{"id":928,"date":"2009-03-02T21:57:34","date_gmt":"2009-03-03T02:57:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.flascience.org\/wp\/?p=928"},"modified":"2009-04-30T20:13:32","modified_gmt":"2009-05-01T00:13:32","slug":"orlando-sentinel-poll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=928","title":{"rendered":"Orlando Sentinel poll"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Orlando Sentinel education blog, School Zone, has a post up about the “critical analysis” bill<\/a>. They also created a poll asking readers if intelligent design should be taught<\/a>. Of course, PZ Myer’s minions have crashed the poll<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I hate these polls. I understand that the newspaper wants to make its online offerings interactive, thus the reason for the polls. But why can’t the poll just offer yes, no, and I don’t know. Why do the poll creators insist on skewing the poll by putting words in the respondents’ mouths? In the process of doing so, the poll introduces an error in fact: “Intelligent Design provides an alternative explanation to evolution, which is just a theory<\/em>.” Yes, evolution is a scientific theory, but it is not “just” a theory. Saying “just” a theory implies that the everyday usage of the word is being used, as in a guess or hunch. That’s an error in fact. Scientific theories are explanations of a body of facts and observations. They’re the exact opposite of guesses.<\/p>\n

Sheesh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Orlando Sentinel education blog, School Zone, has a post up about the “critical analysis” bill. They also created a poll asking readers if intelligent design should be taught. Of course, PZ Myer’s minions have crashed the poll. I hate … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcZNLl-eY","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":449,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=449","url_meta":{"origin":928,"position":0},"title":"Monday news roundup","author":"Brandon Haught","date":"February 18, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm going to be leaving soon for my road trip to Tallahassee. I plan on live-blogging the state board of education meeting starting bright and early in the morning with posts about the speaker sign up process, what the crowd is looking like and such. Meanwhile, here is a news\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "In the News"","block_context":{"text":"In the News","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":191,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=191","url_meta":{"origin":928,"position":1},"title":"Another poll","author":"Brandon Haught","date":"April 7, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Yet another poll, this most recent one by Newsweek, shows a lack of support\/understanding for real-life, established science. Questions 12 and 13 ask the tired old questions of evolution. Personally, I'm tired of these polls as they don't tell us anything we haven't been told over and over again before.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Analysis\/Commentary"","block_context":{"text":"Analysis\/Commentary","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?cat=4"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":220,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=220","url_meta":{"origin":928,"position":2},"title":"Another poll about evolution","author":"Brandon Haught","date":"June 8, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Yet another poll featuring opinions on evolution is trotted out to sell newspapers. As I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve mentioned before, these polls are useless and annoying. They do spotlight a stunning ignorance of basic, accepted science, but they have nothing of value to add to the overall discussion. As a matter of fact,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Analysis\/Commentary"","block_context":{"text":"Analysis\/Commentary","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?cat=4"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1269,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=1269","url_meta":{"origin":928,"position":3},"title":"Fox channel news story & poll","author":"Brandon Haught","date":"March 14, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"The central Florida Fox affiliate, Channel 35 WOFL, ran a story tonight at 10 and 11 about Sen. Wise's antievolution bill. The story itself was OK. The person interviewed in favor of the bill, Jim Stemberger, claimed religion has no part in any of this, and said that all they\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "\"Critical Analysis\" bills '11"","block_context":{"text":"\"Critical Analysis\" bills '11","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?cat=29"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":186,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=186","url_meta":{"origin":928,"position":4},"title":"What Minnesota went through","author":"Brandon Haught","date":"March 24, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Yesterday I posted about Cheri Yecke's desire to be Florida education commissioner. A commenter at Pharyngula reminded me of a post done a few years back at our old blog site about Minnesota's fight over the state science standards when Yecke was there. I'm reposting it here for easy reference.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Our Science Standards"","block_context":{"text":"Our Science Standards","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?cat=7"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1091,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=1091","url_meta":{"origin":928,"position":5},"title":"You’ve been warned","author":"Brandon Haught","date":"July 13, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Be prepared to see this bad poll commissioned by the Discovery Institute in all of their\u00c2\u00a0future efforts to undermine evolution education. Anyone want to wager on when we'll see it for the first time here in Florida? A Zogby poll commissioned by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute says more than three-quarters\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 3 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 3 comments","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=1091#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}