Statistics and chemists — like water and oil?
Chemists, in general, don’t like statistics. I guess they may be the horde of natural scientists who despise statistics the most… even though many of us could profit from a better understanding. Once you are out there in industry things change much: efficient use of resources becomes as much a necessity as anywhere else.
Here is my question to those chemists out there (in academia): what problems do you tackle with stat-fu?
And here are some links that may be of interest:
I use statistics any time I want to make a quantitative statement on same chemical fact. Any chemist should do that! I’m sure the error bar if the outcome of a synthesis is ‘oil’ is not so important, but there are numerous applications in bench chemistry, I’d say.
Going beyond that… statistics is a great tool to analyze a large pile of experimental results, where approaches can come up with new ideas, the experts never though of. But mind the ‘garbage in, garbage out’… it the chemist produces inaccurate experimental facts, don’t expect a computer to magically fix it.
Egon, how do you digthrou data - software-wise? Just Excel? Text files? SPSS?