Quote:

Quote: Science doesn't start with an out-of-the-blue hypothetical "what if..." like she started with. It starts with an observation.

No, that's not possible: for, how could we decide which observation to start with?

You've got it backwards. It's not only possible, it's the way it's done. I just googled "scientific method" to see if there's some huge misinformation campaign going on that I'm not aware of, but the first three results will explain this to you:

A hypothesis is a suggested explanation of a phenomenon (phenomenon obviously implying observation)

There was no phenomenon that her hypothesis that "ACORN is corrupt" is attempting to explain.

The scientific method starts when you ask a question about something that you observe

Again, our budding Einstein heard "Ask a question..." and stopped right there. Past the first three words of the first step in a basic explanation of the scientific method, and she's already on the wrong track. Remember her question: "Ask A Question: What if a 'prostitute' and her alleged law school boyfriend walk into ACORN seeking housing for an underage brothel to fund his future congressional campaign?"

(step) 1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.

I suppose, in her dim understanding, that her "background research" step is meant to satisfy "observation and description", but again, the subject of her research was not an observed phenomenon (I would love to read the results of her "history of ACORN and its effect on the United States" research).

Google's top three results, giving us three slightly different phrasings of the same concept, none of which saves her, and none of which omits "observation" as the start of the process.

Quote: We always, always start with theories,

Again, backwards. Theories come at the end of the process.

Quote: The theories tell us what to bother observing.

I don't know what this means. You bother observing what you're interested in. New knowledge gained through the application of the scientific method opens the door for observations that were not possible before, but that doesn't tell you what to "bother" observing, nor does it mean that these newly unlocked observations don't count as observations.

Or maybe you're saying that theories make predictions, and your use of "observing" refers to observation of the predicted phenomenon? While I wouldn't say that is incorrect, that still doesn't mean that the theory did not come from experimentation which came from a hypothesis which came from an observation.

[Edited by - BerwynIrish on September 23, 2009 11:39:58 PM]

More evidence that ACORN has been unfairly targeted gathers...

For ACORN, Truth Lost Amid the Din

Quote:
...
ACORN's third focus has been to expand the electorate. In the 2007-08 election cycle, it registered 1.3 million new voters in the nation's inner cities. This activity particularly vexed many Republican politicians, who have repeatedly accused the organization of massive voter fraud. The Bush administration's politicization of the Justice Department -- its widely reported firing of U.S. attorneys for their failure to bring voter fraud indictments (all of them looked and could find scarcely any instances of same) -- stemmed from the administration's apparent desire to depress minority turnout, a goal it sought to accomplish by demonizing ACORN.

Now, how much of this would you know from following the stories about ACORN that have been running in even the best of the media? Little to nothing, as Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College, and Christopher R. Martin, a professor of journalism at University of Northern Iowa, just concluded in an exhaustive study of news coverage of ACORN. Looking at the 647 stories on the group that ran in leading newspapers and broadcast networks in 2007 and 2008, they found that not only did a majority of such stories focus on allegations of voter fraud but also that 83 percent of the stories that linked ACORN to those allegations failed to mention that actual instances of voter fraud were all but nonexistent.
...

Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong

Quote:
Using the controversy over ACORN as a case study, this report illustrates the way the media help set the agenda for public debate, and frame the way that debate is shaped. It describes how "opinion entrepreneurs" (primarily business and conservative groups and individuals) set the story in motion as early as 2006, how the "conservative echo chamber" orchestrated its anti-ACORN campaign in 2008, how the McCain-Palin campaign picked it up, and how the mainstream media reported these allegations without investigating their truth or falsity. As a result, the relatively little-known community organization became the subject of a major news story in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, to the point where 82 percent of the respondents in an October 2008 national survey reported they had heard about ACORN.