|
Fleacircus: If you think the guy is psychic you should take him to vegas and forget the coins. No, seriously in statistics we use alpha and the null hypothesis to determine significance. The null or null hypothesis is the hypothesis of no difference. In the case of your friend the null hypothesis states that his ability to predict the side the coin will land on is no better than anyone else in the population. This is where alpha comes in. Alpha is usually set at .05 which means that he would have to correctly predict the side it landed on more than 95 times out of a hundred to reject the null hypothesis. If he did correctly predict the side the coin would land on 96 times out of 100 you would reject the null hypothesis and he could say that the results of his test throws supported his hypothesis that he was psychic. Just as an add on I have never seen any research that showed a psychic was significantly better at telepathy than the rest of the world.
|