Statistics every writer should know

created by sabre23t

(idea) by sabre23t (3.1 y) (print) ? (I like it!) 1 C! Wed May 10 2000 at 3:28:30

According to Robert Niles every writer should know the following basic concepts of statistics:

Mean, more vaguely called average value
Median, the middle most value in a population or sample
Mode, the most common value in a population or sample
Percent of a population or changes
Standard Deviation and Normal Distribution
Margin of Error and Confidence Interval
Data Analysis, at the very least knowing whether where the data comes from, and whether it was peer-reviewed

After
http://www.robertniles.com/stats/

Unfortunately, I still have not found out whether the way I calculated my so called "cumulative average" in the Everything Statistics on May 9, 2000 and beyond, is statistically correct. Google searches for "cumulative average" and "cumulative mean" have drawn blanks. Everythingians?
Update May 13, 2000. My discussions with /dev/joe leads me to understanding weighted average, a version of which is wa7 that I now use in the daily Everything Statistics since May 12, 2000. Thanks /dev/joe.

Update December 1, 2000. Revised median and mode. Thanks SgtCoolGuy.

printable version
chaos

All I ever needed to know about unit conversion, I learned from drugs	I felt a need for some excitement tonight, so I drove up and down random streets yelling "I am one with the flying cows!" at regular intervals	Googlewhacking to estimate the number of pages indexed by Google	standard deviation
Being average is rare	Weighted Average with denominator 7	normal distribution	Have you told your parents you're gay?
Timmy McVeigh: A Handwriting Analysis	Confidence Interval	Robert Niles	American alcoholic writer stereotype
weighted average	Explicate your lyrics	continuity error	mean
May 9, 2000	Alive and magnificent	The Day Today	The Great Gatsby
John Irving's advice to writers	Experiments and Surveys	Percent	Freelancing

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