Um, no. What you are suggesting is a sampling method to find a significant degree of error. Unfortunately all sampling methods have a known margin of error associated with them. When you see results from most political polling you will have about a 4% margin of error and a 95% reliability. Meaning 19 out of 20 times the actual result will be within 4% of whatever they said it was, plus or minus.
The problem with this particular case is that the margin of victory is absolutely tiny (42 out of about 2.8 million or 0.0015%. Statistically to ensure that you are even 95% certain of a margin of error smaller than that would require counting almost all the votes anyhow.
Should they be comparing to the machine results? I think they should.
Should they be using ballots which have a very low degree of deterioration during recounts(and this is not covered in the Help America Vote Act by the way)? Definately.
Here, however, we are learning that people who voted on electronic voting machines don't even get the democratic benefit of a hand recount. Is this to say that somehow electronic voting machines aren't subject to error? How can that error be quantified if there is no voter verified paper trail? I smell a tasty lawsuit coming which will provide lots of fun for/. in the future.
I trust a survey of 175,000 students in 31 countries about as much as I trust the picture at the bottom of the story which says that 92% of high school students "use a PC at home for schoolwork." Did I miss something, or do many fewer than 92% of students even HAVE a PC at home?
Anybody have a link to their methods for taking and recording 175,000 surveys?
And then what are the odds that microbes from Mars would be able to survive in a human environment? And if it did live in a human environment, would it be able to spread at all considering it has had no previous experience trying to spread in any organism that exists today?
This is rediculous news akin to people being afraid of meteors for possibly containing alien fungus that will eat their brains.
The Electoral College - its solid, secure, hard to influence, not subject to ad campaigns, and what the founders intended. Why don't we use it?
The intention was that the electoral college would be a second special legislature which would elect the President because they didn't want the real politicians to have control over the executive and they didn't think that the average person could be knowledgeable about candidates, but they would know about prominant people in the local area.
This doesn't say that electors couldn't run ad campaigns and that these campaigns wouldn't just say "I'll vote for so-and-so". State legislatures realized this and passed laws creating slates of electors sworn to a particular candidate because the people feel that they are qualified to vote for a presidential candidate more or less directly.
The electoral college can't work as intended because our media can contact people directly very easily. Electors could be banned from stating which party they intend to vote for, but that would just make the electoral process even dirtier and more confusing for the public to figure out which candidate an elector already wants to vote for.
Gone! are the days of waiting in endless lines just to discover you were in the wrong presinct and you must waste more of your Tuesday just to be confused by candidates you don't recognise and legal measures with words you cannot pronounce all on a ballot whith confusing instructions like "punch out the third chad to vote for the second person on the left".
With modern voting and polling technology, ballot booths are a thing of the past. Automated computerized voting booths, using ultra-complicated statistical methods, can tell how you will vote even before you do.
So why bother with election day when 2,000 randomly selected land line phone owners without caller i.d. and fifteen minutes to spare can do the work for you? Just another wonder of the computer age.
1 tonne of He3 per 200 million tonnes of lunar material. Rocks must be heated over 800C and it must be removed from the resulting gas mix.
So, how evenly is it distributed? Is any of it prohibitivly inaccessible? What would be the cost of maintaining the mining devices required to collect, heat, and seperate out the He3 all on the moon?
If he density of the lunar surface material is 1.2tonne/cubic meter then we would have to process 167 km^2 1m deep for each tonne of He3. If it takes 25 tonnes of He3 it would take 4175 km^2 to power the U.S. for one year, not including the energy required to extract and transport it and assuming zero leakage in the system. I'm not sure if they calculated energy recovery efficiency into that 25 tonne figure, but if they didn't that would be another hurdle.
A flat tax, for example - say $0.50/month per resident. That should cover 911-expenses.
Great, another regressive tax to pay for an essential service. Just make 911 service a manditory expenditure at a rate equal to $0.50/month/resident and pay for it out of the general fund. At least that way there is a chance it can be funded progressively.
The first recount occured automatically because the difference was less than 2,000 votes (and less than a percentage, but in a WA statewide election 2,000 votes is less than that percent). The first machine count gave Rossi a lead of over 200 votes. Just running through the ballots through the machines again and the margin closed to 42 votes with many of the early counties reporting net increases for Rossi.
If the machine error between the two counts is greater than three times the current official margin then what possible problem can you really have with going back and triple checking?
