About Statistics and stuff...

[darin]

Fantastic powerpoint presentation relating to, and sourced from, my link in this thread: http://www.debatepolicy.com/showthread.php?p=161831

It is an incontestable fact that most negative or neutral results are not published. Editors do not like them and readers find them boring. Thus the published results are mostly winners in the one in twenty lottery; i.e. purely accidental.
Worse, there is now political censorship. Editors of once great journals, such as Nature, jump through hoops in order to prevent the publication of critiques of establishment dogma.

http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/Stuff.ppt

[gabosaurus]

You know what they say:
There are lies, damn lies and statistics.

[Hobbit]

I've taken statistics classes before, and while unethical, it is PAINFULLY easy to take a statistical analysis and alter the level of significance (accuracy) to change the conclusion. In fact, there's a value called the P-value, which is the value of the accuracy at which your conclusion changes.