I am forever seeing results published where the statistics or the experiment are flawed and questionable.
Although I can think of an example… Here is a simple example I made up of what I am talking about.
I think the Challenger was on its 18th mission when it exploded
And the Columbia was on it’s 23rd when it burnt up.
So they averaged 20 missions before being destroyed.
So one could say there was a 1 in 20 chance of success for a shuttle mission.
As this sort of correct, I could if I were publishing a paper arguing that the shuttle missions are unsafe use these figures to back up my point.
But then there have been about 107 shuttle missions in total, so one could say that there is a 2 in 107 or 1 in 53 chance for a successful shuttle mission.
Depending on my stand, I could use either of these figures if I was a bad scientist, however the second is more accurate.
While I can think of examples of questionable studies and questionable statistics, can anyone else think of something that they wondered how could this be published ?
