It's almost St. Patrick's day -- when even non-beer-drinkers
usually get into the spirit and hoist a Guinness, or at the very
least don some Guinness memorabilia. Let's take a nontraditional
approach to honoring the brew that will be so popular tomorrow
by looking at someone behind the scenes who helped create
Guinness' high-quality and consistent signature brew, and who
revolutionized the world of quantitative research: a
statistician. Beer and statistics? That's right ... Imagine my
delight as I stumbled upon the great beer-statistics connection
when doing some reading a few weeks ago for my Quantitative
Analysis communication class, and in my reading I learned about
the t-test, which, in the simplest of terms, allows a researcher
to compare small sample means (mathematical averages) to learn
more about a population as a whole. The original t-test was
developed by William Sealy Gosset, a biochemist who worked for
Guinness in the early 20th century. At this time, the Guinness
brewery was taking the progressi