Ben H

I know kids sometimes use them in science classes. It involves spinning something around in the air, and it's supposed to produce some kind of atmospheric measurement, but I don't remember exactly what. I think it starts with "cyc-".

I have survey results from two sets of respondents who differ by a single variable. I want to know whether there is a significant difference in their responses to any of the survey questions. Each question has a 1-10 scale. The two groups are unequal in size.

My first thought was to use a simple t-test. But then I realized the answers were not normally distributed in either group. In both groups, more than half the responses were "10". So then I thought I should use a Mann-Whitley U-test. But since so many responses have identical values, ranking them doesn't seem very logical.

Any advice?

I'm exploring the idea of a community like Yahoo Answers, but specific to a certain field of knowledge (biology, esp. marine biology) and available only to schools. The idea is that classes could either pose questions or answer them, exploring the depth and limits of their own knowledge while also finding out what their peers know. We might also invite guest experts to answer questions or to challenge students with new questions of their own.

If you're a teacher, would a resource like that be something you would use?

Something not-too-casual, not-too-fancy.

Does "9 inch baking pan" mean a round pan 9 inches in diameter? I don't have one. I do have a 9"x13"x2.5" rectangular pan. Will that work?

My employer offers both an HMO and a PPO option. I've been on the PPO for a few years, but I want to switch to the HMO to cut down on the out-of-pocket expenses. I understand that I would then need to choose an in-network primary care physician, and I have no problem with that since I'm not really that picky when it comes to general care doctors.

The problem is that I have a chronic condition requiring treatment with a specialist, and I am a little more picky about that. I've been going to one specialist in particular for a while, and I want to continue going to her. But for insurance to cover those treatments, I would need my official primary care physician to refer me to her, right? Does that mean I would have to stop going to the specialist until I get that referral? Can you usually request that a primary care physician refer you to a particular specialist? And does the referral process take long?

(I tried calling my insurance company to ask this, but I was on hold for so long that I eventually had to hang up.)

If a protestor gets arrested at a Town Hall meeting and Rush Limbaugh complains about it, will Michelle Malkin call Rush an anti-police bigot?

I have a Maxtor one-touch external hard drive. I currently use it just as back-up storage for important files on my PC. But I also have a lot of video files saved on a friend's Mac. I'd like to move those files to a different PC (for work) and I was hoping to use the Maxtor drive to do it. How do I make sure it can go from one to the other successfully?

I'm willing to dump all the stuff on it right now if it's necessary to re-format it or something. But I'm not even sure how to go about re-formatting.

I wanted to do some research about the origin of organic molecules, so I typed "origin of DNA" into a search engine. The vast majority of hits were sites supporting creationism or intelligent design. It would lead you to conclude that the scientific consensus leans toward creationism/ID.

I was also recently researching a political attack. (I won't specify the charges or which side of the aisle they came from.) After some exhaustive searching, I found that the attack was pretty groundless. Still, simply searching for the key terms in google brought up dozens of sites repeating the same attack compared to only a handful that had the reasonable explanation. Just to rule out partisan bias, I found the same thing when I looked at a groundless political charge lobbied from my side toward the other -- lots of repetition of the charge but only a little bit of the perfectly valid rebuttal.

Is there a name for this phenomenon? Have you noticed it too? Do you think it's dangerous?

Before Obama took office, we already had income tax, farm subsidies (huge ones), social security, medicare/medicaid, finance and security laws, and TANF. But did you think we were a socialist nation in 2001?

If not, then you have to admit that there's a continuum between laissez-faire capitalism and government-controlled socialism.

Now Obama wants to raise income taxes to a level lower than they were at in January 2001. And he wants to regulate (not tax, no matter what Limbaugh says) carbon emissions. With policies like those, you could call him left of center or even liberal, but socialist? Are you just saying that any person advocating any policy that falls to the left of your personal political beliefs is an all-out socialist?

Michael Behe says, ". . . the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed."

Couldn't the opposite be asserted just as easily? "The fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to design, and therefore were naturally selected?" Why must evolution be held up to severe logical scrutiny, while the alternative -- a designer and creator -- is not?

If ID is to compete as a scientific explanation for life's origins, shouldn't it be required to justify the mechanism of the Creator's power? How exactly does a being design and create life? What chemical & physical steps are involved? Why aren't those valid scientific objections?

I don't agree that there are any truly "irreducibly complex" phenomena in nature, but if there were, I would argue that a designer could no more be postulated without evidence than a series of successive variations could be.

Proponents of Intelligent Design, how do you respond to that?

Michael Behe says, ". . . the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed."

Couldn't the opposite be asserted just as easily? "The fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to design, and therefore were naturally selected?" Why must evolution be held up to severe logical scrutiny, while the alternative -- a designer and creator -- is not?

If ID is to compete as a scientific explanation for life's origins, shouldn't it be required to justify the mechanism of the Creator's power? How exactly does a being design and create life? What chemical & physical steps are involved? Why aren't those valid scientific objections?

I don't agree that there are any truly "irreducibly complex" phenomena in nature, but if there were, I would argue that a designer could no more be postulated without evidence than a series of successive variations could be.

Proponents of Intelligent Design, how do you respond to that?

I understand that most of a cell's chemical processes would stop because of a lack of energy, but what causes the cell to "die"? Why doesn't it just drop what it's doing (so to speak) and wait until it has an oxygen supply again?