Phi for All

Thanks, Cloud and Bluenoise, for verifying what this was (something the OP should have done in the first post, or any of the other times he was asked).

In addition to the room full of books, I'd love to see a school class where small groups got put into a room full of random junk (including tape, glue and other fasteners) and told to make a Rube Goldberg device that started in one corner of the room and eventually had to knock over a book on a shelf on the other side of the room. Building such a device would be one of the greatest practical physics learning experiences imaginable. It would also be relatively cheap, too.

Associated with this is the fact that kids from elementary to high school often have a skewed view of the world because of the entertainment industry. Mega-million dollar earnings from making movies or playing sports is *very* attractive to teenagers. Why work when you can play? The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley & William D. Danko should be mandatory reading in high school. This book shows that the vast majority of millionaires don't buy yachts and a thousand pairs of shoes. It's hard for science and any profession where you have to work hard to achieve success to compete with the way the entertainment industry seems to pump out the superstars with the lavish lifestyles who don't *appear* to the kids to have to do much more than play games and sign autographs.

There are systems in place to deal with the standard types of corruption. I think the most insidious type is the corruption that has gained a legitimate veneer through widespread practice and process. This is mostly political in nature but as mentioned above, there are certain instances where society simply looks the other way. Accounting system disparities that lose trillions of dollars yet continue to be used is just one such corruption. One of the practices I consider corrupt is the way my state of Colorado licences a vehicle. You are required to have a minimum amount of insurance before you can obtain plates for your car but you don't have to *prove* you actually have the insurance. You're allowed to promise you have it by signing off on it. True, the penalty is stiff if you're lying and get in an accident, but it's unbelievable how many uninsured motorists there are here. What I consider corrupt is that the state doesn't want to lose the revenue from licencing, the insurance companies get an extra charge for insuring you against "uninsured motorists", and it's the person who does the right thing that gets screwed.

STOP! Take a deep breath and then, with as much accuracy as possible, tell us what a "Bleeding Madras" is. Is it an uncooked curry? Is it a shirt with poor dye qualities? Are you misspelling it horribly?

I understand. I'm not a statistics buff either, but the accuracy of exit polls in particular is being touted by those who do understand it. Again, it's mostly because of the nature of these polls. There's nothing speculative about the questions being asked, the voters *just* voted and there is no reason for the pollsters to fake anything. There is no motive for this. The pollsters are paid for accuracy and since the counted tallies will be coming in within the day it's not in the pollsters best interest to be wrong. Not saying it couldn't happen but add in some of the vote tally irregularities and the exit pollsters go to the bottom of the suspect list. Here is a Random Sample Calculator that tells you you could have a 95% confidence level in the results from a national poll of all US voters from 2004 (with a 1% error tolerance) using only 9600 respondants. Once again, I'm not a big statistician, but statistical sampling using a pretty black and white question like "Who did you vote for for President today?" seems to be about as accurate as anything you're going to get from paid professionals. I admit that some of my prejudices about the voting system are coming into play here. I've never liked the idea of black box voting, touch screens or any type of computer tallying without a paper back up that can be checked before it drops into the lockbox. I also don't like it that election officials are part of a particular party. I've always thought there should be some way to make the counts more independent. I like Mokele's idea of having a week to vote and a month for counts and recounts. Perhaps the results of partisan counts could be averaged against at least two independent counts.

I have to disagree with this. One of the things that make the exit polls attractive to me is the uniformity of their methodology as opposed to the voting system. Exit polls are tallied on preprinted cards (you made it sound like they were using crayons on Post-its) before being uploaded to computers by people with lots of training who have done several test runs in the precincts picked for the polls. They were hired by a group of broadcast news services ranging from AP to CBS to Fox. They know the distance they have to maintain away from the voting place, the tone of voice to use for objectivity, and almost every other factor that could apply. Only the weather can affect them to any great degree and they've been trained for inclement conditions as well. The voting system, on the other hand, uses a combination of methods that make it more cumbersome. Optical scans, DREs, punch cards, paper ballots, lever machines, and data-point devices tally votes and then transmit them in a variety of ways to four different *privatized* corporations. This system has numerous holes in it and seems much more susceptible to tampering. I'm still not saying it was tampered with, just that the possibilities seem higher. The other sticking point for me is that the exit polls were accurate to within 3/10 of a percent in precincts where Kerry had an 80% lock on the vote, yet they were off by an average of 10% (!) in precincts where Bush had 80% of the vote. This disparity hasn't been effectively answered for me yet.

