No, I am not writing about going, “Lalalalala! I can't hear you!” when someone is trying to tell you bad news. In the last couple of articles, we have been exploring how to properly perform research in industry. In this one, we will take a look at how you can handle variables in the real world that just get in the way, but still need to be dealt with. And there is a Really Important Thing partway through this article that will save you a lot of money.

So far we have done a good chunk of the research planning. When last we interfaced, we were planning an experiment to see how manipulating different process variables (the “treatments”) would affect the expansion of a complex polymer. But since it is the real world we are working in, we had also identified humidity as a variable that could affect expansion, a variable over which we had little control.

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