-------- Original Message --------
| Subject: | Re: Fw: education & pay |
|---|---|
| Date: | Sun, 30 Jul 2000 02:28:05 -0400 |
| From: | "Ray E. Harrell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> |
| To: | Christoph Reuss <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> |
| References: | <v01530500b5a8ab32d521@[213.3.152.200]> |
You tried to define Mike and now you try to define me? What's the point? You didn't answer my post. Did you really read it? Should I lecture you on English usage or should I simply assume that this discussion is just another strategic game played by folks who are interested in .......?
Do you really believe that the people on this list don't understand your simple point? That we never averaged a grade or figured out a grade curve in middle school? I'm 58, and a long way from middle school but as an artist and a teacher of interpretive diction, I'm offended by the abuse of the language in the various scientific and computer disciplines.
Do you really mean what you meant about the mean or were you just plain mean in your expression of it? (Sorry I know that was Henwood) Anyway, like you I can enjoy an initial thrust that is cute in a trashy sort of way, but don't get your feeling hurt when you are called on it. Your statement about 101 was insulting, but so what? Are we about college for dummies on this list? I put up with a lot of very silly things being said about my discipline by people who enjoy it but know little about it. I could be terribly nasty about music and performing arts for dummies but it serves no purpose except to beat my chest and drive off consummers.
Mike G. had a point and you lost it. I'm not sure exactly just what his point was either but I did answer it with very serious situation with a friend of mine who is an elderly world class artist who is destitute while I see all of these shallow overpaid children who will be forgotten shortly represented in these figures. My friend will not be forgotten but her spirit will be absorbed in the index of significant American Heritage with America taking credit, when she did what she did in spite of America and not because of it.
I don't know that any of these school educated people deserve those salaries which stretch from 2 to five times the amount this master performer has made with her cutting edge concepts and projects. Schools are, for the most part built around teaching only the simplest of things to the greatest number of people. I always end up teaching their graduates to do the art that I am producing. They don't even learn to move or act in college much less dance and they demand to know why a singer should be required to know how.
My family in the Engineering profession have the same thing to say about college educated Engineers. At one point a relative who had not been to college but was trained by the Cooper-Bessemer company to service four cycle engines, stopped a jet propulsion plant from exploding because a graduate Engineer had designed the plant so impracticably. And then there is the Bradley Fighting Vehicle which was a walking tomb, or consider an Artist observing the science of astronomy. There were many statistical astronomical studies made about the Universe (I always forget what they call those "ideal states" that only exist as a keyhole of data put through the filter of mathematical logic and then projected onto the whole of the known Universe as truth that societies can bank on and people can plan their lives around). Before Hubbell there was no end to their arrogance and now there is no substitute for pictures. Specificity is supposed to follow projection, not simple imgainative wishing. It takes a new toy like Hubbell before they give up those (state projections) and then only if the pictures are beautiful to look at.
Statistics is a tough one. Conservative statisticians claim that Welfare Reform is working in the Bronx while Jonathan Kozel and the other people "on the ground" say it is an abysmal failure. When it comes down to the Aristotelians versus the Galileans I take my place with the latter.
But even they are terrible with the English language and there is no academy to tell them to stop it. So was Mike speaking in the polite, vernacular or vulgar style when he said "stinking averages"? Statistics, and any professional usage, is a specific version of the polite containing even contrary denotative meanings that can only be determined by context. I read "stinking" as vernacular ->vulgar which would mean that both median and average would have more emotional meaning and be roughly equivalent as in the Am. Heritage II dictionary of American usage. You might say median=average is vernacular. AmHer II is basically vernacular.
All words in English have a minimum of 3-4 denotative meanings with another four based upon connotation. If you create a graph with a seven word sentence with each word containing 7-8 layers of slightly different meanings and then constructed the sentence at random across the graph of meanings you would have many possibilities of meaning where the normal cliche'd situation contains only 2 or 3. Performing Artists use such graphs to practice inflection. Something that is not possible on the computer thus far and what makes translation from the voice to the screen so over simple and shallow. As for translating meaning from works of art across differing languages, that is when it really gets funny. Minds with tremendous repertories of inflections still have problems with translation. Computers would have to think to do as well. But they can barely transpose keys on the piano keyboard, a much more simple proposition than language.
So, again, I'm not sure of your intent but I know that you didn't respond to what I was asking and no one has responded to the tragedy of the abuse of the soul of the society by smart children endlessly playing with strategy and game theory while Rome burns.
Regards from a very tired and feeling old
REH
Christoph Reuss wrote:
I wrote:
>> Note that these are _medians_, not "stinking averages".
>> The median is a much more robust statistical metric than the average (mean).
>> ("robust" meaning less sensitive to far-out dots)Ray E. Harrell replied:
> Cute Chris, real cute. Look up the synonym for median in an English
> dictionary. Statistically right perhaps, but we all know how economists
> and statisticians skew English. This is just another cute example to put
> alongside "productivity."Okay, time for a bit of Statistics 101.
Consider these salaries of 11 people:
800
1000
1050
1100
1200
1300
1400
1500
1600
1800
8000The median is 1300.
The average (mean) is 1886.Now, tell me Ray, which of these 2 numbers is more representative of
the 11 people's salaries ?Chris
