Reference no: EM132603823

A researcher designs a double-blind experiment to see if Echinacea tablets are effective at preventing the common cold. She recruits 200 people and divides them into two groups, one of which receives a supply of Echinacea tablets, the other a supply of placebo tablets. She then records the number of colds reported by each participant over the course of a winter season.

a) Draw a bar graph of results, with number of colds on the Y-axis and treatment group on the X axis, that would support the conclusion that Echinacea tablets do NOT influence susceptibility to common colds.

b) You conduct a clinical study on a new sleeping pill that is being developed as a treatment for insomnia. You recruit 400 volunteers between the ages of 18 and 64 that suffer from insomnia, and conduct a double-blind clinical trial in which half of the recruits receive a month's supply of the sleeping pills, the other half a supply of placebo pills, and monitor their insomnia symptoms. Three weeks into your clinical study, data from another research group reveal that the new sleeping pill is less likely to be effective in smokers. In your study you did not recruit or assign volunteers to treatments on the basis of whether or not they smoked. Do you need to cancel your experiment and start over? If not, explain why not, and/or what you can do to salvage the data you've already collected.

c) "We can't figure out how any natural process could account for the complexity of the bacterial flagellum; therefore, an intelligent designer must have put its parts together in the cell." Which type of logical fallacy does this statement represent?