Can alligators cause blocked toilets?

La mult i ani, S tefane!

The Green Cow June 9, 2013

A few weeks ago, your cow went to Romania. This country is rather unknown to tourists. However, it is a very beautiful country with real nice people. They are not only nice, they also have a lot of humor. In the stables where your cow was sleeping, they put up a sign asking to throw only toilet paper in the toilets. The sign listed some things that should not be thrown into the toilets. One of the things on the list were alligators. At rst I just smiled about the sign. After a while, I started thinking about the potential impact of such a sign. Maybe they put the sign because they really had some issues with alligators. The best way to nd out the impact of the sign, is o course to do an experiment. The rst thing to do is to formulate a research question. In this case: are alligators a main cause of blocked toilets in hostels in Romania? One way to answer the question is to ask the managers of the hostels to count how often they found alligators in the toilets of their hostels. However, it is still possible that the alligators manage to free themselves after being ushed away. In this way they might cause a blockage of the toilet, without being noticed. Therefore we need an indirect approach. A typical way to conduct such an experiment is a randomized trial. Hostels participating in such a study would be asked randomly to put a sign mentioning alligators or not. The year following the placement of the signs, the number of interventions by a plumber will be registered. To improve precision of the experiment, we can make it a cross-over study. Then we do the study for two years. In the second years the signs are switched. The hostels with an alligator sign in the rst year will have a non-alligator sign in the second year and vice versa. The number of plumber interventions can than be compared from year to year and between the two groups of hostels. The experiment will give us a database as demonstrated in table 1. Each hostel is counted twice in the table: once for the year with alligator sign and once for the year without alligator sign. Once this database is constructed there are some fancy statistical techniques to compare the numbers of plumber interventions in the years with and without the sign. This tests can give us a P-value enabling us to draw inference on alligators as a cause of blocked toilets.

Hostel Transylvanian Transylvanian Romanian Youth Romanian Youth ...

Group Alligator Non-Alligator Non-Alligator Alligator ...

Year 2014 2015 2014 2015 ...

Interventions 0 5 8 4 ...

Table 1: The data are not real and for illustrative purpose only

Or could we? The problem with experiments is that they do not say anything about causation. It is well possible that there is a statistical signicant correlation between the number of plumber interventions and the presence of the alligators signs. However, that does not mean that the alligators cause the blockage. Obviously, people pay more attention to a sign mentioning alligators than to a standard sign. Paying more attention to the sign causes them to be more careful. Or maybe they to want to cause any trouble to people who made them smile.