I am currently preparing a proposal for submission and one piece of information that the agency suggests is the power required to distinguish effects. This is obviously a perfectly reasonable piece of information to request; however, power calculations fall into that class of things that I know that I should know but I don't. It is one of those topics that every statistics book will tell you is important, but either a) glosses over the topic, or b) provides such a deep background that it is impossible to follow what the authors are talking about. Additionally, power calculations are complicated enormously by the fact that sample designs can become very ...