Bisphenol A in Your Soup Cans Bisphenol A (BPA) is in the lining of most canned goods, and recent studies have shown a positive association between BPA exposure and behavior and health problems. How much does canned soup consumption increase urinary BPA concentration? That was the question addressed in a recent study1 in which consumption of canned soup over five days was associated with a more than 1000% increase in urinary BPA. In the study, 75 participants ate either canned soup or fresh soup for lunch for five days. On the fifth day, urinary BPA levels were measured. After a two-day break, the participants switched groups and repeated the process. The difference in BPA levels between the two treatments was measured for each participant. The study reports that a 95% confidence interval for the difference in means (canned minus fresh) is 19.6 to 25.5 μg/L. (a) Is this a randomized comparative experiment or a matched pairs experiment? Randomized comparative experiment Matched pairs experiment (d) If the study had included 500 participants instead of 75, would you expect the confidence interval to be wider or narrower? Wider Narrower
Continuous Probability Distributions
Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.
Normal Distribution
Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!
Bisphenol A in Your Soup Cans
Bisphenol A (BPA) is in the lining of most canned goods, and recent studies have shown a positive association between BPA exposure and behavior and health problems. How much does canned soup consumption increase urinary BPA concentration? That was the question addressed in a recent study1 in which consumption of canned soup over five days was associated with a more than 1000% increase in urinary BPA. In the study, 75 participants ate either canned soup or fresh soup for lunch for five days. On the fifth day, urinary BPA levels were measured. After a two-day break, the participants switched groups and repeated the process. The difference in BPA levels between the two treatments was measured for each participant. The study reports that a 95% confidence interval for the difference in means (canned minus fresh) is 19.6 to 25.5 μg/L.
(a) Is this a randomized comparative experiment or a matched pairs experiment?
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Randomized comparative experiment |
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Matched pairs experiment
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(d) If the study had included 500 participants instead of 75, would you expect the confidence interval to be wider or narrower?
|
Wider |
|
Narrower |
If the experimental groups are called 'block' then those concept is called randomized block design. In each block, all the treatments appear at least once. The matched pair experiment and randomized comparative experiment are coming under the randomized block design concept.
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