Table of Contents

• Prequiz...
• 1: Do those shoes fit?
• 2: Dilbert's 3 day work week
• 3: The day is saved . or not
• 4: The Brute Force method
• 5: Computer = brute force
• 6: What's your threshold for pain?
• 7: Sick-day sistribution
• 8: A brief recap of the Brute Force Method
• 9: The Brute Force method again
• 10: Using arithmetic instead of Brute Force
• 11: One small correction
• 12: How big is big?
• 13: Degrees of Freedom
• 14: The magic lookup table
• 15: The answer, finally
• 16: Summary of chi-square
• 17: Another example for chi-square
• 18: So, which method do you like better?
• 19: Applications
• 20: Example 1: Testing for a dihybrid ratio
• 21: Example 2: Habitat selection (ecology)
• 22: Review and Words of Wisdom

The Brute Force method

The brute force method to answering this question is to generate a whole lot of data. If we wanted to know if a coin was fair, we could flip it 1000 times and see how many heads came up, right?

This situation with sickdays is a little more complicated. We want to know how often a years worth of sickdays (let's say 100 sickdays in total for 10 employess) contain 42 or more Mondays and Fridays. So what we have to generate is a thousand years worth of sickdays.

How do we do that?

For a computer, its easy to generate 100 randomly chosen sick days. Here's an example:

When you click, the box will fill with 100 randomly chosen sickdays, and the number of Mon/Fri sickdays will be tabulated below. Try clicking several times. Is it unusual to have 42 Monday/Friday sickdays?

Number of Mondays/Fridays:Click below!