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The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Re-Opened

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whoanellie said:
Here's what you actually wrote:
"You would not get a normal distribution on a string of results on carbon testing. A normal distribution relies on a mean where 50% of a population falls within ±1 sd of the mean within the Gaussaian equation." So your explanation of what you meant isn't credible.
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I don't remember the context of the discussion but it is clearly a careless mistake.
 
Vixen said:
No, it was not the 'same education as every U.K. child'.
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And the one-liners keep coming.

Was any of it elective? Was any of it at the college level or higher? Would any of it have qualified you to work as a physicist in industry? You told us you barely squeaked through your O-levels and never had a desire after that to study more physics. Would that characterize your study of it, ages 11-16, as enthusiastic and diligent?

Keep in mind that your attempts at this forum to demonstrate a working knowledge of basic classical mechanics have been comically inept. What can you say that would reconcile your dismal performance with your continuously-ambiguous claims to be uncommonly qualified academically in it?
 
whoanellie said:
As I understand it this is the equivalent of grades 7 - 11 in the US. I find it hard to believe you could have 5 years of physics at that grade level? Did you have to repeat a class?
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No, I was actually in the top stream. One of the teachers - in shades of Miss Jean Brodie - liked to tell us we were the 'crème de la crème'.
 
Vixen said:
I don't remember the context of the discussion but it is clearly a careless mistake.
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The context was your attempt to lecture others on proper sampling and analysis of variance in the samples. Your late attempt to say you were just describing a mean and not a standard deviation doesn't jive with your comments before or after in that thread, nor would it have served to answer the question at hand. You're trying to rehabilitate a fundamental error you made in a field in which you have claimed superior understanding. And you're doing it in a way that makes it more likely to be frantic backpedaling today, not a genuine attempt to correct a mistake from years ago.

Lest we bog down too much, let us recall that the question at hand here is whether you can show proficiency in various models of inquiry used in the kind of investigation that was applied to MS Estonia. That you conflate them with statistical modeling of significance is a far more fundamental flaw.
 
JayUtah said:
And the one-liners keep coming.

Was any of it elective? Was any of it at the college level or higher? Would any of it have qualified you to work as a physicist in industry? You told us you barely squeaked through your O-levels and never had a desire after that to study more physics. Would that characterize your study of it, ages 11-16, as enthusiastic and diligent?

Keep in mind that your attempts at this forum to demonstrate a working knowledge of basic classical mechanics have been comically inept. What can you say that would reconcile your dismal performance with your continuously-ambiguous claims to be uncommonly qualified academically in it?
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This is how it used to work. At age 11 people had to take an 11-plus exam, a test of cognitive ability, of which roughly 20% passed to go to Grammar School (now abolished although you can still go privately), who were thought capable of an academic education, meaning having the ability to pass the standard five O-levels that employers wanted for entry level jobs. It was also the stepping stone to taking three A-Levels to get into a degree course.

Once at grammar school you were streamed after the first year, so the top stream did all three sciences as separate subjects, two languages, Maths, English Language, English Literature, History and Geography from year two to take nine to ten O-Levels in Form 5.. The second stream did two sciences and one language plus art and music, the two lower streams did six or seven subjects plus Art and Domestic Science for girls and Woodwork for boys. The syllabus was demanding and we were expected to do at least two hours of homework every night and swot like mad in very competitive exams for which you were ranked. Coming top was the goal. I was certainly a diligent girlyswot coming top or near top in most subjects.

The grammar schools were abolished as they were considered unfair to the less able pupil - the other 80% - but on the other hand they enabled social mobility, so someone from a poor home could have the same first class education as a rich kid, simply because of innate ability.
 
JayUtah said:
Then explain why you're incompetent at physics.
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In the UK system, once you've sat GCSE's you choose two to four A-Levels. This normally means dropping most of the subjects you did for GCSE. It means selecting your best subjects for A-Level or your favourite subjects, depending on what career you want to pursue. If you want to go into medicine, you'll pick the sciences (naturally) together with two or three maths (pure, applied or further). If English, you do the language based ones and so on and so forth.
 
Vixen said:
The grammar schools were abolished as they were considered unfair to the less able pupil - the other 80% - but on the other hand they enabled social mobility, so someone from a poor home could have the same first class education as a rich kid, simply because of innate ability.
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they were abolished because they were based on faulty reasoninng.

they were 'gatekeepers' for the middle classes t keep the plebs out of university.

