May 3, 2004

• AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

  A.P. Statistics test tomorrow.

  You know it's bad when In Stake Conference the speaker talks about Stats. Yesterday one of the area authorities was talking about tests that prove various outcomes. For example, it you wanted to find out if drug x was effective against a certain disease, then you would gather a random simple sample from a population. You would randomly select half to get a treatment, drug x, and half to get a control, or placebo. To be really accurate you would include double blindness and replication in the experiment. If the people taking the drug do better than those with the placebo, it'd be a good idea to use that drug.

  Apparently God conducted an experiment to prove to men that the scriptures are effective against moral disease. God took a random simple sample from the anciet Hebrew population in Jerusalem, around 600 B.C. They were separated randomly into two groups. The first group was Lehi and his family. After leaving the city, they were told by God to back into Jerusalem to get the Brass Plates (scriptures) from Laban. Then they went to the promised land and became a mighty civilization. The second group later became known as the Mulekites. Mulek was the son of King Zedekiah who escaped the genocide of Zedekiah's family. He escaped Jerusalem and ended up in the promised land, but he brought no scriptures. After a few hundred years, Mulek's descendents were not only morally corupt, but they had forgotten the language and religion of their fathers. Since it is obvious that scriptures did make the people who used them better off, we can conclude that it'd be a good idea to use them.

  Random Sample - Control vs. Treatment randomly assigned - Data compared

  It's sheer statics, will probably be one of the essay questions on the AP test tomorrow, and I learned it first from the Book of Mormon. Go figure.

  • 7:47 pm
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