John Smith wrote: > How is it of any use to the average Joe?
Err, what kind of average Joe are we talking about? I'm not use how many 'averages' there are but in general one would talk about at least three: The mean, the mode and the median. Each are important if you are talking about "Joe" :) depending upon how you are talking about him. The mean is what is normally mean by the average. The mean is a very useful measure but is can be misleading. I can say that the average (mean) income of the 10 employees in the ACME widget factory is $50,000/year which sounds pretty good. However it may not sound so good when we suddenly find that nine employees each make $500/year and the boss makes $495,500/yr. How one presents the numbers makes a big difference. A knowledge of statistics is very helpful if you want to read and understand many newspaper articles , watch or listen to the news or understand many arguments your local municipal government may make. Newspapers often make a statement that says something like 'Burglary rate jumps 50% in Podunk". This does not meant the same thing if the rate jumps from 2 to 3 than if it jumps from 100 to 150. If one does not have at least a basic knowledge of statistics it is difficult or impossible to see if the way the numbers are being presented makes sense. Statistics is just a subset of numeracy which is more and more important all the time. The simple ability to look at a couple of numbers and do even some simple adding or multiplying is very helpful. For example: About 20 years ago there was a rash of recovered memory cases in children with accusations of Black Masses, ritual murders etc. all across Canada and the USA. They even seemed to make sense until one suddenly pulled out a calculator and figures out that some place like New Jersey had to have ~ 3 million murder victims (and the bodies ) unaccounted for over about 5 years. D'uh! Some ones in New Jersy have managed to murder over 1% of the the population of the USA and secretly despose of the bodies? Stats, at the most basic, simply provides better tools and concepts to do this. You might want to have a look at either of the books below: Best,Joel (2001): Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics:Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists. University of California Press. ISBN 0-5202-1978-3. Huff,D (1954): How to lie with statisics. W.W. Norton & Company, New York. -- John Kane The Rideau Lakes, Ontario Canada . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
