  In two dimensions, quenched disorder always rounds transitions involving the
breaking of spatial symmetries so, in practice, it can often be difficult to
infer what form the symmetry breaking would take in the ``ideal,'' zero
disorder limit. We discuss methods of data analysis which can be useful for
making such inferences, and apply them to the problem of determining whether
the preferred order in the cuprates is ``stripes'' or ``checkerboards.'' In
many cases we show that the experiments clearly indicate stripe order, while in
others (where the observed correlation length is short), the answer is
presently uncertain.
