3 ms·

You would have to be very confident in the accuracy of your measurements to throw away your margin of error like that. If you report values 13% lower to try to

You would have to be very confident in the accuracy of your measurements to throw away your margin of error like that. If you report values 13% lower to try to appeal to consumers and your lab numbers are off by 3%, now you're wrong by over 15% and you're going to have a problem (if anyone even notices, or cares). Are there any Polish media reports about this practice? It sounds like the kind of thing the American media would love to report about if it was happening here. (Anything that fits the basic format of "Are companies misreporting arsenic levels in your child's grape juice? Story at eleven!" is going to make a journalist here salivate.)

chris_va 10y ago
Kind of reminds me of this story: http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/Teach/Math//Gamow_BreadRationingStory.pdf http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/Teach/Math//Gamow...
- alexbock 10y ago
  Would it be possible for the baker to distribute bread to customers in such a way that the weight appears to follow a fair curve for any one customer, but is still unfair if all loaves for all customers were analyzed in aggregate? (something like Simpson's paradox?) After the professor first discovered him he obviously could have started giving him loaves calculated to follow the fair distribution, but I'm not sure if it's possible to scale that technique.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    If he is able to control the loaf the professor gets he could buy 1 correct form.
  - chris_va 10y ago
    Each customer would need to see a normal distribution (possible), and each would need the mean to match the "correct" value (not possible without the overall mean matching the correct value).
  - sukilot 10y ago
    A bread loaf is discrete . Use the same fractional unit rounding technique from Superman II / Office Space.
- sukilot 10y ago
  There's a book with an apocryphal story about how a coin maker was a accused of cheating because his gold coins had excessive standard error, before the discovery of standard deviation.
baddox 10y ago
Well who does the measurement to determine the percent error? Presumably it would be the government or some lab at the request of the government, so food manufacturers could just use that same lab.

chris_va 10y ago

Kind of reminds me of this story: http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/Teach/Math//Gamow_BreadRationingStory.pdf http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/Teach/Math//Gamow...

alexbock 10y ago
Would it be possible for the baker to distribute bread to customers in such a way that the weight appears to follow a fair curve for any one customer, but is still unfair if all loaves for all customers were analyzed in aggregate? (something like Simpson's paradox?) After the professor first discovered him he obviously could have started giving him loaves calculated to follow the fair distribution, but I'm not sure if it's possible to scale that technique.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  If he is able to control the loaf the professor gets he could buy 1 correct form.
- chris_va 10y ago
  Each customer would need to see a normal distribution (possible), and each would need the mean to match the "correct" value (not possible without the overall mean matching the correct value).
- sukilot 10y ago
  A bread loaf is discrete . Use the same fractional unit rounding technique from Superman II / Office Space.
sukilot 10y ago
There's a book with an apocryphal story about how a coin maker was a accused of cheating because his gold coins had excessive standard error, before the discovery of standard deviation.

baddox 10y ago

Well who does the measurement to determine the percent error? Presumably it would be the government or some lab at the request of the government, so food manufacturers could just use that same lab.