Week 10 -- Finalizing, Paper, and Presentation

Well, now I’ve got all my data. Working with Kevan was pretty interesting but quite monotonous, all I did was mix my catalyst into a solution of water and premade stock for each ocean condition and let it sit for an hour, while every ten minutes I’d get up and sample it. I decided to not run a UV-Vis test between each sampling time because 10 minutes was just too short. When I initially tried doing so, centrifuging, diluting, measuring and cleaning just took too long, especially cleaning, since I didn’t have a sink I could rinse the cuvette out with. Normally, I’d quickly stick the cuvette in the sink and use the tap to quickly clean it, but I didn’t have the ability to do so at NVIGEN, so I ended up waiting until I had all my samples before measuring each one. While this may have caused some additional degradation while it sat, I did cover them in aluminum foil to reduce light exposure, which, in theory, would stop the reaction.

Anyways, with my data, I ended up plotting the difference between my experimental group and my control group, because it showed the trend more cleanly than separately plotting the points. That said, though, my statistical test was still with the two samples. I ended up using the Mann-Whitney U test. Those students who have taken AP Statistics might know about such tests, and while a 2 sample t test would be the most obvious course of action, my sample size, 6, was just too small for the t test to reliably give me a result. Moreover, my data was anything but normal. Therefore, this was perfect for the Mann-Whitney U, or the Wilcoxon ranked sum test. This test is great for small data sets, and is intentionally made for non normal data. Even better, it only works on continuous data, and with my absorbance measurements being of that type, it was perfect. My stats ended up showing a statistically significant difference in the saline and hardness solution groups, but no statistically significant difference in the pH groups.

As I have finished my paper, now all I need to do is polish my presentation and I will be good to go.