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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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rshow55 - 07:18pm Aug 29, 2002 EST (# 4013 of 4014)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

In some ways, all wars are alike. The "reading wars" have really been wars. All the follies of wars are on show. Villians are hard to find and hard to hate in this one - - but casualties have been heavy. Agony has been very real. The stakes have been high. BEGINNING TO READ: Thinking and Learning about Print by Marilyn Jager Adams MIT Press 1991 . Adams summarized and synthesized an ENORMOUS amount of knowledge - - and was a major effort to make peace in the "reading wars" - - and make progress, too.

Yet a decade later, the conditions Brent Staples describes in Mayor Bloomberg's Test: Teaching the Teachers How to Teach Reading http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/23/opinion/23FRI4.html . . persist all over the country.

Here is the beginning of Ch 13 of BEGINNING TO READ: Thinking and Learning about Print by Marilyn Jager Adams MIT Press 1991 .

" We have seen again and again that skillful reading depends critically on the speed and completeness with which words can be identified from their visual forms. Yet, for the beginning reader, it is visual word recognition skills, it is the knowledge that makes the Orthographic processor work and links it to the rest of the system, that is uniquely absent.

" Acquisition of these skills depends in part on the child's conscious awareness of the phonological structure of speech. It depends equally on conscious awareness of the nature of print. No matter the child's level of phonemic awareness, to make use of it she or he must learn the visual identities of the individual letters. No matter the child's sureness with the individual letters or their sounds, such knowledge can be productive only given an awareness that words consist of strings of letters and print of strings of words. But even word awareness is not enough. Linking up the system as a whole, building both to it and from it, depends on the child's possessing certain expectations and understandings about the basic structure and functions of print.

How might we get the necessary learning done - at the levels that matter?

For N= 10 . . N!/(N/2)! =3.024 x 10e4 . . . N!/(N/5)! = 1.814 x 10e6
For N= 20 . . N!/(N/2)! = 6.704 x 10e11 . . N!/(N/5)! = 2.027 x 10e16
For N= 40 . . N!/(N/2)! = 3.358 x 10e29 . . N!/(N/5)! = 1.703 x 10e39

These are huge numbers. Too big to think about? Well, it is MASSIVELY helpful, in relative terms to narror down the number of cases. The larger the number of alternatives, the more imporant it is.

What are the odds of our finding patterns, again and again, that are just due to chance? If we're actually checking facts?

Vanishingly small. Which means that even "sloppy" logic can lead to some very good judgements.

We'll see patterns that are really patterns. We only have to find ways to tell the right stories about them. That means we have to check our stories.

Looking at the odds of "seeing" patterns that are really random is a big step toward answering the linked questions

How can people be so smart?

and yet

How can people be so stupid at the same time?

Because the odds of induction are so often strongly convergent, very fallible and sloppy "logic" can get very good answers, very often.

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