Doctor Recommended
100% All Natural

My younger brother mentioned that none of his teachers let him cite or reference the popular online encyclopedia, due to published errors in various entries. This despite the fact that peer-review journals such as Nature have independently found that Wikipedia is about as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica (in at least the sciences). [Note: Britannica should have seemingly won this war years ago.]

While that is not unexpected, there are other ways to handle this conundrum.

The first, and perhaps most instructive would be to offer students extra credit to revise and correct the errors of an entry. Not only would the student learn some basic, potentially valuable web-based editing skills, but it will allow future readers to understand the material better.

In some ways, the teachers reaction to this resource and tool was similar to how many administrators reacted with MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites — by banning them and setting up strict consequences for accessing or having an account on them.

While social networking and encyclopedias are not the same thing, students can still learn valuable web-editing, time-management, and organizational skills that they can use later in life (e.g., Facebook has a very useful “Event” feature that makes it much easier to schedule specific social gatherings like service projects, reunions, and of course parties).

Embrace or ignore?

Earlier today I received a curt email from an Air Force officer with a little too many bones to pick. I had attacked his golden egg (NASA) and should among other things, give my parents a refund for the tuition and fees charged by A&M (because, you guessed it, I’m retarded).

He starts his letter by insinuating that Wikipedia was not a legitimate source for reference material:

Since you appear capable of using Wikipedia as a large source of your
learned and august “research,” I suggest you point your browser to…

He then links to a number of other online resources such as TheSpaceReview, Scientific American, and SpaceQuotes — sites that are completely foreign to me… [Note: he has since sent yet another email filled with a sundry of links proving his point: that he has a hard on for all things NASA.]

To be honest, in the past I’ve referenced journals, books, and many other professional periodicals for various projects and articles. However, for the topic at hand, the Wikipedia entries I linked to in the footnotes were not only concise and succinct, but also fairly accurate.

In addition, sprinkled throughout the footnotes were links to other mainstream press articles about the numerous problems, both engineering and economics-based, that the shuttle program has had and continues to have.

Completely succinct?

I received another email this morning from a different reader, who noted that the shuttle success rate should actually be even lower than the 1-in-50 that I cited.

There is also an abort to orbit mode, which was used on STS-51-F, evidently not one of the better missions. One of the shuttle main engines failed, and the _Challenger_ was told to abort to orbit. Obviously, this failure did affect the mission, and must be included with the two catastrophic failures.

Apparently there were five other pad aborts, missions STS-41-D, STS-51-F, STS-51, STS-55, and STS-68, which cost taxpayers a bundle. So all told, between 8 or 9 partial and full failures in 117 missions — a ratio that is not yet in the Wikipedia entry. For shame.

Contrast this with Burt Rutan’s privately financed endeavor: SpaceShipOne. Because his company operates under a different business model (one not financed by taxpayers or manipulated by politicians), he has to break even or he will go bankrupt. Therefore it is in his best interest to succeed, or rather, not blow up his clients. Every time.

As a result, Rutan has had only one partial non-catastrophic failure in seventeen flights, of which sixteen were manned. And again, he had to build the engines, frame, and flight systems from scratch — on a limited budget.

Retrospecticus

This will probably not be the last time I will discuss this issue. In addition, the actual article wasn’t about comparing apples (airplanes) to oranges (shuttles) as implied by various Digg posters; it was more abstract and dealt with business models. And unfortunately, the casualities in this nationalized endeavor are the unseen opportunities stifled and prevented from ever taking place because of the mass diversion of scarce labor and capital.

In closing, there are several other references that come to somewhat similar conclusions of cancelling the shuttle project. In their words, its development is an “example of a poor quality national commitment to a major technological undertaking” and “…even if the worst happens and the Shuttles are mothballed … the loss to science will have been negligible.”

• A Rocket to Nowhere (well-written prose, see footnotes too)
• The Space Shuttle Program: A Policy Failure? (Note: this is the abstract at Science, you need an institutional account to access the full paper)
• The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped from Time magazine
• Beam Me Out of this Death Trap, Scotty from Washington Monthly