On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 10:21 AM, David Andrews <[email protected]> wrote:
> > And here I go, doing my part! > > Peter points out that "Unusually long or short times are both a > legitimate cause for further investigation". I agree. So let's ask > Brian not to bother us unless the times are unusually long or short. > > Brian, at the risk of increasing your project scope considerably... > would you consider keeping a history file somewhere? Keep the last N > statistics for JOBNAME/USERID, then report in your email if the job time > is outside -say- one standard deviation from the mean (and the mean is > large enough to make the job interesting). > And my even more OT digression: an article on not using "standard deviation" as a measure http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25401 <quote> The notion of standard deviation has confused hordes of scientists; it is time to retire it from common use and replace it with the more effective one of mean deviation. Standard deviation, STD, should be left to mathematicians, physicists and mathematical statisticians deriving limit theorems. There is no scientific reason to use it in statistical investigations in the age of the computer, as it does more harm than good—particularly with the growing class of people in social science mechanistically applying statistical tools to scientific problems. </quote> > > -- > David Andrews > A. Duda & Sons, Inc. > [email protected] > > -- Wasn't there something about a PASCAL programmer knowing the value of everything and the Wirth of nothing? Maranatha! <>< John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
