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Re: [TowerTalk] My Yearly Mistake

To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] My Yearly Mistake
From: Patrick Greenlee <patrick_g@windstream.net>
Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2015 21:07:04 -0500
List-post: <towertalk@contesting.com">mailto:towertalk@contesting.com>
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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