This is the first Australian Winegrower article following the Christmas and New Year break. It is at this time of the year that many people commit, however briefly to New Year resolutions after some soul searching and personal examination of the past year. Many New Year resolutions have a very brief shelf life, and the intent may not be matched by the commitment needed for change. The discipline of self- assessment is the hard part.

We have reanalyzed a selection of data obtained from laser scintillation experiments in the light of recent criticisms of analysis techniques based on the moments of the data. In agreement with those criticisms, we find that comparing the higher moments of the data with those of model distributions can produce misleading results. We therefore use a least-squares fitting method to compare directly the experimental probability distributions with the models. The conclusion of the earlier experiments, that the K distribution is generally better than the log-normal distribution in the strong-scintillation regime, however, is not changed by the new analysis.