People send me stuff.
In my Inbox today was a link to a Science Poll conducted by the Pew Research Center. The aim of the poll was to gauge American knowledge of science and it is a parallel poll to one conducted by telephone. Given the millions spent on global warming/climate change messaging, I was shocked to see the results of this question on Carbon Dioxide. Note what I circled in red.
Similarly, I thought far more people would get this grade school science question right. Only 20% did.
The choices for both of the questions were amazingly simple, and I thought these would score far higher in the general population. One has to wonder about the 24% of college graduates that also missed the CO2 question and the 69% that missed the Nitrogen question. I also wonder what percentage answered “Carbon Dioxide” as the primary gas of Earth’s atmosphere instead of Nitrogen.
I got 100% on the test by the way.
You can take it yourself here: http://www.pewresearch.org/quiz/science-knowledge/
See how your results compare with the 1,006 randomly sampled adults that took part in the Pew national telephone survey and review how you responded to each question.
For more findings from the survey, read “Public’s Knowledge of Science and Technology.”
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Gail Combs says:
October 8, 2013 at 12:16 pm
Well Anthony, what did they expect when they shortened CARBON dioxide to “Your CARBON foot print”
Remember 50% of the population has an IQ under 100 and they VOTE! (As long as their Community Organizer remembers to send around the bus to pick them up and carefully instructs them on how to vote and bribes them with candy or…)
I didn’t get any candy Gail, where’s the candy?
Bill Taylor – What Ben is saying is the continents don’t move on their own.
The question should be phrased correctly
milodonharlani said @ur momisugly October 8, 2013 at 10:04 am
Sir Arthur Eddington estimated the CBR at ~3K from his measurements of starlight in 1926. In 1946 George Gamow estimated CBR to be 50K based on what was later to be called Big Bang Theory. I’d say that observations of a CBR at 3K falsified, rather than confirmed Gamow’s BBT prediction.
I, too scored 100% on the test.
As for those who claimed to have got their gender correct, the genders are: masculine, feminine and neuter. The terms male and female are sexes, not genders.
That remark about gender was pompous enough, the Pompous Git! Rock on!
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=gender
Joe Crawford says:
October 8, 2013 at 4:00 pm
JEM says (October 8, 2013 at 10:04 am ) “… I need to figure out some way to demonstrate to her what would happen if the atmosphere WERE mostly oxygen.”
Tell her the story of the Apollo 1 fire. where we lost space veterans Gus Grissom and Ed White and their rookie crew-mate Roger Chaffee. Quoting from an article in Time Magazine: “… A frayed wire to Grissom’s left let fly a spark, one that would have been entirely harmless at sea level pressure in an ordinary nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere. In the high-pressure, 100% oxygen environment of the Apollo spacecraft, it was like dropping a match in gasoline.” (http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2044930,00.html)
=========================================
By the way, Oxygen does not burn!
Second, if you drop a lit match into gasoline that is in a container that contains no Oxygen, the match simply goes out; goes out just like dropping it into a container of water.
Gene Selkov said @ur momisugly October 9, 2013 at 2:49 pm
There’s no point adopting the pseudonym unless it is wielded with great wielding 😉
The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd Ed) only partially agrees with your link. There is no reference to the use of the word as a synonym for sex. The feminists introduced gender as a euphemism for sex (in the 1970s if memory serves). See pp. 427-8. Indeed, there are some languages that possess two genders: animate and inanimate. Presumably the animate would correspond to male and the inanimate female… Feminism can take one down strange trains of thought 🙂
The Pompous Git says: “Feminism can take one down strange trains of thought”
So strange I would not have imagined the real intent behind the choice of this word in surveys, had this conversation not occurred.
Incidentally, I had been processing a survey of surgical residents when this thread erupted. The category where they stated their sex is called Gender. I guess you can’t blow against the wind. It will always be Gender in surveys.
The French wiki explains why, in a rather more straightforward way compared to its English counterpart:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genre_(sciences_sociales)
> L’utilisation scientifique du mot, dans le contexte des rôles sociaux des femmes et des hommes, date de son emploi par John Money en 1955 et a été popularisé par le mouvement féministe dans les années 1970 et a progressivement remplacé l’usage du mot « sexe » dans les sciences sociales3.
See, the category reported in my survey is not biological. It is a “social role”. How strange is that?
I wouldn’t have guessed from data values, which are “male” and “female”.
The English wiki tells a similar story, a bit differently (it’s always fun to compare national wikis):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender
Also note an over-developed section on etymology there. Beats the Oxford Dictionary by a mile! (just as well, for the Oxford Dictionary doesn’t claim to be an etymology source)
In German, there is hardly any difference between the two meanings, and the same word is used for both. I guess we would not be having this discussion if not for the Anglo-Roman version of feminism.
Ken S said @ur momisugly October 9, 2013 at 3:04 pm
Try saying that after sticking your finger into a flask of liquid oxygen 😉
@ur momisugly Gene Selkov
How many sexes in your survey? I recall a friend attempting to integrate several government databases some years gone. The different databases did not agree on what that number should be; some had 2, some 3 and one had 4! This latter had the usual male, female, neuter, and “not stated” for those offended by the question.
Apropos the French and their prissiness on matters sexual, Stephen Hawking was considerably amused at their responses to (and translations) of his papers on hairy black holes and smooth black holes. Who would have thought that astrophysical terminology was not suitable for polite conversation? 🙂
@ur momisugly The Pompous Git:
It was simply inhumane to subject the sensitive French public to dirty insinuations about the unmentionable place that Hawking pulls his theories from. But for the offended ones, there is a powerful antidote:
(apologies to those who have already seen Stephen Crothers talk about black holes — The Git was not here the last time we had a chat about bad ideas)
~~~~~~
In my survey, there are only three sexes: male, female, and “not stated”, with a surprisingly large number of “not stated” for a rather small (and anonymous) survey it is. They report race — another politically incorrect thing — much better than sex. This outcome essentially renders the sex factor useless for the purposes of the survey.
I’m native Finn and my education is that I’ve been book’d 8 years in bublic school wich does not mean, that i’ve been there. Still I got 100% right. What proofs that school is not only place, where one can learn things. 🙂 Forgive my bad english, I have learn it from movies.
100% also and some of the totals are a tad concerning. I mean only 20% understand that frackking is used to obtain natural gas???
I think the average human should have been expected to get 13/13 from UNPROMPTED answers, and almost 100% should have got 13/13 when they had the correct answer given to them in a multiple choice format. Wonder what the scores would have been in open answer format? “What is the role of red blood cells?” “What is the most prevalent gas in the atmosphere?” Good grief – nearly a quarter got wrong the “true or false” on plate tectonics!
The thing that struck me is that the next time a 20-something activist lectures you on fracking, the odds are 2/3 that they don’t know what it is! Only 35% knew (even with the answer staring them in the face) that it is extraction of NG, and not diamonds (FFS!).
And yet in AUS we had govt by Twitter for the past 3 years. Disgraceful.
Pedantically if scientists believe the gas causes temperatures to rise they are inept. The gas traps the heat but it does not cause anything itself. how can anyone truly judge responses when the questions are sloppily phrased?