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Earhart Project Research Bulletin #28 |
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Evaluating Betty’s Notebook | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This was submitted as a posting to the Earhart Forum, and was so useful we decided to put it here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
As I see the process of assessing Betty’s notebook, it looks something like this:
Therefore I want to look ahead to the issue of content assessment. What follows is an attempt to clarify the assessment process by getting criteria and definitions “on the table.” It is unlikely that everyone can agree on criteria, or agree on the relative importance of specific criteria. However, if a discussion begins without some framework confusion seems likely. Already some postings have identified possible “categories” to characterize the notebook contents, and I think I saw:
Maybe (surely) there are some I missed. The “Betty” Hoax is early discounted but included for completeness. Already I see characteristics of these categories being cited and used for assessment. The following matrix is created to identify some of those characteristics and compare the categories based on those characteristics. Note that in some categories a characteristic may have a broad range of values, therefore it may not be a particularly good determinant of that category. Poorly-characterized categories may also be indicators of poorly defined categories, which require division into finer and more descriptive categories. Of course, the Real Transmission category will have more variability in its characteristics than the Dramatization category. On the other hand this type of analysis may identify some characteristics as critical indicators. Therefore, here’s a straw man matrix: |
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“Occult” does not refer to magic, only a compact notation for information hidden from the vast majority of contemporaries. I expect that everyone who reads that matrix will disagree with one or more of my characterization-values. That is part of the beauty of this formalism because the discussion can then find a focus. If we can’t get something like consensus of what these categories will be like, it is unlikely that we can share conclusions that result. This type of discussion has already started, with the discussion that some sort of location should have been available for broadcast and therefore real transmissions should have that characteristic. Another advantage is that it lets us identify the logic we are intuitively using:
Finally, it may show places where categories are degenerate, not distinguished:
In conclusion, I have attempted to organize the logic some of the credibility asessment posted so far. I see two features:
John Pratt (2373) |
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