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Let me start this off by saying I think it is a REALLY neat idea, Alex . It shows some real ingenuity on your part; but….
Speaking as an expert in statistics, I will say this has an extremely high potential for being a meaningless compilation of data if great care isn't taken. Jody, Rock, Jason, and Simon have all brought up critical points. If you don’t go by the area of the coin’s origin, the data will be meaningless. We already know in general, that P varieties will originate in the East and the D varieties will originate in Midwest/West, so we are looking to know SPECIFICALLY what area the coin made its FIRST appearance after it was minted. This is essentially only knowable if it came from an OBW from a bank that you know, and even then I am not positive these don’t travel. Even if a variety is found in pocket change, who knows how many times it was previously spent and how far it traveled to get to your pocket? Like Rock points out, what good is knowing that 1 was found is PA, 1 in Maryland, 2 in New York, 1 in Georgia, and 1 in CA? This tells us nothing we didn’t already know. Furthermore, I will add an extremely important point that hasn’t been mentioned yet. You will need a sufficiently large sample size of data for each entry in order to have even the slightest degree of confidence in what the data might seem to suggest. This is unlikely to happen in my opinion unless you can gather accurate information from many other resources than just here on LCR. Also, don’t forget the time of the find is also an extremely important factor. So, unless you get a whole lot of data like Bob offered in a recent 1963D thread, where he says, “In 1976, I found 26 of these in the two years I was stationed in Abilene Texas,” I don’t believe this experiment will yield anything truly valuable.
On a side note, let me ask this: Even if you could grow this into something meaningful, how would you use the information? For example, since you know there was a concentration of 1963D 1DO-001s found in Abilene, Texas in 1976, how do you use that information? Do you go back in a time machine to Texas to find the variety you need? Just some thoughts I had. Please don’t let my skepticism stand in the way of going for it. Like I said, I think it is a cool idea and could yield some interesting information and discussion. You should ask your cyber teacher if you can get some math credit for this project. You could do some calculations, plots and graphs and such for it. Good luck with this, and I will be happy to help where I can.
Speaking as an expert in statistics, I will say this has an extremely high potential for being a meaningless compilation of data if great care isn't taken. Jody, Rock, Jason, and Simon have all brought up critical points. If you don’t go by the area of the coin’s origin, the data will be meaningless. We already know in general, that P varieties will originate in the East and the D varieties will originate in Midwest/West, so we are looking to know SPECIFICALLY what area the coin made its FIRST appearance after it was minted. This is essentially only knowable if it came from an OBW from a bank that you know, and even then I am not positive these don’t travel. Even if a variety is found in pocket change, who knows how many times it was previously spent and how far it traveled to get to your pocket? Like Rock points out, what good is knowing that 1 was found is PA, 1 in Maryland, 2 in New York, 1 in Georgia, and 1 in CA? This tells us nothing we didn’t already know. Furthermore, I will add an extremely important point that hasn’t been mentioned yet. You will need a sufficiently large sample size of data for each entry in order to have even the slightest degree of confidence in what the data might seem to suggest. This is unlikely to happen in my opinion unless you can gather accurate information from many other resources than just here on LCR. Also, don’t forget the time of the find is also an extremely important factor. So, unless you get a whole lot of data like Bob offered in a recent 1963D thread, where he says, “In 1976, I found 26 of these in the two years I was stationed in Abilene Texas,” I don’t believe this experiment will yield anything truly valuable.
On a side note, let me ask this: Even if you could grow this into something meaningful, how would you use the information? For example, since you know there was a concentration of 1963D 1DO-001s found in Abilene, Texas in 1976, how do you use that information? Do you go back in a time machine to Texas to find the variety you need? Just some thoughts I had. Please don’t let my skepticism stand in the way of going for it. Like I said, I think it is a cool idea and could yield some interesting information and discussion. You should ask your cyber teacher if you can get some math credit for this project. You could do some calculations, plots and graphs and such for it. Good luck with this, and I will be happy to help where I can.
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