On the bias of science: more on methods

As I have said, there are many different methods used by scientists. What I will focus on today is so-called Gaussian statistics and a number called the p-value. This has been discussed enough in scholarly literature of late that many non-scientists probably have a general idea that there is controversy associated with it and think they at least understand the gist of it. Just in case you don ' t really understand it, let me try to explain it as simply as I can. If you flip a coin multiple times, the most likely result will be an equal number of heads and tails. The second most likely will be one more heads or one more tails, and so on, with the least likely being all heads or all tails. If you make a bar graph it will look something like this:You ' ll notice they ' ve superimposed a smooth curve, which is called the normal distribution, and that ' s what you get with an infinite number of coin flips. (The " tails " on each end actually extend asymptotically but you can ' t show that in a finite graph.) It turns out that a lot of phenomena in the real world that aren ' t binary, but continuous, such as people ' s height, look something like this. But that ' s not so important. What ' s really important is that regardless of whether some quantity is normally distributed, if you take a whole lot of random samples the means of those sampleswill benormally distributed. One of the properties of the normal curve is called the standard deviation; this is a measure of how spread...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs