h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The biggest problem with discussing religion in school, I think, is that predominant religions would get more time. In Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming it would be Mormonism. In Massachusettes (sp?) it would be Catholicism. In the South it would be Baptist. Other religions would get something along the lines of "We also have these religions...".

Plus, even if such a scheme were introduced, the "extremes" would probably just take their kids out of one school and put them into another which provides instruction only in their particular religion of choice. A lot of kids would still benefit from the classes, but not the ones who probably need it most.

Oh and in the current political climate, forget about anything positive being said about Islam.

I don't know- my parents are about the furthest from extremes that you can get, and I still could have benefitted, simply because the school was so isolated.

All schools at least in Ohio have to follow state curriculum guidlines- if those guidelines were to propose which religions were to be discussed in detail, then they would have to do it that way. I can see guest speakers coming in from mosques, churches, synagogues (sorry if I misspelled that), temples, what have you.

Once again, good idea on paper, can't get it to work in the real world.

Evil Roy, I don't care to read the report. And the other question goes to your credibility.

I've always thought that a Comparative Religions class offered as an elective at the high school level would be a good thing.

As long as the class recongnized the Raelians as the one true religion, it would be fine.

Evil Roy, the point of a team blog is that we all contribute synopses of links or of news or information that we've heard. That way we don't duplicate the effort, like your very worthy reading of the report, which you then summarized to us. One of us asked you what one of the unexplained acronyms meant. There was no need to snark. Personally, the one thing I hate about a lot of computer trade zines is their failure to explain acronyms.

I really appreciate you keeping a good discussion going, though.

I can only imagine the look on bible-thumping parents faces when the child went home and told them "we had a discussion about Wicca today mom and I think I'm going to convert"

It's so bad here in the US midwest that some schools have been forced to stop celebrating Halloween and letting the kids dress up in costume for a school parade on halloween - because rare parents complain that it's "satanism" or "devil worship".

And when they started pickting the release of the Harry Potter movie... what morons! If you're so afraid that your child can't be taught the difference between fantasy and reality, then you should be buying robots to program, and not procreating.



Okay, I think I'm under control again!

I agree, and would also like to add that if your faith can be shaken by gays marrying and evolution being taught in a science class, then it wasn't very strong in the first place

And by the way - I'm a Christian and I still have problems with these "holier than thou" bible thumpers!

Well, really with any religion that thinks it can treat people like because they don't fit into a box...

What others have mentioned is right--I think any discussion of Wicca, Islam or what-have-you would put some parents up in arms and at the very least cause them to protest what they would see as the promotion of "paganism" or "terrorism". At this point in American society, I think it's impossible to have a civilized, informative, neutral discussion of *all* belief systems in a public classroom setting without the ugly head of divisive politics rearing up.

What's ironic is that a class such as we have been discussing is completely PC, which the reptilians seem to firmly believe in.

In the comparative religions class here at UCI, one of the professors who teaches the pre-modern class brings in a priest, an imam, and a rabbi. The fundamentalist Christian students get all up in arms, screaming that the priest isn't really a Christian, etc, and trying to cite chapter and verse at the imam and rabbi.

I loved the imam's response to one student throwing bible passages at him. He said something to the effect of if your religion consists of nothing more than memorizing texts, it isn't much of a religion at all. He pointed out that Islam doesn't think Jesus was evil, or that Jews should be burned, and told the kid if he had more substansive things to say, he'd be happy to discuss them, but if not, to sit down and shut up.

I like that guy!

All I have to say to that Imam is: Well Done!

This is gonna be a biggie, folks, so please bear with me.

Start of Section 1 - Tickets please!!

<< If determining how the relative methods stack up in terms of spoiled vs unspoiled ballots isn't accuracy, what is? >>

The point is that it is *not* a measure of how accurately the unspoiled votes are counted, which is what I understood us to be talking about. It is a measure of the way "changes in technologies within localities over time explain changes in the incidence of ballots that are spoiled, uncounted, or unmarked".

Slight detour here.......

While we are in the general area of Residual Votes (Residual Votes = spoiled, uncounted, or unmarked votes)........ I also quoted this sentence from the report, with regard to electronic voting technologies.

<< It seems the most likely technology to benefit significantly from new innovations and increased voter familiarity. >>

Then, in the section on the probable reasons for the relatively high residual vote rates for DREs, there is this....

<< Third, we may be still low on the voter learning curve. As voters become more familiar with the newer equipment errors may go down. As more people use electronic equipment in other walks of life, such as ATM machines for banking, residual votes may drop. >>

Taking into account the fact that this report is close to four years old, both these statements seem to be ratified by this.

http://www.sos.state.ga.us/pressrel/111804.htm

For those who don't wish to read the press release, the following is some text taken directly from it and a brief summary.

In the 2000 presidential election, Georgia produced a residual vote rate which was the second worst in the USA.

In 2002 Georgia deployed a "uniform electronic voting system".

