It's not a normal distribution and the variance is high, so neither the median
or average tells you much about the population.
Is Mugsy Bogues on that island?
Al
AB2ZY
-----Original Message-----
From: TowerTalk [mailto:towertalk-bounces@contesting.com] On Behalf Of Patrick
Greenlee
Sent: Sunday, August 16, 2015 10:07 PM
To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] My Yearly Mistake
On an Island populated by pygmies and NBA stars in equal numbers what good
would an average height be?
On 8/16/2015 3:12 PM, Al Kozakiewicz wrote:
>> Which is why knowing the distribution....
> As not everything has a Gaussian (normal; bell) distribution. Much of what is
> taught in the typical statistics course for non-mathematicians focusses on
> normal distributions and their variants because they nicely represent so much
> of real life populations of measurements.
>
> W/R/T median and average, there is no "right" one. It all depends on the
> nature of what it is you're measuring and what you want to know. The median
> is useful for a lot of sociological data as the question often asked is "what
> is typical for a single data point". For populations that are additive in
> nature (say, rainfall amounts), the average is probably more useful if for no
> other reason than you can multiply it by the number of samples and get the
> total for the dataset.
>
> Al
> AB2ZY
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