What’s significant in your life?
Regular person: my partner, my job, my friends,
etc.
Scientist: hopefully my data
In everyday use, significance means that something
is important and meaningful.
For scientists, significance has a very
specific definition, which is referred to as statistical significance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance).
Basically, if I have a result, what are the odds my result occurred from some specific factor versus the odds that my result just occurred by chance. If I'm confident
my result came from some effect, then the result is considered significant.
