OCSTUG meeting Feb 24, 2011

Ottawa Carleton Smalltalk Users Group:

The Great Apple Experiment Software
David Buck A few weeks ago, our local Scout troop did an experiment to earn their science badges. David wrote some software in Smalltalk to organize the experiment and calculate the results? How do you capture over 2000 numbers collected from 20 scouts and calculate results within an hour? Come and find out.


Location: The Code Factory
246 Queen Street, Ottawa
Thursday, February 24th, 2011 at 6:00pm

Great Apple Experiment results

Well, the Great Apple Experiment by my son's scout troop is finished.  We had all the scouts rank their own apples then rank all of the other apples on a scale from 1 (best looking) to 9 (worst looking).  Excluding the scout's ranking of their own apples, I averaged the ratings for each type of apple and got the following results:

• Love
• Mean: 4.23
• Standard Deviation: 2.43
• Mean rating of scout's own apples: 3.31
• Hate
• Mean: 4.54
• Standard Deviation: 2.34
• Mean rating of scout's own apples: 3.5
•  Neutral
• Mean: 4.82
• Standard Deviation: 2.41
• Mean rating of scout's own apples: 4.9
•  Control
• Mean: 4.18
• Standard Deviation: 2.41
• Mean rating of scout's own apples: 3.8
• Lemon
• Mean: 3.48
• Standard Deviation: 2.57
• Mean rating of scout's own apples: 3.38
• Open Air
• Mean: 7.50
• Standard Deviation: 2.11
• Mean rating of scout's own apples: 7.75

The following graph shows the number of each of the rankings from 1 to 9 for each type of apple.

The  Lemon line clearly shows a benefit with 62 apple slices being ranked as 1.  The open air apples were the worst with 109 being ranked as 9.  The remaining apples seemed to follow a very similar distribution.

The results don't demonstrate any positive effect of saying nice things to apples or any negative effect of saying bad things to apples.  We're left with the null hypothesis that saying things to apples is ineffective.

Thanks to all the scouts who participated and congratulations on earning your science badges.