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A mass of 168 g of manganese dibromide is dissolved in 225 g of water. What is the molality of the solution — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nanceninja ( talk • contribs) 02:28, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
A friend of mine who lives in Hawai'i says that he rarely sees lightning there. Is there data to support this and if it's true that there is little lightning there, what's the cause? Dismas| (talk) 07:56, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
In Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, there is a fairly lengthy discussion of the contribution of genetics, family environment, and "unique" environment to an individual's personality and abilities. The contribution of each is measured according to its role in explaining the variance: more fully, the proportion of variance of the response variable of the sample that is attributable to that characteristic. Note that the three contributions add to 1 (the third is determined by subtraction, I think). I can make easy sense of this when we are dealing with measures that vary continuously, which would include the response variables, since personality measures can be made continuous. But surely the same has to apply for the independent variables, or else we need a categorical variable for each individual. How do they measure, in particular, genetic proximity as an independent variable? I know there are measures of consanguinity, like the coefficient of relationship, but you can only measure a small handful of people on the same scale like this. Furthermore, this is only defined by relationship, not in any absolute sense, so what reference point do you use? What do you do when you are using a large sample of unrelated people? For that matter, how do they measure the family environment? Is it just two categories, "same" and "different"? IBE ( talk) 22:17, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
Science desk | ||
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< February 25 | << Jan | February | Mar >> | February 27 > |
Welcome to the Wikipedia Science Reference Desk Archives |
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The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages. |
A mass of 168 g of manganese dibromide is dissolved in 225 g of water. What is the molality of the solution — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nanceninja ( talk • contribs) 02:28, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
A friend of mine who lives in Hawai'i says that he rarely sees lightning there. Is there data to support this and if it's true that there is little lightning there, what's the cause? Dismas| (talk) 07:56, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
In Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, there is a fairly lengthy discussion of the contribution of genetics, family environment, and "unique" environment to an individual's personality and abilities. The contribution of each is measured according to its role in explaining the variance: more fully, the proportion of variance of the response variable of the sample that is attributable to that characteristic. Note that the three contributions add to 1 (the third is determined by subtraction, I think). I can make easy sense of this when we are dealing with measures that vary continuously, which would include the response variables, since personality measures can be made continuous. But surely the same has to apply for the independent variables, or else we need a categorical variable for each individual. How do they measure, in particular, genetic proximity as an independent variable? I know there are measures of consanguinity, like the coefficient of relationship, but you can only measure a small handful of people on the same scale like this. Furthermore, this is only defined by relationship, not in any absolute sense, so what reference point do you use? What do you do when you are using a large sample of unrelated people? For that matter, how do they measure the family environment? Is it just two categories, "same" and "different"? IBE ( talk) 22:17, 26 February 2012 (UTC)