Project 1. Reporting a medical study. Many of the major articles in medical journals concern statistically designed studies and report the results of inference, usually either P-values or 95% confidence intervals. You can find summaries of current articles on the websites of the Journal of the American Medical Association (jama.ama-assn.org) and the New England Journal of Medicine (www.nejm.org). A full copy may require paying a fee or visiting the library. Choose an article that describes a medical experiment on a topic that is understandable to those of us who lack medical training—anger and heart attacks and fiber in the diet to reduce cholesterol are two examples used in Chapters 21 and 22. Write a two-paragraph news article explaining the results of the study.

Then write a brief discussion of how you decided what to put in the news article and what to leave out. For example, if you omitted details of statistical significance or of confidence intervals, explain why. What did you say about the design of the study, and why? News writers must regularly make decisions like these.