But the reason to store it at Yucca as opposed to an above ground structure in a less sensitive spot is precisely for this 10,000 year storage idea. I am not saying that it isn't a good idea to centralize and modernize our nuclear waste storage, I am saying that we can't just bury it and hope it goes away like was the plan with Yucca Mtn.
This very article is saying basically the same thing, permenant storage is unreasonable and we should just hold on to the stuff until a better technology comes around to deal with it. While we wait for that technology to come what do we do with the waste? Perhaps putting it all in a single very modern facility designed with the intent of later removing it and doing something else with it is definately a reasonable idea, but that isn't what Yucca Mtn was chosen for, and we should definately re-plan with our new purpose.
Well, that depends on what your definition of 'last' is, an equal argument could be made that they havn't lasted in that one purpose they were supposed to fulfill was to protect their contents, which they have failed miserably at. Regardless, the difficulty in producing a container which can hold its structural integrity for that period of time, which has been decided by the courts to be too short, is at a minimum considerable.
I will admit to the minor error in my posting and that they do have a possible potential to withstand another 5,000 years or so, though that will only be proven well after our deaths.
Actually, a lot of the sites the DoE looked at were even worse that Yucca Mtn.
For example, salt deposits, seen as suitable places for apperent lack of water and geologic soundness, have a nasty problem of occasionally being inundated with water after bedrock is disturbed either naturally or human processes causing the salt to dissolve and sealed containers to move around.
The point is, humans have never created a structure that can last even the previous standard of 10,000 years. The oldest structures on earth are in the 4-6,000 range. Even if we could build containers which could contain these materials for that period of time, how are we going to keep people out of them? You don't actually expect people to speak the same language in 10,000 years do you? A war will come by, people will forget what is in the boxes and try to open them up to get at the treasure only to be killed by radiation.
Well, considering that there is so little funding for archaeological research of ape species that aren't linked (nomatter how dubiously) to human ancestry, it is quite conceivable that australopithecus and modern man did not evolve from apes.
This could mean that we perhaps didn't climb out of the trees, but that pre-humans climbed into the trees.
Basically the archaeological record is so full of holes and politics that everything is a guess.
However, the physological similarities between apes and humans abound, particularly in skull and shoulder structure making it a pretty clear case that humans and apes are relatively closely related.
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Um, no. What you are suggesting is a sampling method to find a significant degree of error. Unfortunately all sampling methods have a known margin of error associated with them. When you see results from most political polling you will have about a 4% margin of error and a 95% reliability. Meaning 19 out of 20 times the actual result will be within 4% of whatever they said it was, plus or minus.
/. in the future.
The problem with this particular case is that the margin of victory is absolutely tiny (42 out of about 2.8 million or 0.0015%. Statistically to ensure that you are even 95% certain of a margin of error smaller than that would require counting almost all the votes anyhow.
Should they be comparing to the machine results? I think they should.
Should they be using ballots which have a very low degree of deterioration during recounts(and this is not covered in the Help America Vote Act by the way)? Definately.
Here, however, we are learning that people who voted on electronic voting machines don't even get the democratic benefit of a hand recount. Is this to say that somehow electronic voting machines aren't subject to error? How can that error be quantified if there is no voter verified paper trail? I smell a tasty lawsuit coming which will provide lots of fun for
One thing's for sure, he sure as hell isn't a Stormtrooper.
I trust a survey of 175,000 students in 31 countries about as much as I trust the picture at the bottom of the story which says that 92% of high school students "use a PC at home for schoolwork." Did I miss something, or do many fewer than 92% of students even HAVE a PC at home?
Anybody have a link to their methods for taking and recording 175,000 surveys?
Why does the "Core" index exclude the swans?
And then what are the odds that microbes from Mars would be able to survive in a human environment? And if it did live in a human environment, would it be able to spread at all considering it has had no previous experience trying to spread in any organism that exists today?
This is rediculous news akin to people being afraid of meteors for possibly containing alien fungus that will eat their brains.
The intention was that the electoral college would be a second special legislature which would elect the President because they didn't want the real politicians to have control over the executive and they didn't think that the average person could be knowledgeable about candidates, but they would know about prominant people in the local area.
This doesn't say that electors couldn't run ad campaigns and that these campaigns wouldn't just say "I'll vote for so-and-so". State legislatures realized this and passed laws creating slates of electors sworn to a particular candidate because the people feel that they are qualified to vote for a presidential candidate more or less directly.
