1.30 Vitamin supplements. To assess the effectiveness of taking large doses of vitamin C in reducing the duration of the common cold, researchers recruited 400 healthy volunteers from staff and students at a university. A quarter of the patients were assigned a placebo, and the rest were evenly divided between lg Vitamin C, 3g Vitamin C, or 3g Vitamin C plus additives to be taken at onset of a cold for the following two days. All tablets had identical appearance and packaging. The nurses who handed the prescribed pills to the patients knew which patient received which treatment, but the researchers assessing the patients when they were sick did not. No significant differences were observed in any measure of cold duration or severity between the four groups, and the placebo group had the shortest duration of symptoms. (a) Was this an experiment or an observational study? Why? (b) What are the explanatory and response variables in this study? (c) Were the patients blinded to their treatment? (d) Was this study double-blind? (e) Participants are ultimately able to choose whether or not to use the pills prescribed to them. We might expect that not all of them will adhere and take their pills. Does this introduce a confounding variable to the study? Explain your reasoning.
Compound Probability
Compound probability can be defined as the probability of the two events which are independent. It can be defined as the multiplication of the probability of two events that are not dependent.
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Probability theory is a branch of mathematics that deals with the subject of probability. Although there are many different concepts of probability, probability theory expresses the definition mathematically through a series of axioms. Usually, these axioms express probability in terms of a probability space, which assigns a measure with values ranging from 0 to 1 to a set of outcomes known as the sample space. An event is a subset of these outcomes that is described.
Conditional Probability
By definition, the term probability is expressed as a part of mathematics where the chance of an event that may either occur or not is evaluated and expressed in numerical terms. The range of the value within which probability can be expressed is between 0 and 1. The higher the chance of an event occurring, the closer is its value to be 1. If the probability of an event is 1, it means that the event will happen under all considered circumstances. Similarly, if the probability is exactly 0, then no matter the situation, the event will never occur.
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