TOPIC 27

Correlation Coefficient

In 1970, the United States Selective Service instituted a draft to decide which young men would be forced to join the armed forces. Wanting to be completely fair, they used a random lottery process that assigned draft numbers to birthdays: those born on days with low draft numbers were drafted. But was the lottery process carried out in a fair, truly random manner? In this topic, you will learn a new technique for analyzing such data and answering this question.