The Scientific Method - Assignment Example

Hence, it could be stated that greater the amount of charging, the earlier the battery’s life will end. 5. Alternative hypotheses: a. Charging your battery more often exposes it to voltage variations in the power sockets leading to battery failure. b. Only cheaper batteries tend to lose their effective life when charged too often. Part II The data presented by Horowitz is misleading since it is repetitive and tends to refocus on the same categories repeatedly. For example, the first item in the list is “reaching, leaning” while the second item is “changing audio controls” which would require the driver to reach and lean as well.

There is no categorical scheme that was utilized to present the data by Horowitz. The lack of hardcore categorization means that data may have been repeated in various categories since the presented categories have fluid boundaries. For example, the item data “eating / drinking / spilling” might have entries that are redundant with entries for “preparing to eat / drink”. In this manner, Horowitz has expanded his list of top driver distractions so that the cellular phone use categories are pushed down to a much lower level.

On another note, Horowitz’s classification scheme could have benefited if he chose to group together related items such as “adult distraction”, “child distraction” and “baby distraction” into one category such as “human distraction”. This would have allowed the list to be more realistic and in line with scientific principles on the presentation of data. However, Horowitz has chosen to expand on the distractions in order to drive cellular phone use to a much lower section in the list.

For example, Horowitz’s classification of cellular phone use is split into three list items namely “talking on a cell phone”, “dialing a cell phone” and “answering a cell phone” which tends to drive these items much lower on the list. On the other hand, if these three items were combined into one category such as cellular phone use, their combined place on the list would have been much higher. Horowitz has effectively manipulated his data to lower the frequency of his supported actions (cellular phone use) versus other list items to lower cellular phone use position on the overall list.

Part III 1. Blair’s statement needs to be decomposed into its principal components to look at its defects. The first component of Blair’s statement is “overweight people who exercise regularly” while the second component is “normal weight people who do not” (exercise). The third component of Blair’s statement is “live longer than” and tends to impinge directly on mortality rates. The last component of Blair’s statement requires the greatest attention since it is used to assess the first two components.

Looking closely at the first statement it becomes clear that the statement is self contradictory. If overweight people were to exercise regularly, their weight would tend to reduce dramatically enough to classify them as “normal weight people” within the time frame of Blair’s study since losing weight does not take years but months. Moreover, a primary reason for obesity is the lack of exercise that overweight people are used to in their lifestyle. Again this method of looking at Blair’