Background
On the TV show Mythbusters, one of the early investigations was of the belief that when buttered toast falls on the floor, it is more likely to land butter-side down (messy) than butter-side up.
- Optional Video
| Pre-study: First, they needed a device to drop the toast “without bias.” So they built and tested a mechanism for dropping toast. Once they have a working mechanism, the plan to repeatedly drop toast buttered on one sided to see whether there is convincing evidence a tendency for it to land butter-side down. In the test runs, one side of the unbuttered toast was labeled “top” and the other side was labeled “bottom.” Then they dropped 10 pieces of toast and recorded whether it landed “top” down or “bottom” down, hoping for a 50/50 split. |  |
Research Question 1: Is there convincing evidence of a built-in biase with this dropping mechanism?
Research Question 2: Is there convincing evidence that buttered toast is more likely to land buttered-side down?
Goals: In this lab, you will
- Formalize your analysis of a binary variable
- Derive and use the binomial probability distribution to calculate p-values
