On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 12:51 AM, Jared ''Danger'' Earle <[email protected]> wrote: > On 21 Feb 2009, at 23:45, LuKreme wrote: >> I only have two results, yes and no (or 'positive' and 'negative'), >> I'm not seeing how graphing it is going to be useful. I know 19/78, >> the order of those 19 can't possibly matter... > > > You have 78 results, the last of which is 19. > > Figured out the graph yet? > > Oh, and read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation
just as I was thinking of heading off to bed after watching "Le scaphandre et le papillon" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401383/>... ...BZZZT!... >From Lewis' info, its impossible to say anything at all about the probability beyond his initial report that he got 19 out of 78 - and standard deviation does not enter into the equation as it stands. >From the info given, there are two outcomes "positive" and "negative". He reports 78 tests from which he got "19" positive results and he states that he does not know the mechanism that controls the outcome. Since he does not know the mechanism, he does not know whether the order of his test is relevant (recursion ? - its software after all), so any "curve-fitting" would be highly speculative, since we would not be able to assess the appropriateness of the parameters. OK. One could plot your suggested graph for y (number of tests completed) v. x (sum of positive results for y) and we might get something that approximates a staircase that approximates a straight line with smallish residuals, but will this really answer Lewis' question any better than his current best guess of 19/78 ? My answer is, based on the available information, no. If we want to get std. dev. involved, then at least two more of us would need to repeat the test and report out results. We might then have e.g. Lewis: 19/78, Jared 26/78 and Mark 18/78 and we could start to do some stats. We could start thrashing around in the dark and look at Lewis results using non-parametric methods and maybe even start looking at some meta results (e.g. how often does a postive result follow two consecutive negative results (software again)), but, as the data stands, the sensible thing to do is to repeat the experiment before trying to establish anything. Instead of Wikipedia, in this case I would cite Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (: mark. _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
