Re: Age of Earth according to some Americans

Ye Old One wrote:
>
> I find that in the UK more people don't understand that there is more
> than one "average" then there are people who don't accept evolution :)

I was in error, by the way. The median by definition must fall right in
the middle of the array of values. In the case of a gaussian
distribution the mean, the mode and the median are all equal because of
the symmetry of the distribution.

It is interesting to note that there is a sizable percentage of the
British population that is undereducated or miseducated in matters of
science and critical thinking. It is not exclusively an American malady.
For historic reasons the Fundie minority (it is a minority) seems louder
and more influential than it really is. The public schools, disgusting
as they are, have been maintained as a secular institution sinces the
days of Horace Mann over 150 years ago.

Bob Kolker

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Q on "average"
    ... Typical scheme seems to be sum/N. ... The problem is that example has no median. ... reliability statistics what you have is a time dependent failure rate ... distribution steady-states to a constant failure rate exponential ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: Q on "average"
    ...    Typical scheme seems to be sum/N. ... reliability statistics what you have is a time dependent failure rate ... distribution steady-states to a constant failure rate exponential ... the 50% point of the cumulative and is therefore also the median. ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: computing on streams of data
    ... you need to be able to keep a running median for the first N values? ... We wanted to be able to show the distribution of values ... What I ended up doing was creating bins that were logarithmically ... a K-bit approximation using significantly fewer bits than for the ...
    (comp.theory)
  • Re: Median likelihood?
    ... of the likelihood function or the median of the log likelihood ... Median is of a probability distribution (such as the sampling ... distribution is equal to the parameter being estimated, an estimator ...
    (sci.stat.math)