mosaic (version 0.6-2)

Seed: Gosset's Experiment on Regular and Kiln-Dried Seeds

Description

William S. Gosset was employed by the Guinness brewing company of Dublin. Sample sizes available for experimentation in brewing were necessarily small, and new techniques for handling the resulting data were needed. Gosset consulted Karl Pearson (1857-1936) of University College in London, who told him that the current state of knowledge was unsatisfactory. Gosset undertook a course of study under Pearson and the outcome of his study was perhaps the most famous paper in statistical literature, "The Probable Error of a Mean" (1908), which introduced the t distribution. Since Gosset was contractually bound by Guinness, he published under a pseudonym, "Student," hence the t distribution is often referred to as Student's t distribution.

Usage

data(Seed)

format

A data frame with 11 observations on the following variables.

• regular.seed

{corn yield (in pounds per acre) planting regular seed} kiln.dried.seed {corn yield (in pounds per acre) planting kiln-dried seed}

Details

As an example to illustrate his analysis, Gosset reported in his paper on the results of seeding 11 different plots of land with two different types of seed: "regular" and "kiln-dried". There is reason to believe that drying seeds before planting will increase plant yield. Since different plots of soil may be naturally more fertile, this confounding variable was eliminated by using the matched pairs design and planting both types of seed in all 11 plots.

The hypothesis is that kiln-dried seed yields more corn than regular seed.

References

Part of the Carnegie Mellon University Online Learning Initiative datasets.