Cocktail-Making-Contests & Statistical Analysis

On Friday night I attended a surprise, birthday, cocktail-making-contest party for a girl in my lab named Genoveva. The idea was that party goers would compete to whip up the drink that the birthday girl liked the best. Everyone brought the fixins for their concoctions and mayhem ensued...

Later in the evening after Genoveva had tried all of the drinks, I noticed two people (both PhDs) huddled over a sheet of paper, scribbling columns of numbers and names of drinks onto a sheet of paper. When I asked them what they were doing, they said, "We're figuring out the results of the cocktail-making-contest. " Amused by their dedication to this analysis, I listened in on their calculations for a while.

They had one column of values for Genoveva's "score" of the drink on a scale of 1-10. The second column was a percentage of how much of the drink she had actually consumed. I couldn't hear everything they were saying, but I gathered that they were using the percent consumed as a covariate with drink score to determine who the true winner of the contest was, because, presumably, if she did not finish all of the drink, then she couldn't have really like it that much. I noticed that they did not consider confounding factors, such as how many drinks she'd had before she tried each drink, presentation, how many drinks she was being offerred at once, whethor or not she cleansed her palette with water between drinks, etc. However, as far as cocktail-making-contest analysis goes, I'm willing to bet that this was one of the most advanced calculations ever done.

I leaned over to the person next to me and whispered, "Who invited these nerds?".

ANOVA and my circle

Heidi's presentation last week on ANOVA was my first real introduction to a statistical analysis that I probably should have familiarized myself with a long time ago. Finally having these concepts explained to me in plain English (well, as close as you can get with this stuff, I suppose) made me realize that for years I've heard and read this term over and over without really understanding what it meant. This got me thinking about something a professor once told me: Everything we know can be represented by the inside area of a circle, everthing we don't know would be the infinite area outside of the circle and everything that we realize we don't know would be the circumference of the circle.

Therefore, when we know little, we often think we know nearly everything. The more we learn, the more we realize we don't know. Only those who know a lot realize how little they really know.