A student's report has pointed out to me an analysis technique that I shall in future undertake on every possible occasion and with gusto: ``box and whisky plots''.
-- Alan Reese

The trouble with box and whisky plots is that they tend to make all distributions look skew or even multimodal.
-- Dick Brown

Well, you just apply the Kolmogorov Smirnov test for normality, which consists of drinking vodka and looking at your data from time to time until it looks normal enough to you.
-- Ronan Conroy

.... it certainly beats the tea-test ....
-- John Newell

This must be distinguished from the Kolmogorov Smirnov Two-Sample Test for Differences, which is viewed as being more robust than the Watney-Mann U (or Spew) Test.
In the version of the K-S test I know, you need a quantity of vodka (amount determined from a ``degrees of proof'' procedure similar to power considerations) and your data. You look at your data.
A) *If* the relevant differences look statistically significant, drink the vodka, and look at them again. If differences still look significant, they are; if they don't, bget more vodka, and carry on with option B.
B) If the data do not look significant, drink the vodka as consolation.

-- David Stretch

Author: Berwin A Turlach
Date Last modified:Wed Jan 3 10:03:20 SGT 2007
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