>oh, there's no reason to believe the school's water supply is dangerous This is obviously false. I understand the idea of the confidence interval, I'd say the

>oh, there's no reason to believe the school's water supply is dangerous This is obviously false. I understand the idea of the confidence interval, I'd say the interpretation is : credible evidence for arsenic levels above standards, high variance in data requires further testing. Here is how I am saying it should work : All 33 samples are in a public database D. The R script that generates the statistical analysis is in that same database. Company C says because of results from R based on D I conclude X. Similarly for other companies. The bottom line is if the data is public and competent, unbiased observers exist (many of them do exist) then it becomes much harder to lie with stats.