![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Arrrgh bio!
Mar. 29th, 2005 21:40I have a paper due in biology this term, on the topic of how two plant hormones affect the growth of regular and dwarfed pea plant varieties.
When is it due? Hell if I know.
We have a whole crapload of data we just finished collecting, on the heights of six groups of plants (control, gibberellic acid, and auxin, a tall and a dwarf for each). What are we supposed to do with the data? Um... graph it? I think?
We're supposed to run a statistical analysis called "Anova" on the data. What's that? Hell if I know. It's in my calculator. What do I do with the numbers my calculator spits out if I tell it to do this "Analysis of variance"? Chorus: Hell if I know.
Am I wrong in recalling that statistics is not a requirement for this class? Oh, wait -- I've had statistics, and I still have only the slightest vaguest clue of what this Anova might mean. It's somewhere off in the reaches beyond Chi-squared where my statistics class did not venture.
What conclusions am I supposed to be drawing from this data? I think I have a good grasp of what's supposed to be happening.... but it's hard to tell because the college libraries are closed during this, the only week I actually have the time to work on the paper, and neither the Internet nor the public library has sufficient coverage of this topic -- where the bulk of the research was completed fifty years ago. I'm going to end up writing this paper without references, then shoehorning them in later because I'm required to cite five works.
I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to take this data as if I had never seen it before, mess with it in all sorts of ways that seem like they might show some trend, then write a proper scientific paper based on what I find. I am going to ignore all of my teacher's "advice" up until the very end, when I am going to write a very nasty letter about this ass-hattery and paper-clip it to the paper I've finally produced.
I. Hate. This. Class.
When is it due? Hell if I know.
We have a whole crapload of data we just finished collecting, on the heights of six groups of plants (control, gibberellic acid, and auxin, a tall and a dwarf for each). What are we supposed to do with the data? Um... graph it? I think?
We're supposed to run a statistical analysis called "Anova" on the data. What's that? Hell if I know. It's in my calculator. What do I do with the numbers my calculator spits out if I tell it to do this "Analysis of variance"? Chorus: Hell if I know.
Am I wrong in recalling that statistics is not a requirement for this class? Oh, wait -- I've had statistics, and I still have only the slightest vaguest clue of what this Anova might mean. It's somewhere off in the reaches beyond Chi-squared where my statistics class did not venture.
What conclusions am I supposed to be drawing from this data? I think I have a good grasp of what's supposed to be happening.... but it's hard to tell because the college libraries are closed during this, the only week I actually have the time to work on the paper, and neither the Internet nor the public library has sufficient coverage of this topic -- where the bulk of the research was completed fifty years ago. I'm going to end up writing this paper without references, then shoehorning them in later because I'm required to cite five works.
I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to take this data as if I had never seen it before, mess with it in all sorts of ways that seem like they might show some trend, then write a proper scientific paper based on what I find. I am going to ignore all of my teacher's "advice" up until the very end, when I am going to write a very nasty letter about this ass-hattery and paper-clip it to the paper I've finally produced.
I. Hate. This. Class.
