Half above and half below, but just who is the pepper picker's son?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Bart" <pb2...@gmail.com>
To: "Discussion of issues relating to Soaring in Australia."
<aus-soaring@lists.internode.on.net>
Sent: Monday, February 15, 2010 10:17 PM
Subject: Re: [Aus-soaring] Average versus median (I am being Mr. Picky...)
On 15 February 2010 14:30, Mike Cleaver <wom...@netspeed.com.au> wrote:
Another bloody pedant statistician!
Far from it, just a bit of harmless fun :)
Paul, have you identified the one who is
the mean and median, and is half of him (or her) above and half below?
Neither really, for even number of values the mean of the middle two
is taken and that is the only case when half of the values is below
the mean.
Or is
this average also the mode, as it should be with a Gaussian distribution?
In
that case there will be more people of average (modal) intelligence than
any
other single value of intellegence, but still 68% of people will be within
one standard deviation of average (mean, median, mode).
(Somehow, I doubt that it really is an idealised bell-curve, as those with
grossly below whichever average you care to compare are likely to have
less
chance of survival than those above it. Further it was claimed somewhere
that Albert Einstein had an IQ of 210. I suppose it is possible for
someone
to have an IQ of less than zero if they consistently get every question
wrong on an IQ test, even given more than the permitted time to answer the
questions.)
Yes but the original poster said "half has below average inteligence"
- score did not get a mention, hence no one has to have a negative
score to balance Albert's score( I bet he would be too smart to get
himself involved in this discussion). And as you know the frequency
curve only asymptotes to zero, hence it can accomodate any outliers,
irrespective of how far from the mean they may be.
cheers
paul
Of course, this also depends on intelligence being defined as the ability
to
perform in IQ tests - which I find to be only one of a number of ways to
interpret intelligence. IQ tests are also extremely culturally biased!
Some might even consider it intelligent or smart to provoke people and
then
claim money through the legal system for perceived or manufactured
"injury"
- I consider that kind of legal system to be not very intelligent at all.
Wombat
Another bloody pedant statistician (or is that a peasant with blocked
nasal
passages?)
At 14:57 15/02/2010, you wrote:
On 15 February 2010 13:13, Texler, Michael
<michael.tex...@health.wa.gov.au> wrote:
>
>>Reminds me of a faux-statistic: Of 250 million Americans, half of them
> are below average intelligence :)
>
> Half of them would be below the median intelligence.....
Correction to the correction :)
Well only if there is an even number of them, otherwise it would not
be. On the other hand if intelligence follows a normal distribution,
which is the generally accepted fact, then mean equals the median in
which case the original statement is correct
Cheers
Paul
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