I should have paid more attention in statistics class..

Looking at the lichen questions from last time, there are two different lines of inquiry. First: Central fluffiness. We have a theory (Flavoparmelia baltimorensis gets fluffy in the middle when it reaches a certain age/size) and we need to find out if that's true. How?

First off, I should survey a bunch of them and list size and fluffiness. Probably pictures would also be helpful in case someone else wanted to see if my measure of fluffiness (I be eyeballin' it, mebbe, but I was at the periodontist's the other day and he has a small metal pokey thing that I bet is surgical stainless steel (so nonreactive and probably won't bother the lichens) and it has mm's marked on it to like 10 mm's or so and I bet that would be a great tool for getting accurate "fluffiness" measurements of lichens and whoa, amazon sells these for like six bucks...) was legit or not. There will, I expect, be some edge cases that are "not quite fluffy" or whatever, but I will not know that until I go out and look at some damn lichens and by some, I mean "a lot". (How many? I should have paid more attention in statistics class, but I still have the book somewhere. Determining sample size for studies was a thing we covered in statistics.) So that's not terribly difficult.

But, doing that sort of descriptive survey would only answer "How is the current F. baltimorensis population sorted with respect to fluffiness and size?" I mean, it's a good question and I could totally generate a plot or something with the size of the lichens (X axis) and their respective fluffiness (Y axis) and see what we get there. Ideally, I'd get a trend line that slopes up and to the right if there's a positive correlation of some kind going on there.

HOWEVER, it may be that some F. baltimorensis are fluffy and others are not fluffy and some are a little fluffy and ALL OF THIS fluffiness variation is due to like, genetics or sunshine or relative dampness or something else. If that's the case, I get no trend line at all and maybe only ever noticed "fluffiness" on the big ones because I'm stupid. That, also would be interesting to learn. (I am reasonably certain of my ability to identify these lichens appropriately so that I only have the right kind in my survey. They are exceedingly common in my area, like you have no idea how common.)

But, if it turns out that size and fluffiness increase together (as seen by a gently upward sloping line from "small and unfluffy" to "bigger and more fluffy" to "really big and really fluffy"), then what would really be super-helpful at that juncture would be to follow some lichens for a time to see if they are BECOMING more fluffy as they get bigger. Like, do a longitudinal study of them and measure their size and fluffiness as they go along. I don't know how long that would take because I don't know how fast they grow, which is what I'm going to look at for next time.

Publicado el febrero 24, 2018 01:00 MAÑANA por whichchick