Control

This should be the name of the mysterious head of some super-secret, government trouble-shooting team, a la the Mission Impossible team, as in “Control, this is Golden Condor. Mission gone sideways. Request backup.”

It’s really the name for the procedures and preventatives we put in place when we run an experiment to make sure our results actually show that a change in one variable caused a change in another...instead of some other variable we didn’t account for muddling the results.

Controls can be things like single- and double-blinding (which limit who’s getting what treatment in an experiment), control groups (which are groups that get no treatment while other groups get the fancy new pills, so we can be sure it’s the pills and not just random luck that everyone’s ear hair fell out), and careful measurement (which prevents bad data collection). Putting proper controls in place at all phases of the experiment means our results are that much more meaningful and reliable.