From the press release - << A study of Georgia’s deployment of electronic voting and its impact on the 2002 election, released last month by Dr. Charles Stewart of MIT, one of the nation’s foremost experts on voting system accuracy, noted,

"Following the 2000 presidential election, the state of Georgia instituted the most comprehensive overhaul of voting technology in the country. Although the Nation’s eyes were on Florida, a case could be made that it was Georgia that deserved the scrutiny. Georgia’s "residual vote rate", a measure of "lost votes" that has come to be used widely to measure voting technology reliability, was 3.5% -- the second worst in the country, behind only Illinois. This paper shows that the implementation of the Diebold system produced a significant reduction in the residual vote rate throughout the state of Georgia. Just as important, the implementation of the new machines removed gaping disparities in voting machine reliability that could have raised serious questions about the fairness of Georgia’s electoral system. DREs are more reliable, their performance varies less across the state, and the least advantaged areas of the state have experienced the greatest gain in reliability." >>

Final data from the 2004 Georgia election result reveals a nine-fold drop in the Residual Vote rate since the 2000 election (from 3.5% to 0.39%). Only 12,843 ballots out of more than 3.3 million registered no choice for president.

From the press release - << Researchers indicate that, even in a presidential contest using the most accurate voting equipment, some small number of voters will intentionally abstain from selecting a candidate. While achieving a statewide undervote percentage of zero is not a realistic goal, a modern touch screen voting interface that prohibits overvotes (improperly selecting more than one candidate) and offers users a review screen so they can see and, if necessary, correct their choices before a ballot is cast, provides voters a much better opportunity to reduce inadvertent error. Votes tabulated electronically are also not subject to tabulation errors that can occur with punch card and other paper-based voting systems. >>

From the press release - << "In other words, modernizing our voting system resulted in 103,000 more Georgians having their presidential choice counted this year." >>

This is, of course, only the results from a single state. Once again, I hope MIT\CalTech does a full analysis.

End of Section 1 - All change!

Start of (short) Section 2

Snark? Snark? I am accused of snark? What actually is "snark"..... my Oxford Dictionary of English (The Worlds Most Trusted Dictionaries...... because it *says* so on the cover ) lists snark as "an imaginary animal (used typically with reference to a task or goal that is elusive to achieve): Pinning down the middle classes is like the hunting of the snark." So, in the words of an infamous Australian Politician who you've probably never heard of.... "Please explain?"

End Section 2

Start of Section 3

My words << science and scientists have been relying on similar computer hardware >>

daves words << you never gave me an example of a vote counting/ATM machine that was used to organize supercomputer calculations >>

Most ATMs available these days run on Windows-based PCs. In this particular case, the Diebold ATM-style voting machines run on Windows-based PCs. They do not physically *look* the same, but that is what they are. (Sources: Diebold and NCR websites).

Most smaller research facilities (i.e. a lot smaller than Kodak, UPenn, MIT) do not have the funds or computer expertise to buy and run their own "supercomputers". A friend of mine works for one such local research lab and it is only if they deem a particular calculation/project important enough to warrant the use of the technology that they buy/rent time on such a machine (In my friends case, typically they use the computers of the CSIRO Australia (Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation). But all initial testing/calculation is done locally on PCs and, according to my friend, the need to utilise such "super" systems has fallen considerably in recent times due, firstly, to advances in speed (and relative inexpense) of current PCs and, secondly, because in the vast majority of cases the tests returned exactly the same results in both environments. In fact he could only recall one instance in the past 4-5 years where the results were substantially different, and in that particular instance the discovery of a logic error (bug) in the tests they had designed was causing it to produce inconsistent results.

Do you need another example because I could, if necessary, go into my own personal experiences in software development/testing?

End of Section 3

Start of Section 4

re: use of "unexplained" acronyms

The vast majority of people these days understand the meaning of quite a large number of acronyms. In my research into the various electronic voting machines used the the USA, the machines were consistently referred to as DREs. It was a bad assumption on my part to think it a commonly understood term, but then I had already supplied a definition of "DRE" in Post #340. Am I to assume, then, that only parts of my posts are being read? Further in my defence is the fact that when dave asked what it was, yes I took what I considered to be a friendly poke, hence the , to see if the report had been read by anyone else and *then* I defined DRE......... For a second time.

End of Section 4

Final Section..........

I understand the point of a team blog, Lil, but at this stage it seems to be very one-sided. I ask questions which are ignored or simply remain unanswered (for example, those posed in Post 354, I've lost track of others) and yet I am expected to keep up with and answer every single question posed to me. Don't get me wrong, I am enjoying the discussion, but if my straightforward approach appears to come out as "snark" then I am, quite simply, "Evil Roy: Prince of Snarkness".

::toddles off to dictionary dot com to find out if "snark" is an "Americanism"::

It was a most gentle comment, Evil Roy; I picked up the term 'snark' from my sojourning on dailykos.com. It can mean 'nit-pick.' It can mean 'sarcastic rejoinder.' It can mean jokey reaction. The point is that the recipient of the comment doesn't always understand which sort of snark it is, and may look for explanation from the commenter. A genrral definition might be "pointed words." I have seen it used as both verb and noun, adjective (snarky) and adverb (snarkily). I think it's a very handy word, meant to preserve good will!

I apologize if I'm not remembering everything you've posted. I'm having stress IRL and suffering from too much information. Even if I had remembered DRE from reading about them elsewhere, you do not insult me if you include the reminder anyway.

I'm sorry to hear that you're under stress at the moment, Lil. And let me just say that I didn't deliberately pick the questions I had posed to you, they were simply the first examples I came across going back from here.

Dictionary dot com was useless, didn't make "snark" any clearer for me, so thank you for the definition. Someone else on site also just provided me with a definition (combination of "snide" and "remark", sarcastic comments, etc) and then went on to verify that I may, in fact be the Prince of Snarkness.

[GDZ]