The Lund's grocer I shop at in Northeast Minneapolis does it just this way. Another reason I feel justified spending 20% more for my food :).

The fact that they bag your groceries is another reason. It's common in MN to have to do it yourself.

I hope they went to every store with an "express lane for less than 10 items". Shudder.

Surely there must be some studies that have randomly assigned security vs. no security to properties in neighborhoods, and then tracked theft?

I can second this. I did a Master's in Biostatistics, and have a computing background from undergrad. It sounds like this would be a good fit for you, since you're working in a related field already. In the five years I've been working at universities since my Master's, I've had a lot of different experiences, ranging from large clinical trials to military projects. Your computing background will make you a very valuable asset to almost any group you work in, as a lot of stats people are entering from a math background and have little formal programming experience. It's a really good fit for me, because it allows me to balance my time between consulting, designing studies, and programming to analyze them. R and SAS are the two big programs that people in biostat tend to use. I'd look into it if I were you.

There are, however, many quality degree programs in Statistics. As someone who went through one of them, you can largely choose your own mix of theory and practice. I wonder if this isn't just statistics rebranded? I hope it doesn't concentrate too much on certain proprietary software packages. Statistics is like anything else. You can easily produce a bunch of numbers and compile massive books of tables and graphics. But if you don't know the assumptions of each of your methods, and consequently their shortcomings in each situation, you can draw some fairly bad conclusions rather quickly. I just hope this program gives a solid background in theoretical statistical inference, experimental design, and regression analysis, so students understand the 'why'.

I must say I was literally lol'ing the whole time at this post too.

In my experience, what you describe, accounting, is a separate discipline under the Business school, where Economics is usually its own department. An Econ major would almost never need to take a single accounting class I imagine, if they chose not to.

I am a biostatistician.

I have not read the details of this study, but consider the following example, with included R code so you can replicate it. It is a hypothetical study where 6 subjects are randomly determined to be administered treatment, and 6 subjects are randomly given placebo. All 6 in the treatment arm are cured of blindness. None of the 6 in the placebo arm are. The p-value for Fisher's exact test, which is a *conservative* test (i.e., has lower size than the proclaimed alpha level) yields a p-value of ~ 0.002, a highly significant finding. Granted, N = 12, not 6, in my study, but only 6 were given treatment.

Your claims about this not demonstrating safety are valid, as this study was not powered to detect safety issues. But a follow-up study surely will be.

My point is that you don't need a large sample size to prove something causes an event if the odds of the event happening spontaneously are practically nil, as my example shows. And as another poster pointed out, this is how medical research progresses, and you screaming on Slashdot what every third-rate scientist in the medical profession already knows is pointless.

R code:
trial = data.frame(trt = rep(c("Treatment", "Placebo"), each = 6),
                                        out = rep(c("Cured", "Not Cured"), each = 6))

tbl = table(trial$trt, trial$out)

fisher.test(tbl)

        Fisher's Exact Test for Count Data

data: tbl
p-value = 0.002165
alternative hypothesis: true odds ratio is not equal to 1
95 percent confidence interval:
  0.0000000 0.2837803
sample estimates:
odds ratio
                  0

I was talking with my friends about the census. We agreed that after about 10 years of making up data on the web when sites ask for the same questions on the census, that our first instinct when filling it out was to reply with whatever first came to mind. I wonder if the odds of telling the truth on the census are different between the 'internet' generations and those older generations?

Your point of view is right, thank you for sharing, if you have the time, also came to see my site...

If you're going to spam forums, at least learn a bit about the culture there. No self-respecting Slashdotter would start a post how you did.

Now this could actually turn violent!

Read online editions of New England Journal, Lancet, JAMA, etc. There are *plenty* of placebo controlled trials being done all the time by major pharma companies in almost every disease area. I don't know why you wouldn't think there aren't. I've worked on several major ones in the last 5 years.

what might be seen as romantic vs. what might be seen as lame or generic, ... , "Ask Slashdot" isn't really a good place for an answer.

You think?!

It's funny enough that as of my posting, the menu immediately to the right of your linked picture contains an image of Jobs holding an iPad.