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Re: [TowerTalk] My Yearly Mistake

To: "towertalk@contesting.com" <towertalk@contesting.com>
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] My Yearly Mistake
From: Al Kozakiewicz <akozak@hourglass.com>
Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2015 20:12:52 +0000
List-post: <towertalk@contesting.com">mailto:towertalk@contesting.com>
>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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