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 [F] New York Times on the Web Forums  / Resource Area for Forum Hosts and Moderators  /

    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?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.


Earliest Messages Previous Messages Recent Messages Outline (3970 previous messages)

rshow55 - 05:46pm Aug 24, 2002 EST (# 3971 of 17697)
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.

Reading instruction matters in itself. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/23/opinion/23FRI4.html

But the discussion I'm trying to make clear matters for more general reasons, as well. Some of them reasons that philosophers have been thinking about, and concerned about, for 2500 years. Plato's problem -- which is, in essence, the question of how we "know" so much by "connecting the dots" - - how the Socratic method works so well - is partly explained by the statistical insight that when things become known, and the number of remaining variables gets smaller, finding answers is hugely easier. I don't feel that people have appreciated how much easier - and how compelling the implications of that are. I'm working to focus the imporant work of Landaur, Dumais, and others on latent semantic analysis.

The discussion is directly related to missile defense - where the odds of success are vanishingly small -- and to the essential certainty that a key assumption about the logical and geometrical structure of radio wave ranging and positioning arrangements, now more than fifty years old, can easily be changed. When that assumption is changed - it becomes clear that the US is making a trillion dollar mistake - betting on airplanes that are going to be easy to shoot down. 1317 rshow55 4/12/02 6:59pm I don't feel that I'm guessing at all about that. I just made the sort of statement that a PE doesn't make in public lightly.

I want to take time to carefully set out the reading example first - to clarify some of the key issues involved - before I set that out.

I'm taking some time to be careful. I want to make things clear to professionals who seriously look at this thread - because I believe that there are some. http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@180.9Yb1ao4drSi.0@.ee7b085/337

3946 rshow55 8/23/02 6:59pm 3947 rshow55 8/23/02 7:00pm

Under a lot of circumstances, the odds of getting orderly answers, and discarding mistakes - is much better than people have understood. Enough better to give reasons for disciplined hope.

And enough to show how important it can be to shoot certain kinds of boondoggles right between the eyes when they are muddled and hopeless beyond redemption.

rshow55 - 06:27pm Aug 24, 2002 EST (# 3972 of 17697)
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.

http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/313

Playing Know and Tell by John Schwartz http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/09/weekinreview/09BOXA.html .

Schwartz's piece ends:

" Listen."

lchic - 06:49pm Aug 24, 2002 EST (# 3973 of 17697)
ultimately TRUTH outs : TRUTH has to be morally forcing : build on TRUTH it's a strong foundation

Listen in the sense that top-down dogma may not necessarily be right.

backtracking here:

Interesting use of the term 'processor' and that there are cognitive processors

    For spoken language, there is a phonological processor , a meaning processor , and a context processor .

    The phonological processor handles the recieving and sending of spoken language sounds - hearing and speaking.

    The meaning processor and context processor deals with the meanings of words at different levels of abstraction and in context.

    There is feedback between the phonological processor and the meaning processor, in both directions. There is feedback between the meaning processor and the context processor, in both directions. For reading there is an additional orthographic processor which responds to written words as the phonological processor responds to spoken words.

    The orthographic processor is linked, in both directions, the phonological processor AND to the meaning processor.
So if reading is a process, and were it treated as production line, should workers attatched to the line look towards quality improvement along it?

Showalter asks

    Can a rudimentary orthographic processor connected at first only to the phonological processor, and working only for the most common words, be trained first ?
With reference to Deming the 'failure' to learn to read rates can be demonstrated. These figures should show via 'test results'. There actual numbers-statistics-proportions of each age grouping who are demonstratively being 'failed' by the system.

The statistic that 90% of prisoners have literacy problems is real.

The money and human resources put to looking after prisoners represents a huge budget allocation.

That the cultural background breakdown of prisoners is not evenly reflective of the entire population is telling.

Were people better able to grasp rudimentary elements of reading, without 'pain', would they go on to become productive citizens?

~~~

ARE Educators working on the 'reading production line' prescribed top-down methodologies that they 'have' to use?

If these methodologies are widely prescribed and enforced - and are wrong - what's the outcome for the client?

What if teachers were freer to select and use the metholodgical tool most appropriate to need?

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 [F] New York Times on the Web Forums  / Resource Area for Forum Hosts and Moderators  / Missile Defense