxic.
There's one catch. This requires spectral analysis and the requirement said you can't do that. True, all chemical responses (organic or inorganic) will also produce a heat signature (2nd Law of Thermodynamics) but ALL the chemistry will be producing heat and you will have NO idea what fraction might be biochemical and therefore NO means of predicting what level of reduction in activity is significant. (If 1% of the activity might be biochemical, you're looking at a very different level of difference being significant than if 90% might be biochemical.) If you can't construct a hypothesis H1 in the first place, you cannot establish how likely it is if what you are seeing is H1 or H0.
There are techniques for extracting proteins in biochemistry. IIRC, you need them to be in a solution, you add various solvents and reagents and then you filter. Then you're just measuring the mass of that part of the filter vs. the expected
If people were more honest (in court or elsewhere), then the government wouldn't have that excuse. And, yes, it is an excuse, but as long as the overwhelming majority keep providing handy pretexts through wanton dishonesty, you will see those pretexts exploited. Why would you expect otherwise?
That doesn't make it right - two wrongs never do that - and it should be called out and confronted. As should the wrongs that lead to it - the first wrong is no less wrong merely because it got added to. But everyone wants special treatment for them and the book thrown at the other guy, so nothing ever changes except for the worse.
Nor is this a new complaint. Waaaay back, before many Slashdotters were born, a little-known two-tone group penned the following lines regarding abuses of this kind by governments and corporations alike:
Seems to me that nothing has changed in the intervening years. Things haven't gotten worse, the younger generation is merely seeing the problems that the previous generation did.
Asking them to hand over video evidence is a little unfair (the cop would be spending the day burning CDs) but they should be compelled to show that there is evidence and not simply an opinion. Actually, the ideal would be to ban all opinion-based and eyewitness testimony from courtrooms.
We only have his word that he actually stopped. It would be more correct to say that another car explains why there are multiple scenarios explaining what the officer thought he saw. The only way this really relates to traffic (or other) laws is that western law specifically handles multiple scenarios by stating that the burden of proof is on the accuser to show that the scenario they outlined meets a requisite threshold. Physics is not trumping anything, it merely allows one to illustrate in this case some of those alternatives.
Well, no, because AGW is founded on aspects of planetary science which are well-establised, applied to historical data which is also well-established. The "element of doubt" you speak of simply doesn't exist in the science, it exists only in the minds of people who cannot grasp that a global climatic mean change in some value is NOT equal to a local meteorological instantaneous change in a related but distinct variable.
The body has also evolved to NOT produce certain things that are absolutely essential to human life because they can be readily obtained from meat. Agreed on the "quite a bit less" point, where the "quite a bit less" can be quantified. Meat intake above the point where the need of meat-specific sources of nutrition is satisfied (including the high energy requirements of the brain) is entirely superfluous and meat intake hugely in excess of that is detrimental to human health (which not only means the person is losing from it, but valuable resources are consumed in fixing this self-inflicted damage).
A nutritionally-intelligent diet will thus be environmentally good not only through a lower impact via the food chain but also through lower impacts everywhere else AND greater intellectual capacity to utilize resources elsewhere in life better. Harm tends to have a ripple effect, so the elimination of harm eliminates not only the harm but all indirect consequences.
In the end, what did Ghandi actually achieve? India fragmented, as he feared. Sectarian violence and sectarian terrorism is a major problem, as he feared. There is no true self-rule, as all the fragments are heavily dependent on outside corporate interests and governmental interests - is it really such a big difference that it's outsourced US corporations and a mix of the US and Chinese governments rather than the East India Tea Company and the British government? Outside dictatorial control is, ultimately outside dictatorial control. Who it is doesn't change what it is.
As far as I can see, Ghandi succeeded in very little, since although all the problems he highlighted and addressed were entirely real, they are still there and still real but have become acceptable again.
He did a lot that was good, but so many more people did a lot that was bad that his good was largely obliterated within moments of his assassination.
Ceres is a proto-Planet and recent evidence suggests Vesta is also. My guess is that the KBOs that are larger than Pluto are also proto-Planets, although ones larger than Vesta and smaller than Pluto may or may not be depending on mass and structure.
AberMUD is from around the same time, but both are just extensions of Essex MUD which is from 1980 according to the source code.
