Steve, I know the kind of day you had, I had a similar one! The statistics that is used many time in Flow (according to my readings) is the Kolmogorov-Smirnov Stat. or as the Becton people call it the "Vodka Statistic". There is an article in the Journal of Histochemistry and Cytochemistry, 1977: 25:935-941 by I.T. Young that could be helpful. If you have the CellQuest software the stat is generated automatically when doing histogram overlays. I am sure that there are many other stats out there. Good luck and I hope that your week improves! Ed ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: "Sadistics" Author: (INTERNET)steve@cb.uga.edu at external Date: 11/17/97 6:25 PM Help! It's been one of those days. I'm not about to say everything has gone wrong (I still have to make it home safely) but Murphy rules today. Now the last straw: I was in the middle of running an endless rack of samples for a user who was 3 HOURS late, when I got a call from a grad student who works for one of the hot PI's on campus. She ran some samples 6 months ago, and now she wants me to explain how to test for statistical significance between overlapping populations. Right now. Like she has a presentation tomorrow. Ignoring my gut reaction to this type of demand, I embarassed to admit that I've been in flow 5 years and I've never been hit with this question. What IS the best way to approach this type of data? If I understood her correctly these are all "positive" samples, but she wants to assure her prof. that their slight differences in fluorescence are not significant. The Elite gives us mean and SD, so can we just use whatever test you would use to test any other pair of populations? Is there a problem in using these means, which are reported not as channel numbers but as values ranging from 0.1 to 1000 ? A simple answer would be great, but I suppose I'm ultimately after the correct answer, simple or not. Actually right now all I'm after is a stiff scotch, but I'd love to come in tomorrow and read all your thoughtful replies. Thanks in advance, I love you guys! Steve--who's too tired to think of anything witty for a closer..... --------------------------------------------------------------- Steve G. Hilliard steve@habanero.cb.uga.edu If you're a runner you should be dead. http://storm.cadcam.iupui.edu/drs/drs.html ---------------------------------------------------------------
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