Beat me on the post, but damn straight on the content. I second the motion that Diaz is an idiot at worst, or misinformed at best.

This thing is a tool, just like most of the other ones that are out there. Your insurance (for pretty much anything, auto, life, house, etc.) use the same basic principle. You take the big factors, sort them out into groups, and then figure out the relative risk.

You're young, male, and single? Guess what, on average, you've got a better chance of being in a car accident. Live in Florida? On average, you've got a better chance of having a house being blown away by a hurricane. There's data support all of it, but you've got to remember that it's a mathematical predictor, which doesn't mean it's always true.

The real question is what the heck are they going to do after the risks are tabulated? As a post mentioned before, it seems that it may be used for sentencing guidelines, but I hope that's just a small part. If you can find out the groups of at-risk youth, and then do something (like spend money on programs and other things that will encourage those youth to not commit crime (I know, far cry of concept for our elected officials)), then the system is worth it. Prevention of crime doesn't always mean that the police are directly involved. Rather, they should be the last resort.

And as to "real time", it's about as real time (if they're using most modern analytical software) as the data they get in. Ask someone in insurance how quickly they get data in (bonus points if you can find out the differences in time for various coverages).

PS - I love the idea about using this for politicians, and comparing polls in their represented area to their voting history. I'd bet a lot of them wouldn't like that brought up.

Quite true. I was thinking about it from a more historical angle (like U-235), but just double checking, I saw it was alpha decay as well. So yeah, it wouldn't be such a horrible thing. Actually panic would probably be worse (other than trying to clean the damn stuff up).

I'll give you the transport angle. Most times I've ever heard of it, much of the transport was done on the ground, with several routes and sometimes even drivers not knowing, but that's still hearsay. And I would bet, in the rich history of stupid things we've done, there was probably at least one weapon (more likely atomic), transported close to a decently sized population center.

Yes, but generally the design for that reactor was not for it to release all of its energy in one blast. I'd trust a 50-year old reactor more than a 50-year old A-Bomb (and boy do I hope we don't have any 50 year old A-Bombs sitting around).

Yes, there may be no detonation, but even a low-level atomic weapon having its high explosives going off is good enough to irradiate a good-sized area. Now imagine the impact of that weapon that set off it's high explosives, in mid-air, over a large metropolis. Dirty bombs are just as much of a pain in the ass. The destruction isn't wide spread, but you're still not going to want to live there. Actually, in the end, the economic and social damage may even be greater in the long run.

Like Duke knows anything of electrical engineering. It only takes a State student to tell you that (or a Carolina student, but they can go to hell).

Curriculum here started with learning about what a gate was, how it was made from transistors (which were magic black boxes then), from gates we learned adders and other MSI devices, and eventually got to an abstraction of a microcomputer. Assembly then was a Godsend and now using that same assembly language, we've implemented C.

Point is, reference a school for electrical engineering, make a better choice than masking Duke to the country. I mean, look here at State, Ga Tech, Va Tech, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, USC, etc.

I'm a highschool math / science teacher and for a while I've been playing around with moodle (http://moodle.org/). Though it may take a little to setup (PHP and MySQL are needed), it is a good system. Just make sure you have the power to use it.

All in all, it will allow you to make quizzes and lessons online that students can access. Questions can be auto sorted and even short answer questions with different possible answers. Its a beautiful system with the only flaw of facilitating a computer for each student to use. (I'm in an independant school so our kids have laptops at the ready, something we don't all have.)

The only other geek-oriented possiblity would be using scantrons or small LCD based devices, but from what I've seen nothing fits the bill. Possibly the best action might be changing how you grade and what work your students do (ie projects instead of tests and the similar). It works with a little imagination and there's alot less grading!