Hello again, Bob. Thought this vignette (a true story!) might provide some mild interest...
When I was in the fourth grade, attending a three-room school with 8 grades (grades 4, 5, and 6 were in one room), the teacher gave us an assignment to keep busy while she was doing something else -- whether necessary desk work for that marking period, or work with another grade, I do not now recall and wouldn't have been paying much attention anyway. She asked us to calculate our average math scores. Well, as you know, merely adding up a bunch of numbers and dividing by their cardinality is boring, even at age 9; so to relieve the tedium I put all the scores in order (there were maybe a dozen to a score of them), and starting with the lowest, which was around 70% or so, I averaged the bottom two; then averaged this with the next one up; and continued in this way till I'd finished. (Of course, by this time the teacher was wondering what was taking me so long!) I was mildly surprised to find that the result I'd calculated was 99% -- I'd expected the average to be high, but not THAT high. Not surprisingly, when she found out what I'd done, the teacher made me recalculate the RIGHT way. At the time it was something of a revelation, though not then a very complete one: after all, an average was an average, wasn't it, and I'd had an intuitive notion that the value one got oughtn't to depend much on the procedure one used (not that I'd have used that kind of language then). -- Don. ------------------------------------------------------------ Donald F. Burrill [EMAIL PROTECTED] 56 Sebbins Pond Drive, Bedford, NH 03110 (603) 626-0816 . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
