JABbering Stooge

A serious, potentially destructive design flaw threatens NASA’s replacement for the space shuttle (Which frankly, looks like a step backward from the shuttle - at least in an aesthetic sense. I’m sure that it’ll be all modern where it counts.). Thankfully, the error was discovered in the design phase, when it’s still relatively cheap to fix any flaws discovered. As a sci-fi fan and major nerd, I’m always eager to see us explore space in a big way, and if this new spacecraft can help us get there all the faster, then I’m all for it.

Sidebar: One of the other reasons I was interested in this story is of a more personal nature. One of the people interviewed for the story was Dr. Fischbeck, who taught the Decision Analysis and Decision Support Systems class that I took in my last semester before graduating from Carnegie Mellon. Dr. Fischbeck is notorious among CMU students for giving The Multiple-Choice Exam From Hell™.

As you might expect, this exam is not like any ordinary multiple-choice exam you may have encountered. For each question, you are given four possible responses. However, you have to put by each option the probability that you think that option is the correct answer (the probabilities for all four options must sum to 1). The probability that you put by the correct answer is then input into a logarithmic function that runs through the points (0.25, 0) and (1, 5).

What this means is that giving all four answers equal probability, and thus indicating that you have no earthly idea what the correct answer is, gives you no points, while putting a probability of zero by the correct answer (and thus displaying a Bill Kristol level of wrongness and ineptitude) will give you a score of negative infinity! Needless to say, there were quite a few exams in Dr. Fischbeck’s tenure at CMU where a score in the range of -10 to 5 was considered a C. (And yes, there have been a few -∞’s. And no, I wasn’t one of them.)