[General Battuta]

One score and negative two months ago, I set out to answer one of the enduring questions of our time: why do police officers gun down Black people with such enthusiasm on the street, but not in the lab? For that matter, why do normal people (of both races) massacre Black targets with such zeal in simulations?

I employed only the most cutting-edge technology: millisecond-level reaction time measures, carefully photoshopped jpegs, sixteen-page debriefing questionnaires, keyboards with blue and green stickers, rectal thermometers, and more. One hundred and sixty subjects, $10,000 dollars in grant money and fees, and 422 liters of hot salty tears later, I may be on the verge of an answer!

After weeks of painstaking cleaning and formatting, I have prepared a 59,000 line spreadsheet containing all the relevant data. (The original data spew was so large that it could not be opened in Excel.) All that remains is to submit this data to the merciless gaze of statistical analysis.

Will my results be significant? Will alpha drop under .05? THE FATE OF SCIENCE HANGS IN THE BALANCE.

I also have a massive stack of demographic forms and completed questionnaires that I need to haul back to the lab. Unfortunately, an enthusiastic gym session this morning has left my normally glistening, Adonis-like musculature in a state of tremulous quiescence.

What if I am unable to haul the paperwork to the lab? What if I collapse in a puddle, drowning thousands of items of indispensable demographic information in the oily tar of the spring sidewalks?

Can Battuta finish his research? OR WILL IT ALL BE IN VAIN

[Darius]

Ah, but can the study be replicated by a second party to test for reliability? I'm not sure everyone can come up with the required 422 litres of tears.

[lostllama]

Fax them to the lab?

Wait... "...thousands of items..." Hmm. Maybe not a good idea.

[Liberator]

One score and negative two months ago, I set out to answer one of the enduring questions of our time: why do police officers gun down Black people with such enthusiasm on the street, but not in the lab? For that matter, why do normal people (of both races) massacre Black targets with such zeal in simulations?

I employed only the most cutting-edge technology: millisecond-level reaction time measures, carefully photoshopped jpegs, sixteen-page debriefing questionnaires, keyboards with blue and green stickers, rectal thermometers, and more. One hundred and sixty subjects, $10,000 dollars in grant money and fees, and 422 liters of hot salty tears later, I may be on the verge of an answer!

After weeks of painstaking cleaning and formatting, I have prepared a 59,000 line spreadsheet containing all the relevant data. (The original data spew was so large that it could not be opened in Excel.) All that remains is to submit this data to the merciless gaze of statistical analysis.

Will my results be significant? Will alpha drop under .05? THE FATE OF SCIENCE HANGS IN THE BALANCE.

I also have a massive stack of demographic forms and completed questionnaires that I need to haul back to the lab. Unfortunately, an enthusiastic gym session this morning has left my normally glistening, Adonis-like musculature in a state of tremulous quiescence.

What if I am unable to haul the paperwork to the lab? What if I collapse in a puddle, drowning thousands of items of indispensable demographic information in the oily tar of the spring sidewalks?

Can Battuta finish his research? OR WILL IT ALL BE IN VAIN

Hand trucks and a helper is all I can suggest.

[Shivan Hunter]

carefully photoshopped jpegs

PNG > Jpeg.

Also, get some Vishnans to help prepare a jump node through an alternate universe from wherever you are to the lab. Just watch out for Tevs

[General Battuta]

No significant main effects or interactions beyond the basic expected main effect of training.

[Locutus of Borg]

Don't post drunk

[Shivan Hunter]

Aww. That sucks.

Well, a null result is still a result

Locutus: wat

[terran_emperor]

Look up colonel dekker's many drunk postings

[TrashMan]

So the shocking conclusion is ...that there's not enough information to conclude anything?

[redsniper]

So the shocking conclusion is ...that there's not enough information to conclude anything?

No, that's not really at all what this means. "59,000 line spreadsheet" I think implies that the Battman has plenty of data. It's just that his data shows no significant effects on the dependent variable from the independent variables he was testing.

[karajorma]

As far as I can see, we don't have proof of that much even.

So the shocking conclusion is ...that there's not enough information to conclude anything?

Given that Battuta didn't actually post a conclusion of any kind I believe that's a rather textbook case of jumping to conclusions.

[Liberator]

Given that it's been the better part of two weeks, shouldn't he have heard something?  Or am I applying Common Sense that says an instructor grades their students assignments in a timely fashion or am I off since I've not done any Uni training.

[Shivan Hunter]

errrr, he did. Got a null result.

No significant main effects or interactions beyond the basic expected main effect of training.

[General Battuta]

Given that it's been the better part of two weeks, shouldn't he have heard something?  Or am I applying Common Sense that says an instructor grades their students assignments in a timely fashion or am I off since I've not done any Uni training.

This wasn't an 'assignment' that gets 'graded', this was a full-fledged experimental run. I do the data analysis myself.

And the success of the experiment is not contingent upon whether or not it returns significant results.

[Mongoose]

In other words, sometimes not finding what you're looking for winds up being even more significant than finding it would have been.

[Liberator]

* Liberator is a moron who thought Batt was doing a school project