I hear people loughing at this phrase and its variations. In principal, there is nothing contradictory in the statement itself. It is clear to everybody who knows the basics of statistics (at the level of definition of "average", which for a distribution is the same as an arithmetic mean).
As a matter of fact, depending on the distribution you can get any number (percentage) X , 0% < X < 100% that can be above (or below) average. If it is unclear, a simple example can demonstrate it. Imagine in a class of 100 students, 99 students getting 100% score, and one student getting a smaller score, say, 99%. 99% of students will have their score above average, because average will be below 100%. One should not mix average (arithmetic mean) and median. Igor Fri Aug 7 22:27:52 CDT 2009 Sandy Harris wrote: > On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 10:20 AM, John Francis<johnf at panix.com> wrote: > > > Well, just remember this observation: > > > > You know how dumb the average man-in-the-street is? > > Well, half of them are even dumber than that ... > > One of the women, looking magnificently bored, > commented that surveys show 85% of American > drivers consider their own driving skills "above > average". -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