Everything but the 3D aspect was done in AberMUD (which used a 2D graphical interface in a dedicated client). Basic GUI-driven avatar-based multi-player interactions via specialized clients can be traced back to XTrek at least (XTank didn't use clients per-se, since the server transmitted X protocol commands to the client display), since avatars could directly interact and players could chat via a console.
In terms of 3D interactions, Second Life was hardly the first. Alpha World was earlier and even that was derived from earlier attempts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds
Aha! Yes, Worlds Inc was responsible for Alpha World. That makes sense, and certainly Alpha World has a legitimate claim to being the direct ancestor of WoW, etc, and the platform that developed all of the technology used by Second Life, ad nausium. It's a push for them to claim the sole rights to MMORG Virtual Realities, though.
Since it formed very early on, it's most likely a proto-planet rather than a mature planet. Planetary theory is only designed for mature planets, because statistics doesn't apply to extremely small numbers and extremely small numbers is exactly what you have when dealing with proto-planets. Ergo, the theory cannot be applied sensibly, ergo there is no theory that can be described as being defied.
If your best counter-argument is an insult rather than an intelligent response, "balance" is something that is clearly beyond you.
In science, the simplest explanation that fits the facts is ALWAYS the better solution, but when the facts are themselves unknown you should state so and not arbitrarily go around picking explanations that suit you. Science is EVIDENCE-based. If you do NOT know the evidence, you do NOT state that you do. Science is NOT a religion, it is a methodology and you damn-well better stick to that methodology if you don't want observers ripping you a new one.
Agreed that experiments have independent protocols and agreed that guarding against false positives was important.
However, precisely for those reasons, NASA should have stated that the reasons were ambiguous and contradictory, they should NOT have declared one set of results to randomly supersede the results of another. Furthermore, they DID omit other experiments for detecting life, which would have supplemented the evidence and therefore a "tiebreaker" of sorts.
It is also the case that in the 70s organics were no longer considered a definition of life. True, it would take another decade for James Lovelock's idea that life is better defined in terms of a self-regulating system that utilizes and generates unstable conditions and chemistry. However, even in the 70s biologists were looking at processes and not specific implementations. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen are the most flexible elements to work with, but I know of no organism that exploits superionic water or graphene in any appreciable way so it's reasonable to conclude that life doesn't absolutely require that level of flexibility to exist. (Indeed, in the 70s, it was generally accepted that other chemistries were plausible -- to the point that some of the life experiments not included were designed to handle such contingencies.)
The only generally-accepted basic chemical research that pertains to life also pertains to Lovelock's work since he's the recognized father of planetary life science. However, there has only been one Mars experiment designed to look for unstable chemistry -- which was indeed detected in the form of methane from a vent -- but it was largely ignored at the time (in essence NASA said it could be anything), there have been no follow-up experiments and there are no plans for any such follow-up.
The basic chemistry argument is entirely valid, but only applies if said studies were taking place. Their absence is bothersome, as is the failure to follow up on studies. The ditching of NASA's contribution to the joint venture to Mars is also of deep concern, as that WAS an attempt to follow-up on prior results.
I'm not saying this is a NASA conspiracy. Having worked at NASA myself, I would have to say they're not capable. (They were using rsh and .rhosts in 2000!) Rather, this is a case of what a certain Douglas Noel Adams referred to as "clearly defined regions of doubt and uncertainty". Politics doesn't want any scientific questions answered, as that might upset voters and sponsors. Politics wants the illusion of questions being answered, because illusions upset nobody and are a good deal cheaper. Facts are horribly expensive and can be damned inconvenient at re-election time. Does that make it a political conspiracy? Depends on how you mean. It's not a political conspiracy to hide anything, there's no secret knowledge and no X-Files/Indiana Jones-like warehouse of alien and/or mystical technology. So in that sense, no it isn't. I'm not even sure it's a conscious, deliberate effort to sabotage getting things done, which would be the legal requirement. There aren't too many conscious, deliberate politicians. It feels much more like an emotional-level, subconscious aversion to conclusions where there's a general subconscious consensus to never have enough facts to let them get in the way of a good story.
Can one call an instinctive, irrational, unspoken, emotive consensus a "conspiracy"? It doesn't meet any technical definition of the word, even though it certainly meets the common-sense one since it is indeed a collective action with a common purpose even if that purpose has never been consciously considered by any of the participants.
No, only the Martian Vikings invented robots. It's all in the Sagas.