Ability at age 11 is no indication of future ability.
 
JayUtah said:
The context was your attempt to lecture others on proper sampling and analysis of variance in the samples. Your late attempt to say you were just describing a mean and not a standard deviation doesn't jive with your comments before or after in that thread, nor would it have served to answer the question at hand. You're trying to rehabilitate a fundamental error you made in a field in which you have claimed superior understanding. And you're doing it in a way that makes it more likely to be frantic backpedaling today, not a genuine attempt to correct a mistake from years ago.

Lest we bog down too much, let us recall that the question at hand here is whether you can show proficiency in various models of inquiry used in the kind of investigation that was applied to MS Estonia. That you conflate them with statistical modeling of significance is a far more fundamental flaw.
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Haha! You really wouldn't use a normal distribution model to sample bits of the shroud.
 
Vixen said:
This is how it used to work.
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Most of this has nothing to do with what I asked. I'll assume that truthful answers to my questions would not have been favorable to your claims.

I was certainly a diligent girlyswot coming top or near top in most subjects.
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Reconcile this with your earlier claims that you had difficulty with O-levels in physics. Reconcile this with your demonstrable incompetence today in physics. You were sure I was going to find errors in your attempts to complete a certain simple problem you were set. And you were right. You've gone from begging for leniency to top "girlyswot," with no evidence to show it.
 
JayUtah said:
Most of this has nothing to do with what I asked. I'll assume that truthful answers to my questions would not have been favorable to your claims.



Reconcile this with your earlier claims that you had difficulty with O-levels in physics. Reconcile this with your demonstrable incompetence today in physics. You were sure I was going to find errors in your attempts to complete a certain simple problem you were set. And you were right. You've gone from begging for leniency to top "girlyswot," with no evidence to show it.
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I didn't say I had difficulty, I said I was more of a Chemistry person. In fact, I was teacher's pet.
 
Vixen said:
So you're my best friend now that you think you can be familiar with me?
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The questions are not being asked in order to make friends. They are being asked to determine whether you have the knowledge you claim to have, such that you can simply say "it is so" and it should be considered evidence.
 
JayUtah said:
The questions are not being asked in order to make friends. They are being asked to determine whether you have the knowledge you claim to have, such that you can simply say "it is so" and it should be considered evidence.
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Really? So a guy who savagely jumped on me when I described a goal post as 'the bar' is now a chum asking polite questions?
 
Vixen said:
This is how it used to work. At age 11 people had to take an 11-plus exam, a test of cognitive ability, of which roughly 20% passed to go to Grammar School (now abolished although you can still go privately), who were thought capable of an academic education, meaning having the ability to pass the standard five O-levels that employers wanted for entry level jobs. It was also the stepping stone to taking three A-Levels to get into a degree course.

Once at grammar school you were streamed after the first year, so the top stream did all three sciences as separate subjects, two languages, Maths, English Language, English Literature, History and Geography from year two to take nine to ten O-Levels in Form 5.. The second stream did two sciences and one language plus art and music, the two lower streams did six or seven subjects plus Art and Domestic Science for girls and Woodwork for boys. The syllabus was demanding and we were expected to do at least two hours of homework every night and swot like mad in very competitive exams for which you were ranked. Coming top was the goal. I was certainly a diligent girlyswot coming top or near top in most subjects.

The grammar schools were abolished as they were considered unfair to the less able pupil - the other 80% - but on the other hand they enabled social mobility, so someone from a poor home could have the same first class education as a rich kid, simply because of innate ability.
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No, Vixen.

The direct grant funding system was abolished in 1976, but there are currently 163 state funded grammar schools in the UK, and the 11 plus, whilst optional, is still used in Berkshire, Bexley, Birmingham, Buckinghamshire, Cumbria, Devon, Dorset, Essex, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Medway, Shropshire, Trafford, Wiltshire, Walsall, Warwickshire, Wirral, Wolverhampton and Yorkshire to determine who gets to go to those schools. Personally, I think that they should have been abolished outright.
 
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Vixen said:
I didn't say I had difficulty, I said I was more of a Chemistry person. In fact, I was teacher's pet.
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Good for you. Can you explain why your claims of exceptional academic prowess decades ago should be a better determiner of your ability to reason through physics problems today than your manifest ineptitude when asked simple questions?
 
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