In the study, the authors used Hirisplex to predict hair colour phenotypes in a sample drawn from three European populations.

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If the document sample drawn from the population is too small, the defendant might unwittingly produce far fewer than 80% of the responsive documents due to erroneous calculations resulting from flawed sampling procedures.

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The World Bank looked at a sample drawn from 52m migrants in 20 rich countries in 2000 and found that 36% of them had a college education, a sharp rise on a decade earlier.

ECONOMIST: Open up | The

The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and GlaxoSmithKline (nyse: GSK - news - people ), looked at a patient sample drawn from nearly 13, 000 patients over nearly six years.

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The study sample is drawn from all phone numbers--listed and unlisted--in the United States to ensure maximum diversity.

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Although sampling can also lead to errors if, for instance, the characteristics of the sample group differ from those of the population from which the sample is drawn the errors will be smaller and can be measured more precisely.

ECONOMIST: Statistics

Then the bureau wants to conduct a second sample of 750, 000 households drawn from all ethnic groups and locations.

ECONOMIST: Statistics

The estimates for job creation are drawn from a fairly large sample size.

WSJ: What's Behind the Jobs Report?

And again, this data will not be drawn from any sort of representative sample of global humanity, but from a narrow subset about which we already know a lot.

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So, although there have been controversial cases usually those that have ignored the fact that people from the same ethnic group share particular genetic signatures more often than people drawn at random from the population finding the right signatures in a sample generally does mean you're nicked.

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