The electoral college can't work as intended because our media can contact people directly very easily. Electors could be banned from stating which party they intend to vote for, but that would just make the electoral process even dirtier and more confusing for the public to figure out which candidate an elector already wants to vote for.
Gone! are the days of waiting in endless lines just to discover you were in the wrong presinct and you must waste more of your Tuesday just to be confused by candidates you don't recognise and legal measures with words you cannot pronounce all on a ballot whith confusing instructions like "punch out the third chad to vote for the second person on the left".
With modern voting and polling technology, ballot booths are a thing of the past. Automated computerized voting booths, using ultra-complicated statistical methods, can tell how you will vote even before you do.
So why bother with election day when 2,000 randomly selected land line phone owners without caller i.d. and fifteen minutes to spare can do the work for you? Just another wonder of the computer age.
1 tonne of He3 per 200 million tonnes of lunar material. Rocks must be heated over 800C and it must be removed from the resulting gas mix.
So, how evenly is it distributed? Is any of it prohibitivly inaccessible? What would be the cost of maintaining the mining devices required to collect, heat, and seperate out the He3 all on the moon?
If he density of the lunar surface material is 1.2tonne/cubic meter then we would have to process 167 km^2 1m deep for each tonne of He3. If it takes 25 tonnes of He3 it would take 4175 km^2 to power the U.S. for one year, not including the energy required to extract and transport it and assuming zero leakage in the system. I'm not sure if they calculated energy recovery efficiency into that 25 tonne figure, but if they didn't that would be another hurdle.
Great, another regressive tax to pay for an essential service. Just make 911 service a manditory expenditure at a rate equal to $0.50/month/resident and pay for it out of the general fund. At least that way there is a chance it can be funded progressively.
The first recount occured automatically because the difference was less than 2,000 votes (and less than a percentage, but in a WA statewide election 2,000 votes is less than that percent). The first machine count gave Rossi a lead of over 200 votes. Just running through the ballots through the machines again and the margin closed to 42 votes with many of the early counties reporting net increases for Rossi.
If the machine error between the two counts is greater than three times the current official margin then what possible problem can you really have with going back and triple checking?
But the reason to store it at Yucca as opposed to an above ground structure in a less sensitive spot is precisely for this 10,000 year storage idea. I am not saying that it isn't a good idea to centralize and modernize our nuclear waste storage, I am saying that we can't just bury it and hope it goes away like was the plan with Yucca Mtn.
This very article is saying basically the same thing, permenant storage is unreasonable and we should just hold on to the stuff until a better technology comes around to deal with it. While we wait for that technology to come what do we do with the waste? Perhaps putting it all in a single very modern facility designed with the intent of later removing it and doing something else with it is definately a reasonable idea, but that isn't what Yucca Mtn was chosen for, and we should definately re-plan with our new purpose.
Well, that depends on what your definition of 'last' is, an equal argument could be made that they havn't lasted in that one purpose they were supposed to fulfill was to protect their contents, which they have failed miserably at. Regardless, the difficulty in producing a container which can hold its structural integrity for that period of time, which has been decided by the courts to be too short, is at a minimum considerable.
I will admit to the minor error in my posting and that they do have a possible potential to withstand another 5,000 years or so, though that will only be proven well after our deaths.
Actually, a lot of the sites the DoE looked at were even worse that Yucca Mtn.
For example, salt deposits, seen as suitable places for apperent lack of water and geologic soundness, have a nasty problem of occasionally being inundated with water after bedrock is disturbed either naturally or human processes causing the salt to dissolve and sealed containers to move around.
The point is, humans have never created a structure that can last even the previous standard of 10,000 years. The oldest structures on earth are in the 4-6,000 range. Even if we could build containers which could contain these materials for that period of time, how are we going to keep people out of them? You don't actually expect people to speak the same language in 10,000 years do you? A war will come by, people will forget what is in the boxes and try to open them up to get at the treasure only to be killed by radiation.
Well, considering that there is so little funding for archaeological research of ape species that aren't linked (nomatter how dubiously) to human ancestry, it is quite conceivable that australopithecus and modern man did not evolve from apes.
This could mean that we perhaps didn't climb out of the trees, but that pre-humans climbed into the trees.
Basically the archaeological record is so full of holes and politics that everything is a guess.
However, the physological similarities between apes and humans abound, particularly in skull and shoulder structure making it a pretty clear case that humans and apes are relatively closely related.