Yikes! I am almost intimidated by your post.
Very interesting stuff tho...
In response to your first question, many years of experience, schooling, and reading technical documents/diagrams, albeit not necessarily about cellphones or programming.
In answer to your second question, probably.
Without getting into a lengthy (which I have no problem doing as this is very interesting to me, but I must be somewhere in 30 min.) discussion, I am going to make an assumption or two.
WAPs (Wireless Access Points) transmits beacons several times per second. It is active in that it transmits beacons (or signals) announcing its existence. I am going to assume you and I agree on this.
In general, wireless clients are passive - I use that term in that they "listen" for those beacons transmitted by WAPs. As these beacons are transmitted several times per second, when a wireless client enters their range they seemingly appear "instantly". I would also assume we agree on this.
Now in my statements regarding battery usage on the GS3, I have taken for granted - perhaps erroneously, but I would have a hard time believing that - Wi-Fi radios in the GS3 and smartphones in general also work under this premise.
On the other side of things, I would use the term "active" to describe a scan which transmits or "probes", seeking out whatever (in the context of this discussion, that would be WAPs).
Now, stating that, I have taken a bit of liberty here in that I don't have a technical document that states this is how the radio in a GS3 (or in general, any smartphone) works. To me, it wasn't even a thought... Why would anyone design a radio in a device that needs to conserve as much power is possible that actually consumes power by actively probing for devices that they don't need to seek because they announce themselves?
Finally, and this is where it gets really interesting for me due to some things you stated in your post... using monitoring software to measure usage over significant periods of time, power consumption was no different in areas where I was connected to a WAP and areas where many existed, but none which I were connected to. The only difference in usage was when transmitting large amounts of data while connected to a WAP, usage increased over when I was not connected, or connected but not transmitting much data.
Anyway, have to run.. but I am curious about the coding you brought up... is everything shown on battery software based on the values as shown in your code examples? If so, given they are based on estimated values, doesn't it make the software rather inaccurate?