[] his observations might have been the result of standardizing the test scores... IE if you have a test that only scores 50 max and you scale it to 100 obviously you aren't going to have many odd numbers in the results.

He points out that in some of the tests all scores of 94-100 inclusive were obtained, so it's not a case of leaving out odds or a regularly-spaced set of numbers based on a simple scaling up/down.

If you have a maximum score of 53 you might chose a mapping function like this:
    (rawscore 48) ? (rawscore * 2) : (rawscore + 47). That gives you a non-linear mapping with the slope cut in half for a small interval on the right side. The "can get steps of one and two" on the top mean nothing about what you can get below the knee when the mapping is non-linear.

Similar mappings can end up with both ends smooth and only the middle spiky.

Why do that? So you only get ONE discontinuity in the data, near the top, rather than one point of roundoff noising up the spacing and comparisons between students all through it.

A skewed distribution is hardly surprising, especially when the bulk of the measurements are near one end of a finite numbering system. Further, the non-linear mapping above would make the downslope on the right hand side shallower by a 2:1 ratio, exactly what you see. A distribution skewed toward the high end also argues for using a mapping like the one above - to spread out the pile of high-scoring students and make differences in score less divergent from differences in percentile rank.

The deficits just below passing scores and the spikes at them, however, are just bogus. The only "mapping" that can reasonably explain them is the "courtesy points" shoveling of just-failing students into just-passing. However, this can be explained as mercy being built into the mapping. (It can also be explained as protecting just-passing students from being unfairly pushed into the just-failing region due to a center-spreading, hump-flattening, non-linear mapping applied as a convenience for admissions officers.) The total absence of scores just below the fail point says it's not favoritism or individual corruption, but a systematic benefit given to all just-failing students.

What makes you think a declining dollar is GOOD for us (except maybe for the government)?

  - It sucks the value out of anything you own that is denominated in dollars. That includes your savings, bonds, and contracted payments (insurance, pensions, wages/salaries).
  - It also sucks the value out of your investments that AREN'T denominated in dollars: When you finally liquidate them, the government includes the inflation component of the sale price as increased profit or decreased loss, and taxes it.

Especially, inflation affects your wages or salary, which won't be inflated to compensate (and you'll fight just as hard for every cent of compensation you DO get as you would for a raise.) It's the lower payments to workers that CAUSE the "increased competitiveness" of the country's products.

Sure the country's businesses sell more - for less actual value. They could have done that by lowering the price, instead, if the maximum profit for them and their workers was at the lower price. They don't need central planners second-guessing them, tilting the whole playing field, and using it as an excuse to rip off more value from the private sector - which means YOU - for the government's coffers.

>Office 97 formats still rule in companies

Pfff, whatever. We are still on XP, except for the designers, who need to use the new Catia, but we have been using a lot of docx, etc, since the Office 2007 switchover.

Change for the better is fine. Change for the worse is bad.
Change for the sake of change is usually the latter.

Some agile methods have their place. So did Smalltalk.
Others have been described, accurately, as "experiential
programming".

I have yet to see any agile methodology I consider has a
place designing and/or constructing a nuclear reactor
for use near a populated area - or even within the Earth's
biosphere.

To be fair:
  - I haven't studied them all.
  - Some of the components of agile are techniques I have used
      myself, before "agile" was coined, with considerable success.
  - There are a lot of NON-agile methods that are worse than
      even the worst of pre-agile.
I'm willing to be be show that, like best-effort networking with
flakey hardware, it's possible for agile-style methods to be
better at compensating for human error than other
formal methods.

But IMHO all the agile approaches I've seen cut too many
reliability corners for me to trust them on something as
massively life-critical as a reactor design.

I can tell you are old school to the max given your 40 column display you typed that out on. 80 columns is for newbs!

Nah. You're seeing the width of the comment box.
I like to hit a newline and control the spacing of the lines,
rather than have them re-wrap when the window is resized.

(Of course the first serious digital hardware device I designed
and built, single-handed, was a terminal. And it DID have less
than 80 columns. There were limits to how much horizontal
resolution you could push past the filters of a TV set if you
went in with RF, and back in the days of mostly 74xx small-scale
integration, the recirculating shift registers I could find for the
line cache came only in powers of 2 bits, not 80 or 40.)

NOW get off my lawn! B-)

You forgot the "now get off my lawn"

Yeah. Get your darned agile reactor out of my back yard. B-/

Whatever, its not like its going to start WW3... moving on.

If relations sour enough that China stops rolling over and buying more US T-bills and starts selling off its holdings, the collapse of the Dollar will drastically exacerbate the US economic collapse. This could easily lead to a WW III situation.

Make that: "I've been programming professionally
for about half a century, as methodology fads
have come and gone."

And dropping that in an edit should give you an idea
of how horrified I am at the moment.

Maybe they should be using the 'Agile' nuclear reactor construction methodology.

I've been programming professionally, as methodology fads
have come and gone. Among those I've encountered were the agile family and its precursors.

Much of that experience was in the auto industry, where
practically any software might end up being life-critical. and
some in telecom, where the reliability requirements are
tighter than mil spec.

My software is noted for robustness,
to the point that a colleague once remarked that I was the
only person he'd trust to program an artificial heart for him.
(Said colleague was one of the evangelists for an agile
precursor.)

The very thought of deploying a nuclear reactor designed
using an agile methodology makes me shiver. I expect to
have nightmares about the possibly for a while now.

Please DON'T mention this bright idea to the pointy-haired
bosses.

>More if piratical

Arr, matey! Let's show these landlubbers what for!

Of course the math/F22 job will pay better, but personally I consider web programmer salary more than "medium-to-ok". My brother is a web app programmer, first in C#, now in Ruby, and I sure would like his salary. Granted I am just an IT tech, but even when I move up to a more sysadmin position (soon, hopefully), I don't expect to match his current range for *quite* some time.

I was under the impression that the issue of translating LED light into a broad swath of color was an already solved problem (except for some fine-tuning optimization), using appropriately-sized nanoparticles which hand the energy from the photons around, slicing-and-recombining energy from photons into different sized packets and re-emitting the light at a frequency characteristic of the size of the nanoparticle. Cover the LED with a bunch of these in a range of sizes and you get a smooth spectrum.

Works the other way, too: Coat a solar cell with such particles and they take the random-frequency photons from the sun and slice them up into multiple new photons at a frequency good for the solar cell bandgap, and mash the levtovers into more big photons to re-slice to the correct size. (It's not 100%, since some of the photons get away. But it's more than a 2x improvement over a bare cell, which only takes one slice off each photon and throws the rest away.)

If this is correct, this project looks like just a fine-tuning of making the nanoparticles, or finding materials for them that are somewhat more efficient than what was already being used (which was pretty good).

I haven't been following this all THAT closely. Have I misunderstood the current stuff? Or is this just a little incremental tweak along the cutting edge?

Mother Theresa would no doubt have printed a medical tool for removing IUDs.

Which would have been totally useless since most of the countries and places she setup shop didn't have access to birth control to begin with.

India, with its huge population, had a large program making IUDs available at no cost to people in the poorer regions who wanted them.

Mother Theresa's work included providing medical treatment to the poor in many of these same regions. Her clinics were noted for removing the government-provided IUDs of women who were there for other procedures, without seeking permission or even informing the woman that it had been done.

Don't you just pull on the string?

Not if you don't want to kill or sterilize the woman.