[TowerTalk] My Yearly Mistake
Al Kozakiewicz
akozak at hourglass.com
Sun Aug 16 22:17:54 EDT 2015
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 at contesting.com] On Behalf Of Patrick Greenlee
Sent: Sunday, August 16, 2015 10:07 PM
To: towertalk at 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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