Transfer the bikini teacher from social studies to biology.

bob000555, this info was covered in post #42. Please read the whole thread.

We're a bunch of insensitive, non-mind reading, bleeding Madras challenged freaks, that's why! I'm not sure what we were thinking but it is my fervent hope that you will someday forgive us. * * Crafted with care in the USA using SayoCasmTM

bob000555, his patent was posted and it's bearing discussed earlier in the thread. Your question about HHO and H20 was also answered earlier in the thread.

The discrepancy was 5.4%, the margin of error for former exit polls was less than +/- 1%, and the sampling for 2004 was six times the normal size (12,219 voters), which should have made it the most accurate ever done. Exit polls had Kerry winning by just under 5 million votes but the count had Bush win by 3.3 million.

The "Nuke" button is in your User CP next to "Invade Sovereign Nation", but we'd NEVER give *you* anything as dangerous as "delete thread".

Quite the opposite. Her additions to it have been refreshing and abundant. Her... vigorous appreciation for... artistic expression is quite... exhilarating.

OK, barring more statistical skewing by both Dem and Rep sources showing how popular vs electoral college wins would've placed their candidates regardless of the other factors in question, I can still find nothing that refutes the fact that the exit poll information disagreed with the final tallies by a margin that is unprecedented since Mitofsky invented them. This study is one of the only ones I've found that is trying only to access the validity of the process and how it was implemented, without trying to overtly suggest anything was tampered with. I'm really only interested at this point in whether or not my view of exit polls as accurate statistics was well-founded. Given that the exit polls show there might be something wrong with the way the popular vote was counted, is there any other evidence to support this? Remove the aggressive geurilla tactics employed by both sides and the question that begs to be asked is were any of the tactics used in Ohio illegal? Did any cross the line from the aggressive gray area to being against the law? Related to the exit poll question is this: Why didn't the exit poll information coming in all day (in favor of Kerry) skew the vote even more in his favor as undecideds across the country typically figure to back the winner as election day progresses? Bush was able to capitalize on this trend in 2000 when Fox news predicted his Florida win ahead of any other network, apparently biasing the vote in Western states. Also in question are the voting machines used. We've heard the stories about people pushing the "KERRY" button only to see "BUSH" light up, but did the opposite happen just as often? I think we can all agree that the malfunction that tallied several thousand votes for Bush in a precinct where only a fraction of that many showed up to vote is further damning evidence, but were there any malfunctions like that that favored Kerry? Would glitches like that be a "wash" in the long run?

Forging anything official is illegal. Misrepresenting credentials in a court of law is illegal. But I don't think many states make it a crime to list a false degree on a resume unless the job is a sensitive one. Like swansont said, federal contracts are starting to require contractors to weed out personnel with degrees from places like Columbia State University, which sound almost legit until you check them out. Until laws are passed however, I think censure and loss of position and reputation is all that's going to happen unless the fraud steps over from gray to black and white.

Intel's new uber-processor.

Let me attempt a different perspective here. We've been lax about enforcing immigration laws, especially on illegals from Mexico, because in the past they have perhaps given more than they've taken away. Many businesses rely on their off-the-books employment and the citizenry has enjoyed the effects of lower costs in restaurants and grocery stores, to name only two. We've been generous but for a greedy reason. But now the flow across the border has become a flood and we're trying to repair the dam. Certainly the illegals want better lives. Certainly there is room for *some* of them here. But because the flow is so heavy in recent years, we can't cope with it and crime is up along with all the other factors you can imagine when a system gets inundated and the benefits get buried under the avalanche of drawbacks (sorry for the mixed water/earth metaphors). I know I'm not really addressing the beeb article and the OP concerns, but there seems to be a misunderstanding of why illegal immigration is a sudden hot topic here in the US. Valley girl! aww c'mon, Pangloss isn't revprez. Seems like a normal defense of his position to me. testing is good, *most* of the time. Big time. Do an Edit Post on my post here and see how I've done this (I did this purposely to show you how, not to poke fun or anything). It's all about quote and /quote with brackets, and doing it around the sentences you want to highlight. I use the little "WRAP quote tags around selected text" button above my Reply to Thread window. That's available with Quick Reply as well, I see. If you want to quote different people in the same post just copy / paste their quote, do the WRAP and put =YT2095 (or whoever you're quoting) after Quote in the first bracket.

I'm going to find some results from past elections' exit polls, particularly from Edison/Mitofsky. The Kennedy piece did mention that E/M had only increased the segment of voters polled (I think it was by a factor of six) which should make the polls even more accurate. I find it interesting that even the Bush administration relies on their veracity since it funded exit polls overseas in Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine because they were one of the “ways that would help to expose large-scale fraud.” A discrepancy of eight million votes certainly qualifies, imo. I also find it interesting that the exit polls seemed to be completely accurate in non-battleground states. The strongest objection to polling data, that Kerry voters were more likely to respond to the exit polls, was completely refuted. In fact, Bush voters showed a slightly higher tendency to respond to pollers. I'm still looking into it (i hate statistics) but it was my understanding that the exit polls were considered a true barometer because their poll questions were unassailably clear: "Who did you just vote for for President?" Seems like exit polls would be fairly free from your normal statistical skews.

I think any legal recourse applies only if the quack has received money due to the false credentials (and then he may only have to return such funding). Discharge from your place of employment is only certain if your performance was lacking. Even some government contractors whose credentials were faked have been kept on because their work was good (unless it involved high security clearance). There could be some very nasty penalties if the quack made the mistake of being paid to offer legal testimony based on false credentials. As swansont said, there is definitely a problem with claiming affiliation with the uni, like falsely claiming a professorship. Unfortunately, I've never heard of anyone being prosecuted by a uni simply for claiming to have a diploma from it. *Forging* such a document is a whole other ball of wax. AFAIK, the universities involved would stop at a terse letter and a hand slap unless the quack was overtly harming their reputation or getting unwanted publicity. There are simply too many low level offenses for them to waste resources on. They probably have databases that would flag names that came up often in a search by verification services as falsely claiming a degree. The best way to "crack a quack" in these situations is to set it up as newsworthy and get the story to a media reporter. Lay it out nice and neat for them, why the quack is benefitting from his false claims, who he's duped, any money or influence he's been able to garner, and timelines including possible future fraudulent probabilities. In the age of 24 -hour news, every day is a slow news day, and fraud is good reading.

See this thread on Alcohol Damage.

Are there any other suspects in your home? When you say they weren't done by fingernails what do you mean? Are they more knife-like, more gouge-like, more edge-of-the-table abrasion-like? Draw the cross like this to show us what it looks like and give some dimensions if you can: .......X....... .......X....... XXXXXXXXX .......X....... .......X....... .......X....... .......X....... .......X....... .......X....... You say *one* was in the shape of a cross. How many total were there? Is there any indication these were made deliberately, like uniform thickness or other patterns? Are you certain they weren't there before you went to sleep?

I agree with Pangloss that the slant makes it difficult to take the piece seriously. There are always guerilla techniques that both sides take advantage of and some of those dance on the gray borders of the law. That doesn't make it right but much of what is disclosed in that vein must be discounted as opinion. Frankly, the only piece of evidence for tampering that I trust are the statistics from the exit polls. I remember hearing those polls on election night and it was disturbing that such a trustworthy piece of information could be so wrong. Statistics are easily skewed, but there is no rational reason why exit polls could fail by such a large percentage and I remember the shock on reporters faces when results went against those polls. People don't lie to the pollers *after* their vote is counted, at least not by that much. I can't believe Edison/Mitofsky could screw themselves so badly by doing work that would so easily show them to be incompetent. These guys practically wrote the book.