Assignment

Question 1

Everyday people lose, drop, and misplace property. From your reading, do you think that anytime someone loses property that it is automatically abandoned and can be kept by whoever finds it? Why or Why not? What reasonable efforts should be made, if any, of lost property to the rightful owner?

Question 2

The freshman 15 refers to the urban legend that is the common belief that students gain an average of 15 lb during freshman year. The weights of 100 freshmen at a certain university were observed in August and then in May. The null hypothesis claim that the mean difference is equal to 15 lbs. is tested at a 0.05 significance level. The result is fail to reject the null hypothesis.

• What do the results suggest?
• What factors could have affected the results?
• How can these results be used to make changes on campus?

Question 3

Today there are many complaints over the politicization of science. Many people believe politics should not play a role in science, but once government funds science, the funding decisions become political. In most social institutions, disagreements are settled by debate. Science in contrast, uses experiments to prove or disprove theories. Science is testable, and is self-proving. If a better explanation for a phenomenon is found, it will replace other explanations. This is why careful distinctions must be made between Frontier Science, Consensus Science, and Junk Science.

Many difficult controversies surround the environmental problems we face in the world today. Problems include: Air and water pollution, global warming, species and ecosystem biodiversity, energy, hazardous waste, population, and food supply issues. Politics control the financing of scientific research and development to help solve these issues. In politics passion wins over logic Science is not politics and cannot be debated in the same way politics are. Mixing politics with science produces bad science. Government efforts to fund research interfere with the maintenance of high scientific standards. The current Congress consists of 535 members. Of these members, 7 (1.3%), are scientists, and 21 others are healthcare professionals

Use these references along with resources from your own research to help answer the questions that follow

Punjabi, P. P. (2014). The Science of Politics and The Politicization of Science. Perfusion, 29(2), 101.Link to article.

Sarewitz, D. (2014). Science should keep out of partisan politics. Nature, 516(7529), 9.doi:10.1038/516009a. Link to article.

Jamieson, D., Oreskes, N., & Oppenheimer, M. (2015). Science and policy: Crossing the boundary. Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists, 71(1), 53-58. doi:10.1177/0096340214563675. Link to article.

Krauss, L. M. (2015). Scientists as celebrities: Bad for science or good for society?.Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists, 71(1), 26-32. doi:10.1177/0096340214563676.

Do you feel that scientists should be cut out of the policy making process, particularly on environmental issues, when their research is proven and widely accepted and is being ignored and disputed? Politicians ultimately make the decisions, but shouldn't the scientists have a voice?

Do you feel that lobbyists and special interest groups exert too great of an influence and act as an impediment to finding solutions to, and providing the funding for, research for the environmental problems we face?