One study I spotted in Richard Dawkins’ The God delusion this summer by the lake is a study of the (im)possible impact of prayer over patient’s recovery. As a coincidence, my daughter got this problem in her statistics class of last week (my translation):
1802 patients in 6 US hospitals have been divided into three groups. Members in group A was told that unspecified religious communities would pray for them nominally, while patients in groups B and C did not know if anyone prayed for them. Those in group B had communities praying for them while those in group C did not. After 14 days of prayer, the conditions of the patients were as follows:
- out of 604 patients in group A, the condition of 249 had significantly worsened;
- out of 601 patients in group B, the condition of 289 had significantly worsened;
- out of 597 patients in group C, the condition of 293 had significantly worsened.
Use a chi-square procedure to test the homogeneity between the three groups, a significant impact of prayers, and a placebo effect of prayer.
This may sound a wee bit weird for a school test, but she is in medical school after all so it is a good way to enforce rational thinking while learning about the chi-square test! (Answers: [even though the data is too sparse to clearly support a decision, esp. when using the chi-square test!] homogeneity and placebo effect are acceptable assumptions at level 5%, while the prayer effect is not [if barely].)
A few days ago, I was grading my last set of homeworks for the MCMC graduate course I teach to both Dauphine and ENSAE graduate students. A few students had chosen to write a travelling salesman simulated annealing code (Exercice 7.22 in Monte Carlo Statistical Methods) and one of them included this quote
