DiscussWorldIssues - Socio-Economic Religion and Political Uncensored Debate - View Single Post - 90 percent of U.S. paper money contains traces of cocaine

**medifastwoman** · 08-18-2009, 01:22 PM

Not being a statistician, I have no idea if the sample size and number of cities sampled combined is enough to be demonstrably significant. Certainly the scientists conducting the test appeared to think it covered their needs.

What should the number of samples have been, to be considered valid?

No one, not even a Ph.D. in statistics can answer that question. Statistics is one of the few "fuzzy" sciences... which is surprising since it is highly mathematical.

As new statistical methods are developed, they do no replace the existing ones. There are multiple methods to produce similar statistics, it is really up to the statistician's interpretation on which methods to use, since different methods can produce some wildly different results.

To answer your question, a bit of real logic can be used here: A sample of 234 bills is what percentage of the total number of bills available? Even if they are selected truly at random, what does 90% of

08-18-2009, 01:22 PM	#15
medifastwoman Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 490 Senior Member	Not being a statistician, I have no idea if the sample size and number of cities sampled combined is enough to be demonstrably significant. Certainly the scientists conducting the test appeared to think it covered their needs. What should the number of samples have been, to be considered valid? No one, not even a Ph.D. in statistics can answer that question. Statistics is one of the few "fuzzy" sciences... which is surprising since it is highly mathematical. As new statistical methods are developed, they do no replace the existing ones. There are multiple methods to produce similar statistics, it is really up to the statistician's interpretation on which methods to use, since different methods can produce some wildly different results. To answer your question, a bit of real logic can be used here: A sample of 234 bills is what percentage of the total number of bills available? Even if they are selected truly at random, what does 90% of
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