Tesing 1, 2, 3...

What can we learn from this unsettling outcome? It could’ve been a fluke. At the 95-percent confidence level that statisticians talk about, one test in 20 will be a fluke. It also could’ve been caused by a failure of randomness in how the segments were created. For example, the computer operator who split the segment, rather than doing a true nth-select, could instead have just chopped the group in half. If the original list was alphabetized, that would put all the As, Bs and Cs in one group, and all the Xs, Ys and Zs in the other.