Stats, stats, stats
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Abstract
I was thinking about the power of statistics in relation to one piece of data that you may have seen in the media recently. It goes as follows: 7% of U.S. adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. This is staggering. While reading the article that cited these data I wondered about the size of the study that this number had been extracted from, whether it skewed toward a specific group of respondents, and whether the respondents had simply misunderstood the question. I found it so ridiculous that I even wondered whether people knowingly chose the wrong answer simply because it was funny. Could it be that 7% of U.S. adults have such a sense of humor? Cows and chocolate milk aside, statistics are everywhere. Love them or hate them, they are a fantastically powerful tool that allows us to uncover trends in